* The new Game of Thrones characters look fucking great, if you’ll pardon my Tyroshi. I’m giving you the ones you really want to see below; many more publicity stills of faces new and old at the link.
* Wow. Michael DeForge’s Rescue Pet is astonishingly troubling.
* “Cartoonist Chris Ware on why other cartoonists fear Clowes”
* Gabrielle Bell is serializing her Kramers Ergot 8 contribution “Cody” on her website. I’m not clipping anything from it — you need to read the whole thing as it unfolds.
* Check out the comic Mark P. Hensel/William Cardini made for Frank Santoro’s comics correspondence course, Moon Queen. You can really see Frank’s fingerprints on this.
* Young altcomix journo of the moment Ao Meng interviews French altcomix maker of the moment Boulet.
* I’m only running the black-and-white version of Jim Rugg’s Sleazy Slice #5 cover here, because the full-color version is a must-see and his site deserves your traffic for showing it to you.
* Nice art by Renee French, and by nice I mean not nice at all.
* I found these early Dave Berg pin-up gag comics pretty sexy. (Via Tom Spurgeon, from whom I got the Rick Trembles link I posted earlier, too.)
* Saving this for later: Rob Clough’s massive TCJ interview with 1-800-MICE cartoonist Matthew Thurber. I think I’ll read this and the Dan Nadel/Marc Bell monstrosity from a while back back-to-back.
* Matthew Perpetua makes the case for Goldfrapp, the most underrated band of the past decade.
* Real Life Horror: A majority of self-described liberals love President Obama’s army of flying killer robots. A majority of self-described liberals are assholes.
* I don’t pretend to understand George Lucas.
* Finally, one last way to feel a little better about your involvement in comics: Donate to Steve Niles’s fundraiser page for Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to help defray the $17,000 judgment against him on Marvel’s behalf.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, comics, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, movies, music, real life, TV