* Here’s a fine Charles Hatfield piece on Blaise Larmee’s lovely Young Lions, strategically illustrated in case you want to see whether this is your kind of thing.
* Speaking of strategically illustrated reviews, you’ve gotta check out Noah Berlatsky’s piece on Junji Ito’s Uzumaki. He takes the Men, Women and Chainsaws stuff a little far for my tastes–I guess it shouldn’t surprise longtime readers of mine that I might feel that way–but any art-heavy close reading of that unbelievably creepy snail sequence is worth your time. (Via Brigid Alverson.)
* It’s been way too long since I saw In a Lonely Place. I’ve got a copy on VHS someplace, I know…
* I know the feeling Tom Spurgeon’s talking about in his piece on the coming Big Two digital-comics apocalypse. I’ve got an interest in following superhero comics on a monthly basis but very little in buying them in serialized installments, so timely digital release of the weekly books with a subsequent release in trade paperback would siphon money out of me without breaking a sweat. I’m sure I get way too caught up in “Why haven’t they put their comics for sale online yet? Don’t they see what happened to the music industry???” and pay way too little attention to “For all its flaws, the Direct Market is what keeps the industry afloat–I sure hope the advent of digital comics doesn’t wipe it out!!!”
* Elsewhere, Tom reviews the Alex Ross art book Rough Justice. It’s a good review to read if, like Tom, you’re sort of on the outside of the Alex Ross Phenomenon looking in, or if you like books named after surprisingly good late-period Rolling Stones songs.
* Johnny Ryan gets scarier and scarier.
* Speaking of scarier and scarier, god only knows what Josh Simmons cooked up for the latest Cinema Sewer and Sleazy Slice.
* A preview of Ross Campbell’s Shadoweyes! You know what? I’m not 100% sold on this style–not the figurework so much as the way the direct-to-tablet art looks. We’ll see.
* A Mike Mignola Batman variant cover? Sure, I’ll eat it.
* A list of Metropolis-indebted movies with no Tim Burton Batman? For shame, Matt Zoller Seitz, for shame.
* Recently on Robot 6: How the heck did the Red Hulk use Thor’s hammer?;
* and superheroes and atheism, two great tastes that might taste a little weird together, when you think about it.