* When good comics critics collide: Chris Mautner interviews Joe “Jog” McCulloch. Hearing that my blog helped inspire Jog to start blogging himself made my weekend.

* Fearfodder’s Pete Mesling resurfaces to give Clive Barker’s new novel Mister B. Gone a rave review. (At least I think he did–I haven’t read the book yet so I really just scanned the review.)

* Tom Spurgeon has gone on one of his occasional review rampages, critiquing 57 comics in one go. Holy moses.

* The Golden Compass reached number one at the box office but with a disappointing $26 million haul. I have a hard time thinking about this business story without also thinking about a number of disheartening factors: the naked desire of its studio, New Line, to replicate its Lord of the Rings franchise’s success, all the more irksome given that same studio’s treatment of the architects of that franchise; the leeching away of the source material’s anti-theist philosophical oomph; the odious Catholic League riding shotgun; a possible glut of fantasy film set in CGI snow. Add it all up and it doesn’t equal “good time at the movies,” at least for me.

* Finally, after the recent Finnish school shooting involving a young man who posted videos implying his intentions on YouTube, resulting in the media making hay out of that fact although it really had nothing to do with the case itself, I noted that you never see headlines like “Massacre linked to pen and paper” when killers chronicle their thoughts in a more traditional fashion. Sadly, life, in the form of mall shooter Robert Hawkins, has provided us with proof. Note moreover that as far as I can gather, you’re also not seeing voices from the Right decry the victims as exemplars of the feminization of America and the decline of the West this time around, perhaps because it’s politically trickier to dance on the graves of Midwestern Christmas shoppers–or Christian missionaries and megachurch members–than on those of college students.

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