* I suppose now’s as good a time as any to let you know that I reluctantly retired from Robot 6 in mid-January due to time constraints. I miss everyone over there and hope you’ve still been reading them in the months since — I have and will continue to do so!

* With Game of Thrones Season Two set to debut on April 1, I’ve naturally been blogging up a storm at my dedicated GoT/A Song of Ice and Fire blog All Leather Must Be Boiled. I’ll probably do a separate best-of carnival post here this week. I’ve also got one of my trademark Secret ASoIaF Project Announcements coming up soon, with any luck, so stay tuned.

* Everything about the cover for Josh Simmons’s forthcoming Fantagraphics horror-comics collection The Furry Trap makes me uncomfortable.

* Drawn and Quarterly will be republishing Brian Ralph’s Highwater Books classic Cave-In for their children’s line. Smart thinking. That’s a terrific, eye-opening book — like all of Highwater’s Fort Thunder output it hit like a thunderclap at the time.

* In addition to today’s wonderful news about Jonny Negron’s debut book from PictureBox, he also appears to be cranking up the posting of art to his tumblr, which is great news OBVIOUSLY.

* Speaking of ramping it up, Gabrielle Bell is apparently forcing herself to produce more diary comics, as she announces in a post that’s far more self-effacing than it has any need to be.

* I’ve been meaning to say that Jesse Moynihan’s Forming has been really good lately.

* Kate Beaton’s sketches and diary comics are much less ruthlessly gag-oriented than her strips — they pretty much just capture moments, like this one.

* Frank Santoro profiles Zack Soto and his excellent Study Group webcomics site, with an emphasis on how Zack’s reformatted his Secret Voice comic from print to the web.

* Speaking of Study Group, Aidan Koch’s new strip for it, The Blonde Woman, is lovely.

* Press Play’s series of posts describing the plot of Breaking Bad based solely on the show’s opening pre-credits sequences continues to be delightful.

* When I saw that the Comics Journal had transcribed Tom Spurgeon’s panel interview with C.F. and Brian Ralph from Decembers BCGF, I quite literally stopped everything I was doing and read it from start to finish. Starting the panel with “Do you ever get tired of talking about Fort Thunder?” is perhaps the best first panel question I’ve ever seen.

* The Lands of Ice and Fire, an official box set of unprecedentedly detailed maps of Westeros and Essos based on the hand-drawn originals by George R.R. Martin and edited by Martin and the Westeros.org team? Oh, indeed.

* Speaking of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, for various reasons I’ll reveal sooner or later I’ve picked up the pace of blogging at my all-ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled, on everything from prophecy and free will to cruelty and empathy in art. (HEAVY SPOILERS at the links, as is always the case on Boiled Leather.)

* Extremely good news: The Voyeurs, a new collection of Lucky strips and brand-new comics by Gabrielle Bell, who at this point is one of the best in the biz, from Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books — the imprint’s first book-format release, if I’m not mistaken.

* Monster Brains unleashes the cover and a five-page preview of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Four.

* Kudos to Heidi MacDonald for this wondrous discovery: James Killian Spratt’s extremely faithful, extremely NSFW adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, the basis for this weekend’s much-anticipated/dreaded John Carter. If there were a way to print out an entire website and deliver it to Benjamin Marra by hand, that’s what I would do. Heidi provides context at the link — you’d be hard pressed not to see Fletcher Hanks and Basil Wolverton and Tim Vigil and any other weirdo Art Out of Time type you’d care to name in Spratt’s work, which is beautifully colored and features a nice rounded sense of line and character/creature/set design, however gonzo/outsidery it may otherwise be.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two continues in its magnificently morbid vein.

* Michael DeForge started hisself a tumblr.

* Links to every single Drawn and Quarterly cartoonist’s blog.

* The great critic Matt Zoller Seitz on the true appeal of Mad Men. He doesn’t mention them, but this is like a devastating rebuttal to those epically point-missing promos AMC’s running.

* Elsewhere, Seitz and Simon Abrams wonder why cinematic superheroes are such an artistic dud as a genre. I think Seitz sells the Iron Man movies short — no other superhero movies are based so completely on banter — but I think the point that the economics of these films mitigate against innovation or idiosyncracy is well-taken. The best superhero movie, in terms of success as art, remains Tim Burton’s Batman.

* Oh, this is just marvelous: At Press Play, Dave Bunting Jr. edited all the opening sequences from Breaking Bad Seasons One and Two together, then played them for film critic Sheila O’Malley, who’d never watched the show and was then asked to summarize what it was about based on only those introductions.

* Jonny Negron’s “Birthday Cake” > Rihanna & Chris Brown’s “Birthday Cake”

* Lauren Weinstein’s entire belief system = the Savage Dragon’s entire belief system

* New Renee French art is always a linkblogging gimme.

* Tom Neely, you rascal!

* Axe Cop is legitimately one of the most inventive and unpredictable and funny comics around, I don’t care if using a little kid to plot it is cheating.

* Here’s a list of things that are sexier than L’Avventura-era Monica Vitti:

* Real Life Horror: Our constitutional-lawyer president and his attorney general have determined that “the President says so” is sufficient due process to have an American citizen executed without charge or trial. That’s a load off!

* Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who provided much of the visual imagination behind George Lucas’s Star Wars films, has died. Aeron Alfrey at Monster Brains remembers him the best way anyone can: with a gallery of his fascinating creature designs.

* Chills from this Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

* Matthew Perpetua has posted his 2003 Survey Mix as part of his Fluxblog 10th Anniversary celebration, and this one’s an absolute beast. Hey Ya!, Maps, Heartbeats, Yeah, Seven Nation Army, Crazy in Love, Milkshake, Galang, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, Strict Machine, 99 Problems (Sean’s Imaginary Remix Wherein Jay-Z Doesn’t Structure the Chorus Around Referring to Beyoncé as a Bitch), Transatlanticism, We Will Become Silhouettes, Pass That Dutch, Never Leave You, Ignition (Remix), Toxic, In Da Club, Danger! High Voltage…What a goddamn year. Eight discs of fun.

* Here’s another big one, but for movie buffs rather than music buffs: David Bordwell’s masterfully enlightening and readable essay on the aesthetic, technical, and ineffable differences between film and digital projection. If you’ve ever really wanted to know what the difference is — resolution, artifacts, the process of projection, the impact on theaters, the reactions of audiences, the opinions of filmmakers, idiosyncratic observations on seeing a digital movie vs. a film one in any number of settings — this is quite simply the best piece on the topic I’ve ever seen. You’ll be smarter for having read it, but it’s a joy to read in the process.

* Jim Woodring is looking for contributions to help fund his next standalone Frank graphic novel, which I’m excited to see is called Fran.

* Zak Smith and Shawn Cheng’s collaborative webcomic/fighting game Road of Knives is back, and they’ve brought my Destructor collaborator Matt Wiegle along for the ride!

* Hooray, Cindy and Biscuit #2 from Dan White! That is a very good comic.

* Did I never mention that Gilbert Hernandez is doing a zombie comic called Fatima: The Blood Spinners for Dark Horse? Shame on me, then.

* A couple of frequent ADDXSTC commenters and friends of the blog have posted strong pieces on some of my favorite works of fiction. Here’s Bruce Baugh on Stephen King’s The Stand and Rev’D on David Chase’s The Sopranos, particularly the last few seasons.

* Andrew White’s taking Frank Santoro’s correspondence course! That oughta be interesting to see.

* Well, this photo of Jonny Negron and friend certainly looks promising.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force is still great, if you were wondering.

* Lovely Evan Hayden piece from Electric Ant #2.

* The tumblr for the Happiness Comix anthology series has made the regrettable decision to shut down, but for now it’s still posting compelling work by Heather Benjamin and Tom Toye, drawn for still another anthology, Dimensions.

* This is quite a sketch of Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane’s Joker by Frank Quitely.

* I sure am glad Tom Neely’s now in the naked lady business. Lots more where that came from at his blog.

* Here’s a list of things that are sexier than the young Patti Smith:

* The write-up gets a little too “totes amazeballs” for my taste, but just the other day I was talking with friends about the haunting Sesame Street special in which Big Bird and the still-believed-imaginary Mr. Snuffleupagus spent the night in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and tried to help the ghost of a young Egyptian boy escape the underworld, and here’s an impassioned tribute to exactly that. (Hat tip: Simone Davalos.)

* Jeeeeeeeez, Ta-Nehisi Coates on the life and death of Andrew Breitbart.

* “The NYPD did not respond to our request for comment about allegations it has violated the law.”

* If President Obama loves Omar from The Wire so much, why doesn’t he marry him? Oh right, because he believes marriage is between a man and a woman. Also he’s the commander-in-chief of the drug war. Enjoy the show, Mr. President!

* Finally, can I point out that Christopher Young’s “Leviathan” theme music from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 did the Inception Sound thing like two decades before the fact? And in Morse code for “God,” at that? In many ways my adult life is just a fruitless search for a way to replicate the high of that first hit of Hellbound.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force returns!

* Wow: Gary Gianni will be doing next year’s A Song of Ice and Fire calendar. That will be very, very attractive fantasy art. Gianni’s the best illustrator of the similarly rough-hewn Robert E. Howard Conan material by a country mile.

* Wow #2: Kraftwerk will be playing each of their albums in their entirety, one album per night, during an eight-night residency at the Museum of Modern Art. I may have to hire a sitter for this.

* Lisa Hanawalt reviews The Vow for Vanity Fair (!).

* A NOVI Magazine writer whose byline I can’t find has a life-changing encounter with the great Moto Hagio.

* Kristy Valenti pens a short panegyric for Frank Miller’s Ronin.

* I hadn’t seen the cover for Charles Burns’s forthcoming The Hive until the Italian about-comics publication Conversazioni Sul Fummeto posted it to their Facebook account. Lookin’ good.

* These four-panel comic strips by CF (!) are great.

* You should by all means go see the Matt Wiegle/Shawn Cheng/John Mejias art show at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis this weekend.

* This is the first Sam Bosma art I’ve seen that I’d describe as sexy. It’s a good look for him!

* Speaking of sexy, Bryan Lee O’Malley takes us on the express train to Bonertown with this pin-up of his Scott Pilgrim characters Wallace Wells, Kim Pine, Ramona Flowers, and Lisa Miller (whom I had to wiki).

My latest A Song of Ice and Fire podcast is up, focusing on the sample chapter from The Winds of Winter that George R.R. Martin posted to his website a few weeks ago. My co-host Stefan Sasse and I are once again joined by the illustrious Amin of A Podcast of Ice and Fire. Go have a listen!

* They’re gettin’ the band back together, man! Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that company co-founder Mike Catron and former art director Preston White are going back to work at Fantagraphics. Spurge also interviews Catron about his return to the fold.

* I love everything about this powerful post by Jessica Abel, in which she takes a look back at the last fifteen years of her life upon her and her husband Matt Madden’s recent decision to leave Brooklyn for France. And under “everything” I most definitely include their bookshelves.

* Marc Arsenault presents a visual tribute to artist Mike Kelley, who sadly took his own life last week. Kelley’s friend and publisher Dan Nadel shared some thoughts as well.

* It’s the triumphant return of Zack Soto’s The Secret Voice!

* New Sexbuzz pages by Andrew White.

* Allow me to be the last to direct you to Darkness by Boulet, a very cute and crazily gorgeously drawn 24-hour comic. Man, the way this guy draws women.

* Speaking of crazily gorgeously drawn, Frank Miller’s Holy Terror is apparently even prettier than I thought it would be. No, I still haven’t read it, because no, I still can’t bring myself to pay for it, and no, I haven’t had any more luck finding a publicity contact for Legendary’s publishing imprint than you have. (Have you?)

* Jonny Negron celebrates the return to print of his anthology Chameleon #2 the only way he knows how.

* Zach Hazard Vaupen is still making the strangest humor comics around.

* The great Benjamin Marra has an art show opening up later this month in Brooklyn.

* Chuck Forsman is about to release The End of the Fucking World #4. This is a good series.

* If you were wondering when Emily Carroll‘s influence would start to be felt on other webcomics, the answer is right about…now. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Sarah Esteje drew this picture of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album cover using only ballpoint pens. So, you know, jeez. (Via Andrew Sullivan, of all people.)

* I am going to link you to this Michael DeForge comic about facial growths and lesions and then never look at or think about it again.

* Tucker Stone’s excellent review of Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Tyler Crook’s very good B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Russia (he’s dead-on about Crook and company proving themselves and resuscitating the series after a stumble or two) has the bonus feature of functioning as a sort of “state of the Mignolaverse” report.

* The Mindless Ones’ David Allison/Illogical Volume writes about Batman Incorporated and a great many other things besides. The broad theme is how the sadness at the heart of Batman’s story taints his grand utopian projects in much the same way that the malfeasance of his real-world corporate promulgators taints his real-world utility as an icon of positivity. I go back and forth on whether that’s a reasonable thing to expect from art anyway — Grant Morrison’s brand of positivity has long struck me as a bit head-in-the-sand-ish, even before his unfortunate comments on Siegel & Shuster — but I’ve certainly felt the sting I.V.’s describing. Then again, I believe the pleasure we derive from art is quite independent of whether pleasurable things are happening in that art — Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad have at varying times and for varying reasons provided me with more emotional uplift than just about anything I can think of, and Christ, think about those shows for a moment. But I.V.’s not just talking about the content, he’s talking about the circumstances of their creation, which is quite another matter. It’s a meaty post.

* Ryan Cecil Smith, Lane Milburn, and more weigh in on the endangered art of Stephen Gammell in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

* I absolutely loved the elegant simplicity (not a phrase you’d ever associate with the guy under normal circumstances) of Zak Smith/Sabbath’s post on how to advance the narrative in RPGs without railroading your players:

I call it Hunter/Hunted.

-The idea is simple and comes from about a million horror and cop stories: sometimes a scene happens because Sam Spade has found out about a baddie and sometimes a scene happens because the baddie has found out about Sam Spade. And, there, aside from a few stops for bourbon and kissing, is the plot of everything from Lost Boys to Blade Runner.

-Most investigative scenarios advise breaking things up into “scenes”–the idea is you have a scene, find clues in it, these clues lead to the next scene. They then usually cover their ass by saying either “if the PCs don’t do this or find this clue or go to the wrong place give them a bunch of hints or a prophetic dream or otherwise nurse, nudge, or nullify them until they go to the next scene” or just give some vague advice like “hey Venice is interesting, think of something”

-Not so here. Or not exactly: Basically we keep the “scene chain” structure. If the PCs go from clue to clue in a timely fashion like good investigators they follow the scene chain. However, we also give each scene a twin situation, this twin is what happens if the PCs don’t follow a given clue, follow it up the wrong path, or otherwise take too long (in-world game time) to follow the clues. In this twin situation, typically, the PCs have taken long enough to figure out what’s going on that the enemy has noticed their efforts and started hunting them.

* Real Life Horror: America’s flying killer robots target rescuers and mourners of flying killer robot victims. Warning: not liking this state of affairs may make you an al-Qaeda supporter.

* Related, in Professor T.’s “applicability” sense: Bruce Baugh flags two beautiful passages on the horrors of war from The Lord of the Rings.

* Celebrate 10 years of Fluxblog with this interview with its creator, Matthew Perpetua, my favorite music writer and a swell guy.

* Farewell to the first modern zombie, Bill Hinzman. You changed everything, sir.

Stefan Sasse and I are back with an all-new episode of our A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour. This time out we’ve brought along a very special guest, Amin from A Podcast of Ice and Fire, the grandaddy of ’em all. We’re discussing “Southron Ambitions,” Stefan’s provocative essay for The Tower of the Hand on a certain conspiracy theory advanced by one of the characters in A Dance with Dragons. Read up, then listen up.

Mark Pellegrini of Adventures in Poor Taste reveals that publisher HarperCollins has replaced Stephen Gammell’s quite literally unforgettable illustrations from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. (Via Rob Sheridan and io9.) The reason this is a terrible idea is quite easy to grasp: These are the best chlidren’s book illustrations I’ve ever seen. My wife and I are in our mid-30s and came across these books well over two decades ago, yet Gammell’s art (and Schwartz’s strong prose, too, but mostly the art) are so effective that she and I were still discussing them in reverent, slightly panicky tones just a few days ago, well before I’d heard about this ill-advised bowdlerization. When I pulled my Scary Stories Treasury off the bookshelf to show her a particular illustration, she literally made me put it away. That’s how freaked out a grown woman was by Gammell’s art. Which, I suppose, is why HarperCollins is getting rid of it — but it’s also why the books are rightfully considered classics, why they’re worth re-publishing 30 years after their initial release to begin with. I hate to think of generations of children robbed of one of the most intensely pleasurable frightening experiences they’re likely to ever have, in favor of pleasant but toothless “spooky” stuff.

I reviewed the Scary Stories Treasury a couple years ago, and discovered that it had lost none of its power. I advise you to get your hands on the original versions by any means necessary lest you lose the ability to make that same discovery.

Over on my A Song of Ice and Fire blog All Leather Must Be Boiled, I posted some SPOILERY thoughts on the sample chapter from The Winds of Winter that George R.R. Martin posted last month.

Episode 04 of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, has been posted. This week Stefan Sasse and I take a look at the role of religion in Westeros.

* Though I think I’ve only ever played the original and Ocarina of Time, I love that Legend of Zelda continuity is so convoluted and contradictory that people theorized it must involve divergent timelines; I love even more that they were right.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates has what ought to be the final word on the vices and virtues of Louis Farrakhan Ron Paul. I don’t know why I never thought of Paul advocacy in messianic terms before, but of course that’s what’s going on; the support of noted Great Man enthusiast Andrew Sullivan, who appears to have retracted his recent retraction of his slightly less recent endorsement of Paul for the Republican Party presidential nomination, is surely evidence of that. The problem is with seeing individual politicians, with all their flaws (and in most cases “flaws” is putting it mildly, whether you’re talking about States’ Rights dogwhistler and gold bug Ron Paul or indefinite-detainer and non-due-process-assassinator and Skynet-activator Barack Obama), in memetic-engineering terms — “If we support this person we’ll change the conversation and steer the nation toward the good” — fails to consider the systemic nature of successfully implementing change, and dismisses a host of hugely problematic issues with any given candidate in a rush to paint an Alex Ross version of their portrait. And again, no one’s forcing anyone to endorse anyone; doing so as an act of supposed bravery but downplaying your candidate of choice’s problems is in fact an act of cowardice.

* Related thought triggered by Coates’s material on Farrakhan: All religions are completely crazy in terms of their “supernatural history,” if you will; it’s just that we’ve been hearing about the major ones for so many centuries that receiving celestial instructions from a brushfire or rising from the dead and then flying up to Heaven no longer seem quite as crazy as more recent developments like the Angel Moroni or Intergalactic Warlord Xenu do. That said, I feel like between Mormonism, Scientology, and the Nation of Islam, America has cooked up some uniquely science-fictional cults-cum-full-fledged-denominations, and I wonder if anyone’s ever stacked them up side to side as such.

* Jim Henley wrote a song for America; they told him it was clever.

* I hadn’t been super enthused for Ridley Scott’s yes-no-maybe-probably-yeah-definitely Alien prequel Prometheus, because it’s 2012 and it’s Ridley Scott. Then I saw this trailer. Any knucklehead can make a compelling trailer, but pacing and music and title font treatment aside, you simply don’t see scary cosmic monoliths like you did in ’70s SF anymore. Seeing that giant whatever-it-is on that alien planet was like coming home.

* In case you missed it, my favorite fantasy franchises gave us several Christmas presents:

** Here’s a sample chapter from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter. (SPOILERS, of course!) The great Elio & Linda of Westeros.org discuss it here.

** Here’s a trailer for Season Two of Game of Thrones. Everyone looks great and Stannis sounds great.

** And here once again is the trailer for The Hobbit, which I suppose I should get used to calling The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the purposes of this first film. The chills I got when the Dwarves started singing their song! Straight-up outreach to everyone who was raised on the Rankin-Bass cartoon, and successful outreach at that. BTW, I saw a lot of talented artists complaining about what they perceived to be fussy, overly toyetic, off-brand Dwarf designs, but let’s face it, the filmmakers had to help the audience be able to differentiate between thirteen axe-wielding beardos, because it’s not really like Tolkien himself even tried!

* I hope you enjoyed your holidays! While you were out, I kept pretty busy. Here are some links to what I’ve been doing.

* I posted my list of the 20 Best Comics of 2011. It’s exciting to me that old established Grand Masters are about as well represented on it as people whose first comics came out after Obama was elected, and of course there are plenty of people in between as well. It’s also exciting to me that many of the cartoonists represented there are creating huge, consistently high-quality bodies of work without a regularly published solo series as their main venue or even as any venue at all, instead or in addition turning to anthologies, minicomics, and the Internet to get their work to the public. And I haven’t felt this blessed by an abundance of genuinely bizarre and powerful sex-horror stuff since I first discovered Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in 1994.

* Robot 6 celebrated its third anniversary with a massive two-day blowout of exclusive interviews, previews, and assorted other features. I contributed several pieces.

** I interviewed Sammy Harkham about Kramers Ergot 8. I think this is my favorite interview of all the ones I conducted last year. Sammy and I slowly circled around the thinking at the core of the book before finally plunging right into it. It was an exciting conversation to have. (That’s from Takeshi Murata’s contribution to the book below.)

** I interviewed Michael DeForge about the absolutely tremendous 2011 he had, specifically about Ant Comic, Open Country, “Dog 2070” from Lose #3, and “College Girl by Night” from Thickness. I asked a lot of questions about influence and intent, which is a hit or miss proposition, but I think Michael delivered.

** I interviewed the Press Gang triumvirate of Jason Leivian, Zack Soto, and François Vigneault about their plans for their publishing collective. They gave me a lot of exclusive announcements and previews; I think the top announcement is that Soto’s Study Group Comic Books is absorbing Randy Chang’s Bodega Books and taking over publication of The Mourning Star, but beyond that, Leivian’s publishing a book on magick, Vigneault’s Elfworld #3 looks rock-solid, and the line-up of creators contributing to Soto’s soon-to-launch sg12.com webcomics portal is just sick. (There’s no escaping DeForge!) (The page below is from the full-color Danger Country by Levon Jihanian that will be running on sg12.com.)

** And Annie Koyama announced some of her 2012 titles, including new books from Michael DeForge (natch), Julia Wertz, Dustin Harbin, Jesse Jacobs, and Tin Can Forest. You can see covers for the last three at the link.

* In case you missed it, I posted a four-volume mix of the best songs of 2011. (If you were wondering, songs from Underworld and the Game of Thrones soundtrack were cut due to time constraints, because as it turns out the time limit on CD-Rs is actually 79:50, NOT EIGHTY, YOU LIARS, while “Dance (A$$) Remix” was disqualified for the use of the word “anorexic” as a compliment.)

* Finally, I started an A Song of Ice and Fire podcast shortly before Christmas. I’ve posted three episodes so far, in which I’m joined by the Tower of the Hand’s Stefan Sasse in a discussion of honor, morality, and power in Westeros (and Essos). You can find links to all three episodes here. If you like the essays I’ve written about the books or the show, this should be up your alley.

The third episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast with Stefan Sasse, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up on my Game of Thrones blog at boiledleather.com. This week we end up focusing on the difference between 21st-century morality and faux-medieval morality, and what that means for the reader’s experience of the books. I was really looking forward to having this discussion. Hope you enjoy it!

And it’s up on George R.R. Martin’s website. And it’s pretty juicy.

The second episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up! This time out Stefan Sasse and I discuss morality, leadership, and reform in the context of such august personages as Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Roose Bolton, and Tywin Lannister. Enjoy it with your leftovers.

Meanwhile, I contributed a couple of entries to the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2011 countdown: Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise at #80 and Tom Neely’s The Wolf at #78. Enjoy them with your gift cards.

I’ve started an A Song of Ice and Fire podcast! It’s called the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, because who could resist that acronym, and its first three episodes, to be rolled out over the course of the holidays, were the brainchild of Stefan Sasse, the hugely insightful writer behind some of my favorite ASoIaF essays. Stefan noticed that he and I share a focus on issues of morality when discussing the books’ warriors and leaders, so he suggested we just get on Skype and start talking about it. I’m glad he did; this was a ton of fun.

Part one is up now at my ASoIaF/Game of Thrones blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. Part two will go up next Monday, and part three the Monday after that.

Enjoy!

* There’s a new teaser trailer for Game of Thrones Season Two. It centers on one of the new characters being introduced this season, which puts me in mind of several other shows that have introduced major new antagonists after their debuts and how they’ve positioned them relative to the preexisting players.

* Related: I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this, but my A Song of Ice and Fire tumblr All Leather Must Be Boiled has a whole lot of ASoIaF/GoT art/fanart on it. Today I posted this grim painting of the Riverlands by Rene Aigner, which says a whole lot about the series.

* More BCGF: L. Nichols flips the eff out over the show;

* and PictureBox stocks up on many of its highlights and hidden gems for its online store.

* More Jerusalem preview pages from Guy Delisle. This is shaping up to be a really lovely book.

* I don’t think there’s an easy way to link you to all of it, but sniff around Benjamin Marra’s Traditional Comics tumblr for a lot of art from his series of American Psycho tribute booklets.

* The Comics Journal presents a look at four prominent alternative-comics retailers by Patrick Rosenkranz. The amount of thought and creativity they put into promoting the comics they sell and attracting the audience that buys them is both inspiring and a little depressing, in terms of how much time and energy you need to invest if you wanna make a go of this sort of thing.

* Entertaining speculation about the evolutionary origins of monsters in the human mind, the idea being that early man’s brain combined features of all the animals it was worried about getting attacked by into creatures like dragons and such, as a kind of shorthand for “LOOK OUT, DANGEROUS ANIMAL!” (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

I wrote a long piece on learning to see the victims of war for my A Song of Ice and Fire blog. (Beware of spoilers.)

* So as you might have heard, I wrote a Spider-Man comic and annotated A Game of Thrones.

* On the latter score, Elio Garcia of Westeros.org has posted his own announcement of the project. Elio calculates that he and I and Anne Groell wrote over 1,000 notes on the book between us, which both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me at all given how into it we all got. I’m telling you, it’s a really rich vein to tap. Elio also notes that Subtext is working on a web version, so you non-iPad users out there, take heart.

* And this was a daymaker: An effusive write-up from big-deal SFF site Tor.com, and one that quotes extensively from me at that. I mean, get a load of this praise:

“this definite guide is interactive, comprehensive, ever-expanding, and most of all, made with the fans in mind….The annotations aren’t idle theories, rather, these are insights from those who know this world better than anyone else in the world, save George R. R. Martin himself.

Who am I to argue?

* My chum Rob Bricken of Topless Robot notes how useful the annotations will be for those readers who can’t tell the players without a scorecard. He also touts our bonafides as experts, which apparently I will never get used to.

* And a special tip of the hat to the Chief, Dan Nadel, who very kindly congratulated me for the project on the blog of the estimable Comics Journal itself.

* As for Spidey, I’d like to thank three of my favorite comicsbloggers, JK Parkin, Tom Spurgeon, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, for pointing their readers in my comic’s direction. Same for everyone on Twitter and Facebook who’s done so. Thank you all!

* And as noted, I spoke with my co-writer J.M. DeMatteis about all things Spider-Man for CBR.

* Meanwhile, I’m still making my way through Mad Men. Latest post on the end of Season Three here, archive of every MM post so far here.

* As I mentioned earlier, I reviewed Benjamin Marra’s Gangsta Rap Posse #2 for TCJ.com.

* Over at Robot 6, Eddie Campbell, Leela Corman, and I defend Craig Thompson’s Habibi against accusations of Orientalism.

* And Ron Régé Jr. says “Fuck Other Forms of Art.”

* Sparkplug Comic Books will continue, under the watch of Dylan Williams’s wife Emily Nilsson, his friend Tom Neely, and his colleague Virginia Paine. They haven’t decided whether or when they’ll be able to start publishing new work, though they’d like to, but they’re continuing to sell and promote the company’s existing, excellent line-up.

* Amazingly, Netflix has backed down off its previously announced plan to divert its DVD subscribers into a separate service with the absurd name Qwikster. I look forward to reading retractions from the folks who wrote that that was secretly a brilliant maneuver. As I said at the time, regardless of the underlying thought process, repeatedly and publicly antagonizing your customers with sweeping business-model changes that make your services more inconvenient and more expensive, delivered first with no real explanation and then with an “apology” that amounted to “sorry for doing that horrible thing, now here’s something even worse, something so bad that I, the CEO of the company doing it, seem on the verge of tears about it” is — surprise! — a bad business move. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen a popular consumer company do, and now it’s doubly so.

* My chums in the Partyka collective will be part of the Desert Island Comic Zine Party for kids at the Whitney Museum this Saturday afternoon. Sounds like a good time for the little ones.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Interesting insights into Ghost World and Shortcomings may be found in this Daniel Clowes/Adrian Tomine panel report.

* Bob Temuka’s post on the Jaime Hernandez/Locas material in Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 is appropriately emotional and dead-on. I talk a bit about it here.

* Buy the original newspaper edition of Frank Santoro’s Storeyville, direct from his dad’s storage space!

* The revived Wow Cool publishing/mail-order outfit is impressive.

* Here’s a very pretty picture of Batman by Rafael Grampá.

* Via everyone: Liquid Television is now online in its entirety, along with related weird animated programs and station IDs from the MTV vaults. That was a real atom bomb of alt-culture for people of a certain age, one that if I’m not mistaken slightly predated Nirvana’s opening of the floodgates for that sort of material and was therefore even more of a cultural category error when in arrived on our teevees between Janet Jackson videos.

* Tom Spurgeon’s nine thoughts on the DC relaunch’s success. Of the batch, I was struck by point six — DC’s newfound insistence on regular shipping will require fill-in slots that should provide better opportunities for new or new-to-the-company creators than the usual miniseries and tryout books — and point nine — the unpleasant-to-much-of-the-online-fan-press tone of many of these successful books will force a generation of journalists weaned on the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit of comics return to cultural prominence in the ’00s to reexamine those assumptions.

* It’s spoilery so I’m staying away (even though it says it’s not spoilery, the first thing they talk about was spoilery as fuck), but Clive Barker talks to his official site Revelations about the recently released Abarat: Absolute Midnight, the third book in his lushly illustrated YA fantasy series. I recommend you read the intro, however, as it details what seems like a hellish last few years for Barker in his personal life — surgery, divorce, death. He’s one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met in this business, hugely generous in spirit, so every time I hear about these things I feel just awful for him. Still, you have to figure that if anyone’s capable of channeling real life awfulness into his art, it’s Clive Barker.

* Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics is up to its second old-school alternative-comic-book-format release, Colleen Frakes and Betsy Swardlick’s Drag Bandits. To paraphrase Barton Fink, I got a feeling we’ll be hearing from that Colleen Frakes, and I don’t mean a postcard.

* What’s Closed Caption Comics member Mollie Goldstrom been up to?

* It bears repeating that Tales Designed to Thrizzle #7 is on the way.

* It also bears repeating that Jim Woodring is posting things like this five, six days a week lately.

* Hellen Jo draws girls masturbating for Vice. These are illustrations for an article on the topic that is the Vice-iest Vice article ever to Vice, so be warned, but still, it’s Hellen Jo drawing girls masturbating. (Via Same Hat!)

* I have no brief whatsoever with “the Milkyway films of Johnnie To Kei-fung,” but this David Bordwell piece on To’s work begins with an explanation of his elliptical storytelling method that should be of great interest to Jaime Hernandez fans.

* Would you like to watch Synth Britannia, the synthpop-focused edition of BBC4’s wonderful series of rock docs, on YouTube in its entirety? Of course you would. (Via Matt Maxwell.)