Twin Peaks Co-Creator Frost Talks Comics and Star Wars

In a newly-published blog interview at Portable, best-selling author and Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost tackled the matter of the critically-panned Fantastic Four movies he worked on and, more generally, the role that comic books and superheroes have played in his life and storytelling.”The first movie was a lot fun because I’d collected Fantastic Four as a kid and had a lot of affections for, so they were stories I was very familiar with,” Frost said. “The studio had tried to develop the thing for about ten years and it had fallen flat and gone in all sorts of different directions. I kind of steered them back to the original conceptions, the original ideas, the point. In a way it was like working with old friends, these were characters I’d known for 40 years. It was a little different than working with an adaptation that was brand new to me, with characters I didn’t know.”That all sounds well and good–and there are plenty of people who will still swear by Fantastic Four, in spite of it having a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than either its much-reviled sequel OR the unreleased Roger Corman version of the movie. What does Frost have to say about Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer?”The second movie never really had much of a chance, it had kind of an ass-backwards development where they had named a release date but they didn’t have a movie to go out on that day. The second movie is a bit less effective than the first one, but that was a little different than a straight adaptation. These characters have been around for so long that they’re almost in our collective unconscious of pop culture, so it wasn’t that difficult.He also discussed some more general stuff, outside of his own professional experiences and delving into the person and the cultural a bit.”You’re trying to speak to those characters in the way they spoke to you, bring them up as the archetypes they were originally assigned to be,” Frost told the site. “I think our infatuation with superhero movies in the last 15 years speaks to that very thing, that interest in trying to form a mythology for a culture, particularly one as diverse and fast-moving as ours. It’s pretty difficult. As the 21st century came on us this set of characters from those books — characters many people first encountered as kids — have suddenly assumed this place of primacy in our collective storytelling. In some ways its a little alarming — they’re not the most mature characters you’ll come across, but at the same time they do address things collectively that are under the surface. These are issues that many people deal with like, identity, and anxiety and’what’s my ultimate role’ and ‘is there such a thing as salvation?’ All these things are in these books, these comic books.”He added, “I was a big Marvel character as a kid, I read a few DC books as well, but they were kinda like the Democrat and Republican party of comics: we didn’t have all the great indie labels that have sprung up since then. Marvel in the way was the upstart, DC had been around for a couple of decades before. I identify pretty strongly with the Marvel brand, and identify with their whole stable of characters.”