* Now’s as good at time as any to say I’ll be covering Homeland Season Two for Rolling Stone, I guess. That also makes it a pretty good time to watch Season One, for the very first time.

* Homeland is, in its way, part of a genre that’s very near to my heart: haunted suburbia. Alyssa Rosenberg once made this exact point about the show, in fact. The pilot episode’s winter-gray palette of cloudy skies, streets lined by leafless trees, dingy snow on asphalt driveways, people looking out windows into backyards and so on was all awfully familiar to me, and I’m the sort of person who…I don’t know, feels there’s probably something awful beneath the familiar. In the Washington suburbs that’s literally true, of course, since decisions to kill people are made in homes and offices like these all the time. I’m happy to see a place like that played as a source of dread.

* What a terrific germinative moment for this series: A condemned man who’s killed hundreds of people whispering a pivotal, lifechanging, potentially catastrophic phrase into the ear of his wild-eyed nemesis as she’s forcibly whisked away. We don’t hear what he said. We can only take her word for it. It turns out that she was right, but by hiding the actual sound of his voice from us the show lets us know that she will always be second-guessing herself, always have that wide-eyed look of “Did I just hear what I think I heard?”

* Another great nightmare moment: Carrie in the briefing room, fear creeping across her face while everyone celebrates. To be Cassandra, to be Kevin McCarthy in in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that’s bad juju.

* The final moment that sold me: Sergeant Brody crying after he finishes beating his partner to death. The worst thing about torture is the breaking of people, and even if Brody’s al-Qaeda brainwashers were able to put him back together in a new and terrible shape, he’s still broken. I like that the show allowed for that moment, showing he’s not the smirking villain he appears prepared to become as he stares at the Capitol dome in the distance — he’s a man who just did the worst possible thing the old version of him could ever imagine doing, and there’s enough of the old version of him left for the new version to be sick about it. (Which is still the case as he throws up while his plane prepares to land in the States, come to think of it.) Actor Damian Lewis has the look of a character in a just-okay network cop show, and I’ll fully cop to responding to actors on a purely surface level first and foremost, so he had the most work to do of anyone on the show to get me invested. He certainly did in that scene.

* The funny thing is that even aside from my own aesthetic biases, it seemed like he’d have the toughest role of anyone in the cast regardless. Since it appeared as though the show would be about figuring out whether or not he’s a double agent, I figured that I’d spend an entire season poring over this guy’s every facial expression, every movement, every blink. Instead the show does the big reveal almost immediately. That really surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Resting the show on an out-and-out mystery puts too much pressure on that mystery to deliver its resolution and then go no further. They’ve got a lot more flexibility with Brody’s true nature out in the open (for us at least). And this is not to say that Brody might not harbor some doubts about his mission, which will help the character maintain some air of uncertainty.

* This is going to sound weird, but was I the only one who caught a Stephen King vibe from this? In Brody I saw echoes of that manchurian-candidate Dead Zone character; in the treatment of the ‘burbs I saw Derry and Jerusalem’s Lot and any other place pervaded by evil and reluctantly, frantically protected by the one person who can see the forest for the trees.

* Very, very excited to be watching a Great TV Drama with a female antihero protagonist. Excited it’s Claire Danes, too, whose face seems like it was carved out of marble to play exactly this kind of high-stakes, high-strung operative at the end of her rope.

* I’m also excited to be watching a war-on-terror show that, despite being more explicitly about the war on terror than any other, seems at least somewhat determined to play that conflict as a nebulous and shadowy one, in which secret societies meet in secret rooms to determine the fate of millions, on either side. Everyone’s so busy refining genre art down into mere allegory that they forget you can also inflate allegory into genre art.

The new episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! It’s the first in what sure looks like it’s going to be a hella long series of discussions about the women of Westeros, starting with Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister. Enjoy!

I wrote a graphic novel called Cage Variations that Matt Rota drew. Today the first part was posted at Study Group Comics. I hope you enjoy it.

For my review of last night’s Breaking Bad finale, please visit Rolling Stone. Terrific episode.

For reasons unclear even to me, I have contributed two more guest strips to Stoner Alien. You’ll be able to find all my contributions by clicking here.

Over at Rolling Stone, I updated my list of Walter White’s worst moments — now including Season Five — in anticipation of tonight’s Breaking Bad half-season finale.

I’ve contributed another guest strip to Stoner Alien; this one is a hard-hitting, topical, political work.

Page 17 of “Destructor Meets the Cats” has been posted.

You can read the whole story so far on one continuously scrolling page by clicking here.

I contributed a guest strip to Stoner Alien, a new webcomic made by an anonymous person who clearly knows what they’re doing but chooses to ignore this knowledge for fun. I hope you like it.

Writing for NBC News’ The Grio, Kyle Harvey takes maybe the most in-depth approach to me and Andrew White’s Drake comic “Hottest Chick in the Game” to date. Check it out.

A while back, Isaac Moylan and I made a comic called “The Side Effects of the Cocaine”: the true story of the cocaine psychosis that led David Bowie to the creation of his Thin White Duke persona from 1975-1976. The comic now lives at its own tumblr. I hope you enjoy it.

If anyone out there is interested in drawing a very short, very straightforward, slightly smutty Daniel Clowes pastiche for me, please let me know. Thank you!

The Huffington Post’s Priscilla Frank interviewed me and Andrew White about our Drake comic, “Hottest Chick in the Game.” Well, how about that!

For my review of last night’s Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone. I was, like, oddly unfazed by this one?

Lahav Harkov at the Jerusalem Post and codacarolla at Metafilter enjoyed “Hottest Chick in the Game” and thought their readers might too. I hope they were right!

Art Levy at Prefix and Margaret Eby at the Forward enjoyed Hottest Chick in the Game and said so publicly, for which I am grateful.

Also, Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing linked to my interview with Uno Moralez at The Comics Journal. The more people who see Moralez’s work, the better.

Jenny Nelson at the A.V. Club, Matthew Perpetua at Buzzfeed, Chris Coplan at Consequence of Sound, B. Michael Payne, Maré Odomo, a solid 30, 35% of the people on this Kanye West message board thread, and, uh, IlluminatiWatcher are saying nice things about “Hottest Chick in the Game”.

And it looks like I somehow missed linking to the kind words that Joe “Jog” McCulloch had for “The Cockroach,” me and William Cardini’s contribution to Thickness #3, in his Comic Books Are Burning in Hell podcast with Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca, and Chris Mautner.

Page 16 of “Destructor Meets the Cats” has been posted.

You can read the whole story so far on one continuously scrolling page by clicking here.

I interviewed Jesse Plemons, who currently plays Todd on Breaking Bad and previously played Landry on Friday Night Lights, for Rolling Stone. I thought this was an eye-opening one — Plemons said at least two things about Todd that I hadn’t considered before but which made the character click for me in a new way, while his observation that there seems to be a big new wave of people watching Friday Night Lights for the first time right now (which would include me, if I ever get around to watching the two discs I’ve had out from Netflix since god knows when) confirmed something I’d been noticing, too. I think what has happened is that people have now had the time watch their way through the big HBO and AMC dramas and are looking for what to watch next, and FNL is right at the top of that “what to watch next” list.