“Strip away the Hollywood glamour and shows like Comic Book I-Con are what the hobby are all about: Passionate fans and creators talking about the comics they love”: Joe Lawler of the Des Moines Register has a nice little write-up on Comic Book I-Con, which goes down today in Altoona, Iowa.

“What’s the most stupidly ambitious aspect of “XKCD Vol. 0,” the book based on the wildly popular yet still very underground webcomic”…?: Here’s an LA Times blog post profiling the plans for Randall Munroe’s XKCD hardcopy collection.

“These cartoons radicalized me, an impressionable young person, against the idea of conflict and the then-current Vietnam War”: That’s Craig Yoe in a feature story in The Oregonian, talking about the work collected in his new The Great Anti-War Cartoons from Fantagraphics. There are some real jaw-droppers used to illustrate the piece, so be sure to check it out. (A slideshow can also be seen here).

“Batman at 70″: Here’s a neat Toledo Free Press feature on Batman turning 70, and the way the city’s downtown library is marking the occasion.

Seattle vs. South Carolina cartoon battle: Seattle Post-Intelligencerpolitical cartoonist Dave Horsey drew a cartoon that was less-than-flattering in its depiction of South Carolina, and Palmetto Scoop cartoonist Mike Beckom responded with a cartoon making fun of Yankee unions. Alan Gardner will tell you all about it at The Daily Cartoonist.

So that someone could spend a day of his life hastily assembling an Archie story filtered through Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics. That someone was Adam Prosser, and you can read his whole story in all its shouty, punch, funny hat-wearing glory here. (Thanks to Johanna Draper Carlson, from whom I totally, shamelessly stole this link).

Earlier this week MTV’s Splash Page brought “exclusive” news that novelist S.E. Hinton will be joining the throngs of popular prose writers moving into the hot new medium of comics. Hinton will be working with Bluewater Productions, the company that published some comics based on Ray Harryhausen creations and concepts, but is probably best known for those weird “Female Force” biography comics that seem to generate plenty of mainstream media coverage every time an issue is announced.

Splash Page and Bluewater’s home page both have some covers and details, so head on over there for to take a look (My immediate reaction, you ask? Yuck). It sounds like the relationship will begin with Bluewater adapting some of Hinton’s pre-existing works, before writing “an entirely new title created specifically for Bluewater” in 2010.

I understand why comics publishers are so eager to accept the contributions of proven prose authors, what with their name recognition and their large audience of non-comics readers who would theoretically at least follow them into comic shops, but part of me still thinks there should be some kind of hazing ritual involved. Like Salman Rushdie will be allowed to write an original graphic novel, but first he has to write and draw his own minicomic to be published at a photocopier in a Kinkos, or Stephen King can develop a Vertigo ongoing, but only after a couple issues of Brave and the Bold.

I think I know the perfect title for Hinton’s hazing.

Wanna be a successful cartoonist and/or comics/prose hybrid literary sensation?: Then you should probably enroll at the University of Maryland and get a job doing cartoons for the school’s paper The Diamondback. It worked for Frank Cho, Aaron McGruder and Jeff Kinney.

Apparently, the New York Times list-makers don’t even crack the covers of the books they put on their lists: I quit paying attention to the NYT’s goofy comics bestsellers lists as soon as I got over making fun of their dumb names and dumber press announcement, but manga expert Deb Aoki hasn’t, and she notes another reason to shake one’s head sadly at the lists. Illustrated prose book Death Note: L Change the World apparently ranked #4 on the manga bestseller list, despite not even being manga, or comics of any kind.

“I used to feel as powerful as a locomotive, but I’m running out of steam”: Augusta Chronicle columnist Glynn Moore reflects on his own mortality in relation to dressing up in Superman t-shirts and towel capes with his grandson in this only mildly depressing piece.

Great, now I’m hungry: On Drawn and Quarterly’s blog, the unlikely source of inspiration for Seth’s Nancy Vol. 1 collection cover design stands revealed.

“I cannot wait until Williams III leaves in a couple months time…I wonder how many people are going to admit that if it weren’t for Williams’ III art, this would be just one or two steps above Outsiders“: In his latest post, guy-I-link-to-alot Tim O’Neil reviews the latest issue of ‘TEC, along with several other recent releases, and discusses how muscular Reed RIchards should look.

Cyborg’s name never strikes me as all that boring and prosaic until I hear it next to the name of another cyborg comic character, like Deathlok, who has one of the most metal names in the Marvel character catalog. Deathlok returns this week in Deathlok #1, the first part of a new, seven-issue Max series written by Charlie Huston and penciled by Lan Medina. Cyborg, on the other hand, seems to have the week off, which is probably for the best–he won’t be getting shown up by Marvel’s more bad-ass cyborg.

Who else will be waiting to see you at the comics shop tomorrow? Join me after the jump to find out!

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How Seth writes: Geoff Pevere interviews the George Sprott author about his writing process for The Star.

Your anniversary-inspired Asterix overview of the day: Ben East writes about “good old Asterix and his fulsome friend Obelix” in this column for The National.

Basketball guy married to famous-for-being-famous lady didn’t work too hard on his Batman costume: I still like it better than the ones Christian Bale and the other movie Batmen have worn though

“Millar to direct superhero movie”: I hope it’s better received than Frank Miller’s was…

The single scariest image the comics blogosphere came up with this Haloween weekend: Mike Sterling had it.

I had read all 44 pages of FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency #1 (Radical Comics) before I began to understand why the comic book existed at all and why it felt like a very solid premise from which a story was being reverse engineered, rather than a story that needed to be told.

That realization didn’t come from the comic book itself sadly, but from an interview with writer David Hine, printed after this first third of the story ends—he was apparently brought in to turn the website fvza.org into a comic book. (This also explains the wonky credits. David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez are the only creators with their names on the cover; on the title page the former is credited as “writer” and the latter as “illustrator,” but there are also two people given a “conceived by” credit and two more people given a “painted by” credit).

The premise is an alternate history of the United States, in which both vampires and zombies are real, and have posed existential threats to the nation since at least the time of the Civil War. Eventually, a federal organization was formed to protect the country from these two supernatural menaces. At present, they’ve both been seemingly stamped out, and the agency is in decline, the way that perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would be if the threat of terrorism were somehow almost completely erased.

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“I adore what I do and don’t think of it as just a job. It is what I breathe, it is intrinsic to my being”: That’s Hana Hajjar, “Saudia Arabia’s lone female cartoonist,” talking about her profession in this nice feature on CNN.com. You can see a slideshow of Hajjar’s work there, and much more of it on her website.

“Crazy Dudes Wanted to Fly to Denmark to Murder Old Man Over Cartoon, of All Things”: Gawker had probably the best headline of all the coverage of the plot by two Chicago men to kill the Danish Muhammad cartoonist.

“Not your average wiggly things”: Check out this National Post feature on Drawn and Quarterly’s recent collection of R.O. Blechman’s work, Talking Lines. I plan on writing a full review at some point in the near future, but in the mean time I will say it’s an excellent book, and one I hope you’ll take the time to look at soon.

“Costume possibilities are endless with a simple cape”: Need a last-minute Halloween costume? This article from The Orlando Sentinel makes a good case for starting with a cape and making a simple superhero costume from there. If it was good enough for Superman…

“That’s… different”: Savage Critic Brian Hibbs did a good job of expressing why “Dark Reign” has been less than satisfying for me, in large part because it seems like a branding exercise rather than a story, a new status quo in which nothing ever actually happens—dark or light—as the whole Marvel line simply waits around for the next Secret Invasion-sized event. He did so while expressing some admiration for Dark Reign—The List: Punisher #1, in which something pretty big and pretty dark does happen. Also on Savage Critics, Sean T. Collins defends The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Let the record show: I loved that series (I could have done without all the newscaster segments, but otherwise, I thought it was pretty damn great).

Changes in store for The Comics Journal: The venerable comics magazine’s next issue, November’s #300, will be its last on the current schedule and in the current format. In the future, the hard copy of TCJ will come in “expanded semi-annual editions, each customized to fit its content.” Meanwhile, TCJ.com is going to massively beef up its content. You can read the company’s official press release on the changes here.

How often do Ivan Reis and Johnny Ryan draw the same exact thing in the same exact week?: This week’s Blecky Yuckerella strip on Fantagraphics’ Flog! Blog has Blecky doing to her pal Wedgie just what the Silver Age Atom did to the Golden Age Atom in the pages of Blackest Night #4. Weird.

Also, does it even mean anything if the artist in question has only drawn like five different stories in that career?: Heidi MacDonald finds the phrase “best work of his career” kind of annoying when its used to hype up an upcoming project.

Fantastic: Check out Johnathan of Living Between Wednesday’s Halloween costume. Here’s a hint—It’s Designed Only for Killing…

Fantagraphics recently announced that they’ve struck a deal for seven (7) new books with writer/editor Greg Sadowski, who was responsible for Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 and a couple of B. Krigstein-related works for the publisher.

The books will be published one a season, so seven of ‘em is really planning ahead, and should carry them through to fall of 2012 or so (I don’t even have my next seven blog posts planned yet).

Here’s what they have planned at the moment…

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There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, that yesterday’s issue of Blackest Night reminded me of, and intensified my curiosity about.

If you’ve been reading DC’s superhero line for long, you know that the company has been actively promoting their Blackest Night miniseries and the surrounding story event for well over a year now.

If you’ve been reading Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern work, you know that he’s been writing his way toward this story for a very long time, perhaps as long as he’s been writing Hal Jordan stories.

As the event grew closer, it became apparent that some of the high profile characters the company was killing off were being killed off precisely so that they could return as undead Black Lantern.

Certainly Martian Manhunter and Aquaman were killed for this purpose, but how far back has DC been killing their characters with the expectation that they’d come back as zombie Lanterns in Blackest Night and then, perhaps, stay back once Hal Jordan is able to harness “white light of creation”…?

But what about The Question and Ralph Dibny, killed during the course of 52? Or the Freedom Fighters, Pantha and all the Infinite Crisis casualties? Or Max Lord, Sue Dibny and Blue Beetle II?

There are two relatively minor characters, both villains, that I was kinda shocked DC actually killed off, and I’ve been wondering and worrying about ever since Blackest Night started returning the dead.

That would be Monsieur Mallah, the intelligent gorilla who wears a beret and bandoliers and speaks with a French accent, and The Brain, who is just an evil brain that lives in an evil-looking gumball machine-esque support system.

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“Spy vs. Spy vs. Alien vs. Predator”: Ryan Dunlavey has posted a bunch of mash-up comics he’s done, in which he adapts one sort of comic book or cartoon character into the style of a famous comic strip artist. Like The Thunderkatzenjammer Kids or Little Zemo in Slumberland. Great stuff. (Link via Mike Sterling)

“Because it was a sedentary, solitary activity it was seen as impure. But comics do things that a novel can’t do, that a film can’t do”: Phill Juptus talks comics—how he started reading them, what he likes about them, what he recommends—in this piece from The Daily Mail.

“Mr. Zemeckis has called the dark movie a ‘graphic novel version’ of the classic tale”: That’s an exceptionally random line from a New York Times article about the upcoming computer-animated, Jim Carrey-staring Christmas Carol movie, and the Zemeckis is director Robert Zemeckis. Unfortunately, the Times reporter didn’t follow up by asking him what the hell he meant by a  “graphic novel version.”

What?! No Merv Pumpkinhead?!: For reasons I don’t understand myself, I love characters with carved pumpkins for heads. There’s something about that element in a character design that I find really appealing. So I enjoyed the topic of this list—“Five Comic Book Pumpkinheads For Halloween”—despite the fact that it was written by someone else named “Caleb” (I don’t know if any of you not named Caleb were aware of this or not, but all Calebs are natural enemies with one another) and that it included a character from Malibu Comics instead of more obvious examples.

Cooking with Oishinbo: Derik A. Badman reviews Oishinbo…by cooking from it.

“I then realized that I would have to go beyond grassroots comics evangelism in order to truly effect positive change.”: Josh Elder from Reading With Pictures talks with The Graphic Novel Reporter.

“All Cartoonists Seem To Be Cursed Forever Globally”: Hey kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? If you said “a cartoonist,” think about this Pravda headline before you apply to art school, okay?

You probably wouldn’t know it to look at ‘em, but those little cartoons I usually draw to kick off this column so that there’s some non-comic book cover art to post each week take time to make. I spend minutes and minutes on ‘em each Monday night. Unfortunately, my schedule contained fewer minutes than usual this week, so I didn’t make one this time. I’m sorry to derpive you all of the poorly-drawn colored-pencil-on-index-card imagery you have come to expect at the top of each week’s here-are-some-comics-coming-out-this-week column.

But I did do the writing part! So join me after the jump for an all-words, no-pictures look at some of thise week’s noteworthy releases.

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“The images are shocking, yes, but…the shock is in the act, not in the portrayal”: David Hajdu reviews Crumb’s Book of Genesis for the New York Times. If you’re not already sick of reading about the book, I’d suggest reading his review, as it’s a pretty good one.

The cartoonists were riding in a Blackhawk, relatively at ease, when suddenly the copter’s machine guns were fired”: Here’s a nice write-up of a USO-sponsored visit to the troops consisting of cartoonists Mike Peters, Tom Richmond, Jeff Bacon, Stephan Pastis, Bruce Higdon, Rick Kirkman, Chip Bok, Jeff Keane, Michael Ramirez and Garry Truedeau.

“The songs and the superheroism don’t quite gel here as well as they should. Plus, Batman should never, ever sing”: That bit of blasphemy comes from Marc Bernardin, in a post on EW’s Pop Watch blog, referring to the musical episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, an extremely awesome episode of the extremely awesome series. Why shouldn’t Batman and his allies and foes sing? I saw no reason from watching the episdoe. And isn’t the very best Justice League Unlimited episode the one where Batman sings…?

Con war primer: If you missed a thrilling moment of last week’s escalating con wars between Reed Exhibitions and Gareb Shamus’s Wizard/Or Whatever Shamus’ Next Thing Will Be Called,  Heidi MacDonald has a nice thorough overview on the subject here at The Beat.

Twin reviews of Archie #602: The latest issue of Archie, the climax of the “…Marries Veronica” possible future story (Is this the Dark Knight Returns of Archie comics?) came  out this week, and both Rachelle Goguen and Tucker Stone have some thoughts about it.

“The fact that he’s wearing a shirt at all, and not wearing wings and a hawk mask, makes this a pretty good disguise”: Rachelle Goguen, the Internet’s number one rater of super-hunks, reviews the street clothes the Justice Leaguers are wearing in a panel from JLoA #89, which she calls “one of the most insane and self-indulgent comics ever written.” Ooh, that one should be in the next Showcase Presents collection. Get collecting, DC!

“Who is this movie for? And why this particular story?”: This review of the Superman/Batman: Public Enemies DC does a good job of encapsulating what has been one of the major problems I’ve had with each of the projects I’ve seen so far, that of address. They seem short and simplified as if for children, but usually throw in enough “grown-up” stuff to seem inappropriate for kids. He closes the review out by rating it in probably the most appropriate way possible, as either less than or greater than other DC direct-to-DVD movies. All of them I’ve seen—just the first three or four so far—have been poor in the exact same ways (far too short, bizarrely addressed to the narrowest imaginable audience), so that system seems to work out well.

“The superhero mode has so dominated — you almost want to say “deformed” — comic books for so long that few folks younger than 50 can remember the wonderfully diverse subject matter of the comic’s early days”: Here’s Milo Miles on the Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly edited The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics for NPR.

“‘Comic’ retells Honduran coup and Manuel Zelaya arrest”: In other news, The Guardian still using quotation marks to indicate that not all comics are actually comical.

“New graphic novel is ‘all dolled up’ to go somewhere”: Abby Denson’s Dolltopia should prove popular with headline writers. The puns practically write themselves!

“One fun thing about being an editorial cartoonist is that I sometimes get invited to strange places as a cartoon celebrity”: Daryl Cagle on his week in Algeria.

“Asterix at 50″: Time magazine looks at the career of the most famous Gaul in comics.

Library employees fired for violating library policy proceed to alert the media: Apparently, two employees of the Jessamine County Public Library in Nicholasville, Kentucky were fired last month because they refused to allow an 11-year-old to check out what a local TV news station calls “a book from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series,” which one of the employees, Sharon Cook, referred to as “pornography.” As is usually the case at public libraries, the policy states that it’s up to parents to deem what is and what isn’t appropriate for their children. I know there’s some pretty weird sex in each of the volumes, and if I was a parent I might not want my 11-year-old reading it—while being impressed that she’d be able to understand the dense, allusion-filled book enough to enjoy it—but it’s hard to imagine a grown-up could even flip through any of those volumes and decide that they are actual works of actual pornography. Here’s WTVQ’s report from Wednesday, and here’s a Thursday follow-up on reaction to the original story. You can watch the report here, if you don’t mind sitting through a twelve-second commercial first.

I can’t imagine the term “Blackest Night” can possibly be used to describe the mood around the DC offices these days.

Earlier this week, industry website ICv2.com released their initial data and analysis for comics sales in the direct market during the month of September, and it was apparently a very good month for the market’s perennial second banana, DC Comics.

According to their numbers, the best-selling book of the month was Blackest Night #3, with four other tie-ins to the “Blackest Night” event/story placing in the top-ten—Green Lantern, Blackest Night: Batman, Green Lantern Corps and Blackest Night: Superman. (It’s also noted that there doesn’t seem to be very dramatic drop-offs between issues of the “Blackest Night” books, which is also good news for the publisher.)

Of the top ten, there’s one more DC book—Grant Morrison and Philip Tan’s Batman and Robin—with Marvel claiming the other four spots, with event title Captain America: Reborn, two “Dark Reign” branded tie-ins, and Wolverine Giant-Size Old Man Logan.

That’s a pretty extraordinary showing for DC, and obviously they’re going to want to do whatever they can to try and replicate that success in the future. I’m sure they’re asking themselves, and have been doing so for a while, just what it is about Blackest Night that seems to be hitting with their audience, and what they can do to generate more Blackest Nights in the future.

I’ve got a couple of ideas.

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DC Comics have long been full of dark and evil gods, constantly making trouble for our heroes and heroines. But as bad as Darkseid, Ares and their ilk might be, you know the comic book gods that really scare me?

The ones some of DC writers seem to worship.

Now, the existence of a secret cult that meets in the basement of 1700 Broadway on the nights of full moons, their identities hidden even from one another by ritual cloaks and hoods, to chant in a secret, blasphemous language and bow before a profane, obscene stone idol of a hideous monster-god is just a theory of mine.

I have no actual proof of it, other than the suggestion that surely there must be some reason so many writers have begun their new series or new story arcs with a blood sacrifice, as if it were part of a ritual beseeching some entity for success.

It’s 2003, and Judd Winick and Geoff Johns are about to launch new volumes of The Outsiders and Teen Titans respectively. Their storyline kicks off in a special miniseries in which several characters are killed.

It’s 2005, and the pair—joined by Greg Rucka—are about to set the DC Universe on a course towards Infinite Crisis, and they kick it all off in a special one-shot in which they kill Blue Beetle II.

In 2008, Winick gets ready to relaunch a new Titans title, and he does so by slaughtering a half-dozen minor characters.

That same year, the Grant Morrison-written Final Crisis opens with the deaths of Orion and Martian Manhunter.

Surely there must be some reason for all this blood, and since it is the blood of fictional comic book characters, I can only imagine it’s a very peculiar, quasi-religious reason.

It can’t possibly be a creative or dramatic reason, because it’s been done so often in such a short span of time, and despite their occasional shortcomings, all of these men—even Judd Winick, whose work I like the very least—are talented, and have certainly read enough comic books to know that seeing a character get killed barely moves the needle of fan interest, let alone excitement.

These same writers have also been simultaneously restoring dead characters to life during that same time, even undoing some of the most “sacred” comic book deaths, like that of Jason Todd and Barry Allen, further making the act of death meaningless within the context of their fictional universe.

So they must worship an evil god that feeds on the imaginary blood of fictional characters—It’s the only thing that makes any sense.

I haven’t mentioned James Robinson yet.

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Is this the end of the the Wicomico County, Maryland controversy regarding Goku’s pee-pee?: God, I hope so. The Wicomico school district in Maryland decided to pull the Dragon Ball manga digests from school libraries, after a grandstanding Wicomico County councilman brought photocopies of one of the volumes to a county council meeting. For a very smart discussion of issues revolving around manga censorship, controversy and perception in the U.S., I’d highly recommend this piece by Jason Thompson at i09.com.

Let there be press coverage!: R. Crumb’s version of The Book of Genesis continues to capture mainstream media attention, like these two pieces in USA Today, and these two pieces from National Public Radio.

“It suddenly occurred to me that a cartoon published in 1944 might not be familiar to folks younger than 75″: A staff writer for California paper The Sun on the great Bill Maudlin.

Blah blah blah X-Men blah blah mutants blah: Here’s a nice long review of the recent X-Men story arc “Utopia” by Paul O’Brien. I’ve found that I really enjoy reading about the X-Men, even if I don’t actually read their comics. Meanwhile, Tim O’Neil has some further thoughts about the X-Men franchises fall from the top of the super-comics totem pole (And finds himself intrigued by January’s cover for Wolverine: Origins. The solicitation copy doesn’t actually say, but that is who it looks like, right? Wow.)

“‘X-Men’ Star Too Old For Four”: Yeah, I don’t thin Sir Ian McKellen, as talented an actor as he is, can get away with playing a four-year-old. Oh, wait a minute, that’s not what this tidbit’s about—it actually refers to him being in a fourth X-Men film. Ah.

It’s like Speed, but with a pigeon in the Keanu Reeves role: Mo Willems, one of my favorite artists in the world, shares some fan art, including a sweet-looking movie poster.

I am so excited about Batman Unseen by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, the second issue of which is due tomorrow (Preview here). The first issue magically transported me to a Wednesday afternoon in 1998 or so, and made me want to re-read Morrison, Porter and Dell’s JLA and Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s Hitman. Is this that feeling of nostalgia people are always talking about? Have I just never read a superhero comic book geared specifically toward my own personal nostalgia spot before?

Are any of this week’s books targeted at your personal nostalgia spot? Join me after jump to find out.

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“[T]he country’s two greatest cultural figures are both artists, and as of this year those two bowler-hat-loving Belgians…are being celebrated with their own museums. Not that they would have celebrated together, had they had the chance. The two couldn’t have been more different”: Who are Beglium’s two greatest cultural figures? Tintin creator Hergé and surrealist René Magritte, according to this article from The Globe and Mail.

Not quite comics: Here’s a nice profile of Charles Monroe Schulz Jr., who now shares a publisher with his late father, Charles Schulz—Fantagraphics. Unlike his father, Schulz isn’t a cartoonist, but a prose novelist, and his works are among the first that Fantagraphics has published.

“Nowadays it looks like Iron man is always getting hit with Photoshop effects. It ain’t the same, baby”: Cartoonist Evan Dorkin offers his thoughts on the passing of George Tuska, including his fond memories of Tuska’s work during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“Goldsman won’t exactly apologize for the film, but he comes pretty close”: That’s from this entertaining Los Angeles Times entertainment story, profiling screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. The film he won’t exactly apologize for, but comes pretty close to is, of course, 1997’s Batman and Robin, which the president of production at Marvel Studios is quoted as calling maybe the most important comic-book movie ever made, in that it was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things.

This just in! Steve Ditko book to be awesome: Seriously, just look at this thing. Wow.

There’s no faulting The Anchor #1 (Boom Studios) for a lack of scope. It opens in Hell itself, where the mysterious title character is single-handedly responsible for beating back the hordes of hell with his big, pink fists.

It then jumps to downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, where a giant ice monster is on a rampage. The title character, referred to as God’s anchor to hell by a member of the demon horde and Clem by a volunteer worker who notices he’s wearing a symbol of Saint Clement, is there too, fighting the monster.

“My soul is in hell,” he explains. “It wrestles with demons there…the wounds my soul suffers are borne by my earthly body.”

Writer Phil Hester doesn’t delve much deeper into who The Anchor is, how he came to be, or why his memory seems so addled and he sometimes talks in psalms without even realizing they’re psalms (Actually, the fact that the ice monster hits him with a truck might explain those last two, come to think of it).

And while all that is usually welcome in a first issue (especially see this is a $3.99 comic), that all that info isn’t present certainly isn’t because Hester’s dragging his feet or anything. He does establish plenty of intriguing clues and suggestions, introduces and half-introduces some characters, sketches out a concept and, most importantly, establishes an appealing tone that teeters between supernatural melodrama and comedy.

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