* There’s a good chance that the excellent Batman #682, which runs through about two-thirds of Batman’s career in the space of 22 story pages, will get overlooked because DC created the impression that Grant Morrison’s Batman run ended with last week’s (!) #681. Douglas Wolk annotates the issue so that maybe that won’t happen.

* I saw this Steven Grant essay about how bad comics stunk in 2008 linked here and there, and I’m sorry but it just seems patently ridiculous to me. Aside from his cockamamie Comic Foundry-style conflation of celebrity with artistic success, anyone who argues that only two Best Of-worthy comics were made in 2008 simply either was not paying attention or has horrible taste.

* Viggo Mortensen talks to AICN about possibly being involved with The Hobbit 2: Imladris Boogaloo or whatever it’s going to be called, revealing the existence of a neat-sounding outtake from the original LotR films that showed Aragorn and Arwen back when they first met. (Via TORN.)

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on season five of The Wire (SPOILERS AHOY):

I thought [the notion that The Wire avoided agitprop] was less true in Season Five, when a clear ideology did emerge, but it wasn’t left or right. The ideology was nihilism. Now, nihilism was always at work in The Wire, but at the end, I felt like it just became too much. It felt like a desire to show futility of systems became the author of plot, not character. I thought that the press angle was poorly done–and saying “Yeah well it’s reporters who are objecting” is a weak, ad-hominem defense.

I thought the serial killer turn–particularly the way Freeman embraced it–was hastily executed. I most disliked the ease with which Marlo took over the city’s drug trade. I even hated the manner of Omar’s death–not that he was killed by Kinard, but that he was basically brought back into the plot, simply to be killed. He really served no major plot point. It all felt deeply cynical.

Oh, MAN, is all that refreshing to hear from somebody else, particularly because my past attempts to point out very specific plot-based flaws in the show, including three of the ones Coates notes, were greeted with sneering derision. As I’ve said before, it’s no coincidence that most of the writing about The Wire you see online these days comes from political bloggers, so it’s nice to see one–a liberal who grew up in inner-city Baltimore, no less–basically tell me I’m not crazy. However, I do disagree with Coates’s contention that the show, and season five specifically, was nihilistic. Nihilists believe in nothing, but it seems pretty clear that David Simon believes in David Simon, and in David Simon-esque figures generally.

* Finally, rest in peace, Paul Benedict. You were just as God made you, sir.

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