* Wow, did you know you could read Duncan the Wonder Dog in its entirety for free on Adam Hines’s website right now? But only through March, because AdHouse is prepping a $9.95 downloadable version for sale.

* PictureBox and Comics Comics’ Dan Nadel has a fine Best Comics of 2010 list up at the Economist.

* Good Lord, Jim Woodring.

* Good Lord, Hellen Jo.

* Happy first birthday to the fun sketch blog Comic Twart.

* Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (maybe Catwoman, maybe not) and Tom Hardy as Bane? Sounds potentially delightful, which is probably the first time I’ve ever said that about a Christopher Nolan movie.

* Rob Mitchum’s essay on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall and Roger Waters’s recent tour “The Wall” starts strong with the title and only gets better. He’s definitely right to emphasize the confrontational weirdness of the album; the first time I ever listened to it, my senior year in college, I was stunned that something so insular and vicious was somehow so universal.

* Finally, here are a bunch of Marvel and DC job openings. I bet some of you are quite well equipped to do some of those jobs.

FUC* **U, *SS**LE
Johnny Ryan, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2010
pages
$11.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

Take a good look at that cover, if you will, and you’ll see what it is that makes Johnny Ryan’s grossout humor comics so special. Blecky Yuckerella isn’t just emitting bog-standard gag-strip flopsweat and stinkflies as she hangs, she’s also squirting out tiny little drops of urine. That’s the kind of attention to detail and willingness to go the extra mile that took Ryan to the top!

In Ryan’s last Blecky collection (co-Bleck-tion?), the fun came in seeing the pacing economy of the four-panel gag strip used as a vehicle for a completely unconstrained sense of the absurd, a willingness to turn the corner into even weirder and more ridiculous or offensive territory with each new panel. By contrast, the fun of FUC* **U, *SS**LE (aside from the title itself, Ryan’s best since Johnny Ryan’s XXX Scumbag Party) is mostly how straightforward it is: Ryan’s got a punchline in mind, and by god he’ll set it up in those first three panels no matter how idiotic it is. Wine made from stomping pig carcasses (“I call it S’wine!”), Curly Moe and Larry as the Messiah (“It’s Stoogeus Christ!”), diarrhea caused by eating Bigfoot (“the Sasquirtz”), a porno called 69-11 (“It’s like 9-11, only more erotic!” Blecky points out as Flight 11 and the North Tower perform oral sex on one another) — I’d say “you can’t make this shit up,” but you can, or Ryan can at least, and watching him frogmarch his characters through the outlandish scenarios needed to give birth to these you-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me ideas is Guffaw City. And as I always point out, he’s a fine, fine cartoonist; this idea has more traction in a post-Prison Pit world, I know, but you don’t get to see his buoyant brushwork in those books, while here it’s what sells the childlike glee of everything that’s going on. His thick blacks really vary up the dynamics of each page, too. Unfortunately, this Blecky’s final hurrah, as Ryan has retired the strip. You can certainly see how Prison Pit and Angry Youth Comix afford him a lot more formal leeway, but I’m going to miss the consistently high batting average on display in the Blecky books. I guess it’s like Blecky herself tells Aunt Jiggles: “You can either have a lotta annoying noise and a clean robot pussy, or peace and quiet and nasty robot pussy stench. But you can’t have it both ways!”

* Brigid Alverson tries to figure out where the reduced-price rubber hits the increased-volume road for digital comics.

* Shame on me for missing this when it went up and kudos to Tom Spurgeon for alerting me to it: Emily Carroll’s dream comics. Man, what a talent.

* Curt Purcell vs. Apollo from Battlestar Galactica. I think Curt’s selling the character short — there’s something to be said for sticking a Hero in a non-heroic world and seeing what that does to him, and he was great in the trial — but I think it’s clear he’s the major character with whom the writers had the most trouble connecting.

* Real Life Horror: Philadelphia police have captured the city’s budding serial killer, the Kensington Strangler. Good thing, too — he’s very young (22) and committed several non-fatal assaults in addition to his three apparently admitted murders, so it seems like he was ramping up to a potentially long and awful career. (Via Atrios.)

* Definitely listen to this streaming copy of Destroyer’s new album Kaputt. Avalon and on and on. (Via Pitchfork.)

Regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware (to say the least!) that I am a big fan of George R.R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels called A Song of Ice and Fire, and that I’m eagerly anticipating the HBO series adapting them, called Game of Thrones. But a few days ago I realized that you might not know why. Credit for this goes to my blogging chum Curt Purcell, who used the occasion of my umpty-millionth post on the topic to ask:

Without giving too much away, can you maybe hit a few bullet-points about what sets SONG OF ICE AND FIRE apart from other similar fantasy series? It sounds so run-of-the-mill, even when people gush about it. What am I missing that would make me want to read it?

As I said in the comment I left to answer his questions, I’m such an enthusiast for this material that I don’t know if I’ll be any good at expressing or explaining why. (I’m also emotionally and physically exhausted due to all sorts of off-blog goings-on this past week and am not at my most cogent.) But I’ll take a shot at running down some of the series’ distinguishing characteristics. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the hard sell.

First off, what exactly are we talking about here? Well, as I said, A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy novels by writer George R.R. Martin, whom some comic fans and nerds may know from his involvement with the Wild Cards series of revisionist-superhero prose novels, or for his time on the writing staff for the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton Beauty and the Beast TV show. So far, four volumes of a (sort-of^) planned seven have been released: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows. The HBO series, spearheaded by David Benioff and Dan Weiss, takes its title (sans indefinite article) from the first volume and will debut on April 17; the plan is to adapt one book per season, although the books get so long that some may need to be spread over the course of two seasons.

What’s the setting? Without spoiling anything important, here goes: The books take place mostly in a land called Westeros, your basic roughly medieval-European epic fantasy setting, albeit one with far, far fewer overt trappings of fantasy than, say The Lord of the Rings — humans are the only game in town in terms of races, and we’re several generations removed from the last time magic/sorcery or mythical creatures like dragons were a going concern. The main fantastical feature when the story begins is how the flow of seasons work: Summer and winter can each last for years, decades even, before shifting unpredictably.

Westeros, which ranges from an arctic climate up north to a Mediterranean one down south and has similar cultural lines of demarcation, was once divided up into Seven Kingdoms, each ruled by great families, or Houses. But for centuries now, the whole continent has been united under one ruling King. However, about 15 years or so before the story begins, a group of powerful Houses banded together to overthrow the current king, who had gone insane, thus ending the kingdom’s first and up until that point only dynasty.

What’s the story about? Again, without spoiling anything important: It’s 15 years after Mad King Aerys of House Targaryen was overthrown by an alliance of nobles who were either burned by his cruelty or hungry for power of their own, or some combination thereof. The leader of the alliance, Robert Baratheon, has been king ever since, supported by his wife’s hugely influential, hugely assholish family, House Lannister. But when his mentor and right-hand man dies (or is murdered — no one’s really sure), Robert, who seems well-intentioned but by now is kind of a drunk and glutton and horndog and not a very good king, heads north to seek the help of his best friend, Eddard Stark, who has command of the kingdom’s distinctly unglamorous northernmost area. A Game of Thrones primarily chronicles the conflicts between House Stark and House Lannister as Ned, as he’s known to his friends, tries to help out King Robert and get to the bottom of the mystery of their mutual mentor’s death, and some other shady goings-on as well.

But meanwhile, two threats are brewing beyond the kingdom’s borders and outside the struggle for power and influence surrounding the rival Houses. The first lies in the uncivilized wastelands to the North, beyond a massive Great Wall of China-type structure called The Wall, a 700-foot-tall barrier made totally of ice that stretches from sea to sea. Thousands of years ago some kind of supernatural menace came out of the North to threaten the Seven Kingdoms, and the Wall was constructed after mankind’s victory to keep the threat from coming back. By now it’s been so long that the organization tasked with maintaining the wall is a neglected, ragtag band, ill-prepared for…whatever it is that seems to be going on out there, somewhere.

The other lies overseas, where the only two survivors of the overthrow of House Targaryen, a boy named Viserys and a girl named Danaerys, have hit their teenage years and are trying to mount a comeback. Even though Aerys was a major creep, and Viserys is no great shakes either, if the two of them get the right backers and the right soldiers, they could present a major threat to the new rulers of their old kingdom, who know they’re out there but have no idea how to find them.

Why should I care about any of this? This is really the heart of Curt’s question, and probably yours, if you have a question about the series yourself. Chances are you either are perfectly conversant and comfortable with the standard tropes of fantasy and thus this series’ specific iterations thereof aren’t enough to hook you, or you’re the sort of person who automatically tunes out anytime someone in a tunic whips out a sword and says “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, heir to the throne of Gondor” or somesuch and thus you’re skeptical that the books would be for you even if they’re the best gosh-darn stories about a made-up kingdom of knights and dragons and shit ever invented. With all of you in mind, I put together a list of what sets the books apart, both for me and, from what I’ve gathered based on talking to and reading about other fans, for a lot of people. This is the stuff that matters.

1) I mentioned this already, but it bears repeating: The fantasy elements are surprisingly minimal, particularly at first. Simply put, if you’re the kind of person who can’t stand elves and orcs and dwarves and wise old wizards, they won’t be around to turn you off out of hand. Now, this wasn’t really a selling point for me, since I’m a person who has the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left arm and obviously has no preexisting, in-principle problem with elves and orcs and dwarves and things of that nature. But I think you’d be surprised at how little high/epic fantasy I’ve actually read outside of The Lord of the Rings. The vast majority of my fantasy reading was done when I was a YA reader, and was centered either on satires (Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, Robert Asprin’s Myth series) or sort of off-model, less Tolkienian series (this is the stuff I remember more fondly — Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy, and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, the most Tolkienian of the group but still pretty far removed from the Elves/Dwarves/Orcs model that dominates much of the genre)). In my mind, I’d come to associate stuff that more directly bore the fingerprints of Professor T or his Gygaxian reinterpreters with either unoriginality, tedium, or cheese. So a series that focused more on character and worldbuilding in the cultural and historical senses of that word than on invented races or bestiaries or magical systems was perfect for me when deciding to give fantasy another try at age thirtysomething.

2) A closely related point: In the absence of magical stuff, the story’s driven by realistic human conflicts. Martin has said that the series’ central struggle for power — the titular game of thrones played by various important people we meet — was inspired by England’s real-world War of the Roses, with its complex web of family loyalties and regional rivalries and so on. In terms of narrative fiction, I think the the closest comparison is The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. A Game of Thrones combines the first film’s story of rival families violently jockeying for supremacy amid all sorts of complex conspiracies and alliances with the second film’s story of the very serious, very smart leader of one of those families trying to uncover the origin of a plot against him and his. The point is that we’re very far from rote Joseph Campbell hero’s-journey fantasy storytelling, with some dude learning it’s his destiny to defeat the Dark Lord. If you’re sick of that sort of thing, you’ll find a lot more to hook you here. This goes double if you’re the sort of person who’s ever enjoyed fictional or non-fictional war epics or gangster stories. “The Sopranos with swords” really is a pretty dead-on way to describe what’s going on here.

3) Another reason “The Sopranos with swords” works, and probably one of the big reasons HBO bit: There’s graphic language, violence, and sex. Again, I’m not particularly well-read in the genre, but this is something I’ve really never seen before, not outside weirdo projects like CF’s Powr Mastrs — and this isn’t some cult-favorite alternative comic series, it’s the most popular and influential contemporary fantasy series other than Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. If you’re the sort of person who’s complained that Tolkien’s world is too sexless and bloodless to really care about, believe me, you won’t be voicing similar complaints here. I’ll elaborate on this a bit below, but I also would argue strongly against the notion that any of this is shock for shock’s sake, or rote revisionism. It’s simply Martin writing fantasy the way other writers would write about any other world full of human beings who kill each other and have sex and get pissed off. It’s refreshing. “Deadwood with swords” works here.

4) One last related point: The story isn’t just set in a (relatively) realistic world, driven by realistic human conflicts, and featuring realistic human behavior — it’s powered by relatable human relationships, emotions, drives, desires, and even mistakes. I’ve written about this at length before in somewhat spoilery fashion, but to recap it here, so much of what happens in these books hinges on the personal relationships between the characters, and the way old grudges or old friendships cloud judgment and lead to poor decisions. Perfectly well-intentioned, innately noble characters can’t stand other perfectly well-intentioned, innately noble characters for various reasons that are all too familiar — long-ago affairs, half-forgotten insults, petty jealousies. Characters will know full well that their family is a collection of really awful people, but they’ll still do their level best to help out because hey, it’s family, and it’s psychologically and emotionally tough as hell to leave your family behind. In other words, like all of the best HBO shows did with their respective genres — The Sopranos with the mafia, Deadwood with Westerns, The Wire with cop shows — A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t just surface revisionism, it’s bringing the full weight of richness of literary fiction to genre entertainment.

5) Moving on, here’s a point about the basic logistics of reading these books: The structure of the narrative is highly addictive. Each chapter focuses on a particular character, whose name serves as that chapter’s title, and the characters rotate throughout the book(s). This has the effect of embroiling you in a particular character’s situation or storyline, then immediately popping you over into another’s, so that you find yourself racing through the chapters to get to the next one starring the person you’re interested in — and then getting interested in the ones you’re reading in the interim, and repeating the process over and over. It’s rather brilliant.

6) The raw plot is enormously engrossing. There’s a dynastic struggle that encompasses a murder mystery, a conspiracy, shifting and secret alliances, political machinations — and then brewing underneath it all, two major external threats. You find yourself wanting almost desperately to get to the bottom of it all, and Martin is a strong enough writer to keep adding elements without drowning out the ones that hooked you in the first place. A good comparison here might be Lost, where each time you hit the ground level of the until-then central strain of antagonism, the creators yanked the rug out and revealed another beneath it. The shape and scope of the story is perpetually enriching and expanding.

7) I think Martin’s a pretty strong prose craftsman. There are a few groaners in there, especially in the first book (I think there are two warm fires in the hearth that couldn’t chase away the coldness in Character X and Y’s hearts, for example), but let’s just say that my dayjob sees a lot of SF/F pass across my desk and some of it is embarrassingly badly written. Martin knows his way around the typewriter.

8.) Big surprises, as shocking and powerful as any I’ve read or seen in any work of narrative fiction ever. Stuff that’s on the level of all-time gut-punches like “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” or “You are the dead” (or for you altcomix readers, the big moments in ACME Novelty Library #20 or Love & Rockets: New Stories #3). You want to stay as spoiler-free as possible about these books, that’s all I’ll say. Like, if you start reading them, don’t even read the back-cover or inside-flap blurbs. (Seriously, DON’T.) This is not to say that if you know the surprises, you won’t enjoy the books — I knew one of ’em and still loved it, just like I knew all of the major deaths in The Sopranos through Season Four and still loved it — but man oh man. There’s one part that had me so stunned and upset I literally lost sleep over it, and sat there rereading the chapter, sure I must have missed something or somehow gotten what I’d read wrong. I didn’t. It was awesome.

9) This is hard to articulate without spoiling the grand arcs of the narrative, but suffice it to say that having read all four currently existing volumes, Martin is playing an impressively long game. I don’t want to say too much more, but when you’ve read enough to start getting a sense of where it may head in the final three volumes, it’s kind of stunning in scope. Seeds planted in the first volume are carefully cultivated and tended to for multiple books and multiple years and multiple thousands of pages and still haven’t blossomed yet. Best of all, I think this all ties to one of the central themes of the series, but again, I don’t want to spoil anything.

10) This one’s important: There’s basically nothing glorious or badass whatsoever about violence as portrayed in these books. Most great fantasies don’t skimp on the emotional consequences of being enmeshed in these great struggles — the scouring of the Shire and Frodo’s departure are obviously the beating heart of The Lord of the Rings just for starters — but I don’t think I’ve ever read a heroic fiction that so relentlessly drives home how war and violence immiserate and degrade everyone who participates in them. There’s a haunting flashback in the first volume that in other hands would have been a depiction of some great and glorious last stand, but Martin imbues it so thoroughly with a sense of great sadness and loss and waste and terror. It’s beautiful and really humanistic. Now, I know Tom Spurgeon, who’s no dummy, disagrees with me on how the violence in the book comes across — he thinks it’s Mark Millar’s Ultimate Lord of the Rings, not because he feels Martin is glib or crass or glorifying the violence, mind you, but simply because he feels the use of violence is primarily calculated to get the material over with maximum genre-tweaking impact — but as he’ll also tell you, he’s in a very small minority on this. Martin, as it turns out, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War; I know that doesn’t necessarily reveal a fundamental truth about him beyond “he really didn’t want to go to Vietnam,” but in reading these books, I think his draft board made the right call.

11) That said, when there is action and violence, it’s really strong and really heart-pounding. And when there is fantasy, it’s exciting and strange and awesome, in the original sense of the word. The reason why is the same in both cases: We know that in this world, both swordplay and the supernatural have irrevocable, terrible, life-changing, world-altering consequences.

In short (haha, yeah right), I’m about to say something that I pretty much never say, even about works I deeply love and even to readers whose tastes I feel I understand deeply: I recommend these books without hesitation or qualification. And I’ve done so to readers ranging from my Destructor compadre Matt Wiegle to the fiftysomething mother of two grown children who works in the cubicle next to me, all of whom are basically over the moon for them. If you look into ASoIaF fandom at all, you’ll find this story repeated over and over: Fantasy skeptic gets enthusiastic recommendation from trusted friend, says “What the hell, I’ll give it fifty pages,” and within hours is passing on enthusiastic recommendations of their own. Consider this mine.

^ Why the “sort of”? The series was originally envisioned as a trilogy, but it grew to four volumes and then to six as Martin wrote the initial volumes. When he hit the writing process for the fourth book, he realized the amount of material he wanted to cover would require the book to be split in half even just as a logistical matter, so the series is now slated seven books long. This decision, plus his decision to scrap a planned “five-year jump” for the story between volumes three and four and his subsequent need to re-write and re-conceive a lot of existing work, led to a lengthy delay between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows and a positively infamous delay between Crows and the planned fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons. Martin seemed to have planned to announce a publication date for Dragons during the TCA press tour last week, but an illness around Christmastime sideswiped him; still, I expect an announcement on the book before or when the HBO series debuts in April. (back)

* Myyyyyyy goodness, this new teaser for Game of Thrones is wonderful. The throne! (Via Westeros.)

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming rounds up reactions to the TCA sneak-peek footage. Speaking of which, Elio and Linda at Westeros offer a lengthy and thoughtful reaction of their own.

* Over at Robot 6 I posted a six-page preview of Night Animals, a graphic novel from The Wrong Place author Brecht Evens due out in March from Top Shelf. Looks lovely.

* Speaking of looking lovely, here’s a fun little comic about not liking Nirvana by Sally Bloodbath.

* There’s a super-limited-edition new Yeast Hoist issue (#16) from Ron Regé Jr.

* Wow, buy all four issues of Josh Simmons’s Top Shelf series Happy for the low low price of ten bucks!

* John Porcellino talks process with Frank Santoro.

* I’m posting this more out of obligation than genuine interest, because it’s difficult for me to imagine circumstances under which I’d be like “Oooh boy, a new Ridley Scott movie,” but Alien and Damon Lindelof are things that I’ve cared about, so here you go: Scott’s collabo with Lindelof is no longer an Alien prequel but a new thing called Prometheus. So there you have it. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, I’m just going to post two images from the brilliant Tumblr Kanye + Comics, which takes images from comics and splices them with Kanye West lyrics, but I assure you I could do this all day. Man, that first one should be the Superheroes Lose mascot. (Via someone on Twitter yesterday, I think.)

The new Destructor story begins here.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories
Moto Hagio, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2010
288 pages
$24.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

I frequently gasped, out loud, at the beauty of this goddamn thing. Pioneering Japanese girls’-comics artist Moto Hagio is not a world a way from the shoujo artists you might have seen elsewhere; theirs is a shared vocabulary of thin, beautiful women and men who look like their emotions could lift them off the ground. But Hagio’s line is just a little bit fuller, her character designs a little more lived-in, the endings of her stories a less likely either to pull punches or hit you full-force with maudlin tragedy. Most of them remind me of Jaime Hernandez, of all people, in that the force of the narrative is toward the protagonists coming to terms — with the damage done by a cruel mother, with the inspiration that arose unexpectedly from a childhood tragedy, with the sudden loss of a friendship through a shared mistake in judgment, with the death of a hated rival, with a necessary but traumatic decision, with the death of a parent. Or not! Some characters die, some characters are never afforded the rapprochement they seek, and one little girl gets zapped into nothingness by the conformist overlords of her suddenly science-fictional home. Either way it’s the visual journey that counts just as much as the destination, a journey in love with lush gray textures and stippled explosions of light, and in one memorable strip an array of red-based colors from horror-movie-blood red to rusty russet to hot pink, and portrayed through luxurious swooping lines that make the characters they depict look like Precious Moments dolls gone sexy. (A good thing, I promise you!) Each story’s big narrative and emotional moments seem to swell within and explode out of these textures and lines, like they’ve actualized the potential energy there all along. I dunno, I’m probably sounding a little ridiculous — my point is simply that this is the kind of book whose impact comes as much from simply soaking in the images as reading them, like great comics ranging from Kirby to Fort Thunder. Editor Matt Thorn, who also provides a lengthy essay on and interview with Hagio, is also the book’s translator, and he does a magnificent job; I can’t tell you what a relief it is to read manga with none of the clumsy, overly literal sentence constructions that frequently plague even the best and most well-intentioned such projects, ironically thwarting the author’s intended effect in the name of fealty. Really, really fantastic lettering, even — how often can you say that about translated manga? Reads like a dream, looks like a dream.

* I really enjoyed the Inkstuds best of 2010 critics’ roundtable with Robin McConnell, Chris Butcher, Bill Kartalopoulos, and Tucker Stone, and I explain why over at Robot 6.

* Heidi MacDonald interviews new Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso. He seems to draw a pretty bright line through the (STC-mooted) idea of a revival of the Nu-Marvel hands-off editorial style, since the Big Two are very much beneficiaries and/or prisoners of what he calls the “it has to count” mentality, i.e. Event Tie-In or GTFO. Via Tom Spurgeon, who has further thoughts on the role of personal preferences in Marvel’s top editorial job.

* Tom Neely reflects on 10 years of self-publishing comics and art, culminating in the year where his Rollins/Danzig slashfic made him a household name. That’s a weird year alright.

* Critical polymath Douglas Wolk lists 15 Excellent Things Happening in Comics Right Now, while my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner lists six potentially great 2011 comics you haven’t heard of. The Olivier Schrauwen and Yuichi Yokoyama books ought to be really somethin’.

* The fuckin’ Spider-Man musical, man. I would say that Sony’s exchange of the TV/animation rights to the character with Marvel for an extension on the musical was an all-time great stupid deal, but who knows, maybe a comeback narrative will soon be established and it’ll open to rapturous reviews and no one more actors will be maimed.

Map of My Heart
John Porcellino, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2009
304 pages
$24.95
Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly
Buy it from Amazon.com

I’ll be honest: I skipped most of the prose stuff. I’ve never felt much kinship with zine culture, and among all the other things that John Porcellino’s legendary, long-running, self-published minicomic series King-Cat Comics and Stories is — most notably a pioneering combination of pointilist autobiography and minimalist cartooning without which the careers of Kevin Huizenga, Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka, James McShane, and virtually every webcomic diarist would be unthinkable — it is also a zine. Over the years it’s functioned, essentially, as one end of a pen-pal conversation between Porcellino and his readers, and thus his lengthy handwritten digressions about fishing trips or local wildlife or his Top 40 lists of stuff he’s recently enjoyed serve a necessary and fruitful role during that particular round of correspondence. But that’s never how it’s functioned for me: My experience reading Porcellino and King-Cat has come either from buying a bunch of issues all at once and reading them in one go or from seeing his work in collections like this one. I’m here for the cartooning, not for the conversation.

Fortunately the cartooning is fantastic. The stretch of “comics and stories” collected here run from 1996-2002, a pivotal time period for Porcellino not simply in personal terms — he became critically ill, recovered, moved back home to Illinois after years spent in Denver, married, divorced, and remarried — but in artistic ones as well: I’m reasonably sure his long-form memoir Perfect Example was constructed during this time, and within King-Cat his art made its second quantum leap. After what looks to my admittedly inexpert eyes like an experiment with a brush in issue #57 (which followed and revealed his divorce), his line becomes a true thing of beauty in issue #58’s story “Forgiveness.” It’s smoother and thinner, its curves more graceful, the sense of space between them less cluttered and more balanced. With no captions to guide us, we’re left alone with young John in this reminiscence of an unintentional act of cruelty that clearly still haunts him; the image of his younger self twice curled into a fetal position, repeating “I’m sorry” over and over again, is devastating. Similar flashes of remonstrance and self-loathing creep up occasionally and unexpectedly in some of his Zen-influenced comic poems, a powerful juxtaposition with their serene images and contemplative words. Can it get a little twee? Sure, but I think there’s a sharpness and a coldness to that line, and the occasional glimpses of despair it affords us, that make writing Porcellino’s stuff off as cutesy hippie stuff a big mistake. To flip through the comics material in Map of My Heart is to get a picture of a man fighting to find beauty in the world even as what he’s seen of it buffets him around like one of the leaves on the breeze that he draws. No wonder people loved to hear from him.

* Heidi MacDonald takes the 2011 comics sales chart wonkery ball and runs it into the end zone. The picture that emerges is of an industry revolving around the equivalent of a really killer Entertainment Weekly panel at San Diego, basically: Bendis, Johns, Morrison, Kirkman, O’Malley, and to an extent Millar. Heidi also puts everything together in a way that makes me a lot more open to the notion that creator-owned comics, or certainly at the very least creator-driven comics, are the star attraction of the market right now.

* Kate Beaton signs to Drawn & Quarterly for a Hark, a Vagrant! collection in Fall 2011. Kudos all around.

* Corey Blake wins Headline of the Day: “Archie leads the digital comics revolution”.

* Frank Santoro and Dan Nadel have the details on that Santoro exhibition that was teased a few days ago. It’s Santoro vs. Greco-Roman mythology, and thus sounds awesome.

* I’m not as big a Shane Black person as many commenters around here seem to be, mostly because I tend not to care for slam-bang action comedies, but I could certainly handle the writer of The Monster Squad being tapped to write and direct a live-action American Death Note adaptation.

* And I’m not quite interested enough in either project to post them here, but there are pictures of the new Spider-Man and Captain America movie costumes out there, and they both look pretty good. I would also like to take this opportunity to note that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies weren’t very good.

* Curt Purcell has posted another piece on Battlestar Galactica, focusing on Starbuck. He objects to the character’s resolution (a good deal more reasonably than many such objections, I should note); I disagree in the comments.

* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles Real Genius, which I think me and most of my friends took as more of an instruction manual than an actual movie. Chris Knight, Discordian Saint.

* I’m not sure if the drawings in this Josh Cotter post titled “Ben Clark: Inks” are by Cotter or not, but they’re lovely.

* I think the Westeros crew’s review of the Game of Thrones sizzle reel shown to the press over the past week is the best-in-class effort. It drives home a few points I’ve seen in other reports quite clearly: HBO is using the plot to grab people rather than resting on “It’s a fantasy TV show” (compare and contrast with AMC’s strategy for The Walking Dead), Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke are apparently really impressive in the key roles of Catelyn Stark and Danaerys Targaryen respectively, and the Wall looks incredible. (Cf. Myles McNutt’s fine review, and James Poniewozik’s as well; both via this Westeros post.) Their quibbles seem reasonable to me as well: Jaime Lannister isn’t quite as impressively roguish as they’d expected, for example. (They refrain from naming the character with whom they have the most concerns.) If you’re as starved as I am for good GRRM/GoT/ASoIaF talk, these are all places you should be visiting.

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming serves up an in-depth report on the press roundtable with showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff. It seems primarily concerned with bouncing the show off things to which it will be compared: the books themselves, The Lord of the Rings, other big HBO shows, non-fantasy fans’ preconceptions of the genre, and so on.

* Finally (via McNutt), if you’re interested in Game of Thrones but haven’t read the books, Alan Sepinwall is the TV critic for you: He plans on going into the show without reading them and without consuming any press materials that give away plot points. Sepinwall can be a very insightful critic when he’s working with strong material to which he brings few preconceptions, so this could be good.

Today we posted the final page of “Destructor Comes to Croc-Town,” completing our first ever Destructor story. Thank you to everyone who’s read/commented/linked — it means so much.

Read the whole thing on one page by clicking here. New story starts Monday.

Bodyworld
Dash Shaw, writer/artist
Pantheon, April 2010
384 pages, hardcover
$27.95
Read it for free at DashShaw.com
Buy it from Amazon.com

Did everyone know this was a comedy but me? I actually put off reading Dash Shaw’s, what is it now, second magnum opus and first full-length science-fiction graphic novel because I find the formal experimentation of his SF stuff intimidatingly difficult to parse even in short-story format — surely a 400-page webcomic turned fat hardcover would fuck my shit up, right? But while Shaw’s shorts frequently swap complexity for clarity, at least for me, Bodyworld is a breeze to read. Part of that’s physical — the fun of its vertical layout, kicking back and flipping the pages upward on your lap or desk. But mostly it’s that the thing reads like a quirky indie-movie genre-comedy — think a mid-00s Charlie Kaufman joint, or Duncan Jones’s Moon with more laffs ‘n’ sex. We follow one helluva protagonist, Professor Paulie Panther, a cigarette-smoking, plain white tee-clad schmuck who wouldn’t look out of place hanging out with Ray D. and Doyle in a Jaime Hernandez comic and who has harnessed his prodigious appetite for doing drugs and not doing work into a career as a field-tester for hallucinogenic plants. Basically, he travels around the world smoking anything that looks unusual. For the purposes of Bodyworld that has taken him to Boney Borough, a Thoreau-like enclave whose planners mixed unfettered nature right into the zoning laws as a response to a horrific decades-long Second Civil War that began ravaging the United States, it seems, following the installation of George W. Bush. There he discovers a smokable plant that gives its users a telepathic bond with anyone in their proximity, leading to disastrous romantic entanglements and disentanglements with the local high school’s hot teacher, its prom king, and his girlfriend. But there’s more to the plant that meets the eye, and a Repo Man-style series of surreal/slapstick/science-fictional escalations leads to a funny but still black and potentially apocalyptic ending, like the Broadway version of Little Shop of Horrors.

Bodyworld‘s webcomic incarnation was famous for its vertical scroll, and for my money it’s recreated enjoyably by the vertical flip in the book format. What surprised me about Shaw’s other formal innovations here is how relatively restrained they are. You don’t really need to keep track of his complex, color-coded grid maps of Boney Borough or the school to understand what’s going on where, and the to the extent that he plays with overlaps and repetition and color and so on it’s mostly done to convey the hallucinogenic mind-melding engendered by the drug, quite effectively, at that. Moreover, I’ve often found his character designs hard to parse and hard to like — something about the way they’re constructed from purposely ugly swirls and swoops just gives me prosopagnosia — but his quartet of leads and dozen or so prominent supporting characters are by far his strongest ever in this area; you really can get who they are and what they’re about just by looking at them, which prospect is not at all unpleasant, either. And while some of the yuks fall flat (particularly with the town sheriff late in the game), it’s for the most part a dryly witty, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny comedy, with finely observed humor about high schoolers, teachers, druggies, hoary sci-fi tropes, and the sort of shiftless ne’er-do-wells you enjoy spending an evening with when your buddy brings them along. In short, it’s a prodigiously ambitious cartoonist plying the various tricks of his trade just to tell a good story you can catch some weekend afternoon and then chat about with friends at the diner afterwards.

* Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis are, at long last, officially signed to play Gandalf and Gollum in The Hobbit. Elijah Wood will be back as Frodo, too, somehow.

* Top Shelf has a good 2011 ahead of it, anchored by the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the new Nate Powell, the new Incredible Change-Bots, and the new Ax.

* Jesse Moynihan’s Forming will be collected by Nobrow and released through AdDistro! That’s a good comic.

* Tom Spurgeon muses on the Fantagraphics Complete Carl Barks Disney Duck Comics announcement. Short version: It’s all good.

* Speaking of Spurge, here are links to all of his Holiday Interviews. Tons of talented people in there, interviewed by the best there is.

* Today on Robot 6: Is DC Comics a two-man operation? Actually, you could say that the whole Direct Market is a three-man operation: Fully 65 of the 75 bestelling comic books of 2010 were written by Brian Michael Bendis, Geoff Johns, or Grant Morrison. That seems extraordinary to me, but then I’ve never crunched the numbers to see if this is an anomalous situation. (Hat tip: Douglas Wolk.)

* The New Yorker makes fun of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

* The co-publishers of Secret Acres serve up a fascinatingly candid look at a year in the life of their business, tackling topics from how unexpected demand for one book mucked with their plans for other books to the impact of negative reviews. (To be fair, Barry and Leon: The very same year I was upset by Wormdye, I loved Capacity and named it the #5 comic of the year! Much love for the Acres.)

* Gabrielle Bell battles bedbugs.

* Real Life Horror: The beginning of this Rachel Maddow segment on mass shootings is just magisterially chilling.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I struggled with whether or not to post that roundup of the Right’s use of militaristic and eliminationist rhetoric on Saturday, I really did. I actually deleted it for a little while. Anyone with as abysmal a track record as I have when it comes to writing publicly about politics is behooved to watch his step in the heat of the moment. But when I got the sense that some people who read this blog would get, and in fact were getting, something out of the roundup, I put it back up, and there it is. Right now, though, it seems the fairest characterization of shooter Jared Loughner is that he exposed himself to a hodgepodge of rebellious books as a teenager without much of a throughline beyond “fuck the system” (I knew many liberal Ayn Rand-reading kids in high school and I bet you did too), then subsequently drew from a broad set of conspiratorial and anti-government ideologies more or less clustered on the extreme right — visible from the Tea Party fringe but mostly not in the Tea Party fringe, gold-bug stuff excepted — to formulate a personal, idiosyncratic worldview driven mostly by mental illness. In that light it was unfair of me to imply that Loughner’s actions were of a piece with those of Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, Joe Manchin and so on, and I apologize. Clearly the potential for political violence has been much on my mind — otherwise that round-up of posts in which I used the exact same description of it seven times over the past year wouldn’t have been possible — and I’m sure that clouded my judgment somewhat.

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer correctly points out that the establishment and even anti-establishment far Right, much as they flirt with eliminationist rhetoric time and time again, stops well short of actually celebrating when their political opponents are murdered. (For the most part; doctors who perform abortions are an exception, and I imagine Julian Assange would be as well.) That’s a big difference between America today and societies that were and are genuinely torn by political violence — heck, it’s a big difference between America today and America stretching from the slave days all the way through the overturning of Jim Crow. And that’s something to be grateful for.

Something else to be grateful for, though, is the real outburst of disgust and opprobrium directed toward violent and eliminationist rhetoric by the Right that arose from this atrocity. It’s long overdue. I still say this, even though it seems unlikely that Loughner was anything but lightly or indirectly influenced by people like Angle or Allen West or that “gather your armies” guy, for a couple of reasons. First, fans of the “Overton window” concept, as are many on the Right, should be able to understand that the rise of violent, eliminationist, and militarized rhetoric and imagery in the Republican mainstream — Senatorial candidates, ex-VP candidates, the most popular talk show hosts, and so on — legitimizes those ideas in such a way that the extreme can shift even further, and in such a way that those on the extreme, particularly the mentally ill who all too often drift in that direction, feel that they’ve got the zeitgeist on their side on some level.

For another, Loughner actually did, in practice, what way too many members of the Tea Party right have nudged-nudged-winked-winked at in speeches and statements. Loughner really did “pursue Second Amendment remedies” for his grievances with the political process. Loughner really did do with bullets what ballots could not. Loughner really did attempt to thwart a government he felt was destructive of his liberties by any means necessary. Ultimately, it’s beside the point whether he was following the proverbial marching orders of these noxious figures or the less direct statements of others, just like, say, making light of rape has nothing to do with whether you actually raped anyone. The point is that when you see the stuff they’re jawing about in action, it’s not patriotic and brave and all-American, it’s not cute or passionate or funny or just red meat for the base, it’s a fucking horror show, and it’s not okay at all. Moreover, to counter the kinds of people who say “Aw c’mon, now you sound like the people who want to ban videogames,” I would say first that I don’t want to ban anything, and second that these aren’t fictional characters in a comic or movie or video game — they’re real people, real leaders or would-be leaders in fact, talking about the potential awesomeness of using violence to eliminate one’s political opponents and advance one’s agenda. Loughner’s actions cast this in stark relief, and will hopefully give people pause before acting as though that sort of rhetoric is appropriate.

Anyway, I gave up straight-up political blogging long ago, much to the relief, I imagine, of everyone who’s ever read my blog. For years now I’ve kept everything filtered through a horror or arts-specific lens, which has meant focusing mainly on human, animal, and civil rights abuses, speech and drug issues, and anything that looks like a page from a near-future dystopian science fiction novel. I may scale back even further, because I’m frankly embarrassed by my own writing on the topic and I can’t imagine anyone comes here looking for my thoughts on the issues of the day, unless it’s New Comics Day and you literally mean “issues.” But I wanted to get this all down in public, in part as a clarification/correction/apology of what I posted yesterday, and in part to explain why it worried me so horribly and why I hope it will now stop.

* Over at Robot 6 I pulled some of my favorite parts from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interviews with Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez, two of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Of all time!

* Spurge also interviewed my very talented Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson, who comes at comics journalism and criticism from about a 180-degree remove from virtually everyone else I know. If you care about the field, you should read her interview.

* Kiel Phegley conducts an exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and ongoing Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada. Quesada breaks (I think) the news that Nick Lowe has been promoted to Senior Editor, while Kiel notes that Quesada is the first Editor-in-Chief to depart on his own terms since Stan Lee.

* Tom Brevoort notes that Editors-in-Chief of Marvel comics don’t actually edit comics, which is why he didn’t want the job.

* Are nine of the top 10 bestselling comics of 2010 creator-owned properties, Hollywood tie-ins, or both?

* Theo Ellsworth is working on an ongoing horror-SFF series called The Understanding Monster. Yes please!

* This week, Diamond starts shipping comics to Direct Market retailers a day early, if they want. I hope that works out.

* Frank Santoro on Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the power of drawing comics at the same size they’re printed. “Comments are closed.”

* They’ve given up on making a Wonder Woman TV show. Good. Doing so seemed like an admission that They’re not talented enough to make a movie of one of the most famous characters in the world.

* Rickey Purdin calls the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2010 “a totally insane comics and art show that, per capita, was probably the highest quality of its kind that I’ve ever attended.” Yep.

* Game of Thrones stuff 1: New photo gallery. Direwolf puppies or GTFO. (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Game of Thrones stuff 2: I really enjoyed this report from a roundtable with George R.R. Martin. Martin tells a great anecdote about an asshole at a Lord of the Rings screening who kept shouting shit like “Giant spiders? Oh, come on!” as an illustration of how some people will just never cotton to fantasy; he speculates that A Storm of Swords will be split over the show’s third and fourth seasons; he notes the difficulty of conveying when a character is lying on television, something I thought would be quite a challenge for the series in terms of one specific plot point later in the books; and so on and so forth. If you’re like me and hungry for any kind of smart discussion of the books you can get, you obviously could do a lot worse than a discussion featuring Martin himself.

* Game of Thrones stuff 3: Maureen Ryan posts excerpts of interviews with Martin, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actress Emilia Clarke. I liked Martin’s note of caution that big though the show’s budget may be, it can’t possibly compare to the roughly $15 million spent per hour of screentime on The Lord of the Rings. (Via Westeros.)

* Check out Michael DeForge’s fine Top 15 Comics of 2010 list. And then ask yourself if he ever stops working.

* Now Zak Smith is crowdsourcing an entire RPG: Gigacrawler, about a universe in which every available space on planets and in the void is part of one continuous, contiguous structure. In other words, all of existence is one giant dungeon. He and his crew start brainstorming the game’s major features here.

* Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, talks to Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal about his new album Kaputt, which is really something special. Avalon is referenced, and thus am I vindicated.

Get the family together and read page 13 of “Destructor Comes to Croc-Town.”

Mould Map #1
Jason Traeger, Daniel Brereton, Aidan Koch, Massimiliano Bomba, Stéphane Prigent, Kitty Clark, Matthew Lock, Lando, CF, Jonathan Chandler, Matthew Thurber, Brenna Murphy, Drew Beckmeyer, Colin Henderson, Leon Salder, writers/artists
Hugh Frost, Leon Sadler, editors
Landfill Editions, December 2010
16 large pages
$12
Buy it from Landfill
Buy it from PictureBox
Learn more at MouldMap.com

Ingenious idea, meet ingenious execution. In this gorgeously printed, oversized anthology, a posse of prominent and obscure artcomickers create evocative one-page science-fiction strips/images/whatever — not so much to tell a complete story as to convey a mood, an environment, a series of story possibilities that emerge into the past and future of the events depicted on the page. Aidan Koch’s bold all-caps lettering meshes perfectly with her story of a nude, distraught wanderer of the highways who knows that something terrible is growing inside of him. Lando’s similarly perambulatory protagonist is confronted in the final panel by a reptilian counterpart, the ominous of the sudden meeting conveyed by superimposing a massive image of the creature’s head over the panel itself. CF’s contribution features a warrior in freefall and ends with the phrase “ENTERING ENEMY AIRSPACE” — it stops where the story starts, basically. Jonathan Chandler’s soldiers marvel after one of their fellows — “He really did it. He went out alone after the lights.” — whose journey to a cryptic series of what look like cardboard cutouts of robots or aliens remains unexplained. Many more pages are simply wordless images or wordless series of images featuring vaguely science-fictional figures doing vaguely science-fictional things. The tight space constraints offer the participants a welcome opportunity to step away from the typical worldbuilding concerns of alt/artcomix-genre hybrids and instead focus on world-evoking, a sense of what it would be like to be there, even when you don’t know what or how or why “there” is. The comic is printed in a flourescent orange and blue palette, like Cold Heat‘s pink and blue gone radioactive — a post-apocalypse run by a New York Mets memorabilia cargo cult. It’s a fine package and a delightful combination of form and function.

Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six. Part seven.

Part eight.

I’m almost impressed by how awful the Alan Moore/Jason Aaron thread on Robot 6 has gotten. Pure sociopathy by the bottom of it. Moore should have known better, Kirby should have known better, Siegel and Shuster should have known better, etc. Forget “truth, justice, and the American way” or “with great power comes great responsibility”—FUCK YOU, PAY ME is the motto of superhero comics fandom. It’s a grotesque agglomeration of moral monsters, vicious little philistines anonymously spewing Randian bile from the safety of screen names like “techjedi.” No wonder Moore wants nothing to do with any of it anymore.

* I whipped up a nice long thumbsucker analyzing Axel Alonso’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Entertainment for Robot 6. I hope you’ll take the time to read it. The nutshell version is there are some big question marks even (perhaps even especially) pertaining to the areas where we have the most information by which to judge him, but also a lot of reason to be optimistic in terms of his approach to creators. One thing I didn’t include because because I’m not sure what its actual import is but which still seems worth noting as a positive for the biz: He’s the second Hispanic Marvel EIC in a row. (Memo to Iron Man editor Alejandro Arbona: Patience, grasshopper.)

* I suppose I shouldn’t’ve been, but even so I was surprised by the dominance of media tie-in titles on the list of 2010’s bestselling graphic novels for the Direct Market (as sold through monopoly distributor Diamond). The Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, and Kick-Ass leave a grand total of one slot open on the list, which was taken by a book that got over largely on the strength of a fortuitous “it’s Superman meets Twilight” blurb in the press.

* On the periodical comics end of the list, events still sell–that’s really the only lesson you can draw. Well, that, and books called X-Men #1 trigger some sort of lizard-brain response in the direct Market. One more: The Direct Market is all but a three-man industry at this point, with Brian Bendis, Geoff Johns, and to a lesser extent Grant Morrison dominating.

* Yesterday was the big Game of Thrones presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour. This bums me out because it means that yesterday would have been the day George R.R. Martin made his two big surprise announcements (one surely must have been the release date for A Dance with Dragons, but that pesky plural really has thrown me for a loop beyond that) were it not for his awful-sounding bout of urosepsis over Christmas. It’s also a bit of a bummer because the 15 minutes of footage screened for the assembled critics will likely never air publicly since it used existing film scores as a stopgap soundtrack. The most in-depth summary I’ve seen of the footage is from Chicago TV critic and über-nerd Maureen Ryan. It sounds like it was basically very very good, allowing for some quibbles of the strength of various wigs and Peter Dinklage’s English accent. (Via Westeros.)

* UPDATE: The series debuts April 17th.

* Here’s Drawn & Quarterly’s Fall 2011 release slate. Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray and Brian Ralph’s Daybreak are the big ones for me.

* Chris Mautner runs down six overlooked books from 2010, including my co-#2 best book of the year, Gilbert Hernandez’s High Soft Lisp.

* Alright, I really have no excuses for why I didn’t wise up to Zak Smith/Sabbath’s big “Gygaxian Democracy” experiment, but now he’s croudsourcing things a sea monster can do, so you know I’m all over it.

* Real Life Horror 1: Don’t forget that my representative, Peter King, is okay with terrorism as long as it’s English and Irish children you’re blowing up.

* Real Life Horror 2: Freedom.

* Finally, I’m happy to use Geoff Barrow from Portishead’s anti-record industry twitter screed as an excuse to post the video for “Chase the Tear.” (Via Maura Johnston.)