Taking shameless advantage of his friendship with Guillermo del Toro (and, as we all know, del Toro does not make friends easily), Neil Gaiman has traveled to Budapest and posted the very first, and very unofficial, pics of Hellboy 2 to his official website. This unfortunate episode only grows more sordid when you realize Gaiman inveigled his guest-blogging daughter Maddy to break the news so as to give the whole thing an air of youthful indiscretion.
Is this how the game’s going to be played, Neil? Will you now hop from set to set scoring a series of exclusive, non-studio approved images just because you’re Neil Gaiman and your daughter is either a willing dupe or too young to know better? I mean, you do understand that many of the online movie webmasters have kids of their own? And the ones who don’t have unfettered access to nephews and nieces and teenaged runaways? Is this the kind of escalation you desire? Do you really want to take it there? How soon before the set of Indy 4 is overrun with pre-schoolers and infants and pregnant women with portable ultrasound machines, all brandishing phone cameras for the purposes of obtaining "exclusive" on-set footage?
This is the future you’ve beckoned, Neil. This is the endgame. And you will lose because we are far too numerous and oily (literally and figuratively). Also, we don’t have insanely lucrative writing careers to fall back on.
The rest of the Gaiman family’s illicit travelogue can be seen right here.