* I think my friend Kiel Phegley’s latest Q&A with Marvel honchos Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort makes for meaty reading. Brevoort muses at length on Marvel’s difficulty with ascertaining how new readers are discovering their comics; ponders how to effectively communicate to the bookstore audience given its lack of centrality and mostly casual interest in the product vs. the “comic shops on Wednesday/message boards the rest of the week” hardcore; explains the to-me baffling maneuvers surrounding the Thor titles this summer; and pins some of the blame for Marvel’s slackening sales on overextension of four top editorial figures. He also basically becomes Marvel’s new official mouthpiece by announcing that newly minted Editor-in-Chief Alonso, whose responses here are almost all just one sentence long, won’t regularly be participating in these Q&As anymore, putting Brevoort in the Quesada carnival-barker seat.

* Tom Neely, killing it as usual.

* Remember when there was a line of children’s toys and comics basically centered around Cthulhu? No? Then let Monster Brains’ gallery of Inhumanoids comic covers remind you. That guy who was basically giant rotting crocodile with an exposed ribcage remains amazing to me even now.

* Whoa, I fully support this King Collection line of t-shirts based on classic Stephen King jacket art from Fright Rags. Needs that incongruous bird-guy duel from The Stand, though. (Via Dread Central.)

* TPM’s guide to prominent locations in yesterday’s big Mafia bust really does read like a bunch of black-comedy Sopranos subplots.

Two alleged mobsters in Rhode Island (one who’s 83 and another who’s 63) are accused of extorting two strip clubs in Providence for “protection money” dating back to 1993.

Luigi “Louie” Manocchino (also known as “Baby Shacks,” “The Professor” and “The Old Man”) and Thomas Iafrate are accused of extorting money from the Satin Doll and Cadillac Lounge.

* I’m sort of amazed by how extremely creepy the online horror project Marble Hornets remains even though the current storyline depends so heavily on actors who aren’t strong enough to get their improvised dialogue over. Actually, creepy doesn’t cut it — I’ll go ahead and say outright scary. The two most recent episodes went up while my wife was in the hospital, and I actually put off watching them while I was in the house by myself. I caught up just now on the train, and sheesh — at one point I full-out jumped in my seat, alarming the guy next to me. Something about the visual tools they’re working with, the way they locate the horror in the very means by which we’re seeing and hearing what goes on, hits hard and deep and overcomes any shortcomings in performance and filmmaking.

Tags: books, Carnival of souls, comics, horror, links, real life, t-shirts

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