- Steve Bissette on horror:
Horror is one of the few genres—romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind—that’s all emotion-driven. It’s not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It’s irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.
The rest of the interview is pretty interesting, too.
- I find it tough to mourn the death of cursive handwriting. [via]
- Brazil TV host turned politician ‘ordered killings to boost ratings’. American TV executives are no doubt furiously taking notes. [via]
- Ten things we don’t understand about humans [via]
- And finally, a game: This is the Only Level. (Also of interest, You Only Live Once.) [via]
comics
Monday various
- Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
- An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via] It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.
- Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]
- Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.
- And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)
Wednesday various
- There’s an interesting — albeit pretty spoiler-filled — post on gossip and character in the writing of Stephen King over at Fantasy Magazine‘s blog.
- I can’t say I’m surprised the centerpiece of the George W. Bush Library will be a handgun…
- New Zealand has some weird ideas about advertising. First, there were New Zealand Air flight attendants and pilots in nothing but body paint, and now a bleeding billboard to promote traffic safety.
- Toonlet seems like a neat idea, but I’m not so sure about the “you hereby grant to Toonlet a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty free, worldwide license” clause in their terms of service. [via]
- And finally — “It’s made of pure plotdevicinum.” I really enjoyed this Bad Transcript of Star Trek, more so than the actual film, I think. [via]
Losing one’s sense of shelf
“Ruined? They’re fine, sitting right there on the shelf.” – James M. Cain
It’s often argued that a movie adaptation, however awful, doesn’t do anything to the original book. But what about to its sales? Mike Sterling reports on a recent drop-off in the Watchmen trade paperback sales:
Oh God, I hope you’re the only person calling it that. Anyway, Tom’s referring to my constant experience with comics sales as tied to their movie tie-ins…in particular, that if there’s a sales bump, it’s almost always before the film’s release, to be followed by a paucity of sales following the release. In my case, Watchmen, formerly a consistent seller, peaked prior to the film coming out, and then stopped selling at all since then.
There are plenty of reasons for this. Other bookstores carrying the book (though it doesn’t look like they’re selling any either), interest dropped off after overexposure in mass media, the local potential audience is saturated, or whatever, and it takes time for demand to build up again. And I’ve been in contact with stores in other parts of the country where Watchmen is still selling, so maybe it simply varies region by region.
I don’t have numbers or even chart rankings right in front of me, unfortunately…the “archive” section of Diamond’s website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment…but for May 2009, the Watchmen TP is near the bottom of the Top 300 Graphic Novels sales list. Again, it’s probably just oversaturation…a ton of copies entered the marketplace over the last few months…so a dip in orders is to be expected. If things are still the same in a year or so, and we still haven’t moved many copies, then that may be a point where worry should set in a bit.
Has bad publicity on the film — it received mixed critical reviews, even from fans, and was overall a box-office disappointment — hurt the original book? It would be interesting to take a look at unsuccessful movie adaptations and their subsequent effect, if any, on book sales. I suspect there are a lot of factors to consider, like the age of the book and how well it was selling beforehand, as well as the many factors Sterling mentions above. Maybe successful adaptations result in a similar drop-off. Maybe there is no correlation at all. But it would be interesting to see some actual figures.
That’s one way of putting it
Joss Whedon on working on Wonder Woman:
They didn’t tell me to leave, but they showed me the door and how pretty it was. Would I like to touch the knob and maybe make it swing?
I also like how he calls his upcoming movie, Cabin in the Woods, “old school horror with grad school sensibilities.”
Via Whedonesque. It’s not a new interview with Whedon by any means, but there’s still some interesting stuff in there, mostly about comics and Dollhouse.