I think I figured out a good way to merge the two most recent books in A Song of Ice and Fire, which split a single time period’s worth of stories between two groups of characters in two separate volumes. I get pretty deep in the weeds of ASoIaF talk so I kept it on my dedicated site for that sort of thing, but it’s worth your time if you’ve read the series. Check it out.

I ranked the Top 12 power players in Game of Thrones by how close they are to ruling Westeros for Rolling Stone. Unbelievable to me that I get paid to do things this nerdy, even now.

Respect creators. Respect art. Respect comics. Respect yourself.

* It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Time for Tom Spurgeon’s comically massive guide to the San Diego Comic Con, fully revised and updated this year and as wise and funny and practical as ever. It is literally the next best thing to being there, and every time I read it, I miss the show more. If you want a taste of what it’s like without going, spend your lunch hour with this sucker.

* Matthew Perpetua has unleased another monstrous eight-disc survey mix, this one featuring the best songs of 2006. It’s funny: I don’t disagree with him that 2006 was a weak year overall, but I look at this mix and it’s jam after jam. But I think I started regularly reading Matthew’s Fluxblog site in 2006 because I liked the songs he was writing about, so I suppose it’s not surprising that I’m 100% behind the majority of his selections here.

* Tom Spurgeon also interviews Study Group/Press Gang cartoonist and impresario Zack Soto, who’s at the center of a lot of interesting things going on in alternative comics making and publishing right now.

* By all means enjoy Marc Spitz’s oral history of The Wire for Maxim. The revelation of this little bit of actor business by Jamie Hector, the actor who played the evil-eyed druglord Marlo Stansfield, was dynamite:

You know, I never looked in the mirror, never worked on that stare. I’d look through the other person, like they just don’t exist.

* DC Comics’ big New 52 relaunch helped, but didn’t transform, the company’s sales.

* Okay, so apparently there’s some kind of anthology called CAKE BOOK 2012 edited by Andy Burkholder (related to CAKE the con? I don’t know) and featuring, and I quote:

Dane Martin
Anna Haifisch
Paul Nudd
Brecht Vandenbroucke
Patrick Kyle
Sua Yoo
Michael Olivo
A. Degen
Anders Nilsen
Jason Overby
Nick Drnaso
Sanya Glisic
Jason T Miles
Ginette Lapalme
Blaise Larmee
Otto Splotch
Eamon Espey
Molly O’Connell
Paul Loubet
Jesse Balmer
Aidan Koch
John Hankiewicz
Jeff Lok
Max Morris
Lyra Hill
Karneeleus
Henry Glover
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Michael Deforge
Jesse Fillingham
Edie Fake
Jesse McManus
Mike Redmond
Leslie Weibeler
Matthew Thurber
Josh Bayer
David Alvarado
Chris Day
Mickey Z
Scott Longo
Austin English
Julie Delporte
Andy Burkholder
Conor Stechschulte
Onsmith
Zach Hazard Vaupen
Joe Tallarico
Bret Koontz
Aaron Shunga
Noel Freibert
Andy Ortmann
Shalo P
Anya Davidson

Holy moses.

* Anders Nilsen talks about what looks and sounds like an extraordinary sketchbook-based book and gallery show he’s doing called Rage of Poseidon.

* Zach Hazard Vaupen, the weirdest gag cartoonist on the planet, has started another humor strip called Pixel Dog’s Soft Bark. That’s what this is.

* Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color (of course it is) is now playing on the Study Group webcomics portal.

* Isaac Molyan revisits one of our old collaborations, “I Remember When the Monsters Started Coming for the Cars.”

* Lovely cartooning from Michael DeForge.

* Uno Moralez, image/gif gallery, solid gold, you know the drill.

* Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing a Lisa Hanawalt collection. Great news for all involved, including the readers.

* Filing these away for when I’ve read the book: The Comics Journal’s Nicole Rudick and Ken Parille on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?.

* Tom Ewing on the silence of Star Wars. I know exactly what he’s talking about, and it’s the sort of thing one misses when watching contemporary blockbusters.

* Not that I expected any less, but I sure am glad to see the Mindless Ones avoid the new “Wolverine wouldn’t do that!” school of Mad Men criticism in their review of last week’s pivotal episode “The Other Woman.”

* Speaking of, Gwynne Watkins’s Mad Men interview series for GQ has made for marvelous reading. Big surprise: the actors tend to be very smart interpreters of the show. Particularly recommended but ONLY IF YOU’RE ALL CAUGHT UP: Jared Harris and Christina Hendricks.

* Real Life Horror: What kind of person voluntarily sits in on Obam’s Kill List meetings? Like, where are you in your life where you think to yourself “These are calls I’m comfortable making”?

* Finally, news you can use: Emma Watson will be performing in full Rocky Horror lingerie regalia in her next movie.

How do we feel about this, ’90s high-school drama-club goth Christina Hendricks? “Well, at first I was like…”

“But then I was like…”

I ranked 15 of Season Two’s new characters from worst to first for Rolling Stone. Fun fact: The top two swapped positions from my original draft based on last night’s episode.

* We’ll get to it eventually, don’t worry.

* But first: A weirdly optimistic episode, in its “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play” way, no? As though the whole show had heard “You Really Got Me” as Peggy got on the elevator and reacted accordingly?

* For instance: Apparently SCDP has successfully completed its public-image turnaround. Both the rival ad exec, who has no reason to brownnose Don, and the 4A guy, who has no reason to hire Lane, say how impressed they are. Dunlop basically does the same thing by seeking the agency out rather than vice versa. The mood is reflected among every non-Lane partner.

* What’s more, Don’s got the fire in his belly again, to an alarming, almost monstrous degree. For the first time in ages he seems like the kind of man Connie Hilton would admire, a guy determined to shoot for the moon.

* And he didn’t need to sacrifice his skill with a pitch in this attempt to make big things happen again. Bulldozing Ed Baxter was brilliant lateral thinking, and moreover Don’s position of privilege allows him to pull that kind of thing off where Peggy failed in the Heinz baked beans meeting earlier in the season.

* Nor did he have to ditch his newfound kindness and empathy to make it happen. He may not have been able to pull Lane out of his nosedive, but he gave Lane nearly the exact same advice he gave Peggy in the hospital long long ago — proof he truly did care about the man and didn’t want to see him hurt any worse. He may have given Glen a lift back to school in order to have a nice long car ride to clear his head, but he saw that the kid was hurting and did his best to help. He may not have been able to bring himself to talk to Megan about Lane’s death just yet, but he was as warm and kind to her as he could be without getting into it.

* (And it’s worth noting he’s still legitimately pissed about what happened with Joan. No relief that he didn’t have to make decision himself — just anger at his partners for going against his wishes and putting his friend in such an awful position. And at her, too, it needs to be said.)

* I remain impressed and delighted with the Don/Megan relationship, by the way. He comes home and she blasts him for not calling, reading all sorts of disrespect into it — she drops it right away when he tells her what he’d been through, and from then on out it’s all sweet mutual gestures like holding hands and gently ribbing him for drinking his way through the problem. They’re the best, man!

* Like Don alleges Lane felt when the truth came out, Sally and Glen are relieved to mutually discover they don’t like each other in that way. How much better to admit it than to force yourselves to go through the motions in hopes of making it true. (I also got a nice LOL when Sally asked Glen what he wanted to do now that they had the apartment and the morning to themselves, and his was response was basically “duh–the Museum of Natural History!” I had some empty-house free-morning moments with lady friends myself when I was Glen’s age, and I had no interest going to no motherfucking museum, that’s for sure.)

* Even Betty got a nice warm moment of validation, when Sally ran home to her (despite spending an entire episode basically wishing she didn’t exist) for comfort after her Sansa Stark moment. Of course, being Betty, she converts this into an opportunity to gloat over Megan (something Megan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t give a shit about, to her credit either way), and it’s unclear from her face whether she’s capable of processing momentary closeness with her estranged daughter through any lens other than her own narcissism. But we can hope!

* On a slightly darker but no less delightful note: Ken Cosgrove, thou art avenged! Ken effortlessly kneecaps Pete Campbell after all this time, at last getting his revenge for the way Pete made him eat shit when he first (re)joined the new agency. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that a guy who writes science fiction short stories under a series of pseudonyms has no problem waiting a long time for his moment in the sun — and when he saw it, he took it, with the same smiling self-confidence and security with which he does everything else. He’s actually succeeded in being what all the other people at SCDP torture themselves into trying to be.

* Great Sally moment #1: Oh, fun, fighting with Mom about food! Am I right, ladies??

* Great Sally moment #2: “I wanted to know if you would have any problem with me strangling Sally.” “Should we be having this conversation on the phone?” I laughed really hard at that one.

* Great Sally moment #3: filling that coffee cup with sugar. Sweets to the sweet.

* “Why do we do this? I don’t like what we’re doing. I’m tired of this piddly shit.” Ha, I thought Don was going existential on us — turns out he just wants bigger accounts. Well, that’s something. As Roger tells us (Great Roger moment #1), enlightenment wears off.

* Great Roger moment #2: “She’d never had room service before. It’s too easy.”

* Great Roger moment #3: Detonating Don’s months-long Ed Baxter-based impasse with a tossed-off insult: “You let that wax figurine discourage you?”

* Great Roger moment #4: “I don’t want it to sound rehearsed.” “No danger of that.”

* Great Roger moment #5: No one does “watching in slightly slackjawed, mildly dazed amazement as someone else walks away after doing something surprising” like John Slattery does.

* Nothing convinced me more of the finality and seriousness of Lane’s suicide attempt than when he broke his glasses in half. As a glasses-wearing person I can’t even think of doing that. That’s just destroying your ability to interface with the entire world.

* Don’s confrontation with Lane was excruciating on any number of levels. He’s firing a man for forging a signature he himself has been forging for decades. He’s firing a man for breach of trust in a company whose trust he breaches every day just by showing up. He’s offering to keep Lane’s secret but threatening to expose it should Lane force him despite having a huge secret of his own. And as we see a few minutes later, he’s reprimanding Lane for not coming forward with the problem despite having kept secret Ed Baxter’s revelation that the Lucky Strike letter sunk the agency with the big boys. The way Jon Hamm plays it, it’s clear Don’s acutely, painfully aware of all of this, but has to do it anyway. I kept waiting to see if this had weaponized Lane in some way, made him capable of destroying Don in return. I’m glad it didn’t. I wish it did.

* The car won’t start. Rimshot! In all seriousness the buildup and follow-through of Lane’s death by Jaguar was the show at its most Sopranos, which is to say the show at its best.

* I want to point out how exquisitely staged the discovery of Lane’s body was. Listen to the already mounting panic in Joan’s words as she goes next door to tell the guys, despite her best efforts to be calm: “I think something’s terribly wrong in Mr. Pryce’s office.” Watch as all the sight gags involving characters peering over glass to spy on other characters get transformed into a way to glimpse something horrible. Look at the empty office in broad daylight. Endure the intensely awful intimacy of Pete, Roger, and Don taking him down off the door. Watch Don’s face as he realizes a second man has now hanged himself because of something Don did, or failed to do — crushing childlike sadness.

* “I suppose you’d rather I imagine you bouncing on the sand in some obscene bikini.” Lane can’t help but befoul even the nicest thing in his worklife on his way out the door. Bon voyage indeed.

* A coldly beautiful snow falls, a figurine of the Statue of Liberty buried the frame. Sure, why not.

* Orange alert: The lining of Glen’s coat. Joan’s collar. The couch on which Pete, Harry, and Ken climb to see inside Lane’s office. Lane’s Mets pennant.

* So here are your Zoroastrian competing philosophies: “The next thing will be better, because it always is” versus “What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness!” Or to flip it, “Why does everything turn out crappy?” versus getting to drive a grown-up’s fancy car all the way home. Note which one the show ends with (eliciting crazy-person peals of laughter from me, by the way — laughter of relief). The nonsense Don’s been selling for years about a car or a Kodak being the key to a fulfilling life turns out to be true, in this very limited scenario at least. At last, something beautiful you can truly own.

Nurse Nurse
Katie Skelly, writer/artist
Sparkplug, 2012
160 pages
$15
Buy it from Sparkplug

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

Instead of cutting characters or storylines from the books to save room on the show, Game of Thrones cut a theme: that you are a single thread in a sprawling tapestry of history and prophecy sprawling backward and forward and sideways through time; that you have no control over the shape or design or pattern of this tapestry; that the occasional glimpses you get of the larger tapestry can be exhilarating and terrifying and awe-inspiring; that attempting to unravel the awesome mystery of what it all looks like and how it all connects is a driving force in people’s lives.

Most of the major storylines and characters remain intact; other themes, particularly the exploration of how violence destroys human dignity and connectedness, remain intact. So there’s still much of what you love from the books in the show. But the theme above is not what the creators are interested in exploring. You have to decide how to handle that on your own.

For my recap/review of Episode 20, please visit Rolling Stone.

No, for serious: Please do click the link and read it, because that’s my real review. The stuff that follows is…I don’t know what it is. A review of my own viewing experience?

Alright. BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD. Do not read unless you’ve read at least the first three volumes.

All season long I’ve tried to chart a middle ground — not just in writing the reviews for RS, but also simply as an audience member — between considering the differences between the books and the show and not letting that be my be-all-end-all. There’s a good professional reason for that: Most of the audience hasn’t read the books, and I want something I write for a big mainstream publication like Rolling Stone to be useful to as many of those people as possible. And there’s a good critical reason for it, too, I daresay: It’s just not a productive use of one’s critical faculties to perpetually weigh an adaptation against the source, across the boundaries of different media/art forms and geared toward a different audience and with different creators behind the wheel.

Unless you’re someone for whom fealty to the book is quite openly the one metric that matters to you — and I can respect that — the fact that Littlefinger behaves differently on the show than he does in the book, say, is a value-neutral proposition. Is his new behavior well written, well acted, well shot? In the end that’s all that matters. Frankly, I don’t center my criticism on “but THIS changed, and THAT changed, and and and” as a writer, because I know how little use I’ve gotten out of that sort of criticism over the course of the season as a reader.

Now, once upon a time I tried to evaluate the series based on what non-readers would think, or even what they’d simply be able to understand and comprehend; I don’t think I lasted any longer than the series premiere before realizing what a mug’s game that was. I’m not a mind-reader and I can’t speak for those people, and it’s a waste of time to try. What I described in the paragraph above is different than that, mind you: I’m not trying to guess what non-readers think, I’m trying to base my opinions solely on the text at hand without constantly turning to an outside source for justification.

That being said, nothing can change the fact that, well, I have read the books, and I do notice the differences. And it’s clear at this point that some, but not all, of what I truly love about the books isn’t a priority for Benioff & Weiss. I don’t know why the truncation and bowdlerization of the House of the Undying came as such a shock to me given that the two most directly comparable scenes from the first book, Bran’s vision of the land of always winter and Ned’s dream of the Tower of Joy, were both dropped entirely, but it did. And that’s hard to deal with, man! If I were to make a list of the most important scenes in the series so far, in terms of communicating what the series is “about,” the original House of the Undying sequence would be in the top four, behind only Jaime throwing Bran out the window, Ned’s execution, and the Red Wedding. For all intents and purposes it’s not in the show at all, not in a form that counts — a form freighted with all that prophetic information and linking Dany to a grand tapestry of past, present, and future events. And that’s a loss to me. To a lesser extent, so is turning Brienne into a fury-fueled killing machine, or making it look like Jon killed Qhorin in a rage.

I don’t feel “betrayed” like Linda does, though, because I don’t understand how art can betray anyone. All of us have it within our power to make art completely harmless in terms of its direct impact on our lives, simply by not watching or reading or listening to the stuff we don’t like. Moreover there’s still plenty of stuff going on here that I DO like, centered mostly on marvelous, powerful performances, and a tendency to nail the big images, and the same healthy, bitter anti-violence message I respond to in the books.

Ultimately what I need to do, I suppose, is stop weighing the two against each other entirely — to look at the books as an outline, if at all, and take Game of Thrones as it comes, on its own terms. That’s a tall order, not because I’m married to the text, but simply because when you’ve read the source material you can’t help but remember it. Unlike The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Deadwood, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, and even Boardwalk Empire, the element of surprise that separates those shows from the pack — when I sat down to watch an episode of any of them, I literally had no idea what I might end up seeing, and that’s different from 95% of television — simply cannot exist for me with Game of Thrones. In the end, that’s the big obstacle for me, not for the show, not if I’m giving it a proper chance to be its own thing.

In the celestial venn diagram consisting of a Richard Dawson circle and an ideal-role circle, Dawson found the overlap. It was destiny. Rest in peace.

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

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

Behold Edie Fake’s cover for Thickness #3, the erotic comics anthology featuring Edie Fake, Lamar Abrams, Julia Gfrörer, Jimmy Beaulieau, Sean T. Collins (yep, me!), William Cardini (who drew the thing I wrote), Gengoroh Tagame, Hamletmachine, Andy Burkholder, and True Chubbo, edited by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge. Debuts at CAKE on June 16, available online everywhere shortly thereafter.