* The first annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, or C2E2, was held this past weekend. Apparently attendance was unexpectedly light, and sales were subsequently spotty, but beyond that the show appears quite well received.

* Regarding the attendance figures, I’ll say this: 1) I figure San Diego casts a long shadow over the other big shows. Given several years of widely derided Chicago cons, a new con in Chicago will probably have to wait a while before attracting some of what could be seen as its natural constituency back from Southern California.

* 2) The Con War storyline may be Reed’s best friend, in that it’s difficult to look worse than Wizard tends to. Simply releasing an honest attendance figure already puts them a step ahead of the game, and I figure there’ll be plenty of “oh man this is so much better than Rosemont” buzz going around the city by this time next year.

* Beyond that, as Tom Spurgeon notes, it obviously crushed Wizard’s concurrent Anaheim show in terms of fan and media buzz. But that’s to be expected given the near-total lack of industry support for Wizard’s shows following Gareb Shamus’s decision to pit his Big Apple show head to head against Reed’s New York Comic Con, and the much-rumored behind-the-scenes antics that followed that decision. Without the publishers playing ball, there’s nothing to buzz about, after all.

* Beyond Heidi and Tom’s aforelinked ruminations, my colleagues at Robot 6 have posted three catch-all round-up posts for Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.

* Announcements that caught my eye: Steve Rogers: Super-Soldier by Ed Brubaker and Dale Eaglesham; a street-level Marvel crossover miniseries called Shadowland; more Ultimate [Cryptic Noun] minis by Brian Michael Bendis; Powers going (arrrrgh) bimonthly; Jonathan Hickman saying that Secret Warriors has a natural end-point coming up before issue #30, making it almost a manga-model run; Casanova moving from Image to Marvel/Icon with new colors; maybe the strangest-sounding X-Men line relaunch ever.

* Ah, I thought I remembered Frank Miller saying Batman was out of his anti-terrorist graphic novel, but that the book itself was going ahead without Batman anyway–in fact, I thought that when he said at MoCCA that he wasn’t doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore, he meant he was abandoning the whole idea. But it sounds like he’s not, and like Xerxes, the 300 prequel, is proceeding apace. Good news.

* Now that I’m finally allowing myself to follow news about the production of A Game of Thrones on HBO, I’m pretty surprised to discover that one of the two female leads has been recast following the completion of the pilot, while the other is the subject of persistent recasting rumors herself. Now, shit happens, even on great fantasy projects–Peter Jackson recast Aragorn after shooting started, after all. And supposedly HBO suits are still making all the right noises about the pilot being good. But it’s weird.

* Hope Larson’s adapting A Wrinkle in Time! That’s a good match.

* I’m glad to see Doctor Strange superfan NeilAlien is on my side re: the dialogue in Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man: Fever #1.

* John Allison does the ’80s X-Ladies.

* John Cassaday drawing Superman covers? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Johnny Ryan gets darker and darker, if that’s possible. It’s like Prison Pit is infecting his strip work.

* Speaking of dark, Renee fucking French.

* The comics Dave Kiersh has been posting on the New Bodega blog over the past week or so are like the perfect cross between his old, wistful stuff and his more recent teenspolitation-type things.

* Wow, that’s a beautiful (and ominous!) Batman & Robin #12 variant cover by Andy Clarke.

* It’s weird that cryptozoology expert Loren Coleman reprinted this whole article on his own site–slightly less weird than the time he heavily implied that the reason the Destination Truth guy wasn’t gonna do as many cryptozoology episodes of his series was so he could be a sex tourist in Asia, but still weird–but please don’t let that put you off this very cool piece on, among other things, how escaped snakes and crocodiles from medieval menageries helped give rise to reports of dragons in England. It gets a little wild and wooly after that part, but the material on actual animals is delightful.

* See if you can guess the plot point mentioned in Ed Gonzalez’s review of Tom Six’s The Human Centipede that made me decide that no, I won’t be seeing this movie.

* The video for “Drunk Girls” by LCD Soundsytem looks like it was pulled from the Joker’s Director’s Series DVD. I feel like this is what unlucky henchmen have to deal with all the time. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Finally, on Saturday the Missus and I went to see Eric Whitacre conduct a program of his work at Carnegie Hall. Christ, what beautiful music. He word-premiered a piece that moved me to tears based on its sheer loveliness alone; how often can you say that?

* Sean on Dead Tree alert: I have a piece on Grant Morrison’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne in the new issue of Maxim, featuring a lovely young lady with brown hair whose name eludes me on the cover. It’s on page 34, I think. Woo!

* Speaking of Morrison, here he is being interviewed by Comics Alliance, io9, and MTV Splash Page, all on the topic of Batman. If I were the assistant principal at time-displaced Tom Spurgeon’s middle school I would make him copy all these by hand for detention. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* They are softening a bit about releasing a Nightbreed director’s cut on DVD. Just a bit, though. Apparently the names being collected by Barker’s official fan site are having some effect, so if you think you’d buy a copy and you haven’t done so already, please email them with an intelligently written message of support. It’ll help!

* Diamond and the comics retailers it distributes comics to are talking about moving new comics day to Tuesday, bringing it in line with music, movies, and books. How about just getting in step with every single other form of media and not shipping everything a day late when there was a holiday the week before? That is the romper room-est thing about this romper-room industry.

* Ed Brubaker’s writing another Captain America spinoff miniseries. Fine with me!

* Gene Philips has me ever-so-slightly reconsidering my position on Desmond from Lost.

* Oh man, Virgil Partch. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Yesterday I finished A Feast for Crows, the fourth and at this point latest book in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, which is being adapted on HBO as A Game of Thrones. Holy shit, you guys, these books. Anyway, I decided to put aside the prospect of hunting down and reading the three prequel novella’s he’s written and just dive right into the Song of Ice and Fire sections of the internet. This means I finally got to read his story about Jaime Lannister, aka the Kingslayer, fighting Cthulhu. Good golly miss molly. WARNING: The Ice and Fire-verse characters in the story are situated in-continuity, so the story’s spoilery for all the way up through the third book in the series or so. That said, it’s also awesome.

* Thom Yorke covering “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division! This had me so excited that by the time the main keyboard melody kicked in I was laughing out loud. Had I been there I would have totally and completely misplaced my shit.

* The Diary of a Teenage Girl: The Play is extending its run through May 1st. If you live in or near the city you should see it.

* Brian Chippendale on Captain America and the teabaggers. ‘Nuff said, to coin a phrase.

* My buddy Rickey Purdin went to MoCCA and all he got was like a million comics.

* Tom Spurgeon on Todd Hignite & Jordan Crane on Jaime Hernandez.

* Gorgeous retro-paperback comic cover designs from Fonografiks.

* I love that A Game of Thrones has a “language creator” on staff.

* Oh yeah, had I not mentioned Spinoff Online?

* Lost tonight! Give last week’s Lost thoughts one more once-over, then come by later for this week’s discussion!

I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been as shocked by a book as I was by what I read in book three of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Storm of Swords, last night. Maybe by the end of part two of Nineteen Eighty-Four, possibly by “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” in Watchmen, but I’m not sure. Seriously, I was so stunned that even though it was way past my bed time, I decided I had to keep plowing through the book to get to the next section that dealt with that segment of the storyline–but then stopped when I realized I wasn’t even actually reading the chapters, just letting the words pass through my eyes until I got where I wanted to get to. I had to put the book down. Then I had a hard time sleeping, I was so flabbergasted. I mean, for pete’s sake, I’m up at 7:16am on a Saturday blogging about it. Wow. Folks, you need to read this series. How I’m going to be able to wait until 2025 or whenever Martin will finish the final book is completely beyond me.

(Just a request for commenters who’ve read books three and four in their entirety: Please don’t hint at any coming developments for me! I want to go in as blithely unsuspecting as I was here. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” is acceptable.)

Over the past week and a half or so I’ve been reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, prompted equally by HBO’s greenlighting of a series based on the books and by all the enthusiastic comments about them here on the blog. I’m done with A Game of Thrones (the first volume, which lends its name to the HBO series) and about a third of the way into book two, A Clash of Kings. There’s a little scene in the latter I just loved, and it gives me a chance to talk about a bunch of things I’m really enjoying about the series. SPOILER WARNING duly issued, though I don’t give away a whole lot of potentially enjoyment-lessening stuff, I don’t think.

Anyway, way down South in the capital city of King’s Landing, the book’s anti-hero, an aristocratic little person named Tyrion Lannister who is currently helping to run the kingdom, has his hands full. In addition to helping gird his war-torn kingdom against several major pretenders to the throne and their armies, he’s also navigating the treacherous, occasionally murderous politics of the high-ranking officials within the city itself. He’s got a secret girlfriend, he’s trying to solve a murder mystery for which he himself was once framed, his love-hate relationship with his sister the Queen could go permanently sour at any point, the peasants are revolting (rimshot!), and so on and so forth. For these reasons, and because the messenger in question is a right dickhead, he blows off an emissary from the Wall that guards the farthest border of the kingdom hundreds of miles to the North, and decides to see the severed hand the man has brought along with him (for reasons Tyrion doesn’t even bother to learn) another day. Maybe.

What we know and Tyrion doesn’t is that the last time we saw the severed hand, it was still moving of its own accord. And shortly before that, it was attached to a dead man, who’d risen in the middle of the night to slaughter those he once called his brothers in the Night’s Watch along the Wall.

What makes this such an evocative, powerful little moment? Quite a few things. For starters, the fantasy element in these nominally fantasy books has been minimal. In A Game of Thrones, it’s present in the prologue, then doesn’t reappear until the final few chapters. But that prologue is our first glimpse of the Others (!), a supernatural menace lurking in the wilderness beyond the Wall that turn their victims into undead soldiers for their cause, and so on and so forth. Kind of a Tombs of the Blind Dead deal, if you will. Since this is the very first chapter in a proposed seven-book series, we can assume (and indeed, only 1 1/3 books into the series, that’s all I myself can do) that this will be the crux of the whole affair. But when tipped off to this potentially apocalyptic development, Tyrion Lannister shrugs it off without even realizing the import of what he’s heard. I love the idea of the world’s most important piece of information being lost in the shuffle. It’s like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only if the Ark was secretly multiplying and readying the destruction of civilization there in that warehouse.

So that’s the main thing I dig about it so much. But it also speaks to some of the books’ unique strengths. For example, so much of what happens in them hinges on the personal relationships between the characters, and the way old grudges or old friendships cloud judgement and lead to poor decisions. In this case, the Night’s Watch sent as messenger Ser Alliser Thorne, a man Tyrion had come to dislike during his own visit to the Wall months ago. Tyrion has no problem letting the asshole cool his jets for a few days — the more insulted he gets by the delay, the better, in fact. This despite the fact that Tyrion has been shown to be not just one of the shrewdest characters in the book, but also, despite the crimes of his loathsome family, one of the fairest and most interested in administering justice and preserving the kingdom and its people. What’s more, during his visit to the Wall he took a genuine interest in the fate of the Night’s Watch and promised he’d do what he could to persuade his family to support their mission. But even so, he still can’t help but give the brush-off to a dude who picked on him — and who could blame him?

Another strength: Martin doesn’t hesitate to show that even when a decision is made wisely and justly, with good intentions, and even with good results, that doesn’t mean it can’t still be a disaster in some unforeseen fashion. In this case, it really was a good thing for the head of the Night’s Watch, the Old Bear, to send Ser Alliser away. The guy was a sadistic tool, and in his position as a sort of drill sergeant for new recruits he was much better at bullying his chargers and setting up potentially fatal conflicts between them than he was at actually training them to fight. By sending Thorne on his way, the Old Bear instantly improved the quality of the training the Watch’s desperately needed recruits would receive and punished a creep for his abusive ways. It just happened to backfire in that he didn’t realize Tyrion would be the man to receive the message.

On a structural level, it’s also just a hoot to see one of the book’s many separate storylines poke its head into another. The goings-on at the Wall tied tightly to the main storyline early in book one, with Jon Snow, a member of main character Eddard Stark’s extended family, going to the Wall to join the Watch and Tyrion coming along to pay it a visit. But since then it’s been off on its own almost entirely, with the intrigue and infighting over the kingship and its attendant positions taking precedence. Heck, elsewhere there’s a storyline taking place far outside the kingdom that has yet to tie directly into the main storyline at all, unless you count the decision to dispatch an assassin in the latter bearing fruit in the former, which I don’t since there’s no character overlap. In fact, I read that that storyline won awards on its own as a separate novella — and you really could excise those chapters and have a standalone book if you wanted to. I admire the patience involved, and Martin’s ability to invest his many separate strands with more or less equal pull.

Finally, how creepy is the image of a severed, rotting hand flexing and clutching all on its own as a desperate messenger travels hundreds of miles to a besieged city in a vain attempt to warn its inhabitants that soon such hands could be around their collective throat?

In short, these books are engrossing as all get-out. I’m glad I’m reading them and would recommend you do the same.

* Recently on Robot 6: Lots of Avengers news, to match lots of Avengers news elsewhere. That is a lot of Avengers product. If I were Tom Spurgeon I’d now deliver a funny “whodathunkit” gag about the Avengers and Green Lantern being the biggest franchises in comics.

* Rob Bricken hoists plagiarist Nick Simmons with his own petard. If you read any single post about this whole debacle, make it that one. But if you want, you can throw in Tom Spurgeon’s depressing analysis of the moral relativism of many young artists and fans commenting on the matter.

* Oh God! Oh Christ! Oh Jesus Christ! A Muppet Wicker Man! The ending, as you’d expect, is a killer.

* I always enjoy Chris Butcher’s Previews liveblogging: Part One and Part Two, for your pleasure.

* HBO has officially greenlit A Game of Thrones Season One. I’m looking forward to it, even though I don’t have HBO.

* Just a reminder: I typically have my weekly Lost thoughts post up by, oh, 11:30pm Eastern time at the absolute latest, frequently way before then. (I tend to watch it starting at 10 rather than 9, hence the delay.) I’ve really enjoyed the comment-thread discussions lately, and the more the merrier.

* Amy Sedaris and George Takei are among the voice actors in the amazing pilot for Neon Knome, Paper Rad/Cold Heat impresario Ben Jones’s Adult Swim series-in-waiting. But it will never end up on the air for you to abuse Ambien to unless you vote for it in this contest. Team Comics already pissed away a decade’s worth of increased clout by failing to get Michael Kupperman’s Snake ‘n’ Bacon over; let’s not let this happen again.

* More Destructor fan art over at We Are The LAW, this time from the great Chris Ward. Look for a tease of a future Destructor storyline in the comments!

* Looks like Zak Smith/Sabbath’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars is going to be regular reading for me: Dig this entry on a creation of his called the Vomiter, which is basically a postapocalypitcally infected human who pukes a creature selected from the monster section of the guidebook with a roll of the dice out of an internal dimensional vortex. Damn.

* Todd VanDerWerff may well be the only Lost critic worth reading. It’s delightful watching him think about Jack, even as someone who (unlike VanDerWerff and about 90% of the show’s audience) has never not liked the character.

* Speaking of Lost, things are cooking with gas in the comment thread for this week’s post on the show, so be sure to chime in if you’re interested.

* Speaking of lotsa interesting comment-thread fodder, many smart people have chimed in about George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones books, in such a way as to intrigue me, even if I can immediately grok Tom Spurgeon’s reservations about them.

* ADDTF fave Ross Campbell is doing a new superhero book from SLG called Shadoweyes, but because it’s a Ross Campbell comic, it starts with two gothy girls lying around on a bed and eating vegan food, so that’s good news. My chums at Robot 6 have an interview about it and a preview of it.

* Gary Groth’s grudging admission that TCJ.com is the pits rapidly became as irritating as his initial “We’re now gracing your shitty comics Internet with our presence–you’re welcome, America” post, so it’s nice to see Chris Allen smacking the new post around a bit. I’ve said it before and it looks like I’ll be saying it again and again: You can’t win just by showing up anymore.

* This one goes out to Blaise Larmee.

* Want to reignite interest in your bloated, overlong, shit-the-bed-in-the-third-movie Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy in two easy steps? Cast Ian McShane as Blackbeard and break open the fuckin’ canned peaches.

* Though she is a supporter of motion-capture performances like that of Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Kristin Thompson writes a compelling essay about why they nevertheless shouldn’t qualify for the traditional acting Oscar categories. This is a mitzvah, as the argument really should be hashed out by people with an appreciation both for the technology and the reasons why it’s different than traditional acting, and not as some Internet-style “LUDDITES VS. THE FUTURE” flamewar. One thing though: Zoe Saldana was getting Oscar buzz for her performances as Love Interest in Avatar? I thought that character and everything she brought to it was just as rote as everything else in the movie.

* I haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, though it’s very very high up on my list of “next big prose series I’m reading.” (Right now in my head I’m going through a long digression about how there’s only so much time in the day and how much my Comics Time reading and reviewing prevents me from reading long serialized works of both comics and prose, and moreover how I’ve had the first two discs of Mad Men Season One in my backpack for like four months, and how I’m only up to World 5 of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and god only knows how long it’s gonna take me to get through all of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster now that I have all 18 volumes finally, and hey what about the long-promised revision of my anti-Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets thing that would require me to read all those digests, and for Chrissakes I’m not even up to First Bull Run in the John Keegan American Civil War book, and on and on and on. But you can take it as read.) But it seems to me that an HBO grown-up fantasy series could be to die for, and casting Sean Bean in the lead seems like a great way to start. The whole rest of the cast can be seen at that link, too. Maybe readers can chime in as to who’s good and who sucks in the comments.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch sings the praises of Soldier X. My great hope is that all this Internet attention will spur someone at Marvel into saying, “Ah, what the hell, let’s collect the damn thing.” Help us, David Gabriel–you’re our only hope! Anyway, here’s a nice bit from Marc-Oliver’s review:

This is the point where Soldier X reveals its kinship with Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’ Omega the Unknown, but also with Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Like those works, Soldier X treats superheroes as a metaphor for the literal limitlessness of the human imagination–easily the single most compelling aspect of the genre, as well as, unfortunately, the single most overlooked one.

* A shadowy cabal of my chums from one of my ex-employers has started up a sketch blog called We Are The LAW, where we’re taking turns drawing characters we like. We’ve actually kicked things off with two characters of our own devising: Justin Aclin’s Geist from Hero House, and mine own Destructor from my comics with Matt Wiegle. I want to emphasize that only a handful of us can actually, you know, draw, but hey, what the hell. Below is Geist by me, Destructor by Ben Morse, and Destructor and friends by T.J. Dietsch. Click the links for the full-sized versions.

* Elsewhere, Rickey Purdin draws the Black Flame from B.P.R.D. The sequence where he walks into the Zinco boardroom in full Nazi supervillain regalia with his head on fire and announces “You’re all fired” is one of the all-time great comic book moments I’ve ever read. Full stop.

PS: I wonder if Zinco and Cinco have any connection?

* A good way to prep for tonight’s Lost is to read what Kiel Phegley’s mom Lynn thought of last week’s episode. Imagine a recap column written by Lapidus and you’re pretty much there.

* When I step back and take a look at my tastes–in comics, in music, in film, and in literature–the former two appear to be much broader than the latter two. Provided a first-glance look at the art doesn’t make me want to close the book and not look again, I’ll read virtually any comic, I’m rather voracious about it, I enjoy the experience of reading a lot by a lot of people, etc. With music I’m almost obnoxiously eclectic, and while I’m not necessarily a first-adopter when it comes to new artists (particularly compared with dedicated music bloggers) I do indeed enjoy an enormously wide range. In neither case is this an “eat your vegetables” deal–I truly like a lot of different stuff.

But when you look at my film-viewing habits over the past year or two or perhaps even longer, I’m basically only ever watching and talking about genre films from major studios. That’s due in part to the parameters of this blog during its all-horror incarnation, and to the fact that I really do love horror and a lot of other genre entertainments, and to the fact that tracking down genuine independent and art-house fair involves an expenditure of time and money, but I don’t feel the movie-review sidebar of my blog is actually representative of what I’m interested in overall. I’m a little more expansive in what I’ve been reading prose-wise, but only a little. Again, this is striking me as odd. There’s probably no reason why my movie-watching and book-reading habits shouldn’t be as wide-ranging and reliant on independent outlets as are my music-listening and comics-reading habits.

* In a few weeks I will have spent a year reviewing three comics a week every week without fail. I’m proud of this achievement and I’ve gotten a lot out of it. I still have a bunch of Comics Journal backlog to post and a pile of review copies I really want to get to, so it may stretch into the New Year as well. But one thing that’s really fallen by the wayside, particularly as the year has gone on, is my prose reading. (Actually that’s probably a good reason why the books I’ve read haven’t been all over the map–I haven’t read enough one way or the other.) I think it would be a lot of fun to be reading prose at the rate I’ve been reading comics lately, or at least close to it. I sometimes sit around and think of how much fun it’ll be to finally read The Master and Margarita, or the two or three Chuck Palahniuk books I haven’t gotten to yet, or Moby-Dick, or maybe taking a crack at those George R.R. Martin fantasy novels HBO is going to adapt, or diving into Robert E. Howard because I feel like my pulp pump has been duly primed, or Nixonland, or the Stephen King short story collections that aren’t Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, or Four Past Midnight, or or or or or. Nearly all of my dedicated reading time is taken up by comics, though. Maybe I’ll change that in the New Year, despite how much I’ve dug my thrice weekly Comics Time.

* Oddly, I don’t feel like my writing time has been impacted nearly as much, even though I’ve spent more time on the blog than ever before. I think that’s because my writing habits have always been weird and dependent on long periods of simmering and stewing and mulling culminating in several-hour bursts of creativity, rinse, repeat. That’s an easy schedule to fit into existing frameworks. Meanwhile, having Murder come out scratched a big part of that itch to Be A Comics Writer, obviously. And I have two separate “graphic novels” (in this case meaning “book-length collections of interrelated short stories) largely in the hands of their artists right now, plus a separate short story or two, so I don’t feel like I’ve been slacking.

* One thing you will not see me do, no matter how much I blog enthusiastically about it, is start playing World of Warcraft or any other video game, because that would so clearly be a disaster for me it’s almost comical. There goes the little time I’m not spending at my day job, doing freelance work, doing personal writing and reading, or doing blog writing and reading–poof, gone. No can do!

* My pal Rachel Molino takes a look at Rafael Grampa’s Mesmo Delivery for Wizard.

* Dig AdHouse honcho Chris Pitzer’s eBay auctions, man. Lotsa good, often OOP stuff for cheap.

* Kevin Eastman says that David Fincher, Zack Snyder, and Gore Verbinski will be directing segments in the new Heavy Metal movie, and I totally believe every word he’s saying, don’t you? (Via Splash Page.)

* Bruce Baugh explains why he thinks World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King events are working so well: It’s optional, it’s containable, it’s graspable, and it makes it worth your while.

* Speaking of which, I know I’m spending an awful lot of blog time on something I don’t participate in in any way, but I could not help but dig the hell out of the cinematic intro to the Lich King expansion pack:

One thing Bruce has discussed in his “WoW for N00BS” posts is that the game has a zesty sense of scale, embiggening stuff to make it more awesome. Good! One of the advantages of doing something as unrepentantly nerdy as designing World of Warcraft is that you don’t need to be ad hoc apologists for your material, making sure it’s as realistic as a historical epic or as rooted in readily graspable allegory as possible. If you want to show a giant Sauron guy in skull armor and furry boots break free of a throne encased in a glacier and unleash a gigantic zombie dragon thing in order to psyche up your undead army over music that launches every salvo in the generic-fantasy-score arsenal and narration that’s one vowel away from namechecking the Forest of Lornadoon like it’s straight outta Bored of the Rings, you can knock yourself completely out with it. You can commit.

* In the comment thread downblog, Bruce, Tom Spurgeon, and Strange Ink’s Sean B. offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the soon-to-be-seen-on-not-TV-but-HBO fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Bruce and Sean are mostly pro, Tom mostly con.

* ReFlogging part one: Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit!

* ReFlogging part two: deeply delightful Hulk sequence!

To the extent that things like World War Hulk work, it’s because that angry, savage Hulk can be seen as a reaction against the world failing to work like it does for him in stories like this. The Hulk is both the world as it is and the world as it should be. Batman is the same way, I think, only in his angry version he’s trying to beat the world back into making a sense it fails to make in his non-angry version rather than lashing out against the world when its pre-fallen splendor is interrupted for him. In other words, Batman’s innocence aspect is without hope, while the Hulk’s experience aspect is without hope, if that makes sense.

* Why would you mess with Manuel? (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Apparently the next, possibly Danny Boyle-directed 28 Units of Time Later movie will not be called 28 Months Later. Once upon a time there was an idea for a prequel that took place before the bulk of the events in 28 Days Later—28 Hours Later, perhaps–and maybe that’s what’s going on here. (Via STYD.)

* My pal Rob Bricken, editor of Topless Robot, gets the interview treatment from Poe Ghostal.

* So it looks like They’re making “>an HBO series out of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, to be called Game of Thrones after the first novel in the series. My reaction maps to Rob’s in virtually every particular, including the whole “never read ’em” angle and the “fantasy give the HBO drama treatment could be pretty spectacular” vibe.

* Curt Purcell takes a swing at a pair of frequently voiced memes among horror fans: “it’s scarier because it could really happen” and “what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see.” I will say that I’ve found myself having more intense reactions to horror films in which the “monster” is a human, but I think that has more to do with me being frightened by human cruelty than with plausibility; perfectly plausible “nature gone wild” movies wouldn’t have the same effect.

* Finally, rest in noise, Mitch Mitchell.

Dig this, post-apocalyptic fiction fans: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection of eschatological short stories by everyone from Stephen King to Jonathan Lethem to Cory Doctorow to George R.R. Martin. (Via GalleyCat, via Justin Aclin.)