Danger Country #1
Levon Jihanian, writer/artist
Teenage Dinosaur, 2011
40 pages
$5
Buy it from Levon Jihanian

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

* So yeah, Gareb Shamus has resigned from Wizard. By their works ye shall know them.

* Tom Spurgeon’s BCGF con report is the most thorough you’re likely to find. His assessment of the show itself centers on the caveat that (like all shows) it’s not a show for everyone. I’m really curious as to how deeply that analysis takes root, because most everyone I spoke to at the show was almost deliriously happy with it (myself included — yes, I talk to myself), but it’s easy to see how the narcissism of small differences among comics people could lead someone whose conception of “good comics” doesn’t quite overlap with BCGF’s, or has almost nothing in common with it at all, could really hate that show from afar or even up close. But I think this is the extent of my desire to discuss the show through this lens, because I don’t think I really discuss anything by saying “some people who aren’t me might not like this that much.” And BCGF is an amazing fucking show. Just ask ADDXSTC fave Geoff Grogan, who I can’t remember ever penning this effusive a con report before — doubly surprising given that in the past he’s been at loggerheads with the Kramers Ergot aesthetic that is the show’s backbone.

* Among the many, many, many, many, many books Closed Caption Comics debuted at the show were Conor Stechschulte’s The Amateurs and the Noel Freibert-edited anthology Weird.

* Emily Carroll got herself a big NYC publisher book deal. Well deserved.

* Geof Darrow’s lost Superman cover will show up in print after all. Hooray!

* Isaac Moylan presents “The Mirror.”

* I feel like I’ve written these exact words before, but Jesus Christ, Renee French.

* Uno Moralez continues to tap directly into my underbrain.

* Apparently I never properly subscribed to the RSS feed on Geoff Grogan’s new site, because otherwise I’d be linking to pages from his terrific book Look Out!! Monsters all the time.

* Kate Beaton’s Wonder Woman comics are terrific.

* Finally, now that I’m embarking on Breaking Bad, I want to go back to a couple other shows I wrote about this fall and highlight a pair of reader comments I got a lot out of: Alan on Mad Men Season Four and Hob on Boardwalk Empire Season Two. Spoilers ahoy, obviously, but Alan’s thoughts on a certain MM-late-S4 character contrast that hit home with him on a personal level opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing the show’s central family dynamic, and what Hob said about the link between nihilism and sentimentality smacked me right between the eyes. Thank you, gentlemen, and thank you to everyone who comments on my TV posts — pretty much no matter what show I’ve written about, you’ve been a consistent, collective delight and reward.

* Every year as the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival approaches, I start to see my wallet as an object of intermingled pity, dread, and revulsion, like the Eraserhead baby. I’m racking my brain to see if this is an exaggeration, but nope, I don’t think it is: There’s something interesting at literally every table. Can you say that about any other show? Anyway, I’ll obviously be there, so please say hello to me if you see me. I look like this:

The lack of lens glare over my left eye can be attributed to me breaking my glasses last night on the platform of the Jamaica Long Island Rail Road station while overenthusiastically acting out a scene I enjoyed from season one of Breaking Bad.

* Continuing from last Carnival, here are several guides to noteworthy books you’ll be able to buy there. If you read only one, make it Chris Mautner from Robot 6’s comprehensive round-up post. But beyond that, there’s info galore from…

* Zack Soto, who’s repping the new publishing collective Press Gang, his own Study Group Magazine, and about a million lovely prints;

* non-attendee Dustin Harbin, who notes among other things the opportunity to pick up this year’s alt-festival circuit sleeper hit, Ethan Rilly’s Pope Hats #2 from AdHouse;

* Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino at Secret Acres, who in addition to bringing nearly every single person they publish will have a new issue of John Brodowski’s excellent alt-genre series Curio Cabinet on hand;

* Ryan Sands, who’s bringing tons of work from the greater Same Hat!/Electric Ant/Thickness/Chameleon hivemind;

* Closed Caption Comics, who are literally just filling little cardboard boxes with comics they recently made and calling that issue #9.5 of their flagship anthology;

* Benjamin Marra, who’s bringing the whole panoply of Traditional Comics releases, including the brand new Night Business #4;

* Tom Kaczynski, who lists the goods to be gotten from his Uncivilized Books imprint;

* and Unciv artist Gabrielle Bell, who posts the latest in her ridiculously strong year of autobio strips.

* Few things on the comics internet excite me more than a new Tom Spurgeon review of a book I’ve read; each one reminds me that nobody does it better. Here he is on Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Three. And though I haven’t read the comic yet, here he is on Joe Sacco’s new minicomic from Fantagraphics, The Road to Wigan Pier, a review of George Orwell’s book of the same name.

* Here’s another massive TCJ.com interview I’m saving for when I can really savor it: Dan Nadel speaks with the singular talent Marc Bell.

* Meanwhile, Robin McConnell interviews Geof Darrow, who was practically Cartoonist of the Year this year despite not publishing anything simply by virtue of his influence. Over on Robot 6 I noted Darrow’s recent rejected Superman cover, which he talks about (and posts!) in the interview.

* Game of Thrones hits DVD and Blu-Ray on March 6.

* Dark Horse is the latest publisher to go same-day digital, as of a mere two weeks from now. Après DC la déluge.

* Adrian Tomine just says no to making graphic novels instead of short stories. I’m pretty okay with this.

* Will Jonny Negron’s winning streak never end?

* There’s not a great deal to dislike about Power Comics, a new tumblr dedicated, essentially, to the ’80s black-and-white-boom books Benjamin Marra is pastiching in Night Business. (Hat tip: Agent M.)

* Aeron Alfrey reminds us that it’s never a bad time to revisit Charlie White’s Understanding Joshua.

* First U2, now Bryan Ferry: Trent Reznor’s year in cover versions has been a fun one.

* Any time my friend and collaborator Matt Rota posts new art, it’s worth checking out.

* Like most people on the Internet, I enjoy artist Brandon Bird’s unique entertainment-industry surrealism, both in his own paintings and the shows he curates. His latest is dedicated to the humans of Jurassic Park. I find myself hoping that someone chose to immortalize this one low-angle shot I remember quite vividly of Laura Dern’s khaki-clad hind end as she prepares to sprint across an open field to safety — I’m pretty sure it put me through puberty. (That or an En Vogue video, most likely.) Anyway, that’s Lisa Hanawalt doing Jeff Goldblum below. (Via Agent M again.)

* And hey, that reminds me that longtime ADDXSTC fave Robert Burden (not Flaming Carrot Robert Burden, labor-intensive portraits of action figures Robert Burden) recently painted the Thundercats.

* Finally, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: Matthew Perpetua has posted the Fluxblog 2011 Survey Mix! 10 discs, 183 songs, 13 hours of music, yours for the downloading!

1-800-MICE
Matthew Thurber, writer/artist
PictureBox, 2011
176 pages, hardcover
$22.95
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com

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

I interviewed Closed Caption Comics’ Noel Freibert for my interview column at The Comics Journal.

* Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” column on the work of Grant Morrison was worth the wait. It’s a terrific capsule guide to the most important superhero writer of the post-Moore/Miller era. The “Avoid” section in particular nails it, although I think it’s way too early to call it a day on Action Comics — Morrison’s the first to tell you his new series tend to start off shaky. (And I actually like Action so far anyway.)

* I don’t think I linked to this yet, and I know I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to diving into Hayley Campbell’s interview with Anders Nilsen. It’s great to see all the Big Questions covers in one place like that, too.

* Michael DeForge showcases the four comics he’ll be debuting at this weekend’s BCGF, including a collaborative effort with Benjamin Marra! And lest you think he’s getting lazy in his old age, he’s got the latest Ant Comic up as well.

* And Ryan Cecil Smith is rolling out a three-part SF Supplemental File #2, with part one debuting at BCGF as well. Damn, look at this printing job!

* Matthew Perpetua talks to Tony Millionaire about his new book of illustrations, 500 Portraits, with a strong selection of said portraits accompanying. This is probably the best drawing of Art Garfunkel ever.

* Well lookee here, it’s a page from the best single comic I’ve ever seen, Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset.”

* Looks like Renee French is posting her art at her Posterous site nowadays, so update your bookmarks.

* Outsider graphic novels (by “outsider” I mean people operating totally independently from the comics-making industry as we know it) are a fascinating arena of discovery. Comics is such an oddball medium that when people arrive at expressing themselves using that medium on their own, it takes on an almost miraculous quality. For example, check out Brad Mackay’s piece for the Comics Journal on Bus Griffiths’ 1978 paean to his career as a lumberjack, Now You’re Logging.

* Gorgeous post-it note art by Theo Ellsworth. Longtime readers of the blog will understand why the one below is my favorite.

* Johnny Ryan is a national treasure.

* Sam Bosma draws Solomon Grundy.

* It’s tough to beat Uno Moralez.

* A whole bunch of Hieronymous Bosch-channeling drawings by Salvador Dali called Dreams of Pantagruel? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I really like this painting of Jack Kirby’s Darkseid by Daniel James Cox. As you scroll down to see it, at first it appears like it’s some giant monument with fires burning in the eyes as the evening sun shines through the retreating clouds of a summer thunderstorm.

* I thought Dan Harmon’s obsessive-compulsive sitcom Community got off to a really rough start this season — way too much Chang, way too much emphasis on the unpleasant aspects of the characters’ friendship given that that was the focus of the end of the previous season too, and frankly not enough actually funny jokes. But I caught up on the season this past weekend, and the two most recent episodes were both hilarious, with the character stuff tipped back toward “these people bounce off each other in unpredictable and occasionally destructive but ultimately funny and rewarding ways” from “ugh, stay the fuck away from each other already,” and the more outlandish bits actually connecting (the entire karaoke/hallucination/drifter serenade sequence was a scream). So I’m now joining the rest of the Internet in being bummed out that the show’s in limbo after midseason, and in celebrating gratuitously insular stuff like a Beetlejuice gag that took three seasons to complete.

* Finally, here is a picture of Kristen Stewart, who is attractive.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle
Michael Kupperman, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, November 2011
32 pages
$4.95
Buy it from Fantagraphics

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

Kiel Phegley’s analysis of Marvel’s current publishing situation in light of its many recent cancellations, layoffs, budget cutbacks and so on is one of my favorite pieces of comics writing in recent memory. It’s one of the first such articles, if not the first (and if not the first then certainly the most thorough), to put these moves together with the publisher’s concurrent drive to pump as many issues as possible out of its top creators and characters, and to consider what this means for developing or non-marquee talent in particular. Fascinating stuff if you’re an industry watcher. Grab a beer and read. And don’t miss Tom Spurgeon’s response, either.

* I feel like every moment of my marathon run through all four seasons of Mad Men was leading me to this: A five-hour interview with series creator Matthew Weiner. This is heaven, absolute heaven. Everyone who created a work of art I enjoyed as much as Mad Men should be interviewed about the entirety of their life and career for five hours. And Sopranos fans will absolutely want to watch this as well, as he talks about his involvement in that show at length, and makes an argument for its greatness. (And reveals that he is the Peggy to David Chase’s Don.) My favorite thing about it is Weiner’s good humor and streak of genuine humility/self-deprecation. He’s not needlessly hard on himself — obviously he’s quite good at his job, it’d be stupid to deny that — and nor is he an egomaniac. If you know any talented successful creative people that you personally are friendly with, he sounds like those people. What a treat!

* Great googly moogly: Vince Clarke and Martin Gore are reuniting! This makes me happy in my heart. When I watched that BBC documentary Synth Britannia a while back, I was struck by how a dude like Clarke who made such warm music ankled the rest of Depeche Mode in such a cold way. These were his friends from school, and he ditched them because advances in technology had allowed him to do everything he needed to do (except sing) by himself, so his friends were now superfluous. So glad to see two of my favorite synthpop songwriters working together again, even if it’s for a minimal techno album.

* Five new B.P.R.D. miniseries next year! Way to take advantage of the apocalyptic 2012 zeitgeist.

* I’m bummed to see the very good Panelists group blog shutting down. I’d actually been wondering about this, seeing as how co-founders Craig Fischer and Charles Hatfield have columns going at The Comics Journal. But hey, there’s your silver lining, innit?

* Interesting: The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008. Curious to see what this looks like.

* Fantagraphics: minicomics publisher!

* “With Great Power Comes No Responsibility.” Tattoo it on your forehead, America!

* Wizard’s Gareb Shamus is blogging and tweeting and quietly shutting down his digital magazine.

* Amazingly, Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants interviews Michael Fassbender and never once asks to see his penis! He doesn’t even hint around at it! Jason, I’d like you to know that whenever I think of him now, I mentally refer to him as Fassy, without fail.

* Happy 71st birthday to Cardinal Fang Terry Gilliam, one of the very best people.

* And congratulations to Anders Nilsen for his book Big Questions‘ deserving presence on the New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year list. As you can see from the review-link sidebar on my blog, I’m its biggest fan, although I have yet read the collected edition. But then I have yet to read a ton of promising comics that have come out this year. I’m hoping to reorganize my life to make that possible again. It’s so important to me to have my hands in these things. It makes me feel better as a person and happier in life. Do you know what I mean?

* Benjamin Marra’s Night Business #4 is on sale now! Wow, this is a big year for Ben.

* I take this Michael DeForge post to mean that Lose #4 is on its way. And here’s some illustrations and a strip, because it’s Michael DeForge and a couple of days have past since the last set of illustrations and comics he posted.

* Jason Leivian reviews the Mat Brinkman-designed board game Cave Evil. Good gravy.

* Dustin Harbin draws Osgiliath.

* Ben Morse is right: This is an incredible Survivor Series team.

* I love Big Boa.

* Is it just me or are con/signing photos of cartoonists getting better lately?

* Finally, a happier Occupy Wall Street story: behold the bat-signal of the 99%. I can’t be the only person who saw this and thought Turk-182!, right?

* Recently on Robot 6:

* The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has announced its programming slate. Phoebe Gloeckner’s spotlight panel and a Tom Spurgeon/CF/Brian Ralph three-for-all are the highlights for me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Tom talk about CF at length, now that I think about it…

* Related: AdHouse is gonna have a hell of a show, by the sound of it.

* And here’s a BCGF debut: Zack Soto and Milo George are (re)launching Study Group Magazine, with a killer initial line-up of comics and journalism that includes work by ADDXSTC faves Chris Cilla, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, as well as interviews with Eleanor Davis and Craig Thompson.

* Does Koyama Press have the coolest publisher backstory ever?

* Inspired by a quote from Chris Mautner’s excellent interview with Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus in which Spiegelman explains the pain of having such horrifying and personal subject matter at the heart of his career for so long, I defend Art Spiegelman against his “what have you done for me lately?” detractors.

* And inspired by Nadim Damluji’s excellent interview with Craig Thompson about Orientalism in Habibi (although I must warn you not to enter the ensuing comment thread unless forced at gunpoint, and even then you might want to consider taking your chances at disarming the guy), I defend Craig Thompson against criticism to the effect that he doesn’t really know what’s going on in his own work.

* I’m really enjoying Ben Katchor’s increasingly explicit anticorporatism.

* Top Shelf is going digital in a big way, with a couple of comics apps. And damn, the price is right on the books they’re launching with. Clumsy for two bucks?

* At last! Image is releasing a collected edition of Brandon Graham’s much-lauded King City in February.

* John Porcellino has a new King-Cat coming coming out on Wednesday!

* So this is the cover for Jonny Negron’s Chameleon #2. That make sense.

* The Matthias Wivel-edited Nordic comics anthology Kolor Klimax sure looks good.

* Here’s a long and excellent piece by Zom on the horror of Uno Moralez. It’s a rare feat to analyze what makes something mysterious and horrifying with this kind of accuracy but with no intention of deflating the mystery and horror.

* Fear Itself ate itself, basically. This certainly isn’t the first time a major event comic involved elements of planned rapid obsolescence — it was the knowledge that they’d be wiping out Spider-Man’s marriage and with it whatever other aspects of his history they wanted to fudge that enabled Marvel to unmask Peter Parker for a mainstream-media bounce during Civil War — but it’s really quite unusual for three epilogue one-shots branded with the event’s name to undo the three biggest status-quo changes of the event, within three weeks of that event’s official conclusion. Still more unusual is that in all three cases Marvel’s clearly better off having undone them.

* Tucker Stone’s interview with Mark Waid about Daredevil is really entertaining on both sides of the tape recorder.

* Wow, they are dropping a lot of characters from A Clash of Kings in Game of Thrones Season Two. In some cases I understand both why they’re doing it and how it’ll work. In a few cases I’m kind of unsure how you do certain things you need to do at all without them. But when you think about it, the challenge faced by GoT the show is unprecedented. It’s one thing for The Sopranos to take bit parts and grow them into main characters at some point down the line — you’ve simply taken a presumably grateful character actor and given him the material of a lifetime. It’s still another to know up front that you’re casting a role who’ll get maybe five minutes of screentime this season but will turn into an opening-credits role in three, four years. What do you do, tell the Shakespearean actor you cast this past summer to clear his calendar for 2014? The answer will likely be not to cast such characters until the big stuff is happening, which of course will mean doing things differently than they were done in the books.

* Can you imagine having a sex ed class in which physical and emotional pleasure were valued and discussed? The clitoris, orgasms, the importance of making your partner feel comfortable emotionally, and being made to feel comfortable emotionally yourself? I can’t remember when that particular lightbulb was switched on in my head, but once the idea of such a sex ed curriculum was introduced to me, it became something that made me just shake my head in disgust that that’s not how things are. That’s absolutely how things should be. And in this New York Times piece about such a class in a school in a Friends’ school in Philadelphia shows you how it works.

* Speaking of the Times, unfortunately: Everyone I know thought Occupy Wall Street intended to shut down the New York City subway system yesterday, because they heard it on the news. I heard it on the news and so it’s what I believed. My in-laws, who are visiting us from Colorado, canceled their usual day in the city yesterday because they heard service would be disrupted on the news and so it’s what they believed. After the shutdown never materialized, today my co-workers said that OWS had simply failed to pull it off, because they’d heard of the plans on the news and so that’s what they believed. It turns out it was total bullshit, invented by Fox and the New York Times. But I heard it on several other outlets besides those, up to two or three days in advance, complete with responses to the supposed planned shutdown by NYC authorities. And it was all horseshit. As I’ve been saying on Twitter, it’s really rather amazing to watch all the organs of a body politic afflicted with terminal-stage capitalism work to expel OWS from the system. And this memetic inoculation against it — “protest Wall Street if you want, but once you start making it impossible for regular working people to get where they need to go…” — will likely never go away.

* Another case in point: The truly routine violation of protesters’ rights by the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD. The impunity with which they assault people, illegally arrest and detain them, illegally spy on them for their political beliefs, and so on is breathtaking. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates (via whom the aforelinked article) always says, we’ve got the police force we want, basically. If we didn’t want it, there are many ways in which we could make sure we didn’t have it.

* To end on a happier note, here are a few music links I enjoyed:

* Mark Richardson on freaking the fuck out over My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Man, we’ve all been there. I think my favorite part of listening to the album is when you get to that end section of “What You Want,” right before the final song “Soon” kicks in, and it’s so lovely you almost can’t bear it.

* Jaimeson Cox has been writing about Drake’s new album Take Care all week, and it’s been great. Actually, that album has coaxed great writing out of a lot of music writers. Off the top of my head: Brandon Soderberg, Zach Baron (the bit about the title track’s a must read), Ryan Dombal, Hua Hsu (terrific point about how disconcerting delivering similar sentiments via both singing and rapping can be). It’s early yet, but I think this may be my second-favorite album of the year after Kaputt by Destroyer? There’s just so much to talk about in the music especially, which is why I may inflict a post about hip-hop on you all in the near future. You’ve been warned.

Flesh and Bone
Julia Gfrörer, writer/artist
Sparkplug, 2010
40 pages
$6
Buy it from Sparkplug

Death as an irreparable rupture. Explicit, raw, wounded-animal sexuality. The calculating and casual torture and murder of children. Occult evil that actively belittles the human capacity for love and kindness. It’s tough to think of a darker brew than the one Julia Gfrörer serves in Flesh and Bone, the all too aptly titled tale of a man who’ll do anything to be reunited with his dead beloved and the witch who’s all too happy to accommodate him. But it’s a heady brew, too. Gfrörer’s intelligence shines through in virtually every particular, from pacing (the excruciatingly interminable sequence in which the bereaved man writhes first in agony then in resigned masturbatory ecstasy on his beloved’s grave) to dialogue (a devastating exchange between witch and demon in which love is dismissed as “mutual masturbation,” a form of slavery that prevents humankind from pulling itself out of the muck) to strategic absences of dialogue (a harrowing silent sequence in which an owl is sent to blind a young witness to a horrible crime) to character design (the man’s Byronic good looks, the demon’s disembodied lion head) to facial expression and body language (the witch’s arched back and closed lids as she copulates with a screeching mandrake creature) to a cover that nails the appeal of her wiry, frail characters and line. I can think of few efforts in this vein that impress me, or resonate with me, more deeply than Gfrörer’s. Highly recommended.

* Sad news: pood is folding with its fourth issue. That was a nobly intentioned effort of the sort we need more of, not less.

* Ken Parille does his Ken Parille thing on Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray, which at the time of its release had a decent claim to “Best Single Issue of All Time.”

* Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem looks awfully promising. I think it’ll be an interesting book for a couple of reasons. First, unlike North Korea, China, and Burma/Myanmar, Israel is not an open dictatorship, regardless of what you think of its policies, and I’m curious as to how Delisle’s alien-abroad reportage will translate in that setting. Second, unlike those other nations, the degree of financial, political, and cultural complicity in Israel’s policies, good bad and different, is far greater for the West, so one assumes Delisle’s writing may get more openly political as a result. Regardless, damn, look at that cartooning. As elegant as he’s ever been.

* Closed Caption Comics’ Molly O’Connell will be debuting two books at BCGF; here’s what one of them is gonna look like, and my, it’s lovely.

* Speaking of CCC, Ryan Cecil Smith continues posting gorgeous pornographic pages on his tumblr. Not even reproducing this one, in deference to you shrinking violets out there.

* Michael DeForge, man. More Kid Mafia, stuff for The Believer. more Ant Comic, still more Kid Mafia, something called “Hot Dog.”

* Jim Woodring’s still posting splendidly troubling art almost every day.

* More Chameleon #2 promo art from Jonny Negron. I enjoy this pure concentrated Weirdness.

* Jeepers, take a gander at the art of Ulises Farinas. Darrow über alles these days, huh? (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* B.P.R.D. teaser art? Sure, I’ll eat it. No pun intended.

* Finally, Uno Moralez has a new image/gif gallery up. You know what to do.

Queen of the Black Black
Megan Kelso, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2011
168 pages
$19.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

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

* Lisa Hanawalt’s poster for BCGF gives me a good excuse to link to BCGF’s list of exhibitors, featured artists, and debut releases, which is astonishing.

* Ohhhhh man: The latest old Kevin Huizenga c omic to get a full-fledged hardcover reworking/repackaging from Drawn & Quartelry is Gloriana (previously known as Or Else #2), which features “The Sunset,” one of the greatest comics of all time. OF ALL TIME!

* Related: My Robot 6 colleague Graeme McMillan on Ganges #4.

* Drawn and Quarterly has posted its Winter 2012 and Spring 2012 catalogues for download. And Fantagraphics has published its Spring/Summer 2012 catalog for download. I actually carry new Fanta catalogs around in my backpack to read and re-read like a comic.

* Recently on Robot 6: My quick take on Matthias Wivel’s epic L’Association article.

* Hey now: Jonny Negron’s Chameleon anthology has a second issue on the way in December! Here’s the cover and here’s a page from Negron’s contribution to it, “Violence City.”

* And here’s a page from Uno Moralez’s contribution to it. That’s right, Uno Moralez’s contribution to it.

* Big Two news: Things are looking good for DC’s big relaunch right now, though as many, many people have pointed out to me, these initial few months’ sales figures reflect sales to retailers, not to customers, and have all sorts of huge returnability incentives built in, so sales will likely settle down significantly at some point soon. And Marvel is cutting staff, series, budgets, and royalties. I do believe many Marvel staffers’ protestations that this has nothing to do with DC’s recent success, but the timing sure is unfortunate from a PR perspective.

* Saving this for when I really have time to savor it: Curt Purcell on the psychological underpinnings of the appeal of crossover stories.

* Happy sixth birthday to the A Song of Ice and Fire fansite Tower of the Hand! TotH has the most elegantly coded solution to the problem of spoilers that I’ve ever seen. Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

* Tom Spurgeon on comic titles that read like Captchas.

* Tom Brevoort’s formspring seems to have gone from surprisingly candid to surprisingly lyrical.

* “The scientist’s plan worked perfect. The dog was now a super hero.”

* My Kraven story in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 got a couple more good reviews: Here’s the big-time spider-fan site Spider-Man Crawl Space, and here’s Robot 6’s Tim O’Shea, who singles out a little layout gimmick I was pretty proud of.

* Monster guest lineup at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this year. Aw, who am I kidding, by “monster guest lineup” I mostly mean “oh my God, Phoebe Gloeckner!!!!” Gloeckner is one of a very, very small number of people with whom I’ve had conversations that I’ve more or less memorized.

* Anders Nilsen reveals his five favorite comics to the AV Club. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Zak Smith/Sabbath explains how to make things weird. The answer may surprise you! As is often the case with Smith’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars blog, this post is applicable to a lot more than just playing D&D.

* Is anything in the world more comforting than Peter Jackson talking about the technological wonkery he’s deploying to make movies about Middle-earth? I’m serious — if you studied my brain chemistry while watching something like the making-of video for The Hobbit below I bet there’d be measurable changes. I love this man.

* My friends Ryan Penagos and Ben Morse have launched the This Week in Marvel podcast.

* Yep, those are Jason’s five favorite post-2000 bands, alright.

* I guess that if you’re going to troll Tom Brevoort’s formspring account, you might as well be a good writer in the process.

* You keep drawing them, I’ll keep linking to them, Tom Kaczynski.

* My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is one of those records about which I could read breathlessly effusive birthday celebrations all the live-long day. The best thing I ever read about that album was by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson: “I’ve long dreamt of an album that was ‘Like Loveless, but more,’ but I haven’t found it.”

* Real Life Horror: I briefly started following Andrew Sullivan’s blog again after one of my periodic hiatuses, though every time he asserted that the way to get both the country and the Obama presidency back on track is to “embrace Simpson-Bowles” I was sorely tempted to decamp again, and a post regarding a “debate” over whether or not liberals value “hard work” broke the camel’s back within less than twelve hours of re-adding the RSS feed back to my increasingly less useful Google Reader. But when he’s not espousing fatuous faith-based economics proposals or rounding up links about total nonsense he’s actually quite good, and indefatigable, on issues like torture, or in this case, pretty much the out and out murder/cover-up of several Guantanamo Bay detainees subjected to a suffocation-torture technique called dryboarding. Land of the free, home of the brave.

* Apparently this is just how Ryan Gosling looks now? Like, when he goes to music festivals and what have you?

Twice this year, developments in long-running serialized superhero comics I’ve enjoyed for years were spoiled for me before I had a chance to read them, not by spoilers themselves, but simply through the existence of spoiler warnings about them. With some comics, the number of potential plot twists that the comics Internet would deem both newsworthy and worthy of tagging with spoiler warnings is limited enough that you can guess exactly what they’re talking about simply based on the fact that they’re talking about something.

Of the two, one was a full-fledged “A shocking issue of so-and-so hits stands Wednesday” spoiler-warning-tagged PR blitz promulgated by the publisher a couple days in advance of the issue’s release. That one pissed me off, because it diluted the impact of the story itself, a story that really, really, really, really, really should have been allowed to unfold in its readers’ minds on its own terms. It was, quite literally, the moment the series had been building toward for years, and of all people, the publisher and its representatives should have realized how important it was not to monkey with that for the sake of a sales boost.

The second was just a bunch of people reading the issue the morning it came out and posting about it, and other people complaining that those people had posted about it. This one didn’t bother me so much. First of all, it wasn’t the publisher’s fault. Secondly, the development that the “watch out for spoilers!” talk spoiled through its very existence was, basically, the undoing by a character’s usual creative team of a pretty poorly handled storyline involving that character by a separate creative team. In other words, the twist wasn’t something that emerged from a story I’d been following and enjoying, and thus having it spoiled didn’t ruin my enjoyment — the spoiler was basically an announcement that the story I’d been enjoying until it was kind of ruined by that other creative team was back on track.

* Susie Cagle, a cartoonist and journalist covering Occupy Oakland, has been arrested in one of the mass-arrest sweeps of protesters by police that are becoming depressingly routine in this country. According to her twitter feed, currently being run by her partner, she and other journalists and legal observers rolled up in the arrest were initially charged with unlawful assembly and are being held at the Santa Rita jail; Cagle is slated to be released, but has been charged with “remaining at the scene of a riot, etc.” [sic!]. This is, of course, totally outrageous in a country where the freedom of the press and peaceable assembly are nominally guaranteed. Ali Ferzat winning the Sakharov Prize because his political cartoons brought retaliatory action upon him should be the exception as to how these things work, not the rule. (See also the bombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in France, although at least there the bombers likely don’t draw government paychecks.) Cagle’s partner urges people to call the jail at 925.551.6590 and request their release.

* Marvel will offer same-day digital distribution of all its Marvel Universe comics by the end of March 2012. A year and a half ago they’d just announced day-and-date digital release of a single title; today they’re, what, third or fourth of the major publishers to do this? It happened very fast.

* Great reporting: Matthias Wivel on the crisis at L’Association, the hugely influential French alternative-comics publisher, featuring extensive quotes from the participants on both sides. L’Asso is mindblowing from the perspective of a North American observer — it’s as though the Image Seven were Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Seth and so on instead of guys who drew the X-Men — and so the acrimony surrounding its gradual takeover by co-founder Jean-Christophe Menu and his ensuing conflicts with the publisher’s employees, creators, and other co-founders, culminating in a strike and Menu’s ouster, are doubly fascinating. When you have people like Lewis Trondheim going on record with a reporter with statements like “Menu was the driving force in the creation of L’Association, along with us, but he also ended up a threat to its existence because of his lack of social intelligence and ineptness as a boss and as a manager, and because his alcoholism and paranoia got out of hand,” that is really quite something. The link takes you to part one of the report, which brings things up to the eve of the strike; part two to come.

* My Robot 6 colleagues are posting interesting interviews left and right: J.K. Parkin interviews Ian Harker about the Image Comics tribute zine Rub the Blood, Matt Seneca interviews Benjamin Marra about layout and sequencing, and Chris Mautner interviews Kevin Huizenga about Ganges #4. Bonus Robot 6 link: J. Caleb Mozzocco reviews Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray.

* What Beguiling retailer/TCAF organizer Christopher Butcher thinks about superhero comics and non-superhero comics. The answers may surprise you! I think his point about how you can easily cobble together a very saleable selection of ongoing series from mainstream-accessible genres from all the publishers who aren’t DC or Marvel, plus a handful of such books from those two to boot, is especially well-taken. So too his point that whereas the big mainstream-impactful superheroes have way too many books to their names to make any one the go-to for new readers, non-superhero genre series all have nice, easy to recognize Volume Ones that can be handed to customers with the promise of more to come.

* I would imagine this issue is complicated by Marvel’s pennywise and pound-foolish decision not to emphasize its backlist by keeping it in print. Historically, DC has aligned itself behind certain perennial collections, which not only enhance their sales but, I would argue, their critical reputation. While it is perhaps true that the Marvel of the 1980s didn’t produce any single work of the caliber of Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, they could easily answer Batman Year One with Daredevil: Born Again by the same creative team, and with some canny marketing and thoughtful maintenance of stock there’s no reason they couldn’t do with Marvels, The Dark Phoenix Saga, Kraven’s Last Hunt and so on what DC has managed to do with, say, Arkham Asylum, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Kingdom Come. I’d also argue that in turn, DC (Kirby books aside) doesn’t have Silver Age runs of quality comparable to those of the great Stan Jack Steve and JRSR books, but Marvel’s program has relegated those titles to the status of historical curiosities rather than positioning them as vital to the Marvel Universe (to say nothing of the art form generally) in the here and now. There’s no reason for that to be that way, either.

* Real Life Horror: Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article on the rise, reign, and fall of Muammar Qaddafi, and the Libya he left behind, makes for hugely compelling reading. You might say I have a professional interest in dictatorships, and this piece teases out some common threads I don’t think I’d thought of as common before. For example, Fidel Castro keeping the identity of his special lady a secret for years and years, Saddam Hussein’s near total disappearance from public view once his regime began taking serious black eyes, and Qadaffi’s penchant for creating a byzantine network of confusing and competing bureaucratic entities in order to both defuse potential rival power centers and diffuse culpability for poorly received actions — all three of these things were lesser-discussed items straight from Adolf Hitler’s playbook.

* Well, this is certainly nice: My comic in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 is getting good reviews from the folks who enjoy Spider-Man comics. Here’s Ray Tate at Comics Bulletin, and here’s David Walton at The Reilly Factor. Kitty’s Pryde liked my page layouts but didn’t like my jokes, which, hey, fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing if I pass muster with the big Spider-fan sites.

* Oh hey, look, it’s four of the best people in the history of comics. From left: Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Groth, Phoebe Gloeckner. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog, I wrote about the role of social justice in the series, using the conclusion of the Harry Potter series as a counterexample. I elaborated on the point for the benefit of a naysayer, too. I realized yesterday just how important this is to me.

* Recently on Robot 6:

*Good god: Gary Groth interviews Robert Crumb at glorious length. I ran down some of the high points for Robot 6.

* Ng Suat Tong annotated all the flashback panels from Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” I added my two cents at R6 as well.

* Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” has wrapped up. Some lingeringly creepy images in here, as you’d expect.

* And here’s a quick little highlight reel for the Journal’s Habibi roundtable.

* Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books, Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics, and François Vigneult’s Family Style have formed a publishing collective called Press Gang. That’s promising.

* Jesus: The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo put a caricature of Muhammad on the issue that came out yesterday. Later that day, someone blew up their offices.

* The Minneapolis small press show MIX may be having its last hurrah this weekend.

* David Bordwell’s latest absolute killer of a film essay is on visual density, specifically the way leaving objects that previously played a role in the narrative within the frame charges that frame with memories. The relevance to comics is obvious. And in terms of Bordwell’s recurring themes, he argues that this technique has largely been lost with the primacy of the walk-and-talk/stand-and-deliver binary for shooting dialogue.

* Matt Seneca on recent releases from the great Yuichi Yokoyama. While as usual I disagree with many of his emotional and thematic conclusions — I don’t get pessimism from Garden at all; it seems beyond that to me — I enjoy a lot of his specific observations, like the kindly feeling of the book’s slideshow-style finale. Plus, the piece includes a bunch of gorgeous art from Yokoyama’s thus far untranslated Baby Boom.

* Joe McCulloch on pre-Code horror comics for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Local boy makes good!

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the increasingly obvious problem with the NYPD.

* Dan White’s latest Cindy & Biscuit story is an all-Biscuit affair. Such vibrant cartooning!

* Michael DeForge previews his next comic, Kid Mafia. I’m detecting a lot of Tim Hensley/Wally Gropius in this one.

* Oh hey, Jonny Negron decided to mint money by offering prints for sale of his Drive pin-up.

* Andrew White appears to be prepping to post a comic every day this month.

* Keep drawing the sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* More hot stuff from Ryan Cecil Smith. You know, it’s times like these when I wonder if I should put some kind of NSFW tag at the top of the blog, or if it goes without saying.