* It’s a red-letter day over at the Fantagraphics store: 15% off all their Ignatz nominees (and there are quite a few!), while brand-new books West Coast Blues, Prison Pit Vol. 1, Giraffes in My Hair, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, Love & Rockets: New Stories Vol. 2, Rock Candy, and The Squirrel Machine are all now in available for purchase.

* This week’s League of Tana Tea Drinkers “best of the horror bloggers” link roundup features posts on Thirst, Delphine, True Blood, His Name Was Jason, District 9 (by yours truly), and a guest post by…Andrew W.K.?

* Curt Purcell continues his series comparing Blackest Night to The Great Darkness Saga with another pair of posts. First, he tackles the changing nature of superhero violence. One thing I think’s a little odd about Curt’s superhero blogging so far is that he primarily cites The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen in terms of their use of bloody/realistic violence and its influence on later comics. But neither of those comics is particularly gruesome in that regard (indeed one of the big complaints about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was that it was bloody all the way up to the end, at which point it became bloodless, as opposed to the comic which more or less worked the other way around). I actually think the increased use of graphic violence in superhero comics is the least direct of their legacies. I also think he’s slightly misreading Dirk Deppey’s “superhero decadence” concept by using it synonymously with “stuff that would get these comics an R-rating,” when I think the more crucial element is the debauched nature of contemporary superhero comics as art primarily concerned with itself, its own continuity and conventions–an increasingly artificial edifice built on shaky foundations and displayed for an audience with no interest in ever looking at anything else. But Curt does brush up against that aspect in his second post on the topic, this one focusing on superhero comics going meta. Of course most meta-superhero comics contain some kind of critique of the genre, while the true decadents in the Dirk Deppey formulation are perfectly content just to create ever more baroque variations on Captain Marvel.

* Go, er, squint: Nick Bertozzi tries to condense a 5,000-word prose article to a two-page comics spread. Have I mentioned I’m excited that Nick is blogging so much lately?

* Allow me to be the 40,000th person to recommend Dash Shaw’s interview of Hope Larson on the topic of comics creators working with editors. The problem with working with editors is that some editors are idiots. The problem with not working with editors is that sometimes you’re an idiot.

* TJ Dietsch applauds Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later as superior to Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later, a judgment with which I concur.

* Jeet Heer on the Eiffel Tower’s recurring role in genre movies as something that gets blown up or knocked down, with a tantalizing look at a story in which the Tower itself becomes a city-destroying monster.

* More lowlights from the CIA Inspector General’s report on the Bush Administration’s torture program: Digby focuses on the use of forced enemas, diapers, and forcing detainees to wallow in their own filth, while in a lengthy post running down the worst of the abuses, Glenn Greenwald summarizes the situation thusly:

(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies (“torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .”) — reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.

(2) As I wrote rather clearly, numerous detainees died in U.S. custody, often as a direct result of our “interrogation methods.”  Those who doubt that can read the details here and here.  Those claiming there was no physical harm are simply lying — death qualifies as “physical harm” — and those who oppose prosecutions are advocating that the people responsible literally be allowed to get away with murder.

Also, my congressman, Rep. Peter King, is a fucking monster.

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