10 October 2007

New York Film Festival Panel About Superheroes

The New Yorker Festival hosted a panel this week about Superheroes, featuring Mike Mignola, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Kring, and Grant Morrison. Comic Book Resources has a writeup of the discussion. Interesting tidbits: Morrison is working on a second volume of Seaguy, seemingly despite initial word from Vertigo that it didn’t sell well enough to merit a sequel. Kring said, which I’d heard before, that he’s mostly intentionally ignorant of superhero comics so that Heroes wouldn’t be derivative. This is, I think, a huge mistake. It’s what makes Heroes a failing attempt to do what it’s trying to do. It needn’t make any reference at all to comics, but it misses opportunities all over the place that it wouldn’t in more informed hands.