THIS IS A TERRIBLY GEEKY POST: And it combines comics geekitude with my status as a regular listener of NPR, which is sort of an anti-Reese's peanut butter cup of maligned subcultures--but I do cringe when comics-related guests go on the Terry Gross show. Because while Terry knows a lot of things, she doesn't know the comics very well. So when Frank Miller's on to talk about Sin City she can't really ask him about his influences because she's probably heard of very few of them. Or the relationship of Sin City to his previous work, because she probably hasn't read them. So it ends up being one of her "light" interviews.

I experienced the same cringing during her Brad Bird interview, when they were talking about The Incredibles and didn't bring up Fantastic Four or Doom Patrol not once. Now in this case my cringing was less fair, since I believe Brad has publicly disavowed any comics influence on The Incredibles, though he does credit 60s pop culture quite a bit, so if there's something in that era that leads to the Fantastic Four and he's stripmining that era for ideas, then perhaps its logical that The Incredibles resemble the FF. So there's no reason for Terry to bring it up. But it would have been nice, just given how obvious the relationship is to anybody who knows the Fantastic Four story even slightly well.

The Doom Patrol Elastigirl question is something only one with the heart of a geek would ask, so that is something I wouldn't expect her to ask. But that interview kind of assumed The Incredibles emerged from his head de novo, which they did not. Not in the sense of Bird-ripping-off-the-FF, which he denies and so that's that, but in the sense that The Incredible were all fairly common super-types (stretchy guy, strong guy, fast guy. If there are any Bird-did-rip-off-the-FF conspiracists in existence they are on firmest ground with the Violet/Sue Storm comparisons, since invisibility combined with force fields combined with being a wallflower is not exactly a typical superhero motif.)

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