* Dave Kajganich, who’s writing the screenplay for the upcoming theatrical adaptation of Stephen King’s It, briefly talks to Dread Central. The gist is that the flashback/flashforward set-up will be ’80s/’00s (or ’10s, I guess) rather than ’50s/’80s, but beyond that it’ll be rated R, “we can really honor the book,” the usual Zack Snyder litany. I wish him well, but it’s a mightily ambitious book in scope and in envelope-pushing–I think we can all think of at least once scene that doesn’t stand a chance of making it into an R-rated theatrical release–and will likely prove tough to pull off even before you consider King’s mostly woeful track record with such things.
* Remember that bitchy email from the studio behind Let the Right One In regarding the iffy subtitles for the film’s DVD release? Turns out it wasn’t an internal communication, but an actual email to a concerned citizen! That makes it even weirder and more annoying. (Via The House Next Door.)
* Jeffrey Brown has been talking process a lot at his blog; his latest post offers a peak at how he scripts.
* My pal TJ Dietsch is saying all the right things about Punisher: War Zone.
* Tom Spurgeon’s gigantic Sunday posts are virutally always worth your time. This week’s installment spotlights ten different kinds of out-of-print works you can find and puchase cheaply online. I think Tom intended the post to be seen as an eye-opener in terms of the economics involved, but for me, the avenues he advocates–involving strips, gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, children’s books, art books, “cartooning,” and other non-“comic book/graphic novel” areas–is inspiring and intriguing more in terms of the content than the cost. I’ve been a story-focused comics reader for as long as I’ve been reading comics, and investing time and energy (money notwithstanding) in nice fat cheap old collections of, say, a New Yorker guy exercises a very different part of my comics-reading brain than does an altcomix graphic novel or a superhero serial. I’m starting to feel like enough of a grown-up that I wouldn’t feel like I was wasting money by grabbing a few books just to look at the pretty pictures and marvel at the execution rather than get a rewarding beginning/middle/end read out of them.
* As a bonus, there’s an undeniable pleasure to be had in tracking down images that pressed themselves on your brain as a child long before you had the ability to contextualize them, and then looking at them again knowing what you know now. The closest experience I’ve had to a lot of what Tom talks about is when I bought the Scary Stories Omnibus at Borders for $10 a few years ago. Those watery Stephen Gammell illustrations are still among the scariest visuals I’ve ever seen, and the frisson of experiencing them all over again, of being able to pick up that hardcover off the bookshelf in my own home and flip through it at my leisure, was delightful.
Your last part reminded me of my own experience with a book called The Man Who Moved the World, a comic adaptation of the New Testament published by Tyndale in the late 80s. For whatever reason, I read that thing obsessively as a kid, and ever after I would associate Bible stories with the images burned into my brain from that book. I lost contact with it for years before finally tracking a copy down (via abebooks, I think) a couple years ago. One of these days I’ll have to scan some pages and blog about it…
Why not make that day today, Leigh?!?!