* Today on Robot 6: Both Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly, two of the best publishers in comics, are having massive, and I mean in some cases quite ridiculous, sales right now. You should take advantage of this.
* Also, please let Tom Brevoort know what you think of Marvel’s current event-comics strategy, whereby the company publishers miniature events/crossovers for individual families of titles/franchises rather than one massive line-wide thing. Personally, there’s an attraction to me in linewide crossovers, for all their faults, that the smaller things lack. I mean, I remember franchise-specific crossovers from the bad old days, and it’s hard to get all that excited about them now; by contrast, the sheer chutzpah it takes to make all of your comic books about Green Goblin, Secretary of Defense feels like it’s taking advantage of the shared-universe and serialized-publication models inherent to Marvel and DC in a way that the umpteenth X-over doesn’t.
* Finally, let me entice you to look at some of Frank Santoro’s stupid-gorgeous Silver Surfer art for Strange Tales II.
* HBO aired two previews for their upcoming series adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Game of Thrones. One’s your basic teasey early trailer deal, and one’s a quick behind-the-scenes thing. Neither says all that much about what we can expect, I don’t think, beyond the fact that Martin is very excited and Gregor Clegane is very well cast. (Seriously, if you’ve read the books you’ll know him when you see him, he’s a beast.) The trailers are at the links or below, and there’s a still of Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen below that. Also I guess they’re doing some sort of production blog at the show’s homepage.
* Tim and Eric Awesome Tour, Great Job! Plus an hour-long holiday special on December 5th. Nice. Bullseye.
* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #3 is up on What Things Do. Pretty different from what you might be used to from Rege.
* Jordan Crane draws Dario Argento’s Deep Red. Wow, that’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d be writing today.
* Anders Nilsen covers The Great Gatsby.
* I thought this little portrait of mostly video-era horror icons was fun and admirably thorough; there are a couple on there even I’m not sure I recognize. I wish I knew who drew it; here’s where I found it.
* Curt Purcell reviews the circus comics of Josh Simmons. It’s great to have Curt back in the game, and this stuff’s right in his wheelhouse.
* I hadn’t heard of In a Glass Cage before Jason Adams reviewed it; not sure how I feel about the fact that this has changed.
* I don’t know how I missed this–I think it’s one of those things I was vaguely aware of but didn’t ever actively consider the fact of its existence, sort of like when someone tries to talk to me when I’m watching that Geico commercial with the little piggy who goes wee-wee-wee all the way home–but Eve Tushnet has an infrequently updated blog on which she mostly offers spoilery thoughts on mostly geeky entertainments. Here she is on X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Watchmen, Night of the Living Dead, The Descent, Iron Man 2, and Battlestar Galactica.
* Here’s a fine, lengthy essay by Eric Harvey on the rise of the washed-out Polaroid/Instamatic aesthetic on the cover of indie rock records. I’d probably have just said “Because they look nostalgic and pretty,” but he takes it a lot farther than that for our edification and enrichment.
* This piece on how J.R.R. Tolkien used maps simply to document what he’d already written rather to suggest the existence of a world beyond that was a real lightbulb-over-the-head moment for me. I’d never thought of it this way before: “His maps were always just organizers: they only echoed the text, they never extended it.” I think the fervor with which fandom has seized upon lesser-detailed (both visually and textually) areas to the South and East of the books’ territory is evidence of how much more juice Tolkien could have wrung from those maps.
* As a former writer/editor for A&F Quarterly and thus one of the people partially responsible for Abercrombie & Fitch’s holistic approach to lifestyle branding, I couldn’t have enjoyed Molly Young’s essay on Hollister for The Believer. The part about marijuana was more or less revelatory:
Weed was another great equalizer. It is hard to overstate the importance of weed as a determining factor in the lives of West Coast teenagers. Weed was the reason girls selected clothes based on fuzziness, the reason boys sounded dumb, the reason we inflected every sentence as a question and used like and you know as phatic communications. In an era of T9 input, text messages begun with I would automatically fill in mstoned. Anyone familiar with the dim and spray-scented bedrooms of a weedy adolescence will recognize in Hollister’s decor an environmental proxy of the average Friday night. Weed may not be for sale at Hollister, but its exigencies are everywhere.
It gets better from there. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
* Comics folk, Geoff Grogan’s piece on the hard truth about small-press conventions is an eye-opening, spirit-deflating must-read. In all fairness, however, I don’t know that alternative comics has that many cliques you can’t infiltrate simply by throwing some elbows and barging in. Comics types respond to Type A personalities like a bichon frise responds to the Dog Whisperer.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
Dude I actually thought of you while I was writing up my thoughts on IAGC because I know how strongly you feel about the depiction of child murder in film. Not that I don’t feel that way, I’m not all “Yay dead kids!” up in here, but you’ve just vocalized it enough that now… well when I think of dead kids I think of you. Aww! I romance you with my words, Sean. 😉
Anyway this movie was tough. I had to look away for awhile. It’s not a badge of honor I’m trumpeting here either for being the big manly man who could sit through it; I honestly don’t know that I should see the things that I keep making myself see sometimes. Why couldn’t I have decided to devote myself to Julia Roberts movies???