* I want to thank everyone for all your kind words and warm wishes about the Missus and baby Helena. They have meant a great deal to us over the past few days. They also give me a great excuse to run this piece of Destructor/Helena fanart by Isaac Moylan.
* Two new Game of Thrones videos: One’s a new trailer that sets up the basics and show some skin, the other a featurette on House Stark.
* They did a really nice job with the official Game of Thrones poster. click to see it at its full huge size.
* Looks like GRRM managed to add hisself an extra chapter to the still-unfinished A Dance with Dragons. Slowly he turned, step by step, inch by inch…
* Curt Purcell has finished watching Lost. What did he think? The ANSWERS await you!!!! Seriously, Curt has maybe the sharpest take yet on why what didn’t work didn’t work.
* I just like reading Tom Brevoort talking about how comics are made.
* This is a fine suite of nominees for the Stumptown comic con’s awards program, with what seems to my eyes like a unique and considered emphasis on illustrative chops.
* Speaking of awards, I found myself quite happy to see that Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream won About.com’s Readers’ Choice Award, just because I’m happy to see Hagio’s book win anything anyone cares to award it, but also because a “readers’ choice award” indicates that it’s clicking with more people than just dudes on the internet who don’t read a lot of shojo with which to compare it, like me.
* Bookmarking this for a likely imaginary future in which I have enough free time to read it: The Mindless Ones annotate Batman Inc. #3, an unusually dense issue in terms of annotable things, even by Grant Morrison Batman standards.
* Over at the Nu-Comics Journal, Matt Seneca reviews the revised/expanded edition of C.F.’s City-Hunter Magazine #1.
* I’ll take a new full-color Ben Katchor comic strip, sure.
* Benjamin Marra needs to keep on doing pin-ups for people’s pulp comics.
* Tom Kaczynski needs to keep sketching sessy ladies.
* I really like this Shining piece by Matt Rota.
* “Involuntary Collaborations: I buy other people’s landscape paintings at yard sales and Goodwill and put monsters in them.” (Via Bryan Alexander.)
* Jacob’s Ladder is one of those films that I saw for a class in college, liked a great deal, but then never watched again for some reason. I feel like I should.
* Prepare to flash back to your childhood like whoa: Rue Morgue takes a look at the Crestwood House series of books about classic horror movies. I’ll never ever forget those orange hardcovers.
Tags: A Dance with Dragons, A Song of Ice and Fire, Carnival of souls, comics, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, horror, links, movies, TV
1 – The more I think about it, the more I feel like the real test of whether the droves of young manga readers who fueled the bookstore explosion of the 00s will become comics lifers will be a question of whether or not they explore the form’s past in a real way. That kind of transition is easier for superhero fans to make because I think the impulse to explore the genre’s past starts with filling in continuity gaps or digging into favorite characters but (with the best comics readers) morphs into a love of the growth of the form over time. I know for me, I started buying up random old comics in Middle School looking for random character appearances but then shifted over to looking for Kirby or Ditko or Eisner comics and then jumping out of superheroes all together for the wider range of comics available.
I worry sometimes that so much of what drove the manga boom was “faddish” that with no central nerd hook (like continuity) to spark an adolescent interest in classic material, most of the young people who followed Naruto or Bleach or Hetalia won’t ever look up Tezuka or Hagio or the countless other artists we’re just starting to get quality reprints from in the U.S. Then again, my high school senior cousin went through a phase last year where she and her friends were randomly obsessed with Cyborg 009, so I suppose anything’s possible.
2 – You can go back and watch “Jacob’s Ladder” after you watch “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” which for some reason I am desperate to read your thoughts on.
Congrats on your child, STC. Good to know all the scares were worth it. All my best to you & yours.
O/T as all get out::
The longer I take, re-wading through LOST with my g/f, the more I admire the fate vs. free will debate surrounding the Oceanic survivors, esp. considering WHY Widmore, Hawking, Alpert & Jacob were watching them. Not dissimilar to what Morrison’s done, time & time again (Animal Man; The Invisibles, his Bat-run): how do you address the ill-defined edges of complexity surround a Myth? With Time Travel. How do you resolve the repercussions of Time Travel? By transforming them, thru time, into Myth.
My g/f hates John. -Hates- him. “He has too many problems,” she says. What she hates more, I think, is what the process of stripping those problems away reveals: the shell of the character & the wizened nut within. Simultaneously, as John’s issues are put to bed, as the Fool becomes the Hanged Man, the man of destiny becomes the pawn of fate; becomes Mythic, as he shoulders his predetermined role & enters what Goethe & Cocteau dubbed ‘The Infernal Machine’. He stops being a man & becomes an unorthodox weapon, poor bastard.
Jack’s a polarized example of the same process: as much as he fights fate, the -impossibility- of the fight wears him down to an angry, infantile nub, all but indistinguishable from John… Save that Jack’s motivations were invariably external– his actions, even at their most adolescent & unhinged, were for a cause greater than himself; namely his fellow survivors. John’s quest was purely selfish, and that selfishness made him susceptible to coercion. Jack was Non Serviam up ’til the end. He wasn’t Jacob’s Candidate: he was his friends’.
Bonus blather: Kate’s emerged as among the most consistently honest & balanced, on par with Hurley & Sayid for being completely “Fuck this if it means being disloyal.” I never thought I’d be on Team Kate, but by the middle of season 3 onward she’s all about honoring her obligations & helping her peeps survive, Island be damned. Smokey scratched off Eko as unsuitable because the man wouldn’t kneel; I think Jacob nixed Kate for similarly self-serving reasons.