* With Boardwalk Empire‘s season finale approaching, HBO is unleashing the kraken with regards to publicity for its next big thing, Game of Thrones. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the network released hi-res versions of all the photos from last week’s Entertainment Weekly spread on the show…
* a preview of a 15-minute making-of featurette they’ll be unveiling prior to the Boardwalk Empire finale next Sunday…
* and a new minute-long teaser.
And frankly? It all looks wonderful. In particular, starting that trailer with that particular scene appears to indicate that they know what the books are about, not just what they’re about, if you follow me. As always, they’re just trailers and promo stills and therefore completely unreliable, but. But but but! (Links via Winter Is Coming and Westeros, as usual.)
* Meanwhile, I plan on finding it really weird to watch mainstream pop-culture sites cover the show–even though I myself only discovered the series this year and am far from a GoT OG.
* The enormously engrossing, uncomfortably disconcerting online first-person horror film/ARG Marble Hornets has returned after a seven-month absence for its second season. When I say “uncomfortably disconcerting” I’m really not kidding. Even though I’ve just about exhausted all the information, commentary, and parody available on the project, I still find myself freaking out a little bit when I have to go out in the dark to take out the trash. They’ve hit on a really powerful set of images and techniques. If you’ve got about a movie’s length of time to kill, start here; the latest “entry” is embedded below.
* Two of my favorite webcomics had real doozies for their most recent installments: Jesse Moynihan’s Forming and Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force. Bookmark them!
* It’s official: The Hobbit movies will be filmed in 3D. Peter Jackson seems like a filmmaker who was made to make 3D movies. Certainly more so than James Cameron!
* Wow, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had a rough opening night. Like, rough enough that I wonder if someone–the creators, the performers, the audience, the newspapers, Bono, someone–was just joking. Bitter experience and Avatar have taught me that I have no clue whether or not something will be a for-the-ages flop/demonstration of classical hubris; that said, the story of this show has been completely mesmerizing, and not for the reasons one imagines Julie Taymor, Bono, the Edge, and Sony or Marvel or whoever want it to be. On a qualitative level, my appreciation for Taymor’s glam weirdness is offset by my disgust with the leaden pretension of the U2 music I’ve heard from the show, so I don’t know how to feel about it in that regard either.
* Chris Mautner’s Comics College column tackles Hergé. Since all of his Tintin work is in the same format and working basically the same genre and tone, he’s one of the great “where to begin?” artists in comics. Well, here’s where to begin!
* Sean P. Belcher was a good deal more sympathetic to last night’s episode of The Walking Dead than I was. Basically we agree about its strengths, but differ in the weight we place on its weaknesses.
* Spurge is right: This Deborah Vankin profile of Joyce Farmer’s new memoir Special Exits makes the book look and sound great. I won’t spoil the really revealing quotes from and about R. Crumb, either.
* Trouble with Comics had a bit of an RSS spasm over the weekend, but it brought Christopher Allen’s thoughtful critique of Jack Kirby’s OMAC to my attention, so I’m glad it happened.
* Hawt stuff from Brandon Graham. (Via Agent M.)
* Very much looking forward to Ryan Cecil Smith’s Two Eyes of the Beautiful II, on sale at the BCGF this weekend.
* I’m digging what I’m seeing from Alex Wiley’s Hugger-Mugger Comicx. I like the cute-brut linework and citrusy colors.
* Wow, 102 pages of unpublished comics from James Stokoe!
* Real Life Horror: Every time I think about it, I am freshly amazed that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large nine years after the 9/11 attacks they orchestrated. (And that we’ll probably never be able to try and convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because the Bush Administration tortured him, but that’s a different matter.) The AP has a fascinating, if somewhat depressing, report on the lucky breaks that have kept al-Zawahiri out of American clutches and/or crosshairs. Here’s hoping that once all the money we save by freezing federal employees’ salaries singlehandedly ends the recession and persuades Republicans to put aside their differences and become good-faith allies of the President, there’ll be enough left over help catch this murderous fuck.
* This is one of those days when I want to link to everything that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. Money quotes:
I’d love to see someone make the argument that private sector managerial experience entitles you to run the NYPD.
—on incoming NYC schools chancellor Cathleen Black
What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat.[…]Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically “prove” the problem of violent white supremacists.
—on the FBI sting of would-be Christmas tree bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud.
* Rest in peace, Irvin Kershner and Leslie Nielsen. The Empire Strikes Back and The Naked Gun are two of the movies I’ve absorbed completely enough to have a hard time imagining how I would think and speak about certain things without an array of quotes from them at my disposal.
* Finally, as I mentioned earlier, DestructorComics.com is up and running. Matt Wiegle and I will be updating it on Mondays and Thursdays. I can’t wait to share these stories with you!
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, Carnival of souls, comics, Destructor, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, horror, links, meta, movies, real world, TV
I know Ta-Nehisi Coates dropped the “problem of violent white supremacist” line to imply that such tactics would only ever be used on the dusky races, but what he’s describing is essentially what the FBI did in in the 1960s to battle the KKK.
I didn’t take it that way at all–I thought his point was that you could do this to pretty much any group of assholes with the same effect, and use that effect to justify continuing to do it. “This would never happen to a white guy” isn’t his style.