* On Sunday night I went to a very cool, very swanky, very funny fundraiser held by the stars and writers of Saturday Night Live to benefit the forthcoming stage/multimedia adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s all-time-great graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Here’s the report I did on the event for Comic Book Resources. Your takeaway should be that you should read The Diary of a Teenage Girl and go see Hannibal Burress and John Mulaney do stand-up if you get the chance.

* John Porcellino is blogging. Long Live the King. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Hot damn, a new Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets digest. Those books are the perfect blend of form and function. Scott Pilgrim fans, you have your instructions!

* My comics compadre Matt Wiegle did a 24-hour comic. Liz Bailie, MK Reed, Sally Bloodbath, and pie factor in.

* Gaze upon the face of your destroyer.

* Lost‘s final season begins tonight, and so…

* Lost Links #1: Noel Murray’s pondering of the show at the Onion A.V. Club contained a paragraph that spoke to some of my feelings about the show:

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the mythology is the heart of the show either–at least not for me. I dig the mythology more than the Sawyer/Kate/Jack/Juliet love quadrangle (and I do have questions I want answered), but I primarily love Lost for its thematic concerns and ambitious genre-play. I’ve already talked about how much I get out of the predetermination/freedom business, but I also like that Lost has always been a celebration of storytelling, from the arcane to the archetypal. It’s a genre-hopping story that pays direct homage to nearly every text that’s ever influenced its creators. It’s one long story, made up of a bunch of little stories. It’s a story about how backstories encroach and affect the main narrative, whether it be via time-travel or flashbacks (which are a kind of time travel). And, finally, it’s a story about the repetition of stories, and about which elements can be altered and which can’t.

In the past I’ve said something not identical, but similar: I watch the show not as an exercise in puzzle-solving, but as an exercise in genre that does everything genre can do, very very well: sex and violence, mystery and horror, awe and adventure, heroism and villainy, the literature of ideas, genre elements used as a sort of crucible for character development. Rather than the thematic or philosophical concerns that intrigue Murray, though, I prefer the individual character stories insofar as they deal with what people do when confronted with failure.

* Lost Links #2: In this colloquy between three TV critics–the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, and Time’s James Poniewozik–this passage stood out:

Poniewozik: Unfortunately, there’s this [problem] that’s inherent to sci-fi shows that “Battlestar Galactica” ran into.

In a regular, character-based drama, maybe people have high expectations for the finale, maybe they expect that closure from it, or [maybe they expect it to] wrap up in a certain way for the characters. Even when it’s a finale that people really don’t like — the “Seinfeld” finale, the “Sopranos” finale for a lot of people — I don’t know that many people who said, “I hate this ‘Seinfeld’ finale so much that it ruined the show for me.”

But there’s a thing about sci-fi that they expect the finale is not just supposed to be a narrative ending. It’s supposed to be an Answer, which to me is kind of ridiculous. The finale is supposed to say what it all meant, what everything was about. And you know, I’m not saying that it’s unimportant. I watch these shows for the same reason, but if the show is really good, that’s secondary.

Ryan: Well, I really felt like there was a left-brain, right-brain split in a way, when it came to the reaction to “Battlestar.” I’m obviously being overly reductive, but it seemed like there were two sort of realms of fan responses or reactions. There were the people that wanted the whole mythology to add up correctly and make sense, and there were the people who wanted the character stuff to kind of wrap up.  I was mostly in the latter camp. And so for me, I felt like there were a couple of wobbly things in the finale, but I was willing to live with them because the “Battlestar” finale really delivered, for me, on a character level.

Whereas, in the post-finale comments I was seeing, people wanted the math to add up. You know, like, the show is a math equation and the show needed to get the right answer. And in my mind, it was never going to do that — I necessarily didn’t expect that or think it was going to be possible for it all to add up neatly. I felt like, this is a show that has taken many risks. A few of them have not paid off, but I’d rather watch a show that does something crazy that has an 89 percent chance of working out down the road, story-wise, than a show that plots things out in a way that is purely logical and kind of clinical.

I don’t have much to add to that. (Via LOSTblog.)

* Lost Links #3: Here’s a cute idea from Topless Robot’s Kevin Guhl: ranking the season premieres and season finales by their openings and cliffhangers respectively. I think the openings list is more or less right on, though I would have given top honors to the pilot episode, because that harrowing opening sequence is what sold the world on the following six seasons. The cliffhanger section is sort of weird, though–he doesn’t seem to actually like any of them.

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