* I’m hugely impressed by how well done Poe Ghostal’s list of The 10 Most Famous Geek Arguments for Topless Robot is.
* “‘Fuck it!’ Yes! That’s your answer! That’s your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead!” When it comes to attempting to reform the Direct Market instead of storming out in a huff, Dirk Deppey is most definitely not a Lebowski Achiever.
* My pal Kiel Phegley talks at length to cartoonist and fellow Chicagoan Jeffrey Brown.
* David Lynch has two new, unorthodox projects brewing: providing visuals for Dark Night of the Soul, a musical compilation curated or produced or something by Dangermouse and Sparklehorse (via Pitchfork), and Interview Project, a yearlong series of interviews with ordinary Americans (well, as ordinary as Americans can be when David Lynch gets through with them) conducted during a road trip and posted at Lynch’s site (via The House Next Door.)
* The Onion AV Club talks to Scrubs creator and Josh Homme lookalike Bill Lawrence about the series, whose likely to be final episodes air tonight. Lawrence is impressively candid about the creative highs and lows of the show, though he and I differ about what those are. (Count me in as a fan of the increasingly far-out material of the late-middle seasons, which Lawrence thinks went too far.) This interview reminds me that I’ll be happy when everything goes into reruns so my TiVo can start taping the show again; we might have been able to shuffle things around on the very busy TV night of Wednesdays in order to keep taping the show, but by the time we realized we were missing it it was weeks too late. (Via Whitney Matheson.)
* Flipping the script, Scott Wilson talks to the Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias about his delightful New Cult Canon series. (Via The House Next Door.)
* I liked Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads but I’ve been skittish about the prospects of Tokyopop ever allowing him to finish his OEL manga series King City, so I’ve never bothered to track it down. Therefore I’m pleased to see Graham will be publishing the book (and republishing what’s already come out) in serialized form with Image Comics. (Via JK Parkin.)
* The Coming of Kodansha. (Link and awesome headline via Heidi MacDonald.)
* Starro the Conqueror goes Frazetta via JG Jones? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Topless Robot.)
* There’s something genuinely frightening about how present this cthulhoid brute’s eyes look in this piece by artist Bradford Rigney. This kind of illustration isn’t usually my cup of tea, but kudos to Rigney–you can download a sizable interview and image gallery in PDF form from 2D Artist magazine here. (Via Monster Brains.)
* Real-world torture porn update: As I’ve followed the revelations of the Bush Administration’s use of torture, I’ve been really struck by just how much the nature of the news media’s basic “he said/he said” template has allowed the torturers to frame the debate. That’s the way brutal methods understood around the world as torture since their inception are now referred to straightfacedly as “harsh interrogation techniques that some critics say amount to torture.” It’s also how the Abu Ghraib photos that most closely resemble the “frathouse antics” that torture proponents dismissed them as became the dominant frame for that scandal, to the point where when Rachel Maddow showed a picture of a man tortured to death during his CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib on her show last night, I was stunned to realize I’d forgotten that that even happened. That’s why releasing and publicizing the nauseating details of our torture program is so important. When you learn that someone was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, it’s harder to defend the completely imaginary “one and done” super-awesome terrorist-breaking conception of waterboarding concocted by the torturers and the Internet and think-tank tough-guys who fawn over them. When you learn that we were locking people in boxes with insects, it’s harder to depict the torture program as an orderly means of extracting information as opposed to the sordid province of sickos. For that reason, I fully support the release of as many incriminating photos as possible, and I hope they greatly discomfit the torturers, their defenders, and the people who, like me, spent years in blissful, even willful ignorance of the fact that it can happen here, and contemptuously dismissing those who tried to tell us otherwise.