* Dang: Dirk Deppey has been let go. Take it from someone who was there: Dirk midwifed the comics blogosphere as we know it. Vaya con Dios, Journalista — most of us wouldn’t be here if not for you.
* Two great Quotes of the Day today on Robot 6: Ta-Nehisi Coates on comics as the literature of outcasts (fun, potentially corroborative fact: all of my gay friends are also big nerds);
* and Joe Casey finds today’s superhero comics boring. Oddly, so do I, for the most part, and judging from multiple conversations I’ve had recently, so do a lot of people I know. There are some counterexamples, certainly, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to talk about them if I can collect some thoughts. (Here’s one that’ll be going in: the conclusion to Brian Hibbs’s year-ender essay on the troubles faced by the Direct Market.)
* The Joe Casey quote comes from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interview with him, which kicks off Spurge’s Holiday Interview series for the year. Curling up next to my in-laws’ dogs in Colorado while reading these things on my laptop genuinely is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. I look forward to the rest of ’em. As for this one, Casey’s Ben 10 insulation from repercussions for calling a spade a spade has made him one of the most consistently entertaining interviews in comics on a “here’s where the bodies are buried” level.
* Speaking of Spurge, in this piece on his favorite WildStorm comics he makes the case for that incest storyline from Alan Moore and Zander Cannon’s Smax, the idea being that it’s a jarring enough custom that it makes us feel the kind of response that the characters themselves would feel, instead of setting up afterschool-special-type mustache-twirling antagonists who are racist or homophobic or some other thing we in the audience can gloss right over as “bad guys!” The idea is that it’s sort of the narrative equivalent of the way Shaun Tan used the fantasy elements of The Arrival to better simulate for readers the disorientation of the immigrant experience. It’s smart; given that Moore has shown himself to be prone to afterschool-special literalism in this area — including in Smax‘s fellow Top 10 spinoff The 49ers — I’m not sure I buy it.
* Marvel has made a big deal out of how Fantastic Four will be ending after the current “Three” storyline, which ostensibly will kill one of the Four; today they announced that the Fantastic Four creative team will be launching a new series called FF in March. I don’t understand these kinds of maneuvers. Do they even really goose sales anymore beyond the #1 issue? I mean, these things can work fine if you’re Grant Morrison, but Hickman and Epting are having a swell run on Fantastic Four, and to me the gimmickry just distracts from it.
* Kevin Huizenga has posted three new Fight or Run strips! Someone with more influence over Kevin Huizenga than I have should beg him to make this a weekly webcomic.
* The great Norwegian cartoonist Jason, of all people, pretty much nails Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, or at least what I think of it, right down to some very specific points of comparison with how it probably ought to have been filmed, and to calling out the silliness already present in the original. That said, it seems pretty clear that I like both the comic and the movie a lot more than Jason does.
* Vice’s Nick Gazin says some smart things and some stupid things in his latest comics review round-up, which is par for the course, but it’s entertaining either way, which is also par for the course. (Seriously, PictureBox haters are the new Fantagraphics haters.)
* Ooh ooh, Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Movie Uncut by J.A. Kerswell — a Portable Grindhouse/Destroy All Movies!-style book about slasher flicks!
* Benjamin Marra’s ROM: Spaceknight art is now available as a one-of-a-kind print to raise money for Bill Mantlo’s medical bills. Bid on the thing — as of this writing it’s available for freaking $9.99! (Via Zack Soto.)
* Emily Carroll is a real talent.
* Dave Kiersh is a real talent.
* I can’t wait to talk about Battlestar Galactica with Curt Purcell.
* And here’s another Quote of the Day, this time music-related: Scroll to the bottom of this page from Pitchfork’s Artist Guest List Best of 2010 feature to read OMD’s Andy McCluskey thoughtfully and passionately explain the brilliance of Robyn.
* I think this Alyssa Rosenberg piece on Game of Thrones for the Atlantic (WARNING: more spoilery than I’m comfortable with) fairly misses the boat. Rosenberg argues that the show will require more “sustained leaps” of belief than not just series like The Sopranos and The Wire, which require us to suspend our potential disbelief that murderers struggle to behave decently and contribute usefully in other ways, but also shows like True Blood or The Walking Dead, which depict fantastical things happening “firmly within the existing world” and “in a world discernibly our own” respectively. But the appeal of the Song of Ice and Fire books, and presumably the series, absolutely is that the characters’ motives and their societies’ constructions are recognizable from where we stand, the occasional dragon or bit of sorcery notwithstanding. The fact that it doesn’t take place on “Earth,” not even the alternate near-future Earths of Sookie Stackhouse and Rick Grimes, makes no difference in terms of the show’s approach. (Its reception might be a different matter, but only because swords and armor and accents make a lot of people think “old-timey” and tune out, and that’s not what she’s talking about; she’s saying things like that the show’s in a class by itself because it’ll have “to convince viewers not only that dragons are real, but that they are a literal bulwark against a real and frosty evil,” which in reality is just a difference in degree from “vampires exist and want marriage rights,” not in kind.) “The Sopranos with swords” is dead-on, if the show is done right.
* Finally, no idea how I missed this, but on December 16th George R.R. Martin wrote that he “might have an exciting announcement…maybe two” on January 9th at the Game of Thrones TCA thingamajig in Los Angeles. I suppose it’s easy enough to guess what the first exciting announcement is, but what about the second? I’ll bite: I’ve often wondered if he was actually writing the next two Song of Ice and Fire books at once…
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, books, Carnival of souls, comics, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, links, movies, music, TV
Wow. Really, really sorry to hear about Dirk being laid off. I wonder if there’d be someone willing to handle subscriptions or something for a Journalista continuation; it’s wonderful, and I’m willing to pay something for it.
Not to poop on the parade or anything but when I was posting that Fight or Run page on Flog I ran to my copy of the first issue to see whether it was a new strip and it’s actually just a colored version of the first page of the comic. Still, here’s hoping for an issue 2 from Pigeon somewhere down the line.
Aw, rats.
Maybe the Martin news is that he just plain got sick of writing those long-ass books and is going to be writing Green Lantern Corps starting in the spring.