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.

Andrew White and I made a comic about Drake called “Hottest Chick in the Game.” We hope you enjoy it.

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

I listed my 100 favorite albums from 1996-2011 for the People’s List at Pitchfork. The image above is a spoiler.

I’m honored to be moderating the Gilbert Hernandez panel at SPX in Bethesda, Maryland this year. It’s on Saturday, September 15 at 3:30pm. Hope to see you there!

I interviewed Uno Moralez for The Comics Journal. He’s one of my favorite working cartoonists, and this is his first English-language interview.

* The 2012 Ignatz Award nominees have been announced. Insofar as Jaime Hernandez’s work in Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 is recognized adequately, or even at all, this cements the Ignatz as the United States’ best comics awards slate. Psyched to see SuperMutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki get a nod, too.

* Major comics creators’-rights lawsuit news: Tony Moore is seeking co-authorship of The Walking Dead in federal court, referring to his former collaborator Robert Kirkman as “a proud liar and fraudster who freely admits that he has no qualms about misrepresenting material facts in order to consummate business transactions”; and the federal judge providing over the Shuster/DC Superman lawsuit has canceled a coming hearing in order to proceed directly to ruling on the case without first hearing oral arguments.

* Portland-area residents in particular may wish to contribute to the Kickstarter for The Projects, a new model for a comic con based around actually making and displaying work at the show rather than just selling it.

* Obviously I’ve been waist deep in Breaking Bad for weeks now; the better pieces I’ve seen on it include Alyssa Rosenberg’s review of this past week’s episode and essay on the issue of Skyler White, emotional abuse, and culpability, and Maureen Ryan’s hour-long podcast interview with Vince Gilligan, who as always seems like just about the nicest, most unassuming, most candid a showrunner can get.

* This news has been out and about for a while in various forms, but it’s official: Secret Acres will be debuting The Understanding Monster Book One by Theo Ellsworth at this year’s must-attend SPX.

* But did we know that Aidan Koch’s The Blonde Woman would be collected and released in September 2012, or is that new news?

* Alright, a new Cindy & Biscuit strip by my collaborator Dan White!

* One of my favorite music writers on one of my favorite bands: Tom Ewing reviews the Roxy Music Complete Studio Recordings box set. I think it’s just about dead on in every particular: the choice to emphasize and celebrate Ferry right up front, holding up Avalon as at least the equal of even the best of the first five records, rightly locating Manifesto and especially Flesh + Blood as first drafts for the subsequent masterpiece, and especially calling attention to the tracks where the full band “reach full steam.” Seriously, Roxy could really tear the shit out of a song when that was what they were going for — for pure power, on tracks like “Editions of You” or “Mother of Pearl” or “Out of the Blue” or the almighty “Virginia Plain” they could go toe to toe with just about anyone.

* Then, because it’s my birthday or something, Ewing runs down his four favorite tracks (aka the “Mount Rushmore” meme) for Roxy Music, T. Rex, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles.

* Sheesh — this Mark Richardson piece on being terrified out of his wits as a kid by The Elephant Man proves, if there was any doubt, that Mark Richardson is really good at writing about David Lynch. He should seriously consider going full monomania about it.

* Zach Baron’s Grantland piece on Matt Damon’s Bourne trilogy and its Jeremy Renner-starring follow-up The Bourne Legacy is thoroughly fine; this passage is particularly fine.

In The Bourne Identity, director Doug Liman drew on his dad’s experience prosecuting Oliver North in the wake of Iran-Contra to make a film, only one year after 9/11, that is still one of the best and most thoughtful visions of Americans abroad in this century — Damon’s Bourne was a man in a foreign country with a gun in his hand and no idea how it got there. The Robert Ludlum source novels, Gilroy once said, “were about running to airports.” But Liman, with Gilroy’s help, made a movie about lost identity: an action film in which killing is the symptom of the problem, rather than the solution to it.

It’s also worth noting his take on Renner’s performances in Dahmer, The Hurt Locker, and The Avengers, even if you disagree with it. (For what it’s worth, my review of the Matt Damon Bourne movies and the Daniel Craig Bond movies is one of my favorite bits of film writing I ever did.)

* Tom Spurgeon had a big 50th birthday blowout for Stan Lee & Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man the other day; highlights include Spurgeon’s 16-point meditation on Amazing Spider-Man #1-150 and Kiel Phegley on Spider-Man’s cultural ubiquity.

* Captain America by Rick Remender, John Romita Jr., Klaus Janson, and Dean White: a character I like written by a writer I like, pencilled by a penciller I like, inked by an inker I like, and colored by a colorist I like, but man is the plot a departure from the Ed Brubaker material that made the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby character work as well as, if not better than, he’s ever worked before.

* Domitille Collardey’s Wreckhall Abbey is off to a very strong start.

* Kali Ciesemier’s take on Josie Packard for the Damn Fine Coffee Twin Peaks zine is reliably beautiful.

* Why not take a look at a Ross Campbell drawing of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fighting some Mousers?

* Lingerie Witches: some dumb fun smut from Simon Hanselmann.

* I’m glad the video for A$AP Rocky’s “Purple Kisses” came out on the same day I put up that picture of Jonny Negron’s new book.

* Jason Adams reviews David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and sums up Alfred Hitchcock in one gif.

* Finally, we’ve gotten some terrific Destructor fanart from Aviv Iscovitz and Jordan Shiveley. We’re always up for more.

I wrote about “Pay No Mind (Snoozer)” by Beck for Cool Practice, my tumblr about music and coolness. What a scathing song.

The book, not the baby. Thanks, PictureBox!

In Situ
Sophie Yanow, writer/artist
Colosse/Export, 2011
40 pages
$12
Buy it from Colosse

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

This week I interviewed Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris for Rolling Stone. He plays Hank, a character I really love.

When we first met Hank, he came across as an obnoxious blowhard. In this episode, he’s moving into the boss’s office. It took me a while to see it, but Hank’s a good cop.

Yeah, he is. One of the tensions in the show has always been that I think he’s a good cop, Vince [Gilligan] thinks he’s a good cop, yet he obviously hasn’t caught on yet. There’s always this question: “Why doesn’t he know?” I think it’s because it would be ridiculous for him to ever suspect that any of these things led to [starts laughing] Walter White. That would be bad writing. But he’s found everything else out. He found Tuco, and he obviously was right about Gus Fring, which everyone else was wrong about. He’s getting there.

And last week I interviewed Laura Fraser, who plays the new character Lydia Rodarte-Quayle. She’s a pretty big new ingredient for the show to be adding this late in the cook, as it were, and I’m impressed by how well it’s working.

The audience had to hit the ground running with Lydia, too. We really had no chance to get to know her under normal circumstances, since right away she’s in such dire straits. That has to create a lot of pressure on you to win the audience over.

One relief was that I didn’t have to worry about making her likeable. She’s so clever and bright, and yet so odd. I liked her, but sometimes she can be such an asshole that she just makes me laugh to play her, even when I’m about to die. It’s a trip.

Page 15 of “Destructor Meets the Cats” has been posted.

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

For my review of tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, please visit Rolling Stone.

I can’t remember the last time I was this badly upset by a television show.

still funny to me; thanks, George R.R. Martin

In the diminishing wake of Dan Nadel’s comments about the SP7 anthology and the use of Kickstarter for comics projects, Tom Spurgeon is asking people to share their thoughts about crowdfunded comics. Here are mine.

I might be forgetting something, but I’m pretty sure I’ve donated to three comics-related crowdfunding campaigns. I gave to the Ulule campaing for Leah Wishnia’s Happiness #2 anthology, the Indiegogo campaign for Sparkplug Comic Books following the death of its founder Dylan Williams, and the Kickstarter campaign for Dave Kiersh’s After School Special graphic novel.

Each project had something going for it beyond “I’d like to read this comic.” In the case of Sparkplug, I felt awful about Dylan’s passing, particularly as it affected my friend and incoming Sparkplug co-publisher Tom Neely, and wanted to do something to help. In Kiersh’s case, I’m not just a big fan of his comics, I’m something of an evangelist about them — they just seem like something a lot of people would be over the moon for if they saw them, so I wanted to do my part to help that happen. Happiness is the one project of the three I had the least of a brief with prior to contributing — in fact I actually flipped through the anthology at BCGF last year but passed on buying it — but it seemed important to me that the young cartoonists in that anthology, many of whom I hadn’t seen or heard of before, have an outlet. I considered that one an investment in comics’ infrastructure.

But what it came down to in all three cases was that I believed that these were comics that deserved to be published, but wouldn’t be in any other way. That’s why this Twin Peaks fanzine project has become my Kickstarter Kronstadt.

It’s not that I dislike the idea of the zine. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the same Twin Peaks zine I inquired about contributing to before finding out it already had a set contributor list. I love Twin Peaks, and I enjoy fanzines that pay tribute to stuff I love. Everyone involved seems nobly intentioned, including the editor, Andrea Kalfas, who’s never done this sort of thing before. I’m sure it will be gorgeous, too. So that’s not the problem.

The problem is, well, why on earth do you need to Kickstart a project in which 60 illustrators who (judging from the samples) draw in lush, inviting, commercial-friendly styles make pin-ups from someone else’s intellectual property, drawn from a show that’s so hugely popular with the project’s target audience that it could make its money back and then some during the first hour of SPX without breaking a sweat? If the project’s publisher had asked its 60 contributors to paypal her twelve bucks, that would have covered the $700 goal of the kickstarter right there. Indeed the modest amount being requested makes it more baffling, not less, since it’s undeniable that the zine could have been independently funded with a modicum of self-sacrifice, which again would no doubt be handsomely rewarded the moment the book went on sale. Instead, what we have is a project that’s made three times its goal amount with 18 days to go.

I’m always happy to see artists make a little scratch and don’t begrudge that — in this country, the deck is so stacked against creative-field freelancers in terms of health insurance alone that anything that mitigates against that is worth celebrating. But I think that in some cases, such as when you and your friends think (correctly!) that it’d be neat to draw a bunch of spooky sexy fanart* for one of the most influential television shows of all time, I’d be happier to see this treated as the indulgence it is, rather than an act deserving the recompense of charity.

* I suspect that that is indeed what will comprise the bulk of the book — pretty drawings of the girls and women, square-jawed drawings of Coop, spooky drawings of the Black Lodge and its denizens — and that a more thoroughgoing interrogation of Lynch and Frost’s multifaceted and challenging work will not be forthcoming. I obviously could be wrong, and hope I am.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, the “Kronstadt” thing is hyperbole. I wrote that headline because I love alliteration and I thought the phrase “Kickstarter Kronstadt” was funny and thought people would think it was funny too and maybe read the post because of it. I definitely deserve to be dinged for that if you’re so inclined. I haven’t soured on Kickstarter/crowdfunding in general like the term implies, nor do I intend to make a grand sweeping statement about anything other than this specific project. What I meant by it was that when Dan wrote his anti-SP7 thing the other week and I responded to it, my assumption was that the only crowdfunding campaigns I would have a problem with were a) campaigns for stuff I dislike, in which case the problem’s just an aesthetic one and I’d simply not give to it; b) campaigns that seem hinky in some way, like asking for waaaaay more money than seems reasonable; c) campaigns by successful, wealthy artists with established inroads to traditional publishing, or by successful traditional publishers themselves. It had never occurred to me before now that there could be a campaign run by working artists asking for a reasonable amount of money to fund a book I’d like to read that wasn’t an obvious boondoggle but that I would still have a problem with, for whatever reason. This specific project made me realize that such a phenomenon was possible.