* Tom Spurgeon keeps on posting terrific interviews with interesting comics figures. My favorite at the moment is with Kurt Busiek, in part because Tom used a question of mine about my favorite moment in one of my favorite Superman stories, Up, Up and Away!

* I found Tom’s interview with PictureBox’s Dan Nadel really informative in terms of how Nadel sees his company and his mission–not to mention the breaking news that PBI is closing its brick-and-mortar store.

* Tom got Eddie Campbell to talk a bit more about his belief that the big New York publishing houses will push comics/graphic novels (I’m not sure which, exactly–terminology means a lot more to Campbell than it does to me!) toward children’s literature. I don’t buy that anymore than I buy the notion that they’ll push it all toward boring memoirs. I just don’t think they have that kind of power or that level of investment.

* And if you’ve got two hours to kill, you’re encouraged to dig in to Tom’s astonishingly long interview with Tucker Stone about the year in mainstream comics. It’s a treat to hear Stone’s thoughts on the genre in snark-free mode. However, I do disagree with this assertion:

when you’re working on the biggest super-hero character of the year, and your job is to do that characters big bestseller of the year, then that isn’t the time for you to put out something that any Batman fan, even the dumbest one, calls “confusing.”

I don’t know what it is about superheroes that occasionally draws this sort of thing out of critics, but you rarely see people demand that the big summer movie or the big autumn hip-hop record be more simplistic lest some people get turned off. Keep in mind that even though Tucker’s not a fan of Batman: R.I.P. on a qualitative basis, that’s not what he’s talking about–this criticism would hold even if it were a great comic, as long as it was still confusing to some readers. That seems proscriptive and self-defeating to me.

* The Spirit came out and tanked. Questions of its quality aside, I was always perplexed by the decision to make it a Christmas movie. For what it’s worth, no one I know who’s seen it hated it, but I know very few people who saw it, which is part of the problem. (I’m at the in-laws’ and unlikely to see it till next week at the earliest.) Harry Knowles and Heidi MacDonald both point to problems with the editing as among the film’s more insurmountable, which again is different from the fanboy buzz about the film, which seems more related to a desire to make Frank Miller suffer personally.

* French director Pascal Laugier talks to AICN about his film Martyrs–part of a trinity of well-regarded, hardcore French horror films of late, along with Inside and Frontier(s)–and his upcoming Hellraiser remake. It’s interesting to hear him talk about how easygoing his working relationship with Bob Weinstein has been, that’s for sure. I also was struck by this passage about “cynical,” “self-referential” horror directors:

“I love the same films that you do, guys. We all know where it comes from, isn’t it fun?” Some people find it fun, [but] I don’t. I know it makes me sound like an asshole – very arrogant, very pretentious – but who cares? I don’t. I pay… I go to see movies to be amazed. I go to see movies to believe in what I see. So that’s why I love for example M. Night Shyamalan. He’s brave enough to take some risks to make the audience believe something amazing. You know? Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he miss the points but I will always feel more respect for him than for A LOT of cynical directors.

* Jog takes the last vestiges of my post-“finding out the guy who wrote Benjamin Button also wrote Forrest Gump” interest in seeing the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett/David Fincher film out back and shoots them repeatedly at point-blank range. You’ve gotta love the American Beauty-style sexism about who’s allowed to follow their bliss.

* Matthew Perpetua talks a bit about Beck’s funk masterpiece, Midnite Vultures.

* The Vault of Horror’s B-Sol reviews Let the Right One In, referring to the central human/vampire relationship as “a pure and beautiful friendship.” I think we mistake codependence for pure and beautiful friendships at our own peril.

* Shaggy presents his favorite films of 2008, with an emphasis on “edge of your seat” filmmaking.

* Ben Morse reviews The Wrestler from the perspective of a life-long wrestling fan trying to sell the flick to non-fan audiences.

* Chris Ware is only 41 years old. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

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