* Over at Robot 6 I pulled some of my favorite parts from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interviews with Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez, two of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Of all time!
* Spurge also interviewed my very talented Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson, who comes at comics journalism and criticism from about a 180-degree remove from virtually everyone else I know. If you care about the field, you should read her interview.
* Kiel Phegley conducts an exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and ongoing Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada. Quesada breaks (I think) the news that Nick Lowe has been promoted to Senior Editor, while Kiel notes that Quesada is the first Editor-in-Chief to depart on his own terms since Stan Lee.
* Tom Brevoort notes that Editors-in-Chief of Marvel comics don’t actually edit comics, which is why he didn’t want the job.
* Theo Ellsworth is working on an ongoing horror-SFF series called The Understanding Monster. Yes please!
* This week, Diamond starts shipping comics to Direct Market retailers a day early, if they want. I hope that works out.
* Frank Santoro on Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the power of drawing comics at the same size they’re printed. “Comments are closed.”
* They’ve given up on making a Wonder Woman TV show. Good. Doing so seemed like an admission that They’re not talented enough to make a movie of one of the most famous characters in the world.
* Rickey Purdin calls the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2010 “a totally insane comics and art show that, per capita, was probably the highest quality of its kind that I’ve ever attended.” Yep.
* Game of Thrones stuff 1: New photo gallery. Direwolf puppies or GTFO. (Via Winter Is Coming.)
* Game of Thrones stuff 2: I really enjoyed this report from a roundtable with George R.R. Martin. Martin tells a great anecdote about an asshole at a Lord of the Rings screening who kept shouting shit like “Giant spiders? Oh, come on!” as an illustration of how some people will just never cotton to fantasy; he speculates that A Storm of Swords will be split over the show’s third and fourth seasons; he notes the difficulty of conveying when a character is lying on television, something I thought would be quite a challenge for the series in terms of one specific plot point later in the books; and so on and so forth. If you’re like me and hungry for any kind of smart discussion of the books you can get, you obviously could do a lot worse than a discussion featuring Martin himself.
* Game of Thrones stuff 3: Maureen Ryan posts excerpts of interviews with Martin, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actress Emilia Clarke. I liked Martin’s note of caution that big though the show’s budget may be, it can’t possibly compare to the roughly $15 million spent per hour of screentime on The Lord of the Rings. (Via Westeros.)
* Check out Michael DeForge’s fine Top 15 Comics of 2010 list. And then ask yourself if he ever stops working.
* Now Zak Smith is crowdsourcing an entire RPG: Gigacrawler, about a universe in which every available space on planets and in the void is part of one continuous, contiguous structure. In other words, all of existence is one giant dungeon. He and his crew start brainstorming the game’s major features here.
* Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, talks to Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal about his new album Kaputt, which is really something special. Avalon is referenced, and thus am I vindicated.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, Carnival of souls, comics, fantasy, Game of Thrones, gaming, George R.R. Martin, horror, links, music, TV
I am happy about day-early shipping. Now if I stop by my comic store earlier on Wednesday they will be ready for me.
It’s interesting to hear Martin say the series didn’t look like he pictured it; with the exception of the Dothraki stuff, it looks exactly as I pictured it, right down to the ‘feel’ achieved by the cinematography. Thanks for the link.
Very happy to see you are a Destroyer fan. I don’t think i’ve seen you post about him before.
The GRRM interview was cool, too.