* Al Columbia tells Inkstuds he destroyed the art for his and Alan Moore’s Big Numbers #4 to make an album cover for his roommates in the band Sebadoh. I really don’t know what else to say about that, except that the actual story has ended up being even better than the rumors suggested.

* Again, please do listen to Al Columbia’s entire interview with Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell; an absolutely fascinating way for comics lovers and Columbiaologists to spend two hours. He comes across as an enormously affable guy, admirably cognizant of and secure in his talents and his limitations, and prone to dropping the occasional deeply troubling revelation into the conversation at a moment’s notice.

* pood #3 hits stores April 20th; you can order it through Previews now.

* Retailer and commentator Brian Hibbs has posted his annual look at the BookScan graphic novel/comics sales figures for the bookstore market. It makes for fascinating, if occasionally grim, reading. I think you’ll be surprised by just how well-represented the major corporate prose publishers are on the lists; it can be hard to tell, because their comics releases tend to be spread between various imprints. Unfortunately for fight fans, Brian didn’t include his customary comparisons of the bookstore market to the Direct Market of comic specialty shops, and thus failed to provoke the customary Brian Hibbs/Tom Spurgeon reenactment of the Roddy Piper/Keith David fight from They Live over the conclusions drawn in those comparisons.

* I don’t usually comment on the weekly serial comics releases, but I want to state for the record someplace less ephemeral than twitter that this week’s The Walking Dead #81 from Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard has to be one of the best issues of the series. There’s a line in it that made me say “Oof” and sort of shake my head, and that’s quite aside from whatever zombie-related developments may or may not take place.

* This reminds me that I should have said something similar about The Invincible Iron Man #500 — I mean, I said on Twitter that it was the best issue of the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca run, but I want to say it here too. I enjoyed the flashforwards, I thought the recursive structure was well thought-out and well-executed and also fun to read and unravel rather than just being showoffy or self-satisfied, the action was slam-bang, and Fraction wrote a Spider-Man cameo that actually made me laugh out loud at one point. Plus it boasted fine art from a variety of contributors, including Larroca, Nathan Fox, Kano, and Carmine di Giandomenico. Thumbs up.

* CBR has a pretty extraordinary Joyce Farmer in-store appearance report. Man, it sounds like she tore her guts out to make that book.

* Matt Seneca interviews CF for the Hooded Utilitarian. One of the highlights is CF’s impassioned denial that he’s encoding occult symbolism of any sort into Powr Mastrs. And he really comes out swinging in favor of story-based comics:

I’m aware that there are young people right now trying to make moves in comics and deny the story, but comics are a storytelling medium, more or less.  They can be poetic in the hands of one who “knows” (John Porcellino), but comics are designed to tell stories of some kind.  So in a way you’re asking “why comics?”.

Stories are actually our history, our knowledge, our wisdom.  We can’t live without them!  Stories are unique in their ability to speak on many levels at once in a very intimate way.  I’m drawn to that infinity of possibility.  I want to talk about “everything” with my work, but in an elegant and economical way.  Comics are perfect for this.  So we have funny jokes, economics, significant and insignificant events, cruelty, violence, eroticism, death, and tranquility within one work.  It’s a visual world, with exclusive abilities, living in time…. and still so simple.  That to me is very beautiful. This is what comics are for… if I want to do other things, I make a painting, a sculpture, or music.  There’s no excuse for abusing comics.  Of course we can play with the idea of “story”, and I think that’s a great, worthy thing to do, but I want the characters and ideas to always remain legible within that experiment.

* Today’s look at the work of Uno Moralez seemed to go over pretty well; here’s his Tumblr. (Via Same Hat!)

* This looks promising: The writers and cartoonists L. Nichols, Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, and Kevin Czapiewski have started a group blog called Comix Cube, where they’re mostly talking about influence and process and such, and in refreshingly personal terms. Highlights so far? Czap’s review of Blaise Larmee’s 2001, and his post touching on (among other things) one of the greatest comics of all time, Kevin Huizenga’s “A Sunset.” To me that’s the “Here” of the ’00s. Like Czap, I too was floored by that strip — it absolutely recalibrated my understanding of what comics were capable of. I think it’s maybe the underdiscussed comic of the past ten years.

* I’m tabling this till I can actually read the book, and god knows when that will be, but at first scan, Charles Hatfield’s review of James Stokoe’s Orc Stain, comparing it at length to other acts of fantasy-narrative worldbuilding and to D&D, looks like it’s working some very fertile ground.

* Dan Nadel explains Fort Thunder. Readers looking for a canonical list of Fort residents will come away confused, though, so make sure to consult The Official Handbook of the Fort Thunder Universe if you have any questions.

* Graeme McMillan loved Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark. Can’t wait to check this one out; Bertozzi’s historical comics have historically been beasts.

* Spider-Man’s joining the Fantastic Four (again). Sure, I’ll eat it. Spidey’s got a history with those characters, he’ll give the book some comic relief, the Hickman/Epting FF run has been really entertaining so far, and I like costume color changes on principle. Why not?

* Here’s an amusingly complete recap of the past fifty or so episodes of Jesse Moynihan’s cosmic-realist webcomic Forming. It’s a bit like reading a Wikipedia entry on The Young & the Restless, only instead of Victor Newman, there’s Ghob King of the Gnomes.

* This is just fine, fine writing on “Welcome to the Jungle” and Guns n’ Roses by Mike Barthel.

* I’m less nuts about Grayson Currin’s rave review of James Blake’s self-titled full-length album for Pitchfork, because given that the record’s big departure from Blake’s previous, shorter releases is the introduction of singing, it seems like the lyrics should have been discussed more, which is to say at all. This goes double because the lyrics are so minimalist, and therefore so direct. But I could just be saying that because the singing and the lyrics are what sold me on Blake at last, after a bunch of instrumental EPs that I thought were kind of undistinguished versions of things I’d heard before as far back as Burial and as recently as the last Four Tet record. By contrast, James Blake feels like the emergence of a bonafide pop songwriting tradition with mid-to-late-’90s Aphex Twin at its roots, which couldn’t be more up my alley. (That said, when I hear the phrase “Joni Mitchell cover,” I reach for my gun.)

* The first trailer for Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree is out. It’s cut for maximum red-band-osity, but aside from that it does indeed look intriguingly weird, as befits the spiritual (if not literal) sequel/remake/reboot of Hardy’s own The Wicker Man, one of the most intriguingly weird films of all time. At this point I should probably abandon even the pretense of going to see interesting-looking horror movies in the theater — I still haven’t seen fucking Midnight Meat Train, let alone Monsters — but this could be entertaining.

The Wicker Tree – Trailer
Uploaded by dreadcentral.

* My Robot 6 colleague Kevin Melrose has the best round-up of the critical beatdown Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark took in today’s papers, and the best headline for it as well. One silver lining I think we can all hope for for this thing is that it could maybe serve as the “Uncle Ben getting murdered”-type catalyst for a late-period U2 creative self-reevaluation and renaissance, which is badly needed right about now. (Fun fact: In the show, Uncle Ben dies not from a burglar that Peter Parker failed to stop, but from an unrelated car accident.)

* Hey, Richard McGuire’s “Here” is online in its entirety. One of the all-time great comics.

* The San Diego Comic-Con 2011 completely sold out in one day. Zoinks. Tom Spurgeon has further thoughts, centering on the fact that the show still puts up a world-class slate of comics programming and exhibitors and that the programming end, at least, is better attended now than ever — but that none of that may matter if the way that tickets to the show are sold redound to the movie-trailer crowd’s near exclusive benefit. It’s not clear that that’s the case, however. One thing that seems abundantly clear is that the days of SDCC being something a casual or curious person could plop themselves into the day of, or even the month of, are loooooooong gone, never to return; everyone’s expectations should be recalibrated from there.

* Saving this for when I have the chance to really listen: Inkstuds interviews Al Columbia for two hours. Worth it for the below header image alone:

* Tokyopop is looking into publishing a collection of Brandon Graham’s King City at the extra-large trim size of its Image Comics serial-comic incarnation. I look forward to reading it! Via Frank Santoro, who has more.

* Now this is freaking heartwarming, doubly so if you’ve read the books: The girl who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones has adopted the dog who plays Sansa’s direwolf Lady. That’s the happy pair with the young actors who play Bran and Arya. <3 <3 <3

* Speaking of A Song of Ice and Fire, I agree with the assessment of regular commenter Hob, who emailed me a link to this astonishing map of Westeros by Other-in-Law with the message “Possibly the best fan art I’ve ever seen.” Click the image to see the whole thing, and more maps from ASoIaF besides.

* The Hobbit starts shooting on Monday, March 21, 2011.

* The Australian magazine The Lifted Brow looks interesting — the current issue boasts contributions from comickers Eddie Campbell, Lisa Hanawalt, Noel Freibert, Ron Regé Jr., and Lane Milburn. (Via Mr. Freibert.)

* Interesting list of the Seven Deadly Sins that crappy horror movies commit from Tawnya Bhattacharya. I don’t agree with them all — what inner demon of Sally’s did Leatherface represent in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Her childhood fascination with the zebras on the wallpaper in her grandparents’ house? — but so many horror movies are colossal wastes of time that it behooves us to try to understand why. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Rob Humanick reminds us that Shutter Island > Inception.

* Headline of the Day: One in 50 Troops in Afghanistan Is a Robot

* He’s certainly an expert on leadership vacuums, I’ll say that much.

* Is it just me or does R. Fiore’s review of Acme Novelty Library #20 get just about everything wrong, from matters of basic reading comprehension (the veracity of Lint’s son’s memoir) and aesthetic judgment (the quality of the memoir’s art) to the overall assessment (Ware needs to buckle down and tell a by-god STORY already!).

* Finally, do not tl;dr Lawrence Wright’s enormously long, enormously compelling New Yorker article on the Church of Scientology, as seen through the eyes of its most socially prominent defector, Crash/Casino Royale/Million Dollar Baby writer and director Paul Haggis. I tend not to go for South Park-style Scientology skewering, because it seems clear that the only thing keeping the tenets and traditions of all the world’s religions from sounding just as ridiculous as Scientology (or Mormonism) when laid out in just-the-facts terms is centuries of faith and familiarity. Start a faith thousands of years ago in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent rather than decades ago in the United States of America and they magically become a lot harder to mock as bad science fiction, Moroni and Xenu be damned. However, the CoS’s alleged financial shakedown and apparent physical intimidation of its members, as well as the extraordinary lengths to which it goes to ensure they don’t leave, rise above and beyond the illogic all religions definitionally share and enter the realm of Roman Catholic Chuch-style criminal conspiracy. Moreover, no one who’s spent as much time in the occult/conspiracy underbelly as I have can fail to find the story of L. Ron Hubbard’s shake-and-bake religion, Jack Parson’s black-magick orgy house and all, deeply and darkly hilarious; and the article is coldly ruthless in the way it exposes Hubbard’s self-aggrandizing legend as hokum. Equally damning is its quiet but emphatic and repeated contrast of the Church’s official line about this or that claim by its detractors, however mild or innocuous, with the claim itself: Not only are the particulars of any given apostate or non-member’s recollection of an event denied, but the event in question is said to have never taken place, and indeed the participants are alleged to have never even met. Finally, the way it just tosses out the occasional wholly chilling detail makes for bracing reading. Fun fact: Church leader David Miscavige has apparently had his own wife disappeared for insubordination; no one outside the Church has known where she is for years, and the Church isn’t talking. (Via Anne Laurie.)

* Really can’t say enough about Blaise Larmee’s new webcomic 2001. Beautiful.

* Well this is outstanding: Max Brooks has posted a vampire story set in the World War Z universe for free on the Daily Beast. Nerdout commencing! Can’t wait to read this thing; World War Z holds up miraculously well. (Via CRwM.)

* Stephen King apparently heard about the new adaptation of The Stand at the same time the rest of us did. In this day and age that seems like a failure of due diligence on the producers’ part, doesn’t it? So much nerd media rises and falls on its makers’ ability to convince the nerd audience that the property’s original creators (or current caretakers, on the part of superhero movies) are involved every step of the way. You’d think they could have given Uncle Steve a phonecall.

* Beavis and Butt-head are coming back. “Dammit, Pantera! Get your ass into the kitchen and grab me a beer.”

* Jessica Abel and Matt Madden are blogging about each and every one of the 71 “Notable” comics listed in the back of Best American Comics 2010. Very cool.

* Congratulations to pood‘s Kevin Mutch for his Xeric win.

* Fantagraphics hires Janice Headley for its already formidable marketing department.

* I sure like listening to Tom Brevoort talk about comics.

* Yep, that’s Adrian Tomine’s workspace, alright.

* It’s Brian Chippendale’s world; Dan Nadel just visited there.

* Very, very close, I daresay!

* A couple of Real Life Horror links via Matthew Yglesias: Timothy Snyder tackles the world-historical horrorshow of life in the lands contested between Hitler and Stalin, while Daniel Davies springboards off the Egyptian revolution to muse on the strategic value of arseholes:

And so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million, meaing potentially as many as three million adults on the streets in the worst case. Your total active-duty armed forces are unlikely to be a tenth of that. When it becomes a numbers game, there is only one thing that can save you.

And that is, a reactionary citizens’ militia, to combat the revolutionary citizens’ militia. Former socialist republics always used to be fond of buses full of coal miners from way out the back of beyond, but the Iranian basijs are the same sort of thing. Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren’t interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising – there are fucking millions of them.

(Sidenote: Matthew Yglesias has the worst comment section on the Internet, and I say that as someone who reads comic book websites.)

* I co-wrote the latest, Super Bowl ahem BIG GAME-themed episode of Marvel Super Heroes: What The — ?! I had nothing to do with the funniest bits, though. Fun fact: Alex Kropinak animates these things all by himself.

* PictureBox reveals the details about their next release from Yuichi Yokoyama, Garden. Really looking forward to this one.

* Bill Kartalopoulos’s “Cartoon Polymaths” show sounds pretty cool. I mean, Winsor McCay and Paper Rad in one art exhibit, y’know? It opens tomorrow at Parsons in NYC.

* They’re making A Song of Ice and Fire comics. Shrug. It looks like they’ll be done in the typical front-of-Previews mode, which I don’t think will do the material any favors.

* Jeet Heer defends Art Spiegelman. I think it’s a testament to how deeply influential were not just Maus but also the original version of Breakdowns (not to mention his co-editorship of RAW) that what were once hugely groundbreaking works are now deeply ingrained as almost habits of thought in all of art/alt/lit comicdom and are thus undervalued. Heer also points out Spiegelman’s value as a comics’ foremost public intellectual.

* Michael DeForge reminds us (or at least me) that The Believer has had an Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section for many issues now. Anyone read the mag? How is it? I mean, the February 2011 issue has Jonathan Bennett, Charles Burns, Lilli Carré, Michael DeForge, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Leif Goldberg, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Haven and more, so it seems like it should be pretty great, yet I feel it’s sort of disappearing into the void, at least among comics-critic-dom.

* Speaking of things I’m not reading because I’m a miserly ignoramus, Frank Santoro takes the opportunity of what I think is the conclusion of the Shaky Kane series The Bulletproof Coffin to wax tangential on different modes of serialization in contemporary comics. One of those tangents involves the fate of collections of work that was getting some attention in serialized form, like Coffin and King City. My reading of serialized comics basically hinges on what I can access for free, and my request for review copies for Bulletproof Coffin, King City, Orc Stain, and Morning Glories was turned down en masse by Image, so I can tell you, Frank, I’ll probably be very likely to check out collections of those if I can get my hands on ’em.

* Here’s a nice primer on Mokele-Mbembe, the relict sauropod dinosaur that supposedly roams the Congo basin and is one of my favorite cryptozoological creatures in the world.

* Emily Carroll’s fondness for drawing sessy ladies gets my full support.

* My pal Isaac Moylan is pretty talented.

* Based on a true story!

* Is the latest episode of Axe Cop intentional commentary on the role of women in superhero comics, or is that just a pleasant coincidence?

* I really want to redirect you to Matthias Wivel’s interview with Chris Ware, now that I’ve finished reading it at last. Must-read material. Question now that I’ve read it: Where would Ware be without Richard McGuire’s “Here”?

* They’re making a movie of Stephen King’s The Stand, one of my favorite novels and already the basis for a pretty-darn-good-for-what-it-was TV miniseries. I think there are several potential pitfalls here. For one thing, you truly do need more than the length of a conventional theatrical movie to adapt this thing, but at the same time I’m not sure a rated-R post-apocalyptic survival-horror saga is the sort of thing that can sustain Lord of the Rings/Hobbit/Harry Potter/Twilight-style multi-movie adaptations in box-office terms. Obviously Ron Howard and company are out to prove me wrong with The Dark Tower, but that series is also a fantasy and a Western and science fiction; The Stand is about everyone in the world dying from a biological weapon. I’m also not convinced that the two projects won’t cannibalize one another’s critical and audience and PR oxygen — I mean, without giving too much away, they have a lot in common. I’m also realizing I’m at an all-time low ebb in terms of my tolerance for big-budget Hollywood studio genre blockbuster filmmaking. But I’d be quite happy to see a good Stand movie or movies, certainly.

* It’s Hans Rickheit’s next book, Folly. I know a lot of people who’ve wanted to check out Rickheit’s minicomic series Chrome Fetus, and this is going to collect a lot of that material, so I expect it will go over well.

* The One Ring warns us that the talk about Hobbit creature designs in The New Yorker‘s recent profile of Guillermo del Toro should be taken with a grain of salt, since the interview predated del Toro’s exit from the production. I can’t think of a single cinematic phenomenon more overrated than del Toro’s supposed proficiency with creature design — the alleged complexity of Christopher Nolan movies, perhaps — so this is good news to me.

* To me, the meat of Clive Barker’s recent series of tweets is the forthcoming live-action teaser for his third Abarat book, not a supposed “return to directing” from Barker himself, which is what all the horror sites are talking about but which seems to me to stem from a possible misinterpretation of Barker referring to “my next movie.” After all, the guy has produced the last few adaptations of his work — he has a production shingle and everything — and I’m sure he considers those “his movies” too.

* Curt Purcell on the role of religion in Battlestar Galactica. I don’t want to spoil anything about the show, but speaking from a perspective of thoroughgoing irreligiosity, I’ve always felt that it took an almost willfully small-minded approach to the topic to find anything objectionable about how BSG treated faith and God as valid concerns. The howl of butthurt from the kinds of atheists who voluntarily turn off their brain at anything less obviously condemnatory of religion than Monty Python’s “Every Sperm Is Sacred” joined in chorus with the Science Fiction Is Serious Business with Rules to Follow crowd to create an enormously dispiriting reaction to a show that deserved much better even from its critics. If you watch BSG and think that the series has shoved the Skyfather down your throat, I feel bad for you.

* Ken Parille’s Daniel Clowes Bibliography is really impressive. How great would it be if every major cartoonist had a similar resource?

* Gabrielle Bell wraps up her bedbug comic.

* The great Geoff Grogan has started a “Covered”-style blogathon of his very own. First up: Mike Ploog’s The Monster of Frankenstein #2.

* Still can’t quite get over that Frank Santoro and the Great Cartoonists of Los Angeles photo.

* Finally, I’ve only read half of it — parts one and three, even! — because I missed how it was paginated before I loaded the constituent parts onto my laptop for the train ride home from work, but Matthias Wivel’s interview with Chris Ware, conducted at the Komiks.dk festival in May 2010 and now published on The Comics Journal’s website, is an absolute pleasure. Page one, page two, page three, page four. Here’s a great bit:

MW: …something people often talk about in terms of your drawing style is that it’s kind of dispassionate, distanced, and I think that’s a very purposeful approach …

CW: I prefer the word ‘constipated.’
MW: Right. [Laughter from audience.] I wasn’t going to say it.
CW: Are you asking me why?
MW: Yeah, the choice of this very clean style.
CW: Well, again, it’s to try to get at sort of an ideographic style of drawing, a cartooning style of drawing. I think the closest analogy in the history of art would be Japanese prints, which are really not in any way representational — they’re all about how things are remembered. Their idea of perspective is not about how something is seen, it’s about how something is felt and remembered, and I try to get that in my work too. If I can use the word ‘work’; it makes me sound like I think I’m an artist. So, I don’t try to draw how things are seen, I try to draw how they’re remembered, I guess that is the best way to put it. And I don’t want them to be interesting lines or interesting drawings, because then my hand comes into it too much.
MW: Why is that a problem?
CW: Because I just think it’s harder to read, in the same way that I wouldn’t want to read Ernest Hemingway’s rough draft of one of his novels, I would want to read the typeset, clean version, because I don’t want to be aware of his handwriting or anything. Not that you couldn’t be, necessarily. It’s certainly interesting to see an author’s corrected proof — you can see his scratch-outs and things that are added in — but fundamentally the intention is to have it read smoothly. It’s the words that matter; it’s the story that matters, and fundamentally, I’m interested in the story…

Much much more where that came from.

* I was extremely flattered to be interviewed about Destructor by my Robot 6 colleague Tim O’Shea. This is the most depth I’ve ever gone into about the history of the strip, from how Matt Wiegle and I hooked up to the influences on the comic and characters from across the decades. If you’re interested in the comic, you’ll probably be interested in this interview.

* Over at Robot 6 I rounded up every post about the deaths of Wizard and ToyFare written by ex-Wiz/TF staffers I could find, and tried to draw what conclusions I could.

* Frank Santoro’s L.A. diary. That’s Johnny Ryan, Jaime Hernandez, Ron Regé Jr., Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, and Frank. Jeez.

* Michael DeForge’s Lose #3 is debuting at TCAF. The first two issues are completely sold out; you snooze, you lose Lose!

* In light of DC’s recently announced sixteen Flashpoint limited series, with tie-ins from ongoing series no doubt pending, which recent(ish) mega-event miniseries had the most tie-in issues? Douglas Wolk crunches the numbers.

* This Tim O’Neil post on the deaths of Supergirl and the Flash in Crisis on Infinite Earths is pretty good, but my favorite part is about a different comic entirely: the recent “New Krypton” storyline in the Superman titles, which I enjoyed quite a bit until I hit the ending. Put simply, when it becomes apparent that the only way your story can end is with every character who wears the Superman ‘S’ on their chest collectively failing to prevent a genocide — and hopefully that becomes apparent very early on in the brainstorming process — it’s time to rethink that story.

* Perhaps the best hyperfocused comics Tumblr yet: Four Color Taint, a blog dedicated to comics artists’ predilection for showing superheroes’ grundles.

* Renee French remains very talented.

* It’s VHS Box Art Week at Monster Brains!

* Sumptuous writing: David Bordwell on nothing but the facial expressions made by the actors in The Social Network.

* No one in superhero comics gives better interview in terms of how the sausage gets made than Marvel’s Tom Brevoort.

* Whoa: DC is launching fully sixteen miniseries for its Flashpoint event. And when you look at last year’s sales charts, can you blame them? “Whither the midlist” is always the big question, but these things are going to eat up like half of the upper charts all on their own.

* This Axe Cop fan film looks beautiful and has an incredible theme song.

* Ooh, a lovely A Song of Ice and Fire art gallery by Gianluca Maconi.

* My collaborator Matt Wiegle is posting illustrations for Lord of the Flies at the Partyka site.

* Becky Cloonan posts a page from an unpublished “Abercomic” I commissioned from her for an abortive relaunch of Abercrombie & Fitch’s A&F Quarterly a few years back. Sexy, no?

* Via Matt Seneca, this comic Superwest by Massimo Mattioli sure looks interesting.

* I’m happy/sad to hear that Jeffrey Brown has an Incredible Change-Bots strip in the final issue of Wizard. Click the link for further Change-Bots goodies.

* Speaking of Wizard, my friend and former coworker Mel Caylo of Archaia talks to Sam Humphries and the gang at Meltdown Comics’ Meltcast podcast about the demise of Wizard and ToyFare. If there’s one thing we Wizard alums can do well, it’s talk about life at Wizard; Mel should give you some insight into what it was really like there.

* The Wizard/ToyFare fallout continues:

* Heidi MacDonald has another fine round-up of reactions and analysis, including a deeply unappealing self-evaluation of the company’s strengths from a company document. The bit about “we don’t have any of our own employees; we contract them through Wizard Entertainment” is Scott Rosenberg-level unpleasant.

* iFanboy’s Jason Wood walks us through the way that Wizard owner — actually, I’m not sure that covers it; at this point it seems safe to say that Gareb (and perhaps brother Stephen) and Wizard are effectively synonymous, like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails — Gareb Shamus assembled the shell company through which Wizard now manifests itself. Hmm, I wonder if Shamus’s previous enterprises have something on the ledgers that necessitates picking up stakes.

* On a more pleasant note, toy writer Poe Ghostal laments the demise of ToyFare, which in my experience is the one Wizard product no one ever complained about. And for good reason — it was very very good! I’m glad it will continue to exist in digital form.

* I’m about to write more about the “death” issue of Fantastic Four than I expected to. No spoilers, though, so don’t worry!

* As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been reading Jonathan Hickman’s run on FF, variously illustrated by Dale Eaglesham and Steve Empting, for some time now, for the simple reason that it’s good. Pairing Hickman with the Fantastic Four — not just Marvel’s oldest and most storied franchise, but the one constructed around distinct characters, and indeed around character dynamics, more than any other — is a great way to mitigate his tendency to make the “mad idea” king, as seen in his increasingly less impressive S.H.I.E.L.D. reimagining, a book that feels like some kind of experiment in eliminating character from the storytelling equation entirely. The art is meaty and solid, the pseudo-science is fun rather than merely dizzying, there’s lots of cool creatures and villains to fight or outwit, and of course there’s the recognizable and entertaining Thing, Human Torch, Mister Fantastic, and Invisible Woman (and Namor and Franklin and Valeria and Doctor Doom and Galactus) at the center of it all. So I was gonna read the death issue, #587, regardless. The hype didn’t bother me because, and I say this as someone who makes part of his living following comic book industry hype, there’s no such thing as inescapable comic book industry hype. If you choose to escape it, you can, even while you read the underlying books.

* So! I read the comic and it was a good comic just like the rest of Hickman’s FF comics have been. But I was quite surprised upon turning the final page that the hype machine had cranked up as high and hard as it had, given what I actually saw on the actual pages in question. Even given the transitory nature of superhero-comic deaths, this one — based on what we see and what we don’t see, based on what we know about how the franchise works in general and how Hickman’s take on it in particular, based on the fact that the series is about to start over with a new title and new numbering but its landmark, irresistible-to-marketing #600th issue is right around the corner — felt like a well-executed plot point in service of a larger, longer story much, much more than it felt like a “get me the Daily News on the horn, the people need to know!” pop-culture event.

* And interestingly, the book’s editor, Tom Brevoort, really isn’t pretending otherwise:

[Reader Question:] I think we’ve finally hit a point as a fanbase where a majority of the epople who actually read the books aren’t going “THIS DEATH WON’T LAST” and are instead going “How will the is change the status quo and lead to interesting stories for a while?”

[Brevoort:] Well, let’s hope so.

People aren’t even pretending that deaths will stick anymore; the choice isn’t between deaths that last and stunts that don’t, but between plot points that people care about and stunts they don’t, about stories assembled with care and skill versus meaningless cannon-fodder churn imposed from on high. Or as Hickman puts it:

The question is: Are we trying to have an honest, resonating beat within the telling of a story, or are we trying to shock the reader and score cheap points?

I think it’s a bad idea to completely devalue death in a genre built on the creation and solving of problems through violence, but if that ship has sailed, again, I think you could do a lot worse than treating death as Hickman has and as Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison did before him: as a door you can open to explore parts of your characters and concepts you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

* But leave it to Tom Spurgeon to move past that silver lining and find a dark lining around it:

the takeaway may be that Marvel has helped create a market that limits the reward that used to be due better-than-usual work, and that drastic ways to goose interest and sales in such titles may be the only tools left to them if they want to move more copies.

Good work relies on gimmickry to get over, is the gist of it.

* Anyway, death was already a commonplace for the Fantastic Four: Bully and Douglas Wolk show us just how common.

* Moving on, Tom Brevoort hated, hated, hated this comic. Place your bets, folks!

* Justin Green has a blog! The Pulse!-reading teenager in me is freaking thrilled.

* Jeffrey Brown talks Incredible Change-Bots Two.

* Yet another name change for the Greg Pak/Fred Van Lente Hercules comic. I wonder how long they can Atlas this thing before it runs out of steam. A long time, I hope!

* I normally don’t go in for geeky “who should play so-and-so” casting speculation, but I’ll make an exception for A Song of Ice and Fire’s Brienne of Tarth. That’s a real challenge.

* Jeet Heer leads this piece on Dino Buzzati’s 1969 proto-graphic novel Poem Strip by saying its 2009 translation and republication hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Insofar as I’d never heard of it until reading Jeet’s piece, I’d have to agree. The cover is gorgeous and the two interior panels Jeet reproduces look like John Hankiewicz 45 years before the fact.

* You can watch this Bollywood Tamil killer-robot action sequence from Shankar’s Robot ironically if you want, but I’d kill to see action this intelligently choreographed and impressively staged (for what I’m sure was a relative pittance) in any of the (non-Neil Marshall or Neveldine/Taylor) genre entertainments I regularly consume. Bonus: The Robot looks like Joe Pesci from toward the end of Casino. (Via Michael Kupperman, awesomely enough.)

* Kevin Melrose at Robot 6 rounds up links and commentary about the Wizard/ToyFare shutdown, including the shell game being played by Gareb Shamus’s various ventures.

* Excellent investigative reporting by Newsarama’s Vaneta Rogers, who attempts to unravel who, exactly, ran the now-defunct Comics Code Authority, and just how much “authority” he or she or they actually had. It ends with a terrific cautionary tale from retailer advocate Joe Field of how ratings systems of the sort that have replaced the Comics Code often have the paradoxical effect of decreasing the amount of all-ages content available to consumers. (Via Sam Humphries.)

* Tom Spurgeon worries that Marvel’s much-hyped death of a Fantastic Four character in this week’s issue #587 is taking something intended to heal years-old structural problems with comics’ Direct Market — monopoly distributor Diamond’s decision to begin shipping comics to retailers a day before they go on sale, to give those retailers more time to properly stock their stores — and transforming it before our very eyes into just another short-term sales-goosing gimmick (an issue so important we’re letting retailers break the embargo and sell it the day they get it instead of the day after!) of the sort that caused all those structural problems in the first place. I worry about that too. Silver lining, though? For the second time in recent memory, Marvel’s mainstream-media hype for a character death will actually direct curious readers to a good comic with a sizable run of strong quality behind it. There are much worse fates I could imagine than for someone to be duped into buying into the Jonathan Hickman/Steve Epting/Dale Eaglesham Fantastic Four run, or the Ed Brubaker/Steve Epting/Mike Perkins Captain America run before it.

* Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, whose Kaputt is an early candidate for Album of the Year, gives very good interview to NPR’s Matthew Perpetua and The Onion AV Club’s Noel Murray. Bejar made a tremendous record and talks about it with real panache.

* If you know someone who passionately dislikes Ween, chances are it’s because of the track from their 1994 masterpiece Chocolate and Cheese called “The HIV Song.” Here’s a fascinating passage about the song — gallows humor at its most awesomely awful — from Hank Shteamer’s 33 1/3 book on the album.

* Real Life Horror: The by-now comically transparent punitive mistreatment and overincarceration of WikiLeaker Pfc. Bradley Manning appears to be getting some news-media traction.

* A Della’morte Dell’amore sequel? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Fuck you, there is NOT a Hawkeye story called “The High, Hard Shaft.”

* Finally, we are now accepting Destructor fanart submissions.

* Well, almost: I’ve added a couple more links to my post on the shutdown of Wizard and ToyFare; I hope you’ll read them.

* Your must-read of the day: Matt Seneca reports from Frank Santoro’s “New Values” art show, complete with an interview. It’s even in audio form if you’d like to listen.

* Tom Neely says more Henry & Glenn Forever is on its way!

* Kate Beaton draws sexy Batman. Related: Comics fanboys are assholes.

* Damn this is weird.

* Josh Simmons calls this image “Connecticut.” Wow.

* Curt Purcell checked out Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja et al’s The Immortal Iron Fist based on something I said once about liking the martial arts tournament bit and didn’t like it. Jeez, no one man should have all this power! Seriously, Curt is right: He was clearly expecting something from that sequence that I never intended to imply it delivered. The question was where were superhero comics’ memorable fight scenes; the Iron Fist tournament was just one answer I gave in a short list of different fights done in different styles with different aims. If Curt had specifically asked me for some knock-down drag-out that redefined the use of combat on the page, I’d have come up with a different list; but I stand by my contention that the way the fights were done — the caption boxes with all those made-up martial arts moves, the sudden defeats of various major characters, the loveliness of Aja’s art — made them memorable, especially if you’ve seen things done in a more traditional way a million times as I have but Curt probably hasn’t.

* Related: Tom Spurgeon answers his own question, the very one that spurred my response that spurred Curt’s disappointing reading experience, by exploring five great superhero fight scenes. I especially appreciate his analysis of fights 1 and 2.

Above: The amazing John Byrne/Terry Austin “Days of Future Past” riff that Tom Derenick and Nelson did for a Batman article in Wizard based on an idea I suggested

Gareb Shamus has shut down Wizard and ToyFare magazines, and is taking his company public as a penny stock while relaunching as a digital magazine called Wizard World. I’ll be perfectly honest with you: It’s been an awful day because of this. So many of the details about the news rankle: How it was broken online by a disreputable gossipmonger who — quelle coincidence! — argues the magazine was at its all-time best during the same time period it was wining and dining him at its conventions and regularly feeding him the company line; the unceremonious and cowardly way the company broke the news to its employees, both the ones it kept and the ones it let go; the time spent with no idea as to the fate of some of those employees, since Wizard’s official press release didn’t see fit to mention them or their magazines’ cancellations; the fact that the company’s years of malfeasance and dubious taste overshadows so many of the wonderful and talented and ethical and comics-intelligent people who’ve worked there; the fact that wanting to celebrate those wonderful, talented, ethical, comics-intelligent people makes it harder, emotionally, to do the necessary work of calling out everyone who’s worked there who are none of those things; the tasteless way in which at least one of the survivors chose to mark the occasion; the unintentionally revealing legal disclaimer tacked on to the PR; the gamut of emotions experienced by those of us who used to work there and the occasionally uncomfortable way those different emotions have brushed up against one another; and, of course, the massive blow to the security and happiness of the people who were laid off, and even those who weren’t.

Before I worked at Wizard, it wasn’t as integral a part of my life as a comics reader as it was for many of the ex-Wiz employees with whom you may be familiar. But the only issue I can ever remember reading is one that played a pivotal role in my getting involved in comics at all: After flipping through a copy I found on my then-boss’s desk and reading about an intriguing-looking upcoming approach to the X-Men by this guy named Grant Morrison I’d heard of and this artist Frank Quitely I hadn’t, I figured I’d go to the store to pick it up. The rest is history — a history that includes three years spent in Wizard’s employ. It was a frustrating three years in many ways, and the way it ended was the most frustrating part of all. But in that time I learned a great deal about effective writing from the editors with whom I worked most closely, Pat McCallum and Brian Cunningham, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. If you’ve ever read a review of mine you liked, you have Pat to thank; if you’ve ever read a feature of mine you liked, it’s Brian. Moreover, I met, oh, between a dozen and two dozen of the best people I’ve ever known, people with whom I’m close friends to this day. You’d recognize their names as they’re in positions of prominence across the industry and the popcultjourno biz at large; I don’t care about any of that so much as i care about the fact that they’re kind, generous, talented people I’m privileged to know and be associated with. And there’s nothing I can say about Wizard and its management more damning than telling you how poorly so many of those people were treated there, up through and including today.

Since the Great Con War erupted, it’s become clear that the comics industry, at least, has less and less time for the management’s behavior. This seems to be at least somewhat mutually beneficial: The comics industry has divorced itself from an entity it clearly has disliked and distrusted for far longer than it’s felt comfortable saying so, while that entity is clearly willing and able to pursue avenues of exploration outside the confines of that industry, its characteristic self-promotional mojo still intact. But the conflict’s resolution has seen more than its share of collateral damage over the years, and this latest spasm of it is just the most obviously and publicly gruesome. I just feel badly for anyone who’s ever seen the people and the work they care about caught in the blast radius.

If you’d like to read more about the situation, I recommend the following articles and interviews:

* Kevin Melrose with the basic 5Ws situation

* Me on that press release disclaimer

* Brian Hibbs’s quick two-liner on the near simultaneous demise of Wizard and the Comics Code Authority

* Tom Spurgeon on what the press release’s silence on certain subjects says about Wizard

* Heidi MacDonald with the first official word of the magazine cancellations; Heidi and her commenters do some sleuthing about Wizard stock

* Andy Khouri on (among other things) an even-handed appraisal of the magazine and its legacy in terms of alumni across the industry

* Rob Bricken of Topless Robot on the cancellation of ToyFare and on the way Wizard World announced its decision

* iFanboy’s Ron Richards interviews a laid-off employee

* An industry-reax round-up at Newsarama that includes my friends and fellow Wizard alumni Ben Morse (Marvel), Mel Caylo (Archaia), and Alex Segura (Archie)

* My friend and fellow Wizard alumnus Chris Ward (Boom!, Bluewater) with a warts-and-all take on it not dissimilar to my own

* Vocal Wizard critic Laura Hudson with a kind and even-handed take on the news

* A testimonial by my friend Ryan “Agent M” Penagos (Marvel)

* I think my friend Kiel Phegley’s latest Q&A with Marvel honchos Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort makes for meaty reading. Brevoort muses at length on Marvel’s difficulty with ascertaining how new readers are discovering their comics; ponders how to effectively communicate to the bookstore audience given its lack of centrality and mostly casual interest in the product vs. the “comic shops on Wednesday/message boards the rest of the week” hardcore; explains the to-me baffling maneuvers surrounding the Thor titles this summer; and pins some of the blame for Marvel’s slackening sales on overextension of four top editorial figures. He also basically becomes Marvel’s new official mouthpiece by announcing that newly minted Editor-in-Chief Alonso, whose responses here are almost all just one sentence long, won’t regularly be participating in these Q&As anymore, putting Brevoort in the Quesada carnival-barker seat.

* Tom Neely, killing it as usual.

* Remember when there was a line of children’s toys and comics basically centered around Cthulhu? No? Then let Monster Brains’ gallery of Inhumanoids comic covers remind you. That guy who was basically giant rotting crocodile with an exposed ribcage remains amazing to me even now.

* Whoa, I fully support this King Collection line of t-shirts based on classic Stephen King jacket art from Fright Rags. Needs that incongruous bird-guy duel from The Stand, though. (Via Dread Central.)

* TPM’s guide to prominent locations in yesterday’s big Mafia bust really does read like a bunch of black-comedy Sopranos subplots.

Two alleged mobsters in Rhode Island (one who’s 83 and another who’s 63) are accused of extorting two strip clubs in Providence for “protection money” dating back to 1993.

Luigi “Louie” Manocchino (also known as “Baby Shacks,” “The Professor” and “The Old Man”) and Thomas Iafrate are accused of extorting money from the Satin Doll and Cadillac Lounge.

* I’m sort of amazed by how extremely creepy the online horror project Marble Hornets remains even though the current storyline depends so heavily on actors who aren’t strong enough to get their improvised dialogue over. Actually, creepy doesn’t cut it — I’ll go ahead and say outright scary. The two most recent episodes went up while my wife was in the hospital, and I actually put off watching them while I was in the house by myself. I caught up just now on the train, and sheesh — at one point I full-out jumped in my seat, alarming the guy next to me. Something about the visual tools they’re working with, the way they locate the horror in the very means by which we’re seeing and hearing what goes on, hits hard and deep and overcomes any shortcomings in performance and filmmaking.

* Craig Thompson’s Habibi: September 20, 2011.

* DC takes a bold step into the ’00s by dropping the Comics Code.

* Michael May reviews Brecht Evens’s gorgeous Night Animals, which I think is even lovelier than The Wrong Place.

* Sorcerers Supreme Lose.

* As always, the 22nd Annual GLAAD Media Award nominees in the comics category are a fucking joke.

* Not unrelated: I think that when this piece first circulated, I only read the autobiographical section, and I think I even linked to it as a must-read without ever realizing it was just one-quarter of a longer essay. But anyway, here’s Dirk Deppey’s excellent essay “The Mirror of Male-Love Love,” which is about equally dedicated to the history of adult-male/adult-male homosexuality around the world, Dirk’s personal development and coming-out as a gay man, the physical and psychological mechanics of bottoming and male orgasms generally, and taking down an approach to boys-love manga that doesn’t leave a lot of room for actual gay men or the sex drives of the women who love reading about them. It’s really long, but you’re making a big mistake if you tl;dr it — it’s a wonderfully engrossing read on all four topics it tackles. (Via Tim Hodler.)

* And now, Real Life:

* Absolutely fascinating Economist article on the medieval Battle of Towton during the War of the Roses in 1461. If you want to get a good mental picture of what battles in the world of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire would have been like, start here. (Via Westeros.)

* Massive, massive Mafia bust by the FBI; Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, Colombo, DeCalvacante, and Patriarca family members rounded up in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The link above is for the Daily News; here’s NBC New York, and here’s . (Via TPM.)

* The Vatican directly discouraged Irish bishops from reporting systemic child rape by the Catholic Church. (Via John Cole.)

* Here’s an impressive/depressing list of roughly or explicitly right-wing domestic terror incidents over the past few years. (Via Emptywheel.)

* Khalid Shaikh Mohammed probably personally murdered Daniel Pearl. The odds that he’ll actually ever face this accusation in court are essentially nil.

* Wow, did you know you could read Duncan the Wonder Dog in its entirety for free on Adam Hines’s website right now? But only through March, because AdHouse is prepping a $9.95 downloadable version for sale.

* PictureBox and Comics Comics’ Dan Nadel has a fine Best Comics of 2010 list up at the Economist.

* Good Lord, Jim Woodring.

* Good Lord, Hellen Jo.

* Happy first birthday to the fun sketch blog Comic Twart.

* Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (maybe Catwoman, maybe not) and Tom Hardy as Bane? Sounds potentially delightful, which is probably the first time I’ve ever said that about a Christopher Nolan movie.

* Rob Mitchum’s essay on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall and Roger Waters’s recent tour “The Wall” starts strong with the title and only gets better. He’s definitely right to emphasize the confrontational weirdness of the album; the first time I ever listened to it, my senior year in college, I was stunned that something so insular and vicious was somehow so universal.

* Finally, here are a bunch of Marvel and DC job openings. I bet some of you are quite well equipped to do some of those jobs.

* Brigid Alverson tries to figure out where the reduced-price rubber hits the increased-volume road for digital comics.

* Shame on me for missing this when it went up and kudos to Tom Spurgeon for alerting me to it: Emily Carroll’s dream comics. Man, what a talent.

* Curt Purcell vs. Apollo from Battlestar Galactica. I think Curt’s selling the character short — there’s something to be said for sticking a Hero in a non-heroic world and seeing what that does to him, and he was great in the trial — but I think it’s clear he’s the major character with whom the writers had the most trouble connecting.

* Real Life Horror: Philadelphia police have captured the city’s budding serial killer, the Kensington Strangler. Good thing, too — he’s very young (22) and committed several non-fatal assaults in addition to his three apparently admitted murders, so it seems like he was ramping up to a potentially long and awful career. (Via Atrios.)

* Definitely listen to this streaming copy of Destroyer’s new album Kaputt. Avalon and on and on. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Myyyyyyy goodness, this new teaser for Game of Thrones is wonderful. The throne! (Via Westeros.)

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming rounds up reactions to the TCA sneak-peek footage. Speaking of which, Elio and Linda at Westeros offer a lengthy and thoughtful reaction of their own.

* Over at Robot 6 I posted a six-page preview of Night Animals, a graphic novel from The Wrong Place author Brecht Evens due out in March from Top Shelf. Looks lovely.

* Speaking of looking lovely, here’s a fun little comic about not liking Nirvana by Sally Bloodbath.

* There’s a super-limited-edition new Yeast Hoist issue (#16) from Ron Regé Jr.

* Wow, buy all four issues of Josh Simmons’s Top Shelf series Happy for the low low price of ten bucks!

* John Porcellino talks process with Frank Santoro.

* I’m posting this more out of obligation than genuine interest, because it’s difficult for me to imagine circumstances under which I’d be like “Oooh boy, a new Ridley Scott movie,” but Alien and Damon Lindelof are things that I’ve cared about, so here you go: Scott’s collabo with Lindelof is no longer an Alien prequel but a new thing called Prometheus. So there you have it. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, I’m just going to post two images from the brilliant Tumblr Kanye + Comics, which takes images from comics and splices them with Kanye West lyrics, but I assure you I could do this all day. Man, that first one should be the Superheroes Lose mascot. (Via someone on Twitter yesterday, I think.)

* I really enjoyed the Inkstuds best of 2010 critics’ roundtable with Robin McConnell, Chris Butcher, Bill Kartalopoulos, and Tucker Stone, and I explain why over at Robot 6.

* Heidi MacDonald interviews new Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso. He seems to draw a pretty bright line through the (STC-mooted) idea of a revival of the Nu-Marvel hands-off editorial style, since the Big Two are very much beneficiaries and/or prisoners of what he calls the “it has to count” mentality, i.e. Event Tie-In or GTFO. Via Tom Spurgeon, who has further thoughts on the role of personal preferences in Marvel’s top editorial job.

* Tom Neely reflects on 10 years of self-publishing comics and art, culminating in the year where his Rollins/Danzig slashfic made him a household name. That’s a weird year alright.

* Critical polymath Douglas Wolk lists 15 Excellent Things Happening in Comics Right Now, while my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner lists six potentially great 2011 comics you haven’t heard of. The Olivier Schrauwen and Yuichi Yokoyama books ought to be really somethin’.

* The fuckin’ Spider-Man musical, man. I would say that Sony’s exchange of the TV/animation rights to the character with Marvel for an extension on the musical was an all-time great stupid deal, but who knows, maybe a comeback narrative will soon be established and it’ll open to rapturous reviews and no one more actors will be maimed.

* Heidi MacDonald takes the 2011 comics sales chart wonkery ball and runs it into the end zone. The picture that emerges is of an industry revolving around the equivalent of a really killer Entertainment Weekly panel at San Diego, basically: Bendis, Johns, Morrison, Kirkman, O’Malley, and to an extent Millar. Heidi also puts everything together in a way that makes me a lot more open to the notion that creator-owned comics, or certainly at the very least creator-driven comics, are the star attraction of the market right now.

* Kate Beaton signs to Drawn & Quarterly for a Hark, a Vagrant! collection in Fall 2011. Kudos all around.

* Corey Blake wins Headline of the Day: “Archie leads the digital comics revolution”.

* Frank Santoro and Dan Nadel have the details on that Santoro exhibition that was teased a few days ago. It’s Santoro vs. Greco-Roman mythology, and thus sounds awesome.

* I’m not as big a Shane Black person as many commenters around here seem to be, mostly because I tend not to care for slam-bang action comedies, but I could certainly handle the writer of The Monster Squad being tapped to write and direct a live-action American Death Note adaptation.

* And I’m not quite interested enough in either project to post them here, but there are pictures of the new Spider-Man and Captain America movie costumes out there, and they both look pretty good. I would also like to take this opportunity to note that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies weren’t very good.

* Curt Purcell has posted another piece on Battlestar Galactica, focusing on Starbuck. He objects to the character’s resolution (a good deal more reasonably than many such objections, I should note); I disagree in the comments.

* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles Real Genius, which I think me and most of my friends took as more of an instruction manual than an actual movie. Chris Knight, Discordian Saint.

* I’m not sure if the drawings in this Josh Cotter post titled “Ben Clark: Inks” are by Cotter or not, but they’re lovely.

* I think the Westeros crew’s review of the Game of Thrones sizzle reel shown to the press over the past week is the best-in-class effort. It drives home a few points I’ve seen in other reports quite clearly: HBO is using the plot to grab people rather than resting on “It’s a fantasy TV show” (compare and contrast with AMC’s strategy for The Walking Dead), Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke are apparently really impressive in the key roles of Catelyn Stark and Danaerys Targaryen respectively, and the Wall looks incredible. (Cf. Myles McNutt’s fine review, and James Poniewozik’s as well; both via this Westeros post.) Their quibbles seem reasonable to me as well: Jaime Lannister isn’t quite as impressively roguish as they’d expected, for example. (They refrain from naming the character with whom they have the most concerns.) If you’re as starved as I am for good GRRM/GoT/ASoIaF talk, these are all places you should be visiting.

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming serves up an in-depth report on the press roundtable with showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff. It seems primarily concerned with bouncing the show off things to which it will be compared: the books themselves, The Lord of the Rings, other big HBO shows, non-fantasy fans’ preconceptions of the genre, and so on.

* Finally (via McNutt), if you’re interested in Game of Thrones but haven’t read the books, Alan Sepinwall is the TV critic for you: He plans on going into the show without reading them and without consuming any press materials that give away plot points. Sepinwall can be a very insightful critic when he’s working with strong material to which he brings few preconceptions, so this could be good.