* Chris Mautner takes a look at Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie, the best comic of 2009.

* Hey, the comics section of the McSweeney’s newspaper experiment The San Francisco Panorama is now sold separately. Sold! Smart move, Eggers.

* My friend and CBR overlord Kiel Phegley reviews James Robinson’s Starman Blackest Night special and Superman: Mon-El at length. This is the kind of close reading of how superhero comics work or don’t work that I usually save for chats with friends over lunch or email, and Kiel is one of those friends, so getting a rare chance to see him work his review chops in public is a pleasure. If you’re at all interested in this kind of comics, I think he’s worth reading here even where (I think) I disagree with him.

* Comics, you can keep bleeding sales off the top of the monthly charts as long as you also keep opening up whole new wings of yourself for us to discover, like this King Aroo thing for example.

* How John Porcellino learned to stop worrying and love the Smiths. For me it was a combination of discovering that Morrisey’s Your Arsenal was produced and sounded a lot like Mick Ronson and enjoying Morrisey’s modern-day transformation into a beefy British gangster, and simply tracing these things back to their point of origin. Still not sure I get the Johnny Marr hysteria, but whatevs, I guess there are Moz men and Marr men same as John and Paul or Stan and Jack or Mick and Keef or whoever else.

* Goddammit, Mike Baehr’s Yoda sketchbook is slaughtering my Bowie book. I know the guy works for a comic company and can threaten to shittalk artists to Gary if they fail to produce, but still. 170 entries! Goddammit! Here’s Anders Nilsen’s. Razzafrazza. (Via Flog.)

* Is there anything finer than a drawing of Batman’s awesome rogues gallery by a talented artist like David Petersen? That Muppet piece is pretty sweet too. Click the link to see them both at full size.

* DC Direct is releasing a cool line of 75th anniversary figures, featuring all their big characters as they looked in their debuts. I’d love to see that Shuster Superman slug a Doomsday action figure in the face.

* CRwM dissects the extremely unpleasant-sounding Korean torture-porn film The Butcher. I’ve been thinking of this subgenre, or at the very least what I used to call the “brutal-horror” ubersubgenre to which it belongs, on and off ever since I tried and failed to watch the French film Inside. If you recall, I gave up when it became apparent they were gonna break a cat’s neck, because that’s very very much not my thing, and I didn’t feel like the movie was going to be saying something in so doing that was particularly worth hearing. (No, “That bitch crazy!!!” doesn’t count.) But I don’t think I’ve seen a single horror film with a similar level of violence ever since, cat-killing or no. No Martyrs, no Frontier(s), no Asian or French extreme films, nothin’. And this is because I’m just not convinced I’d enjoy them, which is supposed to be the goal of going to the movies, right? I know that’s a weird thing to hear coming from someone who loves Hostel and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as much as I do, but there you have it. Does this make me a wuss or a lousy horror fan? I really don’t know. I worry that it might, as I think I’ve said before. I wish I could articulate why the really awful movies that work with me work and the really awful movies that don’t work with me don’t, but to do that I’d have to see the latter ones, and, well, there you go.

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