Okay, but if you wouldn't mind, I'd like it if you would list the other descriptions of Maggie that you're thinking of. I don't really recall anything beyond what Ebenezer told Harry in Blood Rites, at the moment.

Hoo boy, let's see if I can slap this together.

The first major reference I can recall is from Chauzoggoroth, the infodemon Harry foolishly summoned up in Fool Moon.  In the course of the discussion, Harry happens to mention his mother, and Chauzoggoroth comments:

"Indeed.  Your mother was a most direct and willful woman.  Her loss was a great sadness to all of us."
"You...you knew my mother?  You knew Margaret Gwendolyn Dresden?"
"Many in the underworld were...familiar with her, Harry Blackstone Dresden, though under a different name.  Her coming was awaited with great anticipation, but the Dark Prince lost her, in the end."
"What do you mean?  What are you talking about?"
"Didn't you know about your mother's past, Mr. Dresden?  A pity we did not have this conversation sooner.  You might have added it into the bargain we made.  Of course, if you would like to forfeit another name, to know all about your mother's past, her redemption, and the unnatural deaths of both mother and father, I am sure we can work something out."

OK, Chaunzoggoroth is a demonic entity, and as such by definition untrustworthy.  Still, the only sucker bait it has to offer practitioners to summon it is useful truthful information.  So lying is highly risky, it needs a reputation for truthfulness to do its damage.  I suspect the only lie it told Harry was about St. Patrick being the source of the loup-garou curse.  For that, it suddenly switched from direct declarative statements to second-hand comments, "It is said..." etc.

Its comments about Margaret, OTOH, were direct declarations.


Our next contestant is the ever-infamous Nicodemus Archleone.  In Death Masks, when he had Harry helpless in that dungeon, he mentioned Margaret.

"Little Maggie's youngest.  You've grown up to be a man of considerable strengths."

Later, Harry asks Nicodemus why he didn't just kill him.  Nicodemus answers:

"I have a fond memory or two of your mother.  It cost me little to attempt it.  So why not?"
"That's the second time you've mentioned her."
"Yes.  I respected her.  Which is quite unusual for me."

OK, Nicodemus could easily have been lying (he does that).  But he did know that Harry was a younger offspring of his mother, and there is some corroborating evidence that he knew Margaret, as we'll get to in a moment.

Next up is Thomas, in Blood Rites.  Having told Harry that they share a common mother, Harry is reluctant to believe it.  Thomas tells Harry:

"She was my mother too.  Harry, you knew she wasn't exactly white as the driven snow.  I know you've learned a little over the years.  She was one Hell of a dangerous witch, and she kept some bad company."

Then a few minutes later, they have this exchange:

"It doesn't make any sense.  What would she have been doing hanging around with your father?"
"God knows.  All I know is that there was some sort of business between them.  It developed into something else.  Father was trying to snare her permanently, but she wound up being too strong for him to completely enthrall.  She escaped him when I was about five.  From what I've been able to learn, she met your father next year when she was on the run."
"Running from who?"
"Maybe my father.  Maybe some people in the Courts or on the Council.  I don't know.  She'd gotten into some bad business and she wanted out.  But whowever she was in it with didn't want her gone.  They wanted her dead."

Thomas then adds that he can't get people to talk to him about his mother.  Thomas and Harry continue to bicker over what the truth is.  A few minutes later they soulgaze, and Harry meets the simulacrum of his mother, who refers to herself/Margaret as being 'so arrogant', among other things.  The simulacrum confirms that he and Thomas are brothers.

Now, the simulation is a little piece of Margaret imprinted on the brains of Harry and Thomas.  What does that sound like? A lot like a Denarian mindshadow.  Where could she have learned to do such a thing?  Well, Nicodemus did claim to have known her.  Those two facts do seem to support each other.

Later in Blood Rites, Ebenezar tells Harry:

"The Council knew that you were the son of Margaret LeFay.  They knew she was one of the Wizards who had turned the Council's own Laws against it.  She was guilty of violating the First Law, among others, and she had...unsavory associations with various entities of dubious reputation.  The Wardens were under orders to arrest her on sight.  She would have been tried and executed in moments if she was brought before the Council."
...

"I don't know why, but for some reason she turned away from her previous associates--including Justin DuMorne.  After that, nowhere was safe for her. She ran from her former allies and from the Wardens for perhaps two years.  And she ran from me.  I had my orders regarding her too."

In Turn Coat, Harry got a look at Ebenezar's journal, and he caught a glimpse of a line written by Eb to the effect that he can't think of anybody he'd trust with whatever is associatedf with Demonreach more than he'd trust Harry, but that..."then again, I trusted Maggie, too."

All right, now we've got various points of view on her, all of which more-or-less match up.  The versions from Chaunzoggoroth, Nicodemus, Thomas, the Margaret-simulation, and Ebenezar all line up with each other.  They contradict Luccio's comments in Turn Coat in several basic ways.  Further, that whole conversation with Luccio was weird, weird, weird.  Harry's reactions to what she was saying made no sense, either.

So I strongly distrust the idea that Margaret was just a misguided but well-intentioned idealist.  Maybe it started out that way...

I've always Marcone to look like George Clooney, only with green eyes. I think the hair, age and attitude/voice is perfect. Plus I think a top of the A list actor should do Marcone. It's a difcult role, super bada$$ and yet super subtel. He needs alot of presence and I think Cloony would pull it off really well.

With you on this one!  Clooney is perfect for the role.

He doesn't look anything like the textual description, but due to imprinting in my childhood, and the fact that we're talking about the rural South (albeit not the same part of it), I can't help put associate Ebenezar in my mind with Uncle Jesse, from the old Dukes of Hazzard TV show.

A few things make the association in my mind.  In the voiceover to the very first episode, Waylon Jennings (the narrator) says of Uncle Jesse that as head of the Duke family, 'he's always obeyed, usually out of love.  But always obeyed."  He's cantankerous, stubborn, and loving, he took in Bo and Luke as children when their relatives died, and his CB handle is 'shepherd' and the boys are 'lost sheep'.  He wasn't always law-abiding, but he had a strong moral sense, and knew how things worked.

I never thought much about this, but Harry would have lived longer because he is a wizard, but would he age normally.

I think there was a discussion about this already where it was stated that one of the wizards that was 100 something years old looked like he was 100 something years old.

So I guess at 40 he would look 40, and so on.

No, it's not quite that way.  We know that they age fairly normally at first, Harry and Elaine grew to adulthood at the same pace as normal kids, for ex, and now Harry has commented that he needs more sleep than he once did, for ex, and has to work harder to stay fit, he's approaching middle age and beginning to feel it.  We've also see that Morgan was still in excellent fighting shape at 100+, and
So my take on is that what Wizards get is a lllloooooonnnnnnngggggggggg period of late youth/early middle age, aging very gradually after the first relatively normal period of childhood and early adulthood.  (It probably also helps if you start with the magic at an early age, like Harry/Elaine.)

I wouldn't be surprised if 'old age' is also brief (i.e. no longer than for us) for Wizards, when it finally sets it in earnest.

Oh my god.

Give him a perpetual five o'clock and several dozen bruises, and it would work. Holy crap, kennedy! Good call!

Yeah, no kidding!  He's not quite old enough, put just a few more years on him, 'roughen up' the look..and we've got Harry Dresden!

In a previous thread about who we would cast as various characters in the DF, I suggested that Thomas Raith, to me, is Jason Dohring, who played a more traditional kind of vampire on the TV series Moonlight.  To me, this is Thomas Raith:




But though I find the casting of Lara far more interesting (for obvious reasons) I never could find someone who fit my mental image well, until it suddenly hit me today that the pop singer Katie Perry gets pretty darned close:








The thing is that to me, Lara should combine blatantly sexy with subtle and sweet.  I have do doubt whatsover that anytime she feels the impulse, Lara can suddenly make herself seem so sweet and innocent that she'd make Bambi look like Jason Vorhees in comparison.  And Katie Perry has a knack for projecting the same playfulness that I suspect Lara exudes amid her supernatural sex appeal.

Of course the playful sweetness is a lie...but at the same time it's probably an effective lie precisely because it was once real, and maybe a tiny hint of it remains real somewhere deep down inside in that same place where the remnants of her conscience might just still live.

But when I picture Lara, Katie Perry is who plays her in my mind.

"I'm the Amazing Spider-Man, not Spider-man and his Amazing Friends"

I just about choked when I read that one. 

If you read one of the BND comics, you would know it wouldn't take too much of Jim's time. He could write it in his sleep and still be better than the BND comics.
OMD sucks. Damn you Joe Quesada for doing this,

What?!  You're saying you want Spidey to get old and die?!!!   

(That was reportedly Quesada's reaction to the idea that Spidey was better off married.)

The entire Marvel Universe has collapsed on itself in terms of its continuity and writing levels, it's only a ghost of its former glory and it's being sustained, I suspect, in large part by Hollywood movies that are better than the comics themselves.

Something went really, really wrong at Marvel back in the 90s and they've never really recovered.