* It’s official: The Hobbit: two movies, in 3-D, directed by Peter Jackson, principal photography to begin in February.

* Alex Dueben interviews Charles Burns about X’ed Out. Reading that book will have to wait until I’m all done with LOVE AND ROCKTOBER/LOVEMBER AND ROCKETS, but I didn’t know that it’s just the first of a projected three-volume story. Burns also tells Dueben that he’s pretty much pulled the plug on the fourth Fantagraphics collection of his pre-Black Hole work, on the thinking that that work doesn’t hold up as a book.

* Today at Robot 6:

* Marvel’s Ultimate line is a surprise (to me, at least) bookstore hit;

* and this anti-Michele Bachmann comic has the best cover gimmick ever.

* Frank Santoro on Chester Brown’s layouts. Indeed!

* Curt Purcell on The Walking Dead. Curt read the book in its Compendium form, a giant book that collects the first forty-eight issues, equivalent to eight trade paperbacks. Sounds like it’s A) a total steal, available from Amazon for less than the cost of four trades; B) a totally fascinating way to read this material–without spoiling anything for anyone, it takes you all the way from the beginning of the series through that issue. Yes, readers, you know the one. What a run of comics.

* What’s all this about Loyal #11, featuring Jim Drain, Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Ron Rege Jr., Devin Flynn and more?

* Much to my surprise I wasn’t feeling Paul Cornell’s Knight and Squire #1; Zom of the Mindless Ones gets at why.

* Still on the World of Warcraft beat (hooray!), Bruce Baugh draws our attention to the big full-fledged couldn’t-be-more-heavy-metal-if-it-tried trailer for the game’s new Cataclysm event. I really am struck by what a great idea for a villain “dragon driven insane by Lovecraftian Old Ones” is. Monstrous traditions should absolutely be cross-pollinated like that. Dracula should solve the Lemarchand Configuration, zombie-apocalypse refugees should seek shelter on Monster Island–go nuts with it! I will also add that based on Bruce’s description of what, exactly, is going down in that trailer, it seems like WoW’s makers at Blizzard have a truly admirable habit of destroying things people care about, which seems like a prerequisite for writing compelling epic fantasy, be it prose or game.

* Elsewhere, Bruce points out a fascinating post about MMO genre conventions. In a weird way, it reminds me of what I said the other day about Brian Hibbs’s column on structural problems with the supply chain from comics publishers to comics retailers. You stay immersed in a system long enough and you forget that it isn’t the way to do things, it’s a way to do things.

* Yeah, see, that’s precisely how Love and Rockets works!” Right???

* Oh, Bill.

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