Fusenews: The Mystery of the Curious Wild Thing

• I was reading the Oz and Ends recap of the A Year of Reading recap of a recent talk given by Scott McCloud and Jeff Smith.  And most intriguing indeed was Mary Lee’s statement, "Insider trivia: Check for similarities between Smith’s dragon and Doonesbury ‘s Zonker."  Now I’m a huge old-school Doonesbury fan (where’s that complete collection?), so any and all mentions of it make me happy.  I like the notion of the dragon as Zonker, though the Dragon is (to everyone’s relief I’m sure) infinitely more reliable.  Still, ya gotta admit that the physical similarities are there.

• If the stars align correctly and we are good and pure in our hearts then we may be lucky enough to find Editorial Anonymous beginning her Slush and Punishment series again. And a new one is already up.

• From Cynopsis Kids :

Laika Entertainment , the animation studio owned by Phil Knight (of Nike fame), is looking for a Hollywood movie studio to partner on several feature films it is developing, per Variety .  Laika, which is in the midst of completing work on its first stop-motion animated movie Coraline based on Neil Gaiman’s book of the same name, and will be distributed by Focus Features.  Projects Laika is reportedly shopping around include:

• Here Be Monsters! - a project based on Alan Snow’s fantasy books set in 1850s London, which revolves around a 12-yr-old who lives in a world beneath the city that is inhabited by monsters but wants to live a normal life in the above ground world.

Here Be Monsters!   Now there’s a great book.  I proposed it to the homeschooler book group I run one week and they turned it down flat.  Brown book covers hold little appeal for kids these days.  But along comes the shiny blue cover and blammo!  Suddenly it’s desirable and fun.  Once you convince them that most of the book consists of pictures (Hugo Cabret is a very good example to bring up in this case) they’ll definitely get into it.  Silly fantasy at its best.

• Daily Image:

I got this from a faithful reader with the following message:

The picture I send comes with a warning– it’s disappeared from its original source.  I found a copy on a message board, but the original link was dead… In any event, I believe it’s from Jim Henson’s workshop.  I found the Murakami reference book in the background particularly interesting.  I don’t know if this is a puppet ‘sketch’ (small scale mock-up) or a final version for something un-movie related… perhaps for a pre-production presentation.