* Here’s a better look at Chris Ware’s elaborate packaging for Building Stories, via Chris Mautner, who helpfully contextualizes it with Jordan Crane’s NON #5 and Closed Caption Comics’ CCC #9.5. Also, they got J.J. Abrams to blurb it?!
* Dan Harmon, the mercurial creator and showrunner of the bizarre, hall-of-self-referencing-mirrors sitcom Community, has been fired from the show. With all my immersion in comics I thought of this in creators’-rights terms — how what’s now considered an outrage among fans of a show is frequently applauded by fans of comics (or comics characters, at least). The best thing I read about it is Maureen Ryan’s thoughtful essay on Harmon, Community, and learning to appreciate difficult people who don’t appreciate you back. I thought about that in comics terms, too.
* This piece by the New York Review of Books’ Elaine Blair on Lena Dunham’s increasingly terrific HBO show Girls is the best I’ve read so far due in large part to its focus on the show’s sex scenes. Girls is a sex comedy first and foremost, and they probably ought to have marketed that way rather than allowing it to become a referendum on what you think about wealthy artsy Brooklynites. The sex stuff is great, by the way — graphic and excruciating, like a ’90s alternative comic.
* If you like what Matt Wiegle’s doing Destructor, then you should be reading what he’s doing on Road of Knives.
* New Jonny Negron comic over at Vice. That opening image has me pining for autumn.
* The best thing about linking to Uno Moralez’s inimitable image/gif galleries is revisiting them to select representative images to post along with the link.
* Wow, Tom Spurgeon is right: Bill Everett’s imagery could be unsettling and odd. Click that link and see if you don’t come away with a whole new appreciation for Everett.
* Ross Campbell draws a worse-for-wear Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. I know Ross disliked the movie, and I expect it’s because he suspects, correctly, that she’ll never look like this at any point during the movie series.
* I post a lot of sessy art, but this piece called “Haircut” by Sam Bosma is, I think, the sessiest I’ve posted in a long time.
* The Mindless Ones on last week’s Mad Men. Ginsberg über alles, Don.
* Every once in a while it pays to consider the remarkable progress that’s been made for LGBT equality in such a short period of time, and as that Ta-Nehisi Coates post points out it’s as much to do with giving people shit for being bigots and hoping they’ll want not to be given shit anymore as anything else.
Tags: Carnival of souls, comics, links, movies, real life, TV