* I’m very excited to direct you to my interview with Tom Neely about his new graphic novel The Wolf, which includes a selection of preview pages. The book is Tom’s best, and one of the best of the year.
* When was the last time you were truly amazed by an artist you’d just seen for the first time? For me it was my discovery via Monster Brains of Mat Brown. This stuff is incredible — like the Sistine Chapel painted by an Alien facehugger attached to Geof Darrow. Click through to see it at full size.
I mean, seriously.
* Whoa: Dave Kiersh has an entire blog dedicated to posting his early minicomics in their entirety. My favorites so far are 1998-99’s Quaaludes, 1999’s Young Adult, and 2003’s Amazons, none of which I’ve seen before despite being a fairly dedicated Dave K. fan. It’s amazing to think he hit his teenage-heartbreak sweet spot when he pretty much was a teenager.
* Mmmm, hot licks from Holy Terror by Frank Miller.
* George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire occupies four of the top ten New York Times paperback best sellers right now, including #1. Don’t click the list unless you want the shit spoiled out of books three and four, though.
* Is it just me, or are the Harvey Award nominees better than the Eisner Award nominees this year? Like, insofar as they actually nominated Acme Novelty Library #20 and Love & Rockets: New Stories #3?
* Gabrielle Bell will be posting a diary comic every day for the month of July. Good news for people who like to see new Bell.
* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley takes a close look at the overabundance of information in the truly horrifying torture sequence from Brian Chippendale’s Ninja. I’d forgotten how difficult that page was to take.
* I’m actually not nuts about the posts in practice — they feel a bit underbaked, a bit too dependent on the reader sharing certain assumptions about and impressions of any given song — but in theory, the music blog One Week One Band spending seven days talking about David Bowie’s 1990s work (with writer Ian McDuffie) is an exciting prospect to me, since that’s the first David Bowie I knew. Like Tori Amos, Aphex Twin, Pantera, Pink Floyd, Marilyn Manson, Gary Numan, and Joy Division, I got into David Bowie because Trent Reznor was into David Bowie. Earthling was my first Bowie record, and it’s still one of my favorites. It’s so loud!
* Better in practice is Matt Zoller Seitz’s list of The 10 Loudest Movies Ever!! It’s basically seven films that are varying degrees of wonderful and then three piles of shit.
* Uno Moralez’s random
image/gif gallery posts are really the best bang for your internet buck. Please click the link — if you haven’t seen one of these things, you can’t understand.
* This is almost anticlimactic after the earlier Mat Brown link, but Monster Brains’ Charles James Folkard gallery is lovely as well. Aeron Alfrey’s really been on a hot streak at that site lately.
* Tom Brevoort gives good interview.
Nostalgia is powerful and potent, and it’s one of the things, particularly for the longtime audience, that makes things go. If you can drop in a reference or do a twist or bounce some story point off a comic we fondly remember, we as an audience like it. It works for us. It rewards the investment in the material and the time spent, and it creates a larger sense of involvement than is typically possible in a single TV show or a movie or a novel. It’s one of the things that comics can do with their serial storytelling style that many other forms of entertainment can’t. The danger there is that if you rely on it too much, you’re telling stories only for people who have been reading for 30 years or who are willing to put in the hard work to understand whatever it is you’re talking about – the particular language you’re speaking. That’s the balancing act.
* It’s hard out here for a cartoonist: Theo Ellsworth edition.
* Best of luck to my old Wizard coworker Rick Marshall as he departs MTV’s Splash Page blog.
* Film and culture historian Robert Sklar has died, rather tragically. A part of me will always be a Film Studies student, and that part is very saddened by this.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, books, Carnival of souls, comics, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, horror, links
The Fifth Element is a pile of shit? I don’t think we can be internet friends anymore.
Someone who’d truly internalized the message that Love Is The Fifth Element wouldn’t say something like that, Coop.