* Oh dear: “I asked all I met at WETA when ‘The Hobbit’ starts shooting. Reply? ‘You tell us.'” —Sir Ian McKellen. A far cry from his previous optimism…

* Look, PictureBox got a fancy new website and a fancy new blog!

* Another day, another fantastic interview with Wally Gropius author Tim Hensley, this one conducted by Chris Mautner and focusing on Hensley’s personal life and background, painfully so.

* Bookmarked for when I have half an hour (!) to kill: Anders Nilsen interviewed by Royal Jelly.

* This week I was struck by how two of the best single-issue superhero comics of the year a) came out on the same day, and b) were about their ostensible hero’s arch-enemies. Douglas Wolk takes a look at them, or the writing at least: Action Comics #890 by Paul Cornell and Pete Woods, starring Lex Luthor, and Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 by Matt Fraction and Carmine DiGiandomenico, starring the Mandarin.

* Nitsuh Abebe tackles CocoRosie and the reaction thereto. Apparently I know a lot less about this band than I thought and there are all sorts of obviously controversial issues at work here about which I feel unprepared to speak, but a big part of the column gets at something I was saying about the band a while ago, which is that on a basic level it really isn’t that hard to figure out why their music might not appeal to a lot of people.

* Which point is germane to comics thusly: Lately I’ve talked a bit about how I’m bummed there isn’t more discussion of alternative comics online. Should I really be all that baffled? Perhaps whoever coined the very term was right, and the reason these things are called “alternative comics” is because they represent an alternative to mainstream/popular taste. The bookstore boom, the sudden explosion of coverage of graphic novels in the mainstream press, the manga boom, the webcomics boom, and the parallel rise in critical fortunes of massively popular hip-hop and pop in the music-crit field has, I think, given the impression that quality and popularity automatically overlap more than they do. Fringe culture is exactly that.

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