Like the title says, last weekend was the big annual New Yorker Festival in the Big Apple. They usually have some comic-related panel as part of the event and this year was no exception, as Grant Morrison, Mike Mignola, Jonathan Lethem and Tim Kring got together to talk about superheroes. CBR and Publisher’s Weekly have the best rundowns:

During audience questions, one member asked about Morrison’s own “evolutionary” theme in New X-Men. Noting that the X-Men can represent “any minority group,” Morrison said that his X-Men stories were specifically about a “war on children”: “These are our successors, they’ll take over, we’re going to die, and we hate them.” Echoing Kring’s remarks, Morrison suggested that superheroes act as a kind of “immune system in times of danger,” as if the “human species” were producing the counterparts of white blood cells.

Another audience member was concerned about the future of the comic book and wondered if superhero movies and TV shows funneled audiences to comics. Mignola replied that he now regards the “pamphlet”-style comic book as a “teaser” for the “ultimate form” his comics story will take in graphic novel format. Mignola also worried that the Hellboy movies, “especially the second film, don’t really reflect what the comic is” and that people who come from the movies to the Hellboy comics “won’t recognize” his version.

Morrison asserted that “a movie doesn’t affect the sales of comics” and claimed that a moviegoer was “more likely to buy a Spider-Man towel” than a Spider-Man comic. He contended that comic books will “probably continue to be despised,” but declared, “Comics are wellsprings of imagination in this country.”

Galleycat and Vulture have even more coverage.

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