The Diary of a Teenage Girl – Teaser from Marielle Heller on Vimeo.

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(The book is one of the greatest graphic novels ever made, I loved the play)

(via Lisa Hanawalt)

Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was recovering from its first convulsions. It stared, with a thousand eyes, at the ruins of its ritual enemy, now spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the impacted ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from the sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded the stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept its balance, even as a common insanity, woken by the horror at its feet, surged through its sinews and curdled its brain. The order went out: the body thrashed and twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo, and fled into the hills.

As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed between the car and the sun, throwing its cold shadow over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his tears, and Judd, his eyes narrowed against the sight he feared seeing around the next bend, only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute. A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.

Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance out towards the north-east, he would have seen Popolac’s head, the vast, swarming head of a maddened city, disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched into the hills. He would have known that this territory was beyond his comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this corner of Hell. But he didn’t see the city, and he and Mick’s last turning-point had passed. From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin, they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.

—words: Clive Barker / art: Stephen Fabian

This week on Vorpalizer I wrote about Sam Alden’s webcomic Haunter and George Lucas’s movie series The Star Wars Trilogy. Spectacle and scale are the main concerns.

David Bowie’s been looking back at himself in his music for at least 16 years, but this is the first time he’s doing it as an artist who’s actually, legitimately, honest-to-god old. At a dashing-looking 66, he’s hardly ready for the record books as World’s Most Decrepit Rocker, but in the past you’d get the impression that to Bowie, being “old” simply meant wrestling with the reality of no longer being the sexual provocateur he was in the early ’70s, the art-rock innovator he was in the late ’70s, or the world-bestriding megastar he became in the early ’80s with Let’s Dance. Now, on his new album, The Next Day, it sounds like “old” means “Jesus, I could have died on an operating table.”

I reviewed David Bowie’s new album for BuzzFeed.

I started writing about The NeverEnding Story for Vorpalizer and this weird emotional manifesto came out.

I wrote about Psychic TV and William S. Burroughs’s “Pirate Tape” over at Cool Practice. Lots of adolescent anecdotes in this one.

I also wrote about Sammy Harkham’s horror/fantasy/western comic “Black Death” for Vorpalizer.

I just read the news that Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics since time immemorial, has been diagnosed with lung cancer; this basically just happened, so there’s no prognosis yet.

Kim, you are the fucking best — a true hero to me. I wish like hell I could have an iota of the impact on my art form of choice that you’ve had, yet remain as approachable and articulate as you have. Get well, be well, good luck.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve made my debut at Wired, writing about recent developments in Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham’s Batman Incorporated #8. I tried to place the event in the context of Morrison’s run, and Morrison’s run in the context of the other things going on both with him and with Batman and DC Comics in recent years. Thanks to Laura Hudson for the opportunity.

And at Vorpalizer, I’ve written about Ron Howard’s Willow and the art and comics of Uno Moralez. Running the gamut!

UNNNNNNNNNNF TRENT YOU KNOW JUST WHAT TO SAY TO ME

5. The Ting Tings – “Happy Birthday”

4. Mya – “The Peanut Butter Stomp”

3. Nikki Flores – “The Twirly Whirly”

2. The Postmarks – “Balloons”

1. Dean and Britta – “Let’s Ride”

I’m going to hell when I die.

I’ve been keeping pretty busy these days.

At Cool Practice, I wrote about “Missing You” by John Waite and the kinkiness of crystalline-sheen ’80s pop rock. This is the sound of my soul.

At Vorpalizer, I continued my series of posts on alt-genre webcomics with entries on SuperMutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki and Forming by Jesse Moynihan. I also posted the second in a series on formative fantastic fiction, focusing on Taran Wanderer and the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.

And at Rolling Stone, I updated my list of the Dowager Countess’s best quotes from Downton Abbey Season Three with a few from the season finale.

A while back I wrote a comic called “1995” that an artist working under the name Raymond Suzuhara drew. It is not safe for work. Now it lives at its own tumblr. I hope you like it.

The new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, is up! This time out, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I continue our series on the books’ female characters, focusing on Catelyn Stark and Daenerys Targaryen.

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Yep.

I wrote about the season finale of Downton Abbey for Rolling Stone.

Can’t think of very many things I’ve had more fun writing about than this season of this show. Thanks for reading.

I made a list of the 12 best Dowager Countess quotes from Downton Abbey season three for Rolling Stone. This was a fun piece to put together.

And at MTV Splash Page I wrote some stuff about who’d win in a fight between Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones and a bunch of X-Men characters, now that Peter Dinklage has been cast in the next X-Men movie. It’s every bit as silly as it sounds.

Broken record time: I find comedy series confounding to write about, because for me writing about TV is calculating how details of setting and shooting and performance add up to something, but with comedy you can’t solve the equation because the need for jokes is an undefinable variable. The joke needs must be king and it trumps all the usual concerns, even on series with heavy narrative serialization and a lot of dramatic moments the inclusion of which used to create “very special episodes” but which are now pretty common across the board. (Scrubs, an overlooked single-camera comedy trailblazer, did this in literally every episode.) Girls is basically a dramedy that has more in common with Mad Men than with Arrested Development, but it still throws those confounding curveballs, exaggerating specific aspects of the characters and milieu for comedic effect. (“Specific” is key here, of course — it’s not flat-out ridiculous — but still.) But just because I don’t write about it very often doesn’t mean I don’t like it an awful lot.

Judging from twitter and Google Reader posts I tried not to read for fear of spoilers, this past week’s episode, “Another Man’s Trash,” was something of a breakout for the show, and having seen it it’s easy to see why. For starters, TV nerds no doubt have to appreciate the humor in borrowing a bottle-episode structure but having half the cast stuck in the bottle be Patrick Wilson.

But its real brilliance is in creating suspense based solely on the show’s established story structure. We’ve all seen Girls before, and we know that anytime something’s going well for Hannah, someone says something that destroys the magic and brings it all crashing down — she’s getting along great with a job interviewer until she makes a date-rape joke about him; she’s having the coked-up time of her life with her gay ex until he tells her he fucked her female best friend, etc. So you spend her entire lost-weekend idyll waiting for the other shoe to drop…

…and it legit seems like it won’t! Hannah and her handsome doctor Joshua keep having sex — lots of it, all over his splendid house, driven by frank and honest statements of arousal and desire that took her months to get to with her ex-boyfriend Adam, if she ever really got to them at all. They lounge, they joke around, they sit quietly reading and eating, they tease each other, they go to sleep and wake up and do it all again. For once she seems able to accept that she and a romantic interest (substitute “friend” or “professional peer” and it’d be the same deal, for her) are on a level playing field.

Why? At one point Joshua tells her she’s beautiful, and when he asks her doesn’t she think so?, she replies something like yes, but that’s not the feedback she’s used to getting. That’s the key here: Joshua’s very existence is the new feedback. Physically stunning, smart, successful, kind, wealthy — Hannah’s holding her own with someone who’s all these things. One of the reasons I love Downton Abbey and Mad Men so much is their emphasis on how the emotional feedback people receive from their friends and colleagues shapes who they are able to be and become; this is the best feedback loop Hannah’s had in ages. If you’ve ever had one of these whirlwind weekends (or whenever) where your every waking and sleeping moment is consumed by someone wonderful you’re in the process of discovering and being discovered by, you know exactly how powerful, arousing, fulfilling, transforming that feedback loop can be. And don’t mistake me—it’s not at all a situation where “oh, someone good likes me, now I feel validated as a person.” It’s more like she’s thrown herself into the deep end and realized she could swim like a motherfucker all along.

That’s her undoing, of course. She believes herself to be totally safe, so after her inhibitions are worn down by getting all light-headed and passing out in the shower, she lets loose with a torrent of pure Hannah solipsism for which Joshua is completely unprepared. It’s heartbreaking to see how Hannah’s emotional awareness works — how she’s initially totally clueless that she’s coming on too strong, that she’s treating Joshua like a journal rather than a person with his own emotions and agency, that she’s being enormously condescending and dismissive to his life; but how the very moment she senses the possibility of rejection, she picks up on those cues and attacks them like a shark that smells blood in the water. She’s clueless unless and until she picks up on someone reacting negatively to that cluelessness, at which point she becomes an emotional Sherlock Holmes.

It was very funny, very sexy, very specific, and very sad. We’re lucky to have the show that gave it to us.

I sure love writing about this show, and tonight there was twice as much to write about it. Click for my review at Rolling Stone.