Comic-con may be the first place that a lot of us will get to see Peter Jackson's The Hobbit in motion before we get closer to its December 14th release, but for now we'll have to settle for this new image of Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.  The magazine's annual Comic-Con issue also features interviews from Jackson and the actors.  The story of The Hobbit, which will be split into two parts (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and December 13, 2013's The Hobbit: There and Back Again) tells the story of a younger Bilbo Baggins, before the adventures of his nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood) in The Lord of the Rings. Hit the jump to check out the cover image and to read some tidbits from Jackson and McKellen..  From EW comes these snippets of an interview with Jackson and McKellen.  Jackson fielded a question about the differences in characters between the J.R.R. Tolkien novels and the films.  Some characters never existed in the book and were created solely for the movie, ie Evangeline Lily's elf, Tauriel.   Here's how Jackson put it:

“In the movie we want these characters to have story lines and a little more substance than they do in the book.  Almost everything we’re doing is from Tolkien somewhere, whether it’s in the book or the subsequent development that wasn’t published in The Hobbit itself.”

McKellen also chimed in about the safety of your mind when watching The Hobbit on the big screen:

“A lot of people weren’t even born when we were filming Lord of the Rings and only know the movies from watching them on DVD…. They’ll see Middle-earth on the big screen in The Hobbit, and I guarantee there will be a lot of minds blown wide apart.”

Sounds messy.  Be sure to keep up with our continuing coverage of The Hobbit right here.