John Cusack as Poe at Comic-Con

Jacket Copy looks at the literary highlights of Comic-Con, which took place over the weekend in San Diego. Our favorite Poe[t] was there! We'll go ahead and make this the second post today wherein we mention "Say Anything" -- how apro-poe. Sorry.

John Cusack talked about playing Edgar Allan Poe in "The Raven." The 2012 film, named after the author's famous poem, focuses on the mysterious last days of Poe's life -- he died at age 40 in 1849 in Baltimore, possibly from overindulgence in alcohol. "I saw some of Hunter S. Thompson in Poe -- his unflinching ability to delve into the abyss and come back. He reminded me of Hunter in that way," Cusack said at his panel, where he called the author "the godfather of Goth." Hero Complex reports that to amp up the story of the writer's final days, the filmmakers have thrown in a serial killer plot. Oh, Hollywood.

Poe was seen elsewhere at the convention, specifically, on the faces of the audience at the preview of Francis Ford Coppola's movie "Twixt." The film is an original script by Coppola, and is about a horror writer (played by Val Kilmer, who also attended) whose career is in decline and who begins having dreams of orphan girls and a certain long-dead author. The movie is partially -- only partially -- in 3-D, and the Poe masks served as 3-D glasses. Coppola told Hero Complex:

[W]e were in Constantinople and I was meeting with a Turkish lawyer whose sister shows up at dinner and they start giving me this beverage called raki, which is very alcoholic, and I went home to my hotel, fell asleep and had this vivid dream. It was all this Edgar Allan Poe imagery and the scary forest and this little girl with braces saying, “You’re looking at my teeth! You’re looking at my teeth!” and children coming out of a grave in the floor, and then Edgar Allan Poe shows up and I was saying, “This is a gift. I’m being given a story” and I said to Poe, “Guide me.”

If that's not enough Poe for you, stay tuned for a possible Poe television show. In January, ABC picked up a pilot for "a crime procedural" that stars Poe, "the world's very first detective, as he uses unconventional methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston." Right.

Read the entire account here.