§ Marvel has a whole month of interviews by Sean T. Collins with the creators in STRANGE TALES, so check back often. The series kicks off with Paul Pope:.

Marvel.com: He has a very devoted cult following, that’s for sure. You’re taking a humorous approach to him?

Paul Pope: Well, it’s a story that’s never been told: Lockjaw feeding time. My take on Lockjaw is that he isn’t a dog, he’s just the most inhuman of the Inhumans. He also happens to not have thumbs, so you wonder—how can this guy eat?

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§ Neil Kleid is happy in his ghetto. and that’s okay.

§ A pair of pieces examining how Comic-Con may be the future for industry trade shows:

BEA/NYCC director Lance Fensterman and Calvin Reid.

§ Comics were the new literacy 20 years ago.

§ A think piece on the shared vision of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Raymond Carver.

§ Elizabeth Rappe on Choking Out Originality:

In the last year and a half that I’ve covered comic-to-film properties, I’ve noticed a startling trend in this direction — and that’s the extreme outside looking in. There have been a lot of books snapped up that are simply genetic Hollywood blockbusters — rogue cops, amnesiac assassins, ex-CIA agents who know too much, the sort of roles that Bruce Willis and Sly Stallone types made again and again. In a culture that’s full of wonderful, envelope-pushing stories, it’s appalling to see the most generic books snapped up simply because someone is like “Oooh! It’s a comic book!” without noticing it’s just like a Renny Harlin movie.* What we’re looking at is a horrible, strangling relationship. Comics are purportedly killing Hollywood’s original stories, and Hollywood is, by extension, killing the originality of the comic industry. As Grant notes, “Given that comics’ current cultural legitimacy, such as it is, is tied to Hollywood’s tacit endorsement of comics as source material, limiting options and minimizing original ideas is the surest way our business has of killing that relationship, along with much of the inroads comics have made with the general public.”

1 COMMENT

  2. “That’s my Lockjaw perception as well. He was exposed to the Terrigen Mists, and morphed into a canine-like being with the ability to teleport. ”

    Already been done once by… Byrne? and then PAD (I think) did a retcon by saying it was a practical job the inhumans were playing on Ben Grimm.

    something like that…

  3. “Given that comics’ current cultural legitimacy, such as it is, is tied to Hollywood’s tacit endorsement of comics as source material, limiting options and minimizing original ideas is the surest way our business has of killing that relationship, along with much of the inroads comics have made with the general public.”

    Now Watchmen, ghostworld might fit that but comics is used to find the most generic ideas that are easy to translate to a generic film – or at least it seems that way from where I sit.

  4. Already been done once by… Byrne? and then PAD (I think) did a retcon by saying it was a practical job the inhumans were playing on Ben Grimm.

    Mostly right, according to one description of the “Lockjaw talks” incident:

    One reason there’s bad blood between John Byrne and Peter David has to do with Lockjaw, the Inhumans’ dog. As created by Lee and Kirby, Lockjaw was just a very large, mutated dog with a normal canine intelligence level. Byrne later wrote a Thing issue in which Lockjaw spoke for the first time, begging that baby Luna not be subjected to the Terrigen Mists, since their effects weren’t always pretty — implying that he was a full-fledged Inhuman like the others. It was a touching, fan-favourite story, but it had Unfortunate Implications: the Inhumans had always treated Lockjaw as an animal, and now this was solely because he looked like one. Thus Peter David revealed that Lockjaw’s “speech” had been a prank on Ben Grimm. (As he tells it, this was a request from editorial.) This fixed the problems with Byrne’s story, but now the Inhumans were Jerkasses for a different reason: pranking Grimm in the middle of an important debate, at Lockjaw’s expense. Fans of the Byrne story remain sore about this… and others remain sore about the Byrne story.

  5. Wow, Synsidar, with that link, you officially killed two hours of my day stone-dead. I never knew what that xkcd comic was talking about, now I know all too well. Good lord. I planned on reading an actual book this afternoon. So much for that.