* Borders is bankrupt. That’s pretty bad news for a lot of publishers.

* I’ll tell you what: If Marvel’s upcoming mega-event Fear Itself really does turn out to be about various heroes and villains battling for control of a bunch of magic Thor warhammers, I am on board. Giant muscly dudes smacking each other in the head with hammers is pretty much why I read superhero comics.

* Gabrielle Bell’s comics have really been clicking with me hard lately.

* I bought this t-shirt.

* I quite liked my friend TJ Dietsch’s review of Brian K. Vaugahn and Tony Harris’s recently completed series Ex Machina. TJ had many of the same problems I did with the ending; he makes a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that linkage between the separate ways in which both Vaughan and Harris seemed to run out of steam toward the end; and he uses it as a springboard for musing a bit on the different ways we react to a disappointing ending for a work of long-form fiction in terms of how we might or might not revisit that work. That’s something I think fans of some of the past decade’s great television shows in particular have probably thought a lot about, with the endings of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica all giving varying segments of those shows’ audiences pause.

* Also relevant to my interests: Tom Spurgeon reviews a pair of recent Dark Horse Conan collections, the animating idea of the critique being that character growth is bad for a character of this kind. Food for thought.

Tags: Carnival of souls, comics, links, t-shirts

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