* With Boardwalk Empire‘s season finale approaching, HBO is unleashing the kraken with regards to publicity for its next big thing, Game of Thrones. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the network released hi-res versions of all the photos from last week’s Entertainment Weekly spread on the show…

* a preview of a 15-minute making-of featurette they’ll be unveiling prior to the Boardwalk Empire finale next Sunday…

* and a new minute-long teaser.

And frankly? It all looks wonderful. In particular, starting that trailer with that particular scene appears to indicate that they know what the books are about, not just what they’re about, if you follow me. As always, they’re just trailers and promo stills and therefore completely unreliable, but. But but but! (Links via Winter Is Coming and Westeros, as usual.)

* Meanwhile, I plan on finding it really weird to watch mainstream pop-culture sites cover the show–even though I myself only discovered the series this year and am far from a GoT OG.

* The enormously engrossing, uncomfortably disconcerting online first-person horror film/ARG Marble Hornets has returned after a seven-month absence for its second season. When I say “uncomfortably disconcerting” I’m really not kidding. Even though I’ve just about exhausted all the information, commentary, and parody available on the project, I still find myself freaking out a little bit when I have to go out in the dark to take out the trash. They’ve hit on a really powerful set of images and techniques. If you’ve got about a movie’s length of time to kill, start here; the latest “entry” is embedded below.

* Two of my favorite webcomics had real doozies for their most recent installments: Jesse Moynihan’s Forming and Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force. Bookmark them!

* It’s official: The Hobbit movies will be filmed in 3D. Peter Jackson seems like a filmmaker who was made to make 3D movies. Certainly more so than James Cameron!

* Wow, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had a rough opening night. Like, rough enough that I wonder if someone–the creators, the performers, the audience, the newspapers, Bono, someone–was just joking. Bitter experience and Avatar have taught me that I have no clue whether or not something will be a for-the-ages flop/demonstration of classical hubris; that said, the story of this show has been completely mesmerizing, and not for the reasons one imagines Julie Taymor, Bono, the Edge, and Sony or Marvel or whoever want it to be. On a qualitative level, my appreciation for Taymor’s glam weirdness is offset by my disgust with the leaden pretension of the U2 music I’ve heard from the show, so I don’t know how to feel about it in that regard either.

* Chris Mautner’s Comics College column tackles Hergé. Since all of his Tintin work is in the same format and working basically the same genre and tone, he’s one of the great “where to begin?” artists in comics. Well, here’s where to begin!

* Sean P. Belcher was a good deal more sympathetic to last night’s episode of The Walking Dead than I was. Basically we agree about its strengths, but differ in the weight we place on its weaknesses.

* Spurge is right: This Deborah Vankin profile of Joyce Farmer’s new memoir Special Exits makes the book look and sound great. I won’t spoil the really revealing quotes from and about R. Crumb, either.

* Trouble with Comics had a bit of an RSS spasm over the weekend, but it brought Christopher Allen’s thoughtful critique of Jack Kirby’s OMAC to my attention, so I’m glad it happened.

* Hawt stuff from Brandon Graham. (Via Agent M.)

* Very much looking forward to Ryan Cecil Smith’s Two Eyes of the Beautiful II, on sale at the BCGF this weekend.

* I’m digging what I’m seeing from Alex Wiley’s Hugger-Mugger Comicx. I like the cute-brut linework and citrusy colors.

* Wow, 102 pages of unpublished comics from James Stokoe!

* Real Life Horror: Every time I think about it, I am freshly amazed that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large nine years after the 9/11 attacks they orchestrated. (And that we’ll probably never be able to try and convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because the Bush Administration tortured him, but that’s a different matter.) The AP has a fascinating, if somewhat depressing, report on the lucky breaks that have kept al-Zawahiri out of American clutches and/or crosshairs. Here’s hoping that once all the money we save by freezing federal employees’ salaries singlehandedly ends the recession and persuades Republicans to put aside their differences and become good-faith allies of the President, there’ll be enough left over help catch this murderous fuck.

* This is one of those days when I want to link to everything that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. Money quotes:

I’d love to see someone make the argument that private sector managerial experience entitles you to run the NYPD.

—on incoming NYC schools chancellor Cathleen Black

What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat.[…]Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically “prove” the problem of violent white supremacists.

—on the FBI sting of would-be Christmas tree bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud.

* Rest in peace, Irvin Kershner and Leslie Nielsen. The Empire Strikes Back and The Naked Gun are two of the movies I’ve absorbed completely enough to have a hard time imagining how I would think and speak about certain things without an array of quotes from them at my disposal.

* Finally, as I mentioned earlier, DestructorComics.com is up and running. Matt Wiegle and I will be updating it on Mondays and Thursdays. I can’t wait to share these stories with you!

* Clive Barker is looking for a publisher. That amazes me.

* New Game of Thrones promo this weekend, big 15-minute “Inside Game of Thrones” thing next weekend.

* Bruce Baugh on The Shattering, the world-changing component of World of Warcraft’s big Cataclysm expansion/event — part one, part two, part three. I’m a sucker for Bruce’s writing on gaming, but I think this is of interest to fans of superhero comics as well because of how directly it speaks to the pleasure of a huge event-driven overhaul of a shared fictional universe, an overhaul that takes care of some housecleaning in addition to opening up story possibilities. Do click on part two at the very least; it’s the photo-driven one, and even I can see how different and much more vivid everything looks now.

* Curt Purcell responds to Tom Spurgeon’s call for good superhero fights. I nominate Superman vs. Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Nixon vs. the grandma robot in Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled–honestly, Frank Miller is fight-scene magic and I could go on–the Immortal Weapons tournament fights in Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja’s Immortal Iron Fist, Daredevil and Elektra vs. Bullseye in Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil, pretty much any storyarc-ending fight in Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley’s Invincible (eg. Conquest)…lotsa stuff.

* Grant Morrison talks to CBR’s Jeffrey Renaud about Batman Incorporated. It sounds like he’s really made a tonal break with the rest of his run.

* Sheesh, look at these original Brian Ralph Daybreak pages.

* Tom Breihan reviews the living shit out of the remastered reissue of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. There’s not a ton of writing on Nine Inch Nails that I…trust, I guess? But this is among it.

* It’s funny: The bit that sold Ben Morse on Paul Cornell’s Action Comics run was the bit that threw me a little. It felt written for the internet.

* Concrete‘s Paul Chadwick storyboarded Strange Brew??? Did I know this?

* Jason Adams catches that the release date for the Thing remake has been rescheduled for October 2011, which seems to indicate some confidence in its horror-audience money-making abilities on the part of the studio.

* I can’t imagine it makes sense to say “rest in peace, Peter Christopherson,” but I’m saying it anyway. Dave Simpson’s Guardian obit is lovely, as is artist John Coulhart’s verbal and visual tribute (via Dan Nadel).

* You should read Matt Zoller Seitz’s essay on his late wife Jennifer.

* Joe McCulloch reviews Jacques Tardi’s masterful loogie in the face of World War I, It Was the War of the Trenches, which I liked a lot myself. Between this and Boardwalk Empire, which I probably should be writing about weekly instead of The Walking Dead, it’s been a great year for examining the horror of war through the lens of the War to End All Wars.

* Ooh look, Pood #2! (I’m acting surprised, but I got a copy in the mail the other day. Just one of the perks of being a glamorous comics blogger.)

* Off the beaten path: Chris Allen reviews Gerry Alanguilan’s animal-rights parable Elmer. I need to get a copy of that book and read it back to back with Duncan the Wonder Dog.

* Things are not going well for John Porcellino, apparently. Ars gratia artis, I fucking guess.

* Halfway between Chris Cunningham’s clip for Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” and a Tool video, you’ll find this creepy-lovely video for School of Seven Bells’ practically perfect certain-slant-of-light dreampop ballad “I L U.” (Via Pitchfork.)

School of Seven Bells – I L U – Official Video from Vagrant Records on Vimeo.

* Ooh, look, Jeet Heer uncovered the cover for Paying for It, Chester Brown’s prostitution memoir! Check the comments to watch noted comics aesthetes recoil.

* The way this excellent Dan Nadel essay on Jack Kirby’s California years for Vice magazine is spread across six hitcount-whoring pages is irritating, to be sure, but don’t let that stop you from reading it. It’s a beautifully written appreciation of Kirby’s art and anti-war humanism. One thing I come back to a lot when thinking about Kirby and about Grant Morrison is Tom Spurgeon’s contention that Kirby’s idea of Anti-Life (essentially, war) is a lot more challenging than Morrison’s (essentially, being a fascist creep). No reasonable person can think up reasons to support Morrisonian Anti-Life. Kirbyan Anti-Life, on the other hand–well, you know.

* More Vice: Nick Gazin interviews Chip Kidd on his new book of superhero pop-culture ephemera, Shazam!, as a part of his latest comics review round-up. I like how he pretty much openly sticks it to Jon Vermilyea and Koren Shadmi, as if that really were the role of the critic after all. (Maybe he’s kidding, I dunno, it’s Vice and the dude says he hates cats so there’s obviously something wrong with him. Also, add the damn comics-only RSS feed already.)

* This is a pretty terrific interview of Charles Burns by the Onion A.V. Club’s Sam Adams. The bits on color and William S. Burroughs’s Interzone were especially interesting. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Jeremy Renner really has no idea what his role as Hawkeye in Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie will be like. What an odd experience it must be to sign on to one of these big movies-by-committee without knowing much more than your character’s name.

* Here’s a trailer for Moon director Duncan Jones’s new movie Source Code. Two thoughts: 1) Wow, he sure knows what he likes, huh? 2) Inception sure opened some doors, huh? 3) The quality of this film notwithstanding, I wonder how much longer “watching major forms of transportation blow up in trailers” will last as a thing.

* Matthew Perpetua assembles a mix that shows the softer side of the Smashing Pumpkins. Well, it includes “Drown” and “Rhinoceros” and such, so “softer” is relative, but you get the idea.

* Lots to chew on in this Tom Ewing piece on Kanye West’s new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Some of it’s even about the music!

* Curt Purcell liked last night’s Robert Kirkman-written episode of The Walking Dead a lot more than I did.

* Today on Robot 6: Box Brown on the COEXIST bumper stickers.

* Hellen Jo sure can draw.

* A new Marc Bell comic called Pure Pajamas is coming from Drawn & Quarterly in 2011! Marc Bell’s comics are great. So excited about this. Suck it, fine art world!

* Strange Tales II #3 are popping up everywhere. Robot 6 has James Stokoe and Michael DeForge, the Beat has Toby Cypress and Harvey Pekar/Ty Templeton, and Comics Alliance has Benjamin Marra, Eduardo Medeiros, and Nick Gurewitch/Kate Beaton.

* John Allison pops up in the Robot 6 comment thread to clarify some of the ideas expressed about artcomics in his Indie Comics Manifesto.

* Wilson: The Movie.

* Still no permalinks, but please do read Gabe Bridwell’s third report on the ACA residencies of Paul Pope, Craig Thompson, and Svetlana Chmakova. My favorite tidbits from this one: Paul invited his mother and girlfriend to work with his students, as well as Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, who Bridwell says gave the best critiques of anyone he’s ever known.

* Music video of note #1: Watch Grant Morrison murder his way through My Chemical Romance in “Sing,” the second clip from their new concept album Danger Days.

* Music video of note #2: The Klaxons have a Cronenbergian orgy (really no other way to put it) in “Twin Flames,” the second video (I think) for their new album Surving the Void. (Via Pitchfork and the Quietus.)

Klaxons — Twin Flames (NSFW) from Mark Twain on Vimeo.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Very nice programming line-up at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival–Anders Nilsen, Jordan Crane, Brian Chippendale, Sammy Harkham vs. Françoise Mouly, Charles Burns vs. Lynda Barry…

* John Allison’s Indie Comics Manifesto. Allison conflates being a crowd-pleaser with artistic merit in a way that makes me pretty uncomfortable, and there’s some crawl-into-your-grave-and-die-old-man rhetoric that doesn’t really help either. That said, he’s also got some common-sense financial advice in there.

* Comment-thread bonus: Here’s a list I came up with of a dozen great “art-damaged visual tone-poem[s] about the inside of [the artists’] psyche[s],” the kind of comic Allison would like to avoid but without which I wouldn’t really want to read comics anymore.

* Is Marvel — for our sins — collecting Mark Millar’s Trouble?

* Comment-thread bonus: links to every issue of David Tischmann, Darko Macan, and Igor Kordey’s Cable/Soldier X run, available to be read on Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited.

* Tom Adams of Bergen Street Comics on the onslaught of Thor comics. Is that what killed Thor: The Mighty Avenger?

* No permalinks unfortunately, and the least user-friendly scrolling interface I’ve ever experienced double-unfortunately, but artist Gabe Bridwell has in-depth reports on the Atlantic Center for the Arts residencies of Craig Thompson, Paul Pope, and Svetlana Chemakova. I found the stuff on Craig and Paul (admittedly two of my favorite people in comics) really revealing–Craig’s group did the most physical playing-around, Paul basically dances around and attacks the bristol board like a painter dancing around and attacking the canvas. Also, looks like the great Dave Kiersh was in Craig’s group. (Via Paul Pope.)

* Ron Regé Jr. talks about his Cartoon Utopia concept/project with the international altcomix publication Gazeta.

* Burn of the Day #1, via Tom Spurgeon: “There isn’t a lot in 2011 that compels from a ‘Battle Of Conventions’ standpoint, and neither one has anything to do with Wizard’s Big Apple show Vs. New York Comic-Con, which wouldn’t be a fight held at the same time in the same building.” It really is the case that Wizard’s Con War battle plan inflicted a massive friendly-fire wound on the company, which couldn’t have damaged its own reputation worse than it did by trying to force the industry to take sides during a major economic downturn if one of the Shamuses had strolled through the con hotel lobby with a prostitute on his arm.

* This bit in the Mindless Ones’ annotations for Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 set off a lightbulb over my head with the word “DUH” written on it in magic marker: “‘Did Darkseid release something… from any kind of box?’ Diana, with her origins in greek myth, would be all too familiar with the kind of nastiness that crawls from evil boxes.” Well done, Amy.

* Burn of the Day #2, via Rich Juzwiak: “[Rihanna’s] voice is not very interesting either, although on her fifth album Loud, she does interesting things with it. Not Diamanda Galás-interesting, but interesting in the way zombies are interesting — when something that once lay flat gets up and starts doing stuff, it’s remarkable.”

* Bruce Baugh walks you through the status of World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm event circa now–where it’s at, where it’s headed, what he’s up to, and what he’s planning.

* Real Life Horror: Embassy bomber largely acquitted because evidence derived through Bush Administration torture is inadmissible; conservatives demand trial by jury be replaced by telephone poll of Bristol Palin’s Dancing with the Stars supporters.

* “You shouldn’t go to jail for an idea, even an abhorrent one.”

* Finally, Entertainment Weekly has a photo gallery and set report from Game of Thrones. (Via Winter Is Coming and Westeros.) Looks pretty good! I mean, so what — the Dark Is Rising adaptation looked good when it had cast Christopher Eccleston and Ian McShane and released that first photo of the Rider — but hey, I’ll take it. I sent the link to a coworker who I hooked on the books and she popped out of her cubicle to tell me she was now in love with Jaime Lannister, so there’s that.

* Here’s the trailer for the Green Lantern movie. I think it looks good as far as the notoriously unreliable medium of trailers goes. Iron Man In Space strikes me as the right tone to establish for civilian audiences.

* This is just a great interview with Lisa Hanawalt by Ken Parille. I had no idea she’d done a Boy’s Club tribute strip! One thing I’ve always wondered, and it’s one of the few questions Parille doesn’t ask, is why she publishes mainly in print vs. online. I feel like an I Want You weekly webcomic would get a lot of attention.

* Grant Morrison updates my pal Rick Marshall at MTV Splash Page on several of his film projects, including We3, Joe the Barbarian, and the BBC series he’s working on with Stephen Fry.

* Christopher Allen on the Blakean blend of innocence and experience that is CF’s Powr Mastrs Vol. 1.

* Benjamin Marra draws ROM Spaceknight! Draws the shit out of him, too.

* Michael DeForge’s new comic Spotting Deer made me a bit nauseous just now.

* The shirt Simon Pegg is wearing in the poster for his new movie Paul features the Death Ray from Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #23, which leads me to ask the question, why doesn’t Fantagraphics make t-shirts? Is it a hassle to get the individual creators to go along with it? Did they used to do it in the ’90s and got burned when their t-shirt distributor went under? Because seriously, wouldn’t a line of Maggie and Hopey shirts basically be like backing up the money truck to the Fanta front door?

* If Bruce Baugh keeps WoWblogging, I’ll keep linking to it. Right now I’m digging the way the game’s makers are doing a lot of prelude-to-Cataclysm stuff, like it’s a big comic-book event or something.

* Finally, am I the only person who was at times genuinely disturbed by this gallery of children’s drawings of the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos? They look like something the police ask a victimized child to draw to describe their attacker or work through their feelings, or like the automatic drawing a child in a horror movie might do of the entity only she can see, so far anyway. (Via Chris Sims.)

* Woo hoo, a new Girl Talk album! Unabashedly excited about this. I feel like as enthusiasm wanes for him in indie-rock-crit circles, we can better appreciate him for what he is: the best mash-up DJ, no more and no less.

* Frank Santoro presents his favorite comics of 2010. He counts 2010 as lasting from SPX 2009 to SPX 2010, which may be the single best year-ender list cheat I’ve ever heard of. He also has a special category reserved for the old lions of alternative comics, who between Sacco, Crumb, Clowes, Woodring, Ware, and Burns have had an astonishing 12 months. The post gets bonus points for illustrating how a strict no-nonsense, no-aliases commenting policy should be adopted Internet-wide when it comes to discussing the work of Blaise Larmee and his Comets Comets crew–including, if Sam Gaskin’s exasperation is any indication, at Comets Comets itself.

* More depressing news out of the Direct Market as its monopoly distributor declines to handle a project of obvious artistic worth. When you’re the only game in town, I think you have an obligation to include as many people in that game as possible, especially when you’ve made plenty of room for people playing another game entirely.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Holy moley, Emily Carroll;

* I think I might…love these Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark images?;

* Mark Waid relentlessly hounds the person who stole his iPad;

* and by all means, bring Doomsday back and let him cut a swathe of destruction through the DC Universe. Seriously, I’m really happy about this! For one thing, The Death of Superman was a great time at the comics. For another, Doomsday is a great visual and a memorably relentless antagonist. And finally, I’ve long been of the opinion that it’d be great to tie tie-ins revolving around villains to dropping a real daisy cutter on your book’s status quo. Like, for example, back in the “Countdown to Infinite Crisis” days, I was always disappointed by how little the seemingly indestructible OMACs did when they showed up in all these books. They were programmed only to kill superhuman, but they did precious little of it when it mattered. I always thought a great way to drive home the threat and make readers feel like the crossovers were more than just a device to goose sales would have been to insist “Okay, Creative Team X, you can use Crossover Villain Y, but only if you kill off one of your major characters or otherwise totally upend business as usual.” Having Doomsday slaughter his way through the mildlist strikes me as a terrific way to clear out some dead wood and pave the way for a new direction. Y’know, like Cataclysm in World of Warcraft. (However, let me join the commenters in hoping that this doesn’t mean they’re gonna kill Steel, one of the great undervalued superheroes on a visual and conceptual level, to say nothing of the need for good non-white characters.)

* Speaking of which: Yep, still digging Bruce Baugh’s extensive pre-Cataclysm WoWblogging.

* A documentary about the early ’70s creative relationship between David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed called The Sacred Triangle? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Bookmarking these for when I’ve seen the episode: Curt Purcell and Sean P. Belcher on The Walking Dead episode 3.

* The Matthijs van Heijningen/Eric Heisserer/Ronald D. Moore prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing has been yanked from the 2011 release schedule. Weird.

* Very excited that my new blogging platform allows me to place the proper accent mark when linking to Ron Regé Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #6 on What Things Do. Longer and more diaristic than previous installments.

* Somewhere between Ben Katchor, Jeffrey Brown, and Brian Chippendale lurks Victor Kerlow’s “Black Shit Monster.” (Via Floating World and Arthur.)

* Speaking of Chippendale, today’s Puke Force installment is a black-comedy kick in the face.

* And speaking of Brown, Aviv Itzcovitz repanels Bighead.

* Real Life Horror: Two stories about the increasingly invasive and pointlessly humiliating security theater at America’s airports; two stories about the Obama administration’s lawless imperial free-for-all approach to dealing with accused terrorists. 2 + 2 = ? (NOTE: Fuck Anwar al-Awlaki and Go Team Comics, but still.)

* Sheila O’Malley writes in praise of Jeremy Renner. I’ve said this for literally years now, but ever since I saw him in Dahmer I knew he was something special. One day I’ll finally review that damn film. (Via Matt Zoller Seitz.)

* Tom Spurgeon against poptimism, more or less.

* Finally, did Doug Wright invent the infinite canvas? More via Matt Seneca.

* Curt Purcell echoes a lot of what I said about last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, and adds something I barely touched on, which is that the zombie stuff wasn’t very good in it either.

* If I had to imagine the way network executives talk about genre programming, I’d probably come up with something like this exchange from a pair of HBO honchos about the upcoming Game of Thrones adaptation. “Transcends the genre”: check. Interchangeable use of “sci-fi” and “fantasy”: check. Dutiful referencing of the twin goals of pleasing the fans and appealing to a wider audience: check. Not that I’m upset about any of this–they mean well. It reminds me, though, that by the sound of it this will be a much more reverent adaptation of the source material, in terms of fidelity, than True Blood.

* LOVE AND ROCKTOBER: Frank Santoro notes the silent messages being sent by what panel grids Jaime Hernandez uses when in his gobsmacking “The Love Bunglers”/”Browntown” suite from Love and Rockets: New Stories #3.

* Speaking of Frank: Naughty, naughty!

* Nick Gazin reviews some recent comics and not-comics releases for Vice. I’m interested in what he has to say about Destroy All Movies!!!, Bent, and so on, but mostly I’m interested in having the opportunity to once again beg him and Vice to create a comics-only RSS feed. (Yes, I’ve tried to hobble one together myself using Page2RSS; no, it didn’t work.)

* Despite its obnoxious one-image-per-page linkbait format, this Wired slideshow previewing Destroy All Movies!!!, the aforementioned look at cinematic treatment of punks and punk, got me pretty excited. It also makes me wish that some current science-fiction filmmaker would populate his post-apocalyptic wasteland with emo kids. (Via Fantagraphics.)

* This Tom Spurgeon drubbing of Mark Millar & John McCrea’s Jenny Sparks Authority spinoff contains what will surely be the critical line of the week. See if you can spot it.

* The great cartoonist Jason lists his 15 favorite cartoonists. It’s as interesting to see the ones who didn’t influence him in any obvious way as it is to see the ones who did.

* Real Life Horror: Americans love the vengeance murders of imprisoned murderers.

* The Xorn/Magneto story is only confusing if you insist on counting things not written by Grant Morrison as part of the story. I understand that Marvel got cold feet about having Magneto slaughter thousands of Manhattanites in extermination camps, then get beheaded–though it frustrates me that they greenlit the story if that’s how they felt about it–but the thing is, there are a million potential outs for that scenario that don’t involve undoing the big reveal at the heart of Morrison’s whole run. Scarlet Witch could have brought him back and he could have repented. Phoenix could have sent him back to life with the mission of making up for his transgressions. Nanosentinels or Sublime particles could have been responsible for his rampage, or brought him back to life, or both, or whatever. All things built right into the story, or into other important stories; all things that don’t necessitate contradicting what was already on the page. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

* Today on Robot 6:

* Nick Gurewitch unveils a new Perry Bible Fellowship comic and some old BBC cartoons;

* and Douglas Wolk unveils the secret of All Star Superman. Or does he?!?!

* Hobbit news: Bofur and Ori have been cast, Gandalf has not.

* Neil Marshall’s Centurion is now out on DVD after a blink-and-you’ll-miss it theatrical run (and some time on VOD, I guess). Marshall’s three-film track record runs “overrated/masterpiece/great time at the movies” for me thus far, so I’m really looking forward to this one.

* More behind-the-scenes sketches and notes from the new Morrison/Stewart/Clarke Batman & Robin hardcover, this time focusing on the new characters in the book.

* I love that “Genesis P-Orridge Quits Throbbing Gristle” is a headline that can be truthfully written in the year 2010.

* I’m always glad to see Brian Hibbs put on his reviewer hat; this time out he reviews a trio of midlist DC books and a pair of zombie television shows.

* If you’re not all Halloween-mixed out, you definitely want to check out Tim O’Neil’s contribution to the genre. This one focuses on the sinister ambient/industrial/electronic end of the spectrum, much to its benefit. I’d also forgotten how the otherwise pretty dire Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was sprinkled with quotes nearly the equal of the iconic lines from the first two–thanks for reminding me, Tim.

* Finally, you’ll notice I’ve added one of those thingamabobs whereby you can instantly post my posts to the social network of your choice by clicking a button at the bottom of each post. My question is, which of these does anyone use? Twitter and Facebook seem like no-brainers, and the email icon seems to be gmail-specific, but I also put Google Buzz and Digg and Delicious and Technorati and StumbleUpon down there because I’ve at least heard of ’em. Do any of you use them? Is there anything you don’t see down there that SHOULD be down there? Please let me know what you think in our wonderfully fast, non-double-posting, non-spam-ridden comments!

* Oh boy, my first Carnival here at the new digs!

* So yeah, welcome to seantcollins.com. This has been a long time coming, as anyone who’s ever had to suffer through me trying to tell them the url for my old blog can no doubt attest. Thanks once again to Ken Bromberg for helping to move everything off of the old site, to the All Too Flat team of Ken, Ben, and Ton for hosting me for over seven years even though their own interests led them elsewhere, and especially to Jason Ervin for designing and building this wonderful new site. It’s still a work in progress in some respects, of course, especially given the plans I have for it–and my laptop’s meltdown last week didn’t help either–but I think it will only get better and more useful. Thank you for being here!

* Josh Cotter needs your help. Please consider buying something to keep this enormously talented cartoonist and his family afloat after they were afflicted by a fire.

* Recently on Robot 6, a bunch of cool comics links:

* Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red”, a quiet knockout of a horror comic;

* Gabrielle Bell’s “Voyeurs”, which I can relate to a bit more than I should perhaps admit;

* Gabby Schulz’s “How Every Single Discussion About Sexism and Woman-Type Stuff on the Internet (and Real Life) Has Ever Happened and Will Ever Happen, Always, Forever, Until the Earth Finally Falls into the Sun. (Or Until the Patriarchy Is Dismantled.)”, which is sort of the “Calgon, take me away” moment for any of us who endured the horrible Kate Beaton debate last week;

* and, I’m quite pleased to say, me and Isaac Moylan’s “I Remember When the Monster Started Coming for the Cars.”

* Meanwhile, you can check out all of our Robot 666 Halloween horror posts here.

* ZOMG Benjamin Marra draws Brian DePalma’s Body Double! Lots of drawings at the link. Please do yourself the favor of watching that film if you haven’t. Spectacularly bizarre, and perfect for Marra.

* Now here’s an odd, unexpected, potentially positive development: sales for the lowest selling books in Diamond’s monthly Top 300 comics sales charts have increased over their historical norm. Does this mean that at least some of the people who stopped buying the big books when the events ended and the prices went up started buying other stuff? Or does it just mean that the big publishers’ product glut has pushed smaller publishers even further down the trough?

* Frank Santoro talks about a variety of recent releases, including books by Seth, Frazer Irving, Darwyn Cooke, Charles Burns, Aidan Koch, and John Romita Jr. Man, I could not disagree more with Frank’s contention that Irving doesn’t do clarity of action.

* DC’s Source blog has posted a pair of cool process-related, art-heavy posts drawn from the back matter of the deluxe Batman & Robin Vol. 2: Batman vs. Robin hardcover.

* I still haven’t had the chance to watch The Walking Dead, so I’ll spare you my thoughts on other people’s thoughts on something I haven’t seen myself. (The poor guy I blew up at on Twitter over Glee‘s bowdlerized Rocky Horror episode last week should’ve been so lucky!) In the meantime I can link you to some things that friends of mine are saying: Rob Bricken (who hasn’t read the comic) was quite impressed, Curt Purcell and TJ Dietsch (who have) were not.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in very good form today.

* Real Life Horror: A good sign that a whistleblower is doing something right is that various keyboard tough guys want him murdered.

* Finally, at some point I’m going to go back and read all the way through 31 Days of Knife, Sean P. Belcher’s woefully under-linked-to-by-me October slasher-blogging marathon. For now, his concluding essay about the subgenre is a good place to start.