For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 13, please visit Rolling Stone.

I’ve been reading a lot about Mad Men and Game of Thrones lately. Here’s an incomplete list of some of my favorite writing on those shows from recent weeks.

* Mad Men: The Mindless Ones on nearly everything about “Tea Leaves.” Hob on subtletly and its discontents. Deborah Lipp on sexualized violence in “Mystery Date.” Matt Zoller Seitz’s synthesis of the latter two topics.

* Game of Thrones: Ryan McGee and Maureen Ryan’s podcast on the premiere, featuring insightful commentary on what you lose when every scene you show is “necessary,” a salient point of comparison between Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings films, and a grand unified theory of fandom. Bob Temuka on a pair of strong moments from the first season’s soundtrack, by way of a fine description of what it’s like to give yourself over to ASoIaF fandom. Josh Wigler rounding up responses to certain taboo acts of violence in the premiere. Westeros.org’s strong words on the second episode’s perceived weak spots. Rowan Kaiser on honor as a means to understanding one’s relationship to power. Alyssa Rosenberg, unique among critics, on lying in the premiere and the treatment of religion. And some further thoughts from me on the role and value of “extreme” material in the show.

* Finally, neither fish nor fowl: Willa Paskin on the Fauxpranos, i.e. middling melodramas with delusions of great-TV grandeur. I’d swap out Boardwalk Empire, which was never less than entertaining and got genuinely weird and great by the back half of the second season, for The Walking Dead, which was sold as a zombie analog for AMC’s other great shows but, to put it mildly, isn’t.

* First, a suggestion: Why not load up this delightful 50-minute DJ set from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy before reading the rest of this post?

* Second, a public service announcement: Charles Forsman’s Muster List aspires to be a comprehensive link repository for minicomics cartoonists and the places online where you can buy those minicomics. It’s amazing.

* Speaking of Forsman, the new issue of his fine series The End of the Fucking World is out.

* Hoo boy: Benjamin Marra’s latest is Lincoln Washington: Free Man #1, a headlong dive right back into Gangsta Rap Posse #2‘s racial swimming/cess pool. “Eagerly anticipated” doesn’t cover it. Read a preview at the link.

* Jillian Tamaki’s figurework deserves some kind of tribute album.

* As do Brian Chippendale’s colossal environments.

* And speaking of figurework, look how fully formed, considered, and lively the bodies and faces were in R. Crumb’s earliest work. It’s like he mastered the hardest stuff first.

* Oooh, this is a good one from Tom Neely. And a relatively rare opportunity to see him do panel-to-panel stuff, too.

* I hope the recent burst of activity (relatively speaking) from Uno Moralez continues unabated.

* L. Nichols has a tumblr and she’s posting some knockout shots of murals and other art she did in a local restaurant. I promise you’re more interested in seeing this than you think you are.

* I have to hand it to DC for coming up with an approach to a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comic book that isn’t appealing to me in a single way. That takes hard work!

* For a brief moment as I scrolled toward it in my Google Reader, I thought this David Bowie photo was a Renee French drawing. Renee, if you’re reading this, you can still make me right.

* Decoding the aesthetics of Beyoncé’s new tumblr. <3 (Hat tip: Beebles.)

* If you’re not familiar with the bracingly frank sex writing of Vanessa at Nightmares and Boners, you should fix that forthwith.

* Glenn Greenwald is writing about the egregious, openly unconstitutional treatment of journalist and documentarian Laura Poitras, but he could just as easily be talking about Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Occupy protesters, and anyone else who makes the mistake of openly opposing American state power in a way that directly impacts or embarrasses the wielders of that power:

As is true for all states that expand and abuse their own powers, that’s what the U.S. Government counts on: that it is sending the message that none of this will affect you as long as you avoid posing any meaningful challenges to what they do. In other words: you can avoid being targeted if you passively acquiesce to what they do and refrain from interfering in it. That’s precisely what makes it so pernicious, and why it’s so imperative to find a way to rein it in.

See also Greenwald guest columnist Jesselyn Raddack on the Obama administration’s legal actions against journalists. The dark beauty of detainment, harassment, confiscation of personal electronics, mass arrests of and police brutality against nonviolent protesters, press blackouts, and so on is that none of it, none of it, has to stick in a court of law, at all. It’s all a fait accompli. The action’s been taken, and by the time it gets rectified in the near term (you’re released, no charges are filed, you get your computer back, someone gets put on desk duty), let alone in the long term (judicial pushback, as unlikely as that may seem with the current courts), your life has been made vastly more unpleasant, and everyone who sees what happened to you knows that their lives will be made vastly more unpleasant too should they do something similar. Message sent.

* Finally, might you consider Kickstarting my friend Simone Davalos’s fighting-robot documentary RoboGames?

My latest video-roundtable recap of Game of Thrones for MTV News is up! For related thoughts (non-book-spoilery), visit All Leather Must Be Boiled.

A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel: Volume One
Daniel Abraham, writer
Tommy Patterson, artist
adapted from the novel by George R.R. Martin
240 pages
$25
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

* Yeah, Episode Four: The premiere counted as two, apparently.

* Twin Peaks debuted 20 years ago today. Mad Men just started celebrating one day early is all.

* Seriously, what a treat to see Madchen Amick, who like all Lynch veterans takes his numinous energy with her wherever she goes. (See also Jimmy Barrett.) Even though it was reasonably clear that her continued presence in the episode and in Don’s apartment was a facet of a fever dream (otherwise why have the fever stuff going on in the first place, right?), her ability to disrupt Don’s life with her ever-increasing bluntness and directness had an uncanny air to it that went beyond “oh, it’s just a dream.” She literally only entered the story due to a physical separation between Don and Megan; she disappeared from Don’s apartment through a crack in the wall — that Gothic staple, a secret passage, one which may or may not exist in real life; she gave Matthew Weiner the opening for his most direct riff on David Lynch yet. (I ended up a little disappointed that the show hadn’t cast Sheryl Lee herself, and I half expected Don to start shouting about Missoula, MON-TANA!!!!!! Also did I detect some Angelo Badalamenti homages in the music round about the time Megan showed up in a halo of light?)

* Also, y’know, any excuse to look at Madchen Amick.

* The actual murder scene made my jaw drop and kept it that way for quite some time, even though I knew on some level — even just a narrative-television level — it couldn’t possibly be real: This wasn’t the sort of thing they’d do about three-fifths of the way into a fourth episode, involving a character we barely knew, in which the whole scene elapsed in what couldn’t have been more than two minutes. But it worked as well as it did nevertheless, in large part because we’ve always suspected Don has this in him. Remember the bit of business in the first season when he goes to his brother’s hotel room and you think he has a gun?

* I do feel like bluntness is Season Five’s stock in trade so far, for whatever that’s worth. Personally I’m not sure it’s worth much. Okay, it’s blunt. Okay, we get that Don telling hallucination-Madchen that she won’t ruin this for him, then strangling her, is his subconscious saying this same thing to the part of himself that cheats. (Although it’s important to note that he cheats first and kills later.) Okay, we get the connection between Madchen under the bed, Sally under the couch, and the survivor of Richard Speck’s Chicago nurse massacre under the bed. Okay, we get the connection between Time magazine being all “Enough with the riots already, this nurse massacre has some juice” and Peggy being freaked out about the massacre but oblivious to the potential and much more real violence Dawn could be facing. Okay, Peggy’s self-congratulation for helping Dawn out and for having been in a similar (but not really comparable) position of frowned-upon uniqueness at the office in the past is belied by both that obliviousness and her instinctive temptation not to leave the cash-filled purse around Dawn. I didn’t feel like I was being made to work too hard to put any of that together, but nor am I terribly tempted to complain about that. Is there such a thing as blunt elegance? Because I think that’s what this show has. There’s something to be said for making a clear point, but making it well.

* I do wish the connection between The World’s Most Intrusive Accordion Player and Joan’s own prowess with the squeezebox (pun intended lol) had gone unspoken, however. And “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” was the most on-the-nose music cue in all of recorded human history.

* I find myself fascinated by Joan’s mother precisely because she’s not “fascinating.” (I realize this runs counter to my point about bluntness being okay, but whatever.) Compared to the nightmarish mother figures we’ve seen on this show, from Betty Draper to Don’s dead prostitute birth mother and cruel stepmother to Henry Francis’s steamroller of a mom to Peggy’s standard-issue loving-but-cruel outer-borough Catholic widow, Joan’s mom is…reasonable, basically. Which is weird on a show like this! They butt heads some, yes, but no more than you expect two adult members of a family to butt heads; there’s obviously some unresolved issues regarding Joan’s service-member dad, yes, but not to a degree that cancels out her advice regarding Joan and Greg, I don’t think. When she tells Joan that Joan’s plan to greet Greg with their (“their”) baby was the right one after all, I internally cheered. A lot of moms on this show could not be persuaded like that.

* Loved the actual filmmaking in this episode. Quick cuts (my favorite was right up front, when without having first gotten an establishing shot, we’re suddenly just looking at Rizzo with pantyhose over his head) and more of the Kubrick influence from last week (Sally Draper as spooky little girl who should not be there is as direct a reference to another film/show as I’ve seen on Mad Men so far).

* And all that salmon and orange! This is quickly becoming this season’s hallmark, and one of my favorite things about it to boot. High point in this episode: Cutting from Joan in her apartment to Peggy in hers, Joanie’s orange walls collapsing from the periphery into the center of the frame in the form of Peggy’s pajamas.

* I laughed when Joan and her cleavage came out of the bedroom and asked her husband, mother, and son “What are the three of you up to?” Joan must get that question a lot.

* With all the horror stuff going on in this episode (btw, good to see Don and Henry’s mom both acknowledge the haunted-mansion vibe of the Francis’s house), I couldn’t help but see Joan’s exquisite moment of catharsis against Greg — dumping him, throwing him out, mocking him with how much effort it’s taken her to make him feel like a man, directly denying his inherent goodness, citing his rape of her as Exhibit A, god it was glorious — as Joanie’s revenge, the last-reel triumph of a horror-movie heroine against her antagonist. Joan was the episode’s Final Girl.

* Quick question about Greg: Greg says the Army makes him feel like a good man, contra Joan’s initial assessment. Does this mean he’d previously suspected he wasn’t good? Or has his life remained unexamined and this is just him patting himself on the back? I’m honestly not sure.

* Great zinger by Dawn (who through her disappearing act the morning after is the episode’s real Final Girl, I suppose), leaving her impeccably polite note right on top of Peggy’s purse. (By the way, I think Peggy’d drunkenness played a big part in her racist fear that Dawn would steal her money. This is someone she works with, who moreover she has all the contact information for, not some catburglar or mugger. What was Dawn gonna do, take the money and run?)

* Once again we see that Megan’s got moxie that few of the other women in Don’s life possess. She will run head-on into the infidelity issue, for example, but not with moralizing — with an “okay, I get that that’s a part of you, but it’s not a part that’s going to work for us, Don, do you get it?” attitude that’s refreshing both in its candor about the problem and its vulnerability in acknowledging her concerns about it.

* Crackpot theory of the day: Megan and Michael Ginsberg? Something about the way Ginzo’s been framed so far makes me wonder. His introduction was given a prominence that’s hard to explain. He’s the only non-Don person the show’s described as a genius. Megan said in the premiere that she’s concerned by her co-worker’s cynicism; Mike literally flees the room rather than share cheap thrills over the crime-scene photos. (Critic Deborah Lipp suggests some hypocrisy in the juxtaposition of that reaction with Mike’s darkly sexual Cinderella pitch to the shoe company, but lots of people can draw that kind of line between real and imaginary behavior.) Then there’s stuff that suggests the pairing on an almost subliminal level: Mike’s key line, “She wants to be caught”; the shoe exec’s suggestion that the woman in the ad be French; the direct address of infidelity in the Don/Megan marriage in the same episode where Mike gives his Draperesque spiel. Am I crazy? (I also think Roger’s going to die this season, but enough about me.)

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 12, please visit Rolling Stone.

* Zak Smith/Sabbath of Playing D&D with Porn Stars (and, y’know, the Whitney Biennial and suchlike) has been hired to work on the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story.

* I’m at the point where I almost want to take Michael DeForge’s drawing implements away from him and make him go play outside in the nice sunshine. If a day went by when he didn’t unveil a new strip for some anthology or magazine or website somewhere, I’d probably call missing persons.

* I’m saving this for when I can read the whole thing in one sitting, but Andrew White has finished his excellent SF webcomic Sexbuzz.

* Lala Albert continues to impress every time a new strip catches my (third) eye.

* J. Caleb Mozzocco raves about Tom Scioli’s American Barbarian.

* Tucker Stone raves about Derf’s revamped and expanded My Friend Dahmer. This couldn’t be more up my alley.

* Finally, I’ll probably be putting together another Carnvial of Thrones before the week is out, but the details on the forthcoming official map collection The Lands of Ice and Fire deserve a link here as well. Sothyros!

Page six of “Destructor Meets the Cats” has been posted.

You can read the whole story so far on one continuously scrolling page by clicking here.

Esperanza
Love and Rockets Library: Locas, Book Five
Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist
248 pages
$18.99
Fantagraphics, 2011
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

* The first Monday of the month is the best Monday of the month because it’s the Monday Matthew Perpetua unveils his latest Fluxblog 10th Anniversary Survey Mix: 2004! We’re kicking off a stretch of years wherein I remember the music very fondly, because I listened to much of it in what my therapist referred to as a sensory deprivation chamber, my car during my 75-90 minute commute each way to and from Wizard magazine. You form some intense relationships with sound in those circumstances. Anyway, Matthew’s taste runs both broad and deep. And this year’s eight-disc mix has some killer transitions: “Vertigo” into “Evil” and “Blood on Our Hands” into “Pardon My Freedom” are my favorites.

* Rock-solid, basic biographical profile of Daniel Clowes by The New York Times‘ Carol Kino. This is not something I care about, really, but Clowes is a great ambassador for comics simply in that you can hand so many of his book-formatted to people, confident in their quality.

* The best of the spoiler-free reviews of the first four episodes of Game of Thrones that HBO sent to critics, at least that I’ve seen, is Willa Paskin’s at Salon.

* Here’s the cover for Hope Larson’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, out on October 2nd.

* It’s been a while since I directed you to Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic. So allow me to direct you to Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic.

* And while I’m sending you to various webcomics, the latest installments of Ray Sohn’s True Chubbo and Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force are unexcerptable but strong.

* Yeesh, Anders Nilsen.

* NEGRON

* In the flat-color vein of that Tom Scioli American Barbarian page from the other day comes the cover to Chuck Forsman’s Snake Oil #7.

* Another cover! This one for Everything Together: Collected Stories by Sammy Harkham, due from PictureBox in September.

* Ross Campbell draws Katniss & Peeta from The Hunger Games. Apparently he hated the movie, but Ross has idiosyncratic taste in movies, from what I can gather.

* My god, look at these pages for Vasilis Lolos’s forthcoming Electronomicon. Next level for Lolos, like an 8-bit Al Columbia. I hope this one actually comes out.

* A pay-cable series based on Clive Barker’s Nightbreed could be magnificent, but as with most of Barker’s potential live-action projects it’s best to see it before you believe it. (Via Jason Adams.) Elsewhere, Barker talks to his fansite Revelations about his recent, extremely grave illness — toxic shock brought on by a trip to the dentist that put him in a coma and damn near killed him.

* Frank Santoro on recent minicomics from Michael DeForge, Jesse McManus, and Chuck Forsman.

* Finally, the Happiness anthology’s crowdfunding campaign is nearing completion, while the publisher Sparkplug’s is about halfway there with a month to go — go donate and get some good comics in return.

The other boiled-leather boot drops: I’m doing a weekly series of Game of Thrones video review/recaps for MTV News! It’s a roundtable with host Josh Wigler and the intimidatingly dapper Lucas Siegel of Newsarama.com, with weekly special-guest appearances by Elio & Linda from Westeros.org. I’m quite pleased with how this first episode came out, given that it was indeed our first episode. I’m also quite proud of my t-shirt. Take a look!

* Where do you come down on Fat Betty Francis versus Fat Peggy Olsen and Fat Lee Adama in the Fat Versions of Characters from the Great Post-Millennial Dramas? I actually think she ranks at the top, but we’ll see where things go from here.

* Heh, nice to see that the show’s not above a little DIRECT CONTRAST BETWEEN THE MRS. DRAPERS GETTING DRESSED. Megan could have turned to the camera and winked and it wouldn’t have been any less subtle. In fact, that was just the first of several moments that felt a bit too on-the-nose: Roger actually saying the words “When’s everything gonna get back to normal?”, about four quarts of sad string music poured all over all of Betty’s scenes, particularly the (otherwise beautiful) scene with the boys running around with sparklers on (I presume) the Fourth of July, and a death-dream that would otherwise have been creepy as hell. It’s okay, Mad Men, you can trust us!

* And then there’s Michael Ginsberg — excuse me, MICHAEL GINSBERG!!! I will say the following things about him here and then move on:

1) I find that schticky mid-century New York Jewish wiseacre accent fun to listen to.
2) The character is talented, and this show does good things with the idea of talent.
3) We went from his elderly European Jewish father blessing him in Hebrew to a showtune sung by a Nazi in under two minutes.
4) The jury is very much still out on this guy — however strong he came on in this episode, this is a show that hasn’t bellyflopped yet, not to a significant “new character developed over multiple episodes” degree anyway, and I’m willing to see where they take it. I mean, why would you watch a show if you weren’t?

* Is it just me, or are the scenes in Pete and Roger’s offices being shot in such a way as to complement their Kubrickian decor and color scheme of orange on black and white? Keeping everyone low in the frame so that the big fields of white can show?

* Dawn and Don, haha! I noticed that before it became a topic of discussion for the characters themselves, perhaps because I’m married to someone who isn’t from New York and for whom, therefore, the pronunciation actually would be confusing. (Where I’m from, Mary, marry, and merry are pronounced three different ways, which has blown many a non-tri-state-area mind.)

* In the Rolling Stones episode, Betty asks the doctor for a mother’s little helper. LOL

* If Director Jon Hamm’s primary visual contribution to Mad Men is the unusual use of fades between scenes, then put him in the director’s chair more often. I’m not sure what meaning we’re supposed to draw from, say, the fade between Betty in the bathroom and Betty in the clinic, and I’m glad of that. It feels gooey, somehow, like the link between the scenes isn’t neat and precise at all.

* Have we seen many, or really any, scenes with just Roger and Peggy before? They seem to have developed a rapport almost like Roger and Don.

* Something about Don in a public, dressed-down setting makes him seem menacing. Visually, he’s so different from the Rolling Stones fans at the concert it’s like he’s dangerous.

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 11, please visit Rolling Stone.

(Yes, the official numbering of the episode is “Episode 11,” picking up directly after the ten episodes of Season One. Kinda neat.)

My Game of Thrones Season Two premiere review will go up at Rolling Stone just after the episode finishes. See you there!