* Big new books from Ben Katchor and Daniel Clowes on the way from Pantheon next spring. The Cardboard Valise is Katchor’s first book in ten years plus, while Clowes’s Mister Wonderful will apparently include 40 new pages.

* Whoa, Fantagraphics is rereleasing Hans Rickheit’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Chloe through its Eros imprint? I wish it were being done by Fanta proper–the fact that it isn’t explains why I didn’t know about it until today–but even still, run, don’t walk, to get that book. Rickheit’s a major talent and that book is something erotic and special. It’s like a dirty secret.

* Spectacularly talented alternative cartoonists: They’re just like us! Kevin Huizenga rents random popular comedies and genre movies from the library!

* I’m glad this worked out for all concerned, but still, threatening a licensed publisher of a franchise over infringing the copyright of your fan-film based on that franchise? How would that work, exactly?

* Alyssa Rosenberg considers A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, world-building, and emotional wiggle room.

* These Brian Ralph sketches sure look like Daybreak collected-edition cover mock-ups to me…

* The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Blu-Ray. Don’t know why that never occurred to me before.

* Nor had it ever occurred to me to look for the Predator soundtrack album, which apparently is only now coming into existence.

* Tom Ewing is right: that new Arcade Fire song is not hot. Personally, I tuned out when they rhymed “sprawl” with “shopping malls,” like a Bad Religion album cut. I wouldn’t go quite as far as Mike Barthel because I think it’s perfectly legitimate to remain aghast at a lot of what goes on in suburbia even as an adult; I just think it’s bloated, boring music and trite lyrics delivered with irritating vocals, which is what I’ve always thought of the Arcade Fire.

* Real Life Horror: When I, a proven fool or worse on such matters, talk about politics on this blog these days, it’s usually in the horror-tinged context of torture or the action/sci-fi framework of a militarized Republican party. But of course these two phenomena are not unrelated. And now we can perhaps add a third category, as articulated by Jim Henley: the degree to which the ugly bigoted sentiments of a swathe of the American right are now being made manifest as actual discriminatory policy, from already nationwide attempts to thwart the construction of mosques anywhere for any reason, to attempts to revise or reinterpret (or repeal?) the 14th Amendment so as to deny birthright citizenship to so-called “anchor babies” on the basis of no one knows what exactly. To a degree, we’re all the blind men feeling the elephant when it comes to the darker forces at work in American political life today. Well, here we have a movement that supports the government’s ability to imprison and torture its perceived enemies at will; that makes a habit of arming itself and discusses this as a potential way to redress its grievances with its political and governmental opposition; and which seeks to abrogate basic constitutional rights for minority ethnic and religious groups deemed insufficiently American. What does that elephant look like to you?

Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.