Colin Panetta and I made this comic as our submission for the Ahoy, Booty! zine, a tribute to butts curated by Lainey Diamond and Emily Partridge. It is of course a genderbending of this legendary page from David Boring by Daniel Clowes. We hope you like it, and we hope Lainey and Emily like it and put it in their zine.

I wrote a list of 23 things John Bonham did during the quiet part of “Stairway to Heaven” for BuzzFeed Music. It is ridiculous, and yet I believe an accurate portrait of the John Bonham gestalt. It does not include this astonishing performance of “Kashmir” but you get it here anyway.

Led Zeppelin – Kashmir by bobjd78

I also wrote about “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones for Cool Practice, my tumblr about music and coolness. Blueballs in music form.

SPOILER WARNING

* Can I level with y’all? I’m not sure five minutes of this entire show have gone by since Brody knelt in prayer that I didn’t think “Aw gee, it sure is a shame they didn’t wire that garage! Too bad the one thing that’d end the story instantaneously happens in the one place the other characters can’t see it happen!” It was a real tactical blunder on the show’s part to call attention to its own plot’s blind spot like that. Either don’t have Brody pray at all (I’m sure he can get the equivalent of a papal dispensation from the relevant al-Qaeda affiliated clerics), or have him pray someplace where it’s safe to do so for reasons other than “whoops,” but whatever you do, don’t have your antagonist do something that would lead to his defeat by your protagonist if he did it in any other room in the house but the one you end up writing a gaping loophole for him to do it in.

* This is in no way the only fairly inelegant bit of plot-necessitated writing in those first few episodes. Saul’s meeting with the judge he blackmails into issuing a FISA warrant for Carrie’s cameras felt like a show within a show called Infodumpin’ with Mandy and Michael. It came complete with a spinoff series: the later exchange between Carrie and her sister, which went something like “I can’t tell anyone about those antipsychotic pills I’m taking or–” “–or they’ll revoke your security clearance, yeah, I know, you’ve told me this many times over the years I, a licensed psychiatrist, have been providing you with these pills, but I’ll repeat it myself for emphasis this time.”

* And occasionally the heavyhandedness came gratis, with no plothammers attached. The scene in which Carrie’s boss David and that unctuous general bigfoot Mike into encouraging Brody to play the hero and thus help them continue the war, or else they’ll reveal Mike’s affair with his wife, felt like action-movie-bureaucrat-villain territory; the vice-presidential advisor with the ludicrous Southern accent was even worse. Shooting a dear to death for trampling tulips in the middle of a dinner party and in front of your own son was maybe a little much too, though it probably wasn’t as bad as punching a reporter in the throat mere seconds after being asked by said son what it’s like to kill someone. And frankly, after Carrie’s harem-girl asset gaver her “I’m just a girl from Sandusky, Ohio” speech, I was almost glad to see her go before we had to hear any more “Jack & Diane”-level backstory for her.

* But there you go, I think I just listed all the weak moments, in total. It’s tough to even classify what happened here as growing pains, since these same episodes contained remarkably nuanced and complex writing about the issues at stake here. Here’s the best way to characterize many of my positive responses: “Man, how interesting!”

* To wit:

* I like how we hear “Is it true you’re going to reenlist?” from the camped-out reporters before either Brody or we had had so much as a single thought about this. Those politicians sure work those phones fast.

* I like how palpable Brody’s disgust with bromides like “Thank you for your service” is, and that it seems to have little to do with the fact that he’s now secretly working to kill people who say shit like that. He genuinely can’t stand the idea that what happened to him, either before or during captivity, is anything to be thanked for.

* I like that the main character’s main action for a third of a season is to sit and intently watch a TV.

* I like how Brody’s rant to Mike about not taking orders from the brass to sell their “bullshit war” is, when you think about it, his last act of patriotism. He of course needs to step up and sell the bullshit war in order to pull off his new mission — he needs to play the good guy to be the bad guy — so a refusal to say “I’m proud of what we’re doing over there” on TV is also a refusal to be a terrorist.

* In other words, Carrie has the right of it: The show’s main innovation with regards to Brody is to examine the idea of terrorism being a difficult choice even for a convert to the cause. Damian Lewis is being asked to portray a lot of complex emotions and ideas, bringing each facet of them to the fore (i.e. his face) at rotating moments depending on Brody’s needs or lack thereof in those moments. There’s really no other character on TV quite like him.

* It was really, really sad watching him crawl into the corner and stay there for hours, no matter what he’s going to end up doing. This was someone’s little baby once, you know? And some other people, who were also someone’s little babies once, hurt him so badly that he has to sit in the corner of his bedroom for hours and hours to feel safe. Nothing better illustrates the nature of our beshitted world, a world that does this to some mother’s son, than torture and its after-effects.

* The Muslim dawn prayer as the definitive sign of monstrousness. Just putting that one out there.

* The well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual and mildly corrupt head of Carrie’s department is a black man about Barack Obama’s age. Just putting that one out there as well.

* Carrie’s closest personal relationships are (or in David’s case, were) with David, Virgil, and Saul — men 15, 20, 30 years her senior. Meanwhile her father has the same mental illness she does. Just putting that one out there next to the other ones.

* Homeland takes place in an alternate universe in which Lawrence O’Donnell bestrides the TV news landscape like a colossus.

* How sure are we that Morena Baccarin is human? How do we know she’s not a High Elf, or a Kryptonian, or an Amazon, or an alien from the planet of people with perfect and I mean perfect faces and bodies? Has this been investigated? Fuck Carrie and Virgil and Saul, let’s get Mulder and Scully on this case.

* Which reminds me: Doesn’t everyone on this show have worse problems on their hands than Sgt. Brody, given that the Vice President of the United States is motherloving Randall Flagg?

* Carrie crying after her asset was murdered was tough to watch — but, I think, vital to the appeal and dare-I-say-it-yes-I-dare importance of this show; her tearful arrival at her sister’s house following her quasi-quitting at Saul’s house even more so. After watching show after show in which deeply flawed men fuck up and/or commit horrible moral or actual crimes over and over again, crying maybe once every two or three seasons when shit gets totally out of control, it’s refreshing and realistic to watch a show in which the protagonist regularly cries when terrible things happen. I do; don’t you? And don’t you think this fact of human behavior should be reflected on TV?

* This isn’t quite on the level of the storytelling sins I listed earlier, but they have a Saudi prince who’s in America all the time on tape talking to the world’s most wanted man, whom no one has seen the better part of a decade. I guess I understand why they can’t make this public, or arrest the prince, but it feels like they should be doing something with this blockbuster piece of evidence. Instead it just kind of sits there.

* There was a great little piece of camerawork in the briefing where Carrie traces the escort’s necklace to a laundromat/Islamic financial institution and everyone is ordered to track its customers: The face of the real terrorist (or whatever he is) pops up just as the camera moves past it and the right side of the frame erases it, for the moment. Carrie and her colleagues live and die on details, and the show gets that, which is why they insert little details like that. Now we know how it feels.

* When Brody took his daughter out to the chainlink fence to see the padlock he and her mom put there years ago, I really thought he was shutting down her obvious attempts to tell him something unpleasant about his wife because he’d figured out what was up, but had forgiven her and wanted the daughter to do the same. But then he spent the next few episodes driving Jessica to the brink by passive-aggressively hinting around about her relationship with Mike over and over again. The jump was jarring.

* Another surprise, though in the opposite direction: We watch Brody’s face nearly the entire time as Carrie bumps into him at his Veterans Anonymous group and then attempts to leave, so if he’s sounding her out to see if she’s on to him, he does a much better job of hiding his true intentions than Carrie herself did. But from what I can see (at least until his cryptic grimace in the final shot of the episode), he was genuinely surprised to see her, and genuinely wanted to talk to her, and maybe even was genuinely concerned for her health. He seemed actually concerned.

* Carrie had a star-crossed relationship with her boss back in the day? Sheesh, lady, don’t shit where you eat.

* Who is this whitebread American woman living with the terrorist professor outside the airport, encouraging him to calm down and lie low? Who was the unaccented American man who tipped them off that Carrie and Virgil were tailing him? It wasn’t brother Max, was it? Dun dun DUNNNNN!

* I really enjoy the post-Cliff Martinez/Traffic score — all those electronic tones ‘n’ drones — though I know that shit’ll date terribly one day. Till then, keep the ominous swells of synthesized sound coming!

* Mandy Patinkin’s finest moment on the show was in his restraint, the way he spit out “I think you should leave now” and then swallowed his words as Carrie stormed out following their big blowup at his house. It works not just because of the contrast with his usual avuncular plainspokenness, but because Carrie has just informed us how dangerous he really is, or used to be.

* “Will he be tortured?” “We don’t do that here.” LOL

I wrote a comic called Here at the End of All Things, which Colleen Frakes then drew and printed as a minicomic. She’ll be selling it at her table (J3 – you can’t miss it, it’s right when you walk in the door) at SPX this weekend. I will also be on hand and will likely have some copies on my person too. If you buy it I hope you enjoy it.

As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

I wrote an article on the chill-inducing phenomena of ASMR and musical frisson for Buzzfeed Music. I’ve gotten chills from certain musical passages for as long as I can remember but never thought about why until very recently. Sourced reporting from evolutionary psychologists and choral composer Eric Whitacre, the works, baby.

I’m honored to be a part of the site’s launch day!

A while back I answered a question about the intensity of my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones fandom that wondered whether I’d ever felt this strongly or invested this much time and energy into another author’s work. The answer was yes and no: felt this strongly, sure; invested this much of my life, no. (Not unless you count “comics” as a whole; writing and thinking about comics has basically been my life’s work.) Even today I think I could just as easily be operating a tumblr and opining professionally about Los Bros Hernandez, or Clive Barker, or the band Underworld, or David Bowie (hey, wait), or ’70s glam rock, or Chris Ware, orThe Sopranos/Twin Peaks/Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Battlestar Galactica/Deadwood, or or or. But A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones it is. And it’s really remarkable how quickly my little “career” as an ASoIaF pundit took off, given how vanishingly little effort I put into getting it started!

I started my ASoIaF blog All Leather Must Be Boiled in March of 2011. My daughter had just been born two months prematurely via emergency caesarean section following another two and a half months of pregnancy complications that required my wife’s repeated hospitalization and lengthy bedrest stays, during which time one of our cats was diagnosed with cancer and was also both hospitalized for surgery and confined to a bedroom for recovery. I’d spent a quarter of a year running from work to hospitals to home, caring for the beings I loved as they suffered. A work as grim as ASoIaF was an odd choice for “escapism” to be sure, but it seemed to do the trick, because it confronts serious issues — issues that truly haunt and hound me day to day — in a way that also helps blow off steam about those issues.

So one day I got back from visiting my daughter in the neonatal intensive care unit during my lunchbreak, sat down at my desk, and decided to fire up the old tumblr dashboard and launch a new ASoIaF-only blog. This way, the things I wanted to say about the series would neither spoil it for readers of my other outlets who were interested in catching up, nor drown out everything else I write about for readers who weren’t. Simply choosing to use Tumblr instead of, say, WordPress indicated, to me at least, how casual the thing was going to be. Most of my initial posts were written for an audience of one: me — stray thoughts, things I caught myself, passages I loved, a play-by-play of my journey of discovery through Westeros.org’s archives and forum, fanart drawn by cartoonist friends and acquaintances, anticipatory effusion about the then-upcoming HBO show. It was truly the tumblr of a fan, not a scholar, barely even a critic.

The point is, I learned as I went, simply through going. The more I wrote, the more I found myself able to articulate what was important to me about the books, to formulate coherent questions about the things I didn’t understand, to provide answers about the things I thought I did understand, to find answers on my own and put them in front of other people. Very quickly, “other people” expanded to include people who really were experts. Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson from Westeros.org said nice things, popped up in the comments, and eventually got me hired to work on the official annotations of A Game of Thrones alongside Elio and the books’ freaking editor, Anne Groell. That happened within six months of me starting this tumblr. Stefan Sasse from Tower of the Hand liked what I was doing enough to suggest we start a podcast together, and voila, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour was born. The writing I was doing about the show (and other shows) was apparently solid enough that when I mentioned how much I’d love to get paid to do what I’d been doing for free to my friend Matthew Perpetua, who was an editor at Rolling Stone, he passed my name to his fellow editor Evie Nagy, who hired me to recap Game of Thrones within days of me just idly “wouldn’t it be nice”-ing this during a google chat. Because of the way I write, and the things I write about, and the place I write about it, I find myself in the central overlap of a Venn diagram that includes traditional, Westeros-style fandom, professional pop-culture critics, and the tumblr ASoIaF/GoT community. Best of all, this doesn’t only work in one direction: One day I clicked on a tumblr that had just followed this one, discovered an incredible, fully-formed music critic at the tender age of 18, and passed his name along to the right people, so that I think he was offered his first pro music crit gig within literally hours. (What up, Jaimeson?) To call All Leather Must Be Boiled the most rapidly rewarding writing I’ve ever done would be to understate the case considerably.

And the rewards, in the form of knowledge and enjoyment of that knowledge at least, never stop. As I said earlier, one of the best things about this blog is the chance it gives me to be wrong about things in public. That way, the people who know more than I do can provide me with the right information, and I can grow and learn and get more right in the future. What a wonderful opportunity! It’s a joy to be corrected by Elio, or enlightened by Stefan, or challenged or outright debunked by another tumblr. I want to get better, and that’s how you get better. I think that because I started this tumblr with no pretensions to expertise, simply the desire to talk about these fun books I read, I was responded to in kind. The vituperative, “SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET” responses I’ve gotten to anything I’ve ever said there can be counted on one hand; even then I try my best to put the tone aside and focus on what they’re telling me that I wasn’t seeing or hearing myself. Sometimes they’re just wrong, of course — hey, I’m a critic, I’m going to think other people are wrong, that’s what they pay me for — but most of the time they’re shining a light on something I could’ve used a clearer look at. You can bet your bottom dollar that I take that experience to heart and try my best to apply it to everything I do, online and IRL. There’s no better way to become an “expert” than to do, and do, and do, and sit back and see what comes of the doing.

* Now’s as good at time as any to say I’ll be covering Homeland Season Two for Rolling Stone, I guess. That also makes it a pretty good time to watch Season One, for the very first time.

* Homeland is, in its way, part of a genre that’s very near to my heart: haunted suburbia. Alyssa Rosenberg once made this exact point about the show, in fact. The pilot episode’s winter-gray palette of cloudy skies, streets lined by leafless trees, dingy snow on asphalt driveways, people looking out windows into backyards and so on was all awfully familiar to me, and I’m the sort of person who…I don’t know, feels there’s probably something awful beneath the familiar. In the Washington suburbs that’s literally true, of course, since decisions to kill people are made in homes and offices like these all the time. I’m happy to see a place like that played as a source of dread.

* What a terrific germinative moment for this series: A condemned man who’s killed hundreds of people whispering a pivotal, lifechanging, potentially catastrophic phrase into the ear of his wild-eyed nemesis as she’s forcibly whisked away. We don’t hear what he said. We can only take her word for it. It turns out that she was right, but by hiding the actual sound of his voice from us the show lets us know that she will always be second-guessing herself, always have that wide-eyed look of “Did I just hear what I think I heard?”

* Another great nightmare moment: Carrie in the briefing room, fear creeping across her face while everyone celebrates. To be Cassandra, to be Kevin McCarthy in in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that’s bad juju.

* The final moment that sold me: Sergeant Brody crying after he finishes beating his partner to death. The worst thing about torture is the breaking of people, and even if Brody’s al-Qaeda brainwashers were able to put him back together in a new and terrible shape, he’s still broken. I like that the show allowed for that moment, showing he’s not the smirking villain he appears prepared to become as he stares at the Capitol dome in the distance — he’s a man who just did the worst possible thing the old version of him could ever imagine doing, and there’s enough of the old version of him left for the new version to be sick about it. (Which is still the case as he throws up while his plane prepares to land in the States, come to think of it.) Actor Damian Lewis has the look of a character in a just-okay network cop show, and I’ll fully cop to responding to actors on a purely surface level first and foremost, so he had the most work to do of anyone on the show to get me invested. He certainly did in that scene.

* The funny thing is that even aside from my own aesthetic biases, it seemed like he’d have the toughest role of anyone in the cast regardless. Since it appeared as though the show would be about figuring out whether or not he’s a double agent, I figured that I’d spend an entire season poring over this guy’s every facial expression, every movement, every blink. Instead the show does the big reveal almost immediately. That really surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Resting the show on an out-and-out mystery puts too much pressure on that mystery to deliver its resolution and then go no further. They’ve got a lot more flexibility with Brody’s true nature out in the open (for us at least). And this is not to say that Brody might not harbor some doubts about his mission, which will help the character maintain some air of uncertainty.

* This is going to sound weird, but was I the only one who caught a Stephen King vibe from this? In Brody I saw echoes of that manchurian-candidate Dead Zone character; in the treatment of the ‘burbs I saw Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot and any other place pervaded by evil and reluctantly, frantically protected by the one person who can see the forest for the trees.

* Very, very excited to be watching a Great TV Drama with a female antihero protagonist. Excited it’s Claire Danes, too, whose face seems like it was carved out of marble to play exactly this kind of high-stakes, high-strung operative at the end of her rope.

* I’m also excited to be watching a war-on-terror show that, despite being more explicitly about the war on terror than any other, seems at least somewhat determined to play that conflict as a nebulous and shadowy one, in which secret societies meet in secret rooms to determine the fate of millions, on either side. Everyone’s so busy refining genre art down into mere allegory that they forget you can also inflate allegory into genre art.

The new episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! It’s the first in what sure looks like it’s going to be a hella long series of discussions about the women of Westeros, starting with Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister. Enjoy!

I wrote a graphic novel called Cage Variations that Matt Rota drew. Today the first part was posted at Study Group Comics. I hope you enjoy it.

For my review of last night’s Breaking Bad finale, please visit Rolling Stone. Terrific episode.

For reasons unclear even to me, I have contributed two more guest strips to Stoner Alien. You’ll be able to find all my contributions by clicking here.

Over at Rolling Stone, I updated my list of Walter White’s worst moments — now including Season Five — in anticipation of tonight’s Breaking Bad half-season finale.