* The Hobbit has been greenlit and Peter Jackson is directing it. I’ll believe it when I see it. Mostly I’m just glad we dodged the Del Toro bullet.
* I really liked retailer Brian Hibbs’s column today on structural problems with the way the big publishers publish their comics. Using the recent price-reduction announcement by DC as a springboard, Hibbs points out that there’s still a lot of work remaining, from ensuring that the comics they send out contain the same work they said they would when stores ordered them to making sure that multi-title franchises release those titles at regular intervals rather than in haphazard feast-or-famine fashion. I think that throughout comics lurk problems so fundamental–like, y’know, putting out books by the creative teams you said would be doing them and not shipping five titles starring the same character one week and zero the next–that we hardly even recognize them, at best shrugging and treating them like inevitable acts of god rather than the product of a set of conscious decisions about priorities. Thinking about them as such does create some unpleasantness, but it also presents us with a huge silver lining, which is that if conscious decisions created these problems, a different set of conscious decisions can end them.
* Wow, here’s some fantastic footage of a night at Fort Thunder circa 1997. As I said on Twitter today, Lightning Bolt is basically “What if Thor’s hammer and Loki’s helmet formed a band?” (Via Spurge.)
* This is pretty rad: A couple of fans of Guy Delisle’s travelogue Pyongyang went to North Korea and mocked up a version of the graphic novel with photographs replacing some of Deslisle’s drawings of what he saw there.
* Bruce Baugh explains just what the heck the new World of Warcraft thingamabobber “Cataclysm” is. Basically it’s an in-game way to make real-world changes to the game, which is the kind of thing I love thinking about. Also, the way I see it, dragons and Lovecraftian entities should be teaming up all the time.
* In the comments downblog, various readers have answered Jim Henley’s bleg for examples of good guys torturing people in pre-9/11 pop culture.
* Yesterday I screwed up that link to the “icon” covers DC’s doing in January, so here it is again and here’s all the icon covers for the Batman franchise and here’s a man-sized copy of that Steel image.
* WHO IS THIS MAN AND WHAT HAS HE DONE WITH BENJAMIN MARRA
