* The San Diego Comic Con International gets its first comics-centric counterprogramming slate in the form of Tr!ckster, a mini-con centered on indy guys like Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and Scott Morse. Now we need an artcomix show and we’re all set.

* Over at Robot 6, I talked a bit about Tom Brevoort talking a bit about how Marvel’s Avengers movies and Marvel’s Avengers comics help each other out versus the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises.

* Dan Nadel rounds up recent reviews of Yuichi Yokoyama’s excellent Garden, including efforts by ADDXSTC faves Chris Mautner and Douglas Wolk.

* Curt Purcell on religion in A Song of Ice and Fire and Battlestar Galactica. This is spoilery as hell for both series, but if you’re all caught up with them, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to read this. Very astute comparisons.

* When Josh Simmons draws things like this you know they can’t be headed anywhere good.

* Another day, another wondrous Uno Moralez image/gif dump.

* I can’t post an image without ruining the gag, but Axe Cop gets better and better.

* Aeron Alfrey has been spotlighting some real treasures at Monster Brains lately, from some ornate skeletal creatures by Pedro Izique to multiple He-Man and the Masters of the Universe galleries, about which I wrote a bit for Robot 6.

* Finally, this picture of January Jones as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class is truly a joy.

I first heard Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on the local alt-rock station. This is a testament to the radio station (101.9 FM in New York — listen to it for half an hour and chances are you’ll hear something rad, like “Down in It” or the full album version of “Personal Jesus” or Luka Bloom’s cover of “I Need Love” or the by-god lead single from King of Limbs) as much as it is to the song, but it’s the song I’m focusing on here. And despite its being a reasonably big hit on the pop-dance stations, where I’ve also heard it played, you can see how it fits in with the rock narrative: A woman sings her guts out about heartache over live minor-key instrumentation, with a reasonably cryptic metaphor (“rolling in the deep” isn’t as one-to-one the standard “our love is like” formulation) and a sharp edge or two (those chanted high-pitched backing vocals during the chorus, to me the weirdest and therefore best part of the song). The first time I heard it on pop powerhouse Z100 I felt like I should mark the date down in my diary, so unlike everything else on Top 40 stations it was, even the nominally rock- or country-influenced stuff, most of which could conceivably be covered in a “Disney Princesses Live!” stage show. “You gotta hear that Adele song!” I gushed to my wife. “It’s the real deal.”

So I thought until I gave it a second or third front-to-back listen. Then I realized that it was something else besides dark and unique in the landscape and impeccably sung: kinda boring. Verse, bridge, and chorus all basically take a single melodic line and repeat it, revealing nothing new about those notes with each new iteration, and leaving nothing to discover in repeat listens. Adele’s got a terrific blue-eyed soul voice, but in much the same way the Walkmen’s world-weary last-call schtick gets old when that’s all they do, singing every line with voice-cracking intensity leaves the listener with nowhere to go, no emotional arc to follow either upward or downward. You’re just stuck in that same old familiar spot, and you know what familiarity breeds.

By contrast, Jeremih is working with a dramatically inferior instrument. But in his goofball “please grind against me and/or give me oral sex” anthem “Down On Me,” he and his producers work that much harder to keep things interesting. Establishing the basic template for the vocals, a follow-the-bouncing-ball monotone of staccato eighth notes, they quickly work against expectations: Jeremih stops short, letting the final syllable of several lines drop from his mouth like that cigarette that got stuck to Ackroyd’s lip in Ghostbusters. Then they distort his vocals, pitchshifting him way downwards for a repetitive nonsense non sequitur: “BANG BANG BANG BANG.” Then he marvels at his would-be conquest’s body with a weirdly specific comparison (“What, you work at Bally’s? Look at your physique”) delivered in a sleepy mushmouth. Then he heads upward in both energy and register for the autotuned chorus, affecting a weird pseudo-South Asian accent of all things, as anonymous hip-hop “HEY!”s echo in the background. Then 50 Cent returns after a brief cameo in the intro for a verse that returns to the earlier ratatat vocal rhythm before dipping into distortion a couple times to hide cusswords or emphasize how he’s not going to put shit on blast. Then he does exactly that, slowing way down to deliver a few lines about how he’s going to stuff his oversized penis into her potentially too-tight vagina (I am not kidding) as an overdubbed choir of Jeremihs sings “Daaaaaamn….oh-oh-oh aw daaaaaaamn.” Then it’s back to the chorus, only this time it ends with the title phrase done in a chipmunk voice. Then there’s a third verse that sounds more like a middle eight, one that repeats an oddly respectful characterization of the girl’s personality: “Say you independent / get it from your mama.” All the while the music bubbles and tinkles and whizzes along, the beat dropping in and out like someone you momentarily lose sight of at a club only to lock onto again. It is a thoroughly, thoroughly weird song, and as cheesy and gross as its message and mien are, it’s not just an earworm but something I can listen to over and over again and find new things to geek out over. It makes Adele’s respectable pleasure feel shallow indeed.

Garden
Yuichi Yokoyama, writer/artist
PictureBox, May 2011
320 pages
$24.95
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com

Meet the non-narrative pageturner. Garden is Yuichi Yokoyama’s third English-language release from PictureBox, and his most viscerally thrilling work to date. It’s the clearest demonstration yet of the innovation that is his masterstroke: fusing visually and thematically abstract material with the breakneck forward momentum, eye-popping spectacle, and pulse-pounding sense of stakes of the rawest plot-driven action storytelling.

Garden has no story to tell, of course, not as such: It simply depicts a large group of sightseers who break into a vast manmade “garden” of enormous natural features combined with artificial and mechanical objects, wander around, and describe and inquire after what they see. With their matter-of-fact pronouncements (“There are many ponds. This one is jagged. There is a giant ball floating in this one. This one is made of stainless steel. We have now arrived at a significantly larger pond.”) doing the heavy lifting of parsing exactly what we’re looking at for us, we’re freed to simply go along for the ride, marveling at each new environment Yokoyama dreams up. As a feat of sheer bizarre imagination it’s tough to top: I can easily picture standing around with other readers comparing favorites — “I liked the hall of bubbles!” “I liked the stack of boats!” “I liked the river of balls!” “I liked the giant book!” “I liked the polaroid carpet-bombing!” “I liked the monkey bars!” Imagine if everything in Walt Disney World were as alien and strange as the giant golfball Spaceship Earth and you’re almost there. Nearly every new area and attraction practically demands to be stolen and used for a setpiece in someone’s weird alt-SFF webcomic. And with a “narrative” through-line that’s 100% pure exploration — lots of little guys walking and climbing and sliding and crawling through doorways and scaling mountains made of glass and so on — echoes of their tactile, discovery-driven adventure can’t help but hit us and excite us as we race along with them to their eventual destination.

In essence, Garden teaches you how to read it. It immerses you in its perambulations and presents you with a new amazing thing with each turn of the page, engrossing you to the point where you hardly even notice that it’s a book-length exploration on Yokoyama’s part of geometric shapes, of the clean line, of costume design (all the little people wear headgear and outfits that make them look like a cross between Jason Voorhees and Carmen Miranda), of his own fascination with the way the natural world and the manmade world shape one another. I felt at the end of the book like I do at the end of a great theme-park vacation: Exhausted, invigorated, and already planning my return.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* It’s a mug’s game for people who’ve read the books to try to figure out what people who haven’t read them think of the show, but I’ll tell you what, this episode made me wish I were in their shoes more than any so far. Not even for the bigger developments necessarily, but for…well, the bit I keep coming back to is Gregor Clegane grabbing his sword and decapitating his own horse with a single blow. What would a tyro make of that, I wonder? I think I’d have done a comical spit-take with the beer I was drinking.

* And this episode was laden with visual hooks of that sort. The Eyrie: its high-fantasy layout, its mad ruler and her breastfed boy, its three-walled sky cells. Theon Greyjoy’s wiener. Renly and Loras’s foreplay-by-way-of-barbering. Tyrion bashing that tribesman’s face in. The enormous dragon skull. Jory’s knife in the eye. In positing it as the best of the series so far, much of the writing I’ve seen about this episode focuses on either the increased action quotient or the fine new scenes added by the writers, as well they should, but these visual moments of “whoa” were what stuck with me as I went to sleep.

* Moreover, both Gregor’s Godfather impression and the whole Eyrie sequence went a long way to rectifying my main complaint about last week’s otherwise excellent episode, the way completely understandable constraints stripped the spectacle from settings like Vaes Dothrak or the Hand’s tourney. Clearly the Eyrie of the books, with its multiple ascending fortresses connected by precarious stairways and winches and leading to a mountaintop stronghold it takes a full day to reach, wasn’t going to work with the time and the budget available to a television show. But unlike Vaes Dothrak, where the art department realized it couldn’t portray an ad hoc assembly of pillaged architecture and artifacts from all over the world but didn’t do anything to compensate and just saddled us (no pun intended) with a bunch of tents, the Eyrie is different but still suitably spectacular, with its towering arches and soaring dome construction and gorgeous weirwood throne. The tournament, meanwhile, still feels way smaller than the Westerosi Super Bowl it ought to be, but having a giant chop his own horse’s head off after losing to a dude with the most ornate armor you’ve ever seen, then duel with his burned brother nearly to the death, goes a long way toward making the event as memorable to viewers as it’s supposed to be to the in-story spectators.

* The new scenes were well worthwhile. Robert and Cersei’s conversation did the necessary work of simply demonstrating how their marriage works and why hasn’t had the other killed yet, but for my money the best of the bunch was Littlefinger and Varys’s duel of words/dick-measuring contest in the throne room. Just a pleasure to watch Aiden Gillen and Conleth Hill be sleazy with an undercurrent of genuine danger.

* After the stagey Dothraki wedding fight, the battle with the hill tribe, the Clegane duel, and the Stark/Lannister massacre went a long way toward reassuring me that the show can handle action properly. It’s worth noting, too, that both of the major battles ended with shots of the survivors standing (or kneeling) amid a pile of bodies. Action’s a bloody, murderous business in this world, or at least it should be, and those shots reinforce the way swordplay is depicted as people swinging huge sharp chunks of metal at each other in the hope that they’ll cut something off of their opponent.

* This episode once again used the show’s penchant for rapid-fire scene transitions to illustrate just how byzantine the court intrigue can be. In back to back scenes, Varys meets with Ned to warn him that the king is in danger and keep him on the trail of the Lannisters; Varys meets with Illyrio to warn him that the Starks and Lannisters are fighting and that Ned will soon discover Jon Arryn’s secret, complicating their ostensible shared goal of overthrowing Robert with the Targaryens at their own pace; Varys meets with Littlefinger to talk shit and maneuver against one another; a few scenes later, Varys sits in the Small Council, encouraging Robert to have the Targaryens murdered. We don’t have any more of a prayer of untangling the Spider’s web than Ned does.

* Murderers’ Row, from left to right: Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, John Porcellino, Peter Birkemoe, Chris Butcher, Chris Oliveros, and Dan Nadel. That’s five of comics’ best cartoonists, two of its best retailers, two of its best publishers, and two of its best convention organizers (there’s some overlap). This photo comes courtesy of the equally magisterial Tom Devlin’s TCAF photo parade, which along with Robin McConnell’s is one of my favorites so far. Meanwhile, Secret Acres’ Barry & Leon and cartoonist Tom Neely contribute fine prose reports. I’ll tell you what: For me, this is the year that TCAF went from “that sounds really nice for people who live in Canada, but I’m all set with MoCCA and BCGF and SPX down here” to “road trip!”

* Every silver cloud has a dark lining, however, and in this case that’s the seizure by customs officials of the Ryan Standfest-edited black-humor anthology Black Eye and Blaise Larmee’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Young Lions, neither of which is smut.

* Hooray: Jordan Crane’s webcomics emporium What Things Do is revving up again, starting with Kevin Huizenga’s Kramers Ergot 7 contribution “Balloon”. I remember flipping through the printout of the book that Alvin Buenaventura brought to SPX that year and marveling at the colors in this one, mouth agape.

* This actually made me say “whoa”: Flashpoint #5, the final issue of DC’s big summer event comic this year, will be the only comic DC will release the week of August 31. That’s an unusual and gutsy strategy — it has an antecedent in that issue of Blackest Night that DC shipped early with instructions to retailers to sell it during Diamond’s skip week between Christmas and New Year’s in 2009, but this time it’s DC that’s making August 31 a skip week, not the distributor.

* Meanwhile, the cover for the fourth issue makes me think that perhaps making Wonder Woman and Aquaman the villains of an event comic is the best way to get these two iconic but historically underserved characters over with audiences right now.

* Joyce Farmer’s run in The Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has been fascinating. Here’s a post on her career as the owner of a bail bond agency; here’s one on her abortion.

* The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual uses Richard McGuire to make an important point, which is that aesthetic coldness does not equal emotional coldness.

* A list of everyone who’s been in Ryan Sands’s zines. As a fan of impressive lists, I am impressed by this list. Speaking of which, you can buy his and Michael DeForge’s smut anthology Thickness #1 now, and get psyched for the just-announced Brandon Graham/Lisa Hanawalt-led line-up for issue #2.

* Everything you need to know about Uno Moralez’s aesthetic project, you can learn from the massive jpeg and animated gif dump he just posted.

* New York sports cartoonist Bill Gallo has died. I do not watch sports, but any time I’d come across one of his comics in the Daily News I’d just sit and appreciate the fact that he filled such a niche with such evocative and comforting cartooning.

* WAT

* Finally, you Game of Thrones folks, including the ones who’ve only just seen the show, oughta get a lot out of this gorgeous infographic guide to character relationships by HauteSlides. Click the link to see it at its full, elegant size.

* Tom Spurgeon talks TCAF. That sounds like an incredible show; the guest list alone is astonishing, I saw publisher and exhibitor after publisher and exhibitor tweeting that they’d sold out of this or that book by the end of the first day, and the free festivals always feel much less like summer camp for comics lifers and more like, well, a festival.

* Benjamin Marra is launching a new webcomic called Zorion the Swordlord, to be written and drawn on an ad-hoc basis during downtime on his commute, as part of a sprawling mythology he’s touched on here and there already called Space Barbarians of the Ultimate Future Dimensions:

The Space Gods then created the SPACE BARBARIANS OF THE ULTIMATE FUTURE DIMENSIONS, warriors in different dimensions of the universe with individual destinies and adventures, existing and operating with no knowledge of each other, in separate realities taking place near the demise of the universe. Each of the SPACE BARBARIANS, through their legion of adventures, is a piece to a puzzle which will stop the PHASER-AXE from completing it’s mission: to reach the HEARTSTAR and shatter all dimensions by cleaving the central sun in two.

I love Benjamin Marra.

* Wow: Various Closed Caption Comics members, with people like CF and Matthew Thurber riding shotgun, enter the “erotic artcomix” sweepstakes with Sock #1.

* Speaking of CCC, Zach Hazard Vaupen’s webcomic Rusted Skin Collection is an endearing combination of funny dick jokes and very weird drawing.

* A trio of noteworthy features from The Comics Journal: Sean Rogers interviews Chester Brown about Paying for It, kicking off a week of PfI programming;

* Joyce Farmer of sleeper-stunner Special Exits fame kicks off her weeklong stint in the Cartoonist’s Diary column;

* and Rob Clough lists his Top 25 minicomics of 2011 (and then some). Also noteworthy is this comment in which Rob makes a point I’d never even thought of before, which is that with various comics schools mandating the creation of minicomics as part of the curriculum, the format isn’t going anywhere, the relative ease of Kickstarter-funded book-format projects (not to mention simply publishing to the web) notwithstanding.

* Nick Gazin’s latest comics review round-up for Vice (which happily used the “comics” tag and thus showed up in my jerry-rigged comics-only Vice RSS feed) is also a stealth interview column, featuring brief chats with Gilbert Hernandez (it’s called “The Fritz Film Series,” sez Beto), Johnny Ryan, Michael DeForge, and Benjamin Marra.

* It’s kind of funny to me to report on in-story developments in a Frank comic, superhero-style, but I was pretty excited to hear Jim Woodring say that Frank will be leaving the Unifactor in his next book, The Congress of the Animals.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones continues his series on the Joker with a piece on Grant Morrison’s “super-sane” take on the Clown Prince of Crime.

* Kudos to Kiel Phegley for getting the ever-fascinating Marvel editor Tom Brevoort to confirm a connection between Marvel Studios’ ownership of movie rights to certain Marvel characters and those characters’ attendant higher profiles in Marvel comics. Brevoort characterizes it as an issue of easier coordination with their in-house studio rather than “let’s favor the Avengers over Spidey or the X-Men because we’re not Sony or Fox,” however, but it’s still the most direct explanation yet of a relationship between the two phenomena that I’d long suspected.

* Ben Morse writes about Thor in the context of that weird superhero-comics phenomenon wherein if your first impression of a character comes during an off-model period for that character it skews your understanding of how that character works pretty much for the rest of your life. I was thinking about that the other day in Target when I walked through the action-figure aisle and saw that a series of “classic fight”-type Marvel two-packs come packaged with the comic in which the fight in question took place; what’s a kid who gets the Dark Spider-Man/Dark Wolverine two-pack from his grandma going to think of it all?

* This admittedly awesome page from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns sold for $450,000, making me wish Batman were real and there were a villain that represented income inequality in America whom he could punch repeatedly in the face.

* Emily Carroll profiled; Emily Carroll’s website revamped — now you can find all of her webcomics (including at least one I’d never heard of before) in one place, not to mention quite a bit of her illustration work.

* Jesse Moynihan’s Forming remains dizzyingly complex and lovely.

* Travis Greenwood of the fine t-shirt company Found Item Clothing interviews the guy who played the little kid in the “BULL SHIT” t-shirt in The Jerk — the greatest movie t-shirt ever.

Page nine of “Destructor and the Lady” has been posted.

Surely any Rocky Horror-experienced person can recognize and applaud in Lady Gaga the realized desire of many young people to be publicly weird in their underwear.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

I’m struck once again by how Game of Thrones: The Show is establishing its aesthetic identity by what it does, for want of a better word, “wrong.” Episode Three’s breakneck scene transitions felt off versus what we’re accustomed to from television, yet complimented the byzantine complexity of this world’s alliances and rivalries. This week’s episode was one long violation of “show, don’t tell,” with character after character telling other characters lengthy stories about the past or filling them in on information about the present. Yet the conversations never felt boring or superfluous, because they told us so much not just about their ostensible topics, but about how this world works. The society of the Seven Kingdoms is held together by the stories its people, particularly people in positions of influence and power, tell each other. The victories and defeats of the past, the valor and ignominy of the competing Houses, the traditions that dictate the positions of men relative to women and the highborn relative to the smallfolk and knights relative to men at arms — in the absence of widespread literacy and with political power a precarious held-at-swordpoint thing, these stories are the glue that binds everything. Telling the right story at the right time can move the world in the storyteller’s desired direction.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

—

* This was my favorite of the three episodes, and before this I preferred the second episode to the first. I could certainly get used to the series getting better and better with each episode.

* The funny thing is that it was the best episode yet not despite the rapid-fire scene-to-scene transitions and abundance of new character introductions, but because of it. The swiftness with which the episode bounced from place to place and character to character and moment to moment could easily have gotten disorienting or obnoxious; instead it felt like the show finding its aesthetic voice as television art — an editing choice that served to underscore the can’t-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard complexity of the show’s world and the byzantine plots and counterplots, alliances and conspiracies and doublecrosses that drive the narrative. It felt like its own thing rather than an illustrated version of the book, perhaps for the first time.

* In many cases it actually was its own thing, since so many of the scenes were brand-new material invented by the writers. And now I’m starting to understand why so many critics who saw episodes in advance said that the new scenes were probably their favorites: They were the first time I could just sorta sit back, relax, and enjoy the show, rather than comparing each moment to its prose counterpart. For some reason GoT is much, much harder for me to deal with in this regard than my other much-beloved epic-fantasy adaptation, The Lord of the Rings — perhaps because so much more of GoT‘s story arises from intrigue and character development than the grandeur/danger/action/spectacle of LotR, so it demands more attention to detail? But in the new scenes, we move away from the familiar material and swivel around to see existing relationships from a new angle, and the freshness of it makes it much easier to simply enjoy. It helped that the scenes were good, of course, and character-revealing to boot: Benjen ladling on the Stark self-righteousness to Tyrion, who could be the best friend the Watch has; both Robert and Ned hectoring Jaime, demonstrating that others have a hand in constructing his insufferable persona; Robert making himself more or less unbearable, to either the visible dismay or studiously cultivated indifference of his underlings.

* And as with Episode One, there were new characters galore: Renly, Viserys, Littlefinger, Grandmaester Pycelle, Barristan the Bold (never named, unless I’m mistaken), Lancel Lannister, Syrio Forel, Old Nan, Rakharo, Lord Commander Mormont, Maester Aemon, Ser Alliser Thorne (also never named), Yoren, Pyp and Green and all the other members of Jon’s class at the Wall. Yet because we were coming to these newbies through the eyes of characters we already knew, it never took on that stop-and-start, receiving-line feel that Episode One was a bit bogged down by.

* You say “mayster,” I say “meister,” let’s call the whole thing off!

* Arya’s first dancing lesson was a balancing act in itself. For quite some time it was “Swordfighting is exotic! Swordfighting is fun!” Then along comes Ned and his aural flashback, and we’re reminded that swordfighting is fucking awful. It’s gutsy of the show to take a big wish-fulfillment moment like plucky tomboy Arya’s chance to follow her dream and root it back in the nightmarish reality of dead butcher’s boys and green young men shitting themselves after having their ribs cracked by a warhammer.

* The moment when Cat stuck her head out the brothel window and yelled “Ned!” was endearingly goofy, almost Britcommy. A little comic relief stemming from the outlandishness of some of these situations — a bug-up-their-ass lord and lady being reunited in a brothel, for example — could go a long way toward leavening the grimness, ultraviolence, and nudity.

* Impressive effects shots at the Wall. I know it probably shouldn’t, but it gives me hope for future effects-heavy moments.