Carnival of souls

* Happy birthday to two of my favorites: Craig Thompson and Stephen King. Over at his blog, the former explains how the latter’s insights helped him rescue his long-gestating graphic novel Habibi from a creative impasse.

* League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls, and Tom Strong author Alan Moore complains about today’s comic-book writers turning to decades-old stories for inspiration.

* Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa: Jim Woodring wrote a Star Wars comic? About a potential mate for Jabba the Hutt threatening to eat him after sex? Oh, indeed.

* Jason Adams has great things to say about Total Film’s list of the 20 Greatest Horror Films You’ve Never Seen, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to inflate their hitcount by paging my way through their one-movie-per-page slideshow this afternoon. Maybe later.

* Two posts in a row might be too few to refer to as “a roll,” but Tim Hensley sure is on something–jiminy christmas look at these Samm Schwartz spreads from Tippy Teen. Wow, Hensley is to the Archie aesthetic what CF, Frank Santoro, Ben Jones, Kaz Strzepek et al are to ’80s action-adventure comics, isn’t he?

* Ta-Nehisi Coates explains the sexual side of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I feel pretty strongly about the power of the song myself.

* Ten years ago today, Nine Inch Nails released their (his) sprawling double album The Fragile. If it weren’t for various world-historical releases like Nevermind and OK Computer, I’d say it was the best album of the ’90s. Listen to the whole thing for free at Last.fm. (Via @nineinchnails.)

* Meanwhile, Trent (?) reports that a deluxe edition of some kind is coming in 2010. I have an iTunes playlist consisting of every original track and NIN-created remix coming from that entire period, up through and including the mostly-acoustic Still EP, placed in logical order based on the extended vinyl version of The Fragile as well as general euphoniousness, that I call “The Complete Fragile.” Hopefully it’s something like that.