* Robot Roll Call! Here’s a round-up post I did featuring links to everything that went up during Robot 6’s big anniversary weekend. Lots and lots and lots of cool content, something for everyone I daresay.
* My favorite of the bunch is our list of The 30 Most Important Comics of the Decade. Part One I already mentioned; Part Two contains my write-ups for The Complete Peanuts, Kramers Ergot, Art Out of Time, Daredevil, and Blankets–all in a row! But you’ll have to click to see where they all fell on the countdown. And check the comment thread for a “editorial cartoons aren’t comics” argument preserved in amber from the McCloudian past like one of those Jurassic Park mosquitos.
* I greatly enjoyed Douglas Wolk’s conversation with Tom Spurgeon about Invincible Iron Man. It really is a conversation, and that’s what makes it one of my favorite pieces in Tom’s holiday interview series on the books of the decade thus far. To paraphrase what Tori Amos’s Jungian mystic once said about me and my wife, the rocks in Tom’s head fit the holes in Douglas’s.
* Here’s another post I cheered for: David Uzumeri’s look back on 2009, by way of responding to the oft-advanced notion that the year really uniquely sucked for comics and/or superhero comics. He just piles up evidence for the case against. On a related note, Jeff Lester did a bang-up job with his post on the origin of comics burnout.
* The thing I loved about Jog’s Best of 2009 post is that he spends as much time talking about the books he missed as he does the books he loved. A great idea! You get almost as much of a picture of the state of the art from the former as you do from the latter. The thing that bummed me out about the post is that two of his top five were books I haven’t even read (through no lack of trying on my end, in my defense), meaning my own list is probably a big lo’ shit sandwich.
* Elsewhere, Jog and I have a quick back-and-forth about our differing reactions to the differing works of Naoki Urasawa.
* MOAR DECADE IN REVIEW FROM MATT MAXWELL
* Yep, I’m gonna have to see Pontypool.
* If you’re looking for good music you haven’t heard, you could do a lot worse than to download Matthew Perpetua’s “Lost ’00s” mix, featuring gems that were largely overlooked over the past 10 years. You really can’t go wrong with Muscles and In Flagranti, I can tell you that much. I’ll tell you what, it’s a bit of a bummer that I’ve become friends with Matthew, because for years he was my source for music I could impress my friends with that no one else had ever heard of, but what the hell can I impress him with? My extensive Pigface collection? (It’s pretty impressive.)
I need to lay off the meth.