* Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis are, at long last, officially signed to play Gandalf and Gollum in The Hobbit. Elijah Wood will be back as Frodo, too, somehow.

* Top Shelf has a good 2011 ahead of it, anchored by the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the new Nate Powell, the new Incredible Change-Bots, and the new Ax.

* Jesse Moynihan’s Forming will be collected by Nobrow and released through AdDistro! That’s a good comic.

* Tom Spurgeon muses on the Fantagraphics Complete Carl Barks Disney Duck Comics announcement. Short version: It’s all good.

* Speaking of Spurge, here are links to all of his Holiday Interviews. Tons of talented people in there, interviewed by the best there is.

* Today on Robot 6: Is DC Comics a two-man operation? Actually, you could say that the whole Direct Market is a three-man operation: Fully 65 of the 75 bestelling comic books of 2010 were written by Brian Michael Bendis, Geoff Johns, or Grant Morrison. That seems extraordinary to me, but then I’ve never crunched the numbers to see if this is an anomalous situation. (Hat tip: Douglas Wolk.)

* The New Yorker makes fun of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

* The co-publishers of Secret Acres serve up a fascinatingly candid look at a year in the life of their business, tackling topics from how unexpected demand for one book mucked with their plans for other books to the impact of negative reviews. (To be fair, Barry and Leon: The very same year I was upset by Wormdye, I loved Capacity and named it the #5 comic of the year! Much love for the Acres.)

* Gabrielle Bell battles bedbugs.

* Real Life Horror: The beginning of this Rachel Maddow segment on mass shootings is just magisterially chilling.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

* Over at Robot 6 I pulled some of my favorite parts from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interviews with Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez, two of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Of all time!

* Spurge also interviewed my very talented Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson, who comes at comics journalism and criticism from about a 180-degree remove from virtually everyone else I know. If you care about the field, you should read her interview.

* Kiel Phegley conducts an exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and ongoing Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada. Quesada breaks (I think) the news that Nick Lowe has been promoted to Senior Editor, while Kiel notes that Quesada is the first Editor-in-Chief to depart on his own terms since Stan Lee.

* Tom Brevoort notes that Editors-in-Chief of Marvel comics don’t actually edit comics, which is why he didn’t want the job.

* Are nine of the top 10 bestselling comics of 2010 creator-owned properties, Hollywood tie-ins, or both?

* Theo Ellsworth is working on an ongoing horror-SFF series called The Understanding Monster. Yes please!

* This week, Diamond starts shipping comics to Direct Market retailers a day early, if they want. I hope that works out.

* Frank Santoro on Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the power of drawing comics at the same size they’re printed. “Comments are closed.”

* They’ve given up on making a Wonder Woman TV show. Good. Doing so seemed like an admission that They’re not talented enough to make a movie of one of the most famous characters in the world.

* Rickey Purdin calls the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2010 “a totally insane comics and art show that, per capita, was probably the highest quality of its kind that I’ve ever attended.” Yep.

* Game of Thrones stuff 1: New photo gallery. Direwolf puppies or GTFO. (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Game of Thrones stuff 2: I really enjoyed this report from a roundtable with George R.R. Martin. Martin tells a great anecdote about an asshole at a Lord of the Rings screening who kept shouting shit like “Giant spiders? Oh, come on!” as an illustration of how some people will just never cotton to fantasy; he speculates that A Storm of Swords will be split over the show’s third and fourth seasons; he notes the difficulty of conveying when a character is lying on television, something I thought would be quite a challenge for the series in terms of one specific plot point later in the books; and so on and so forth. If you’re like me and hungry for any kind of smart discussion of the books you can get, you obviously could do a lot worse than a discussion featuring Martin himself.

* Game of Thrones stuff 3: Maureen Ryan posts excerpts of interviews with Martin, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actress Emilia Clarke. I liked Martin’s note of caution that big though the show’s budget may be, it can’t possibly compare to the roughly $15 million spent per hour of screentime on The Lord of the Rings. (Via Westeros.)

* Check out Michael DeForge’s fine Top 15 Comics of 2010 list. And then ask yourself if he ever stops working.

* Now Zak Smith is crowdsourcing an entire RPG: Gigacrawler, about a universe in which every available space on planets and in the void is part of one continuous, contiguous structure. In other words, all of existence is one giant dungeon. He and his crew start brainstorming the game’s major features here.

* Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, talks to Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal about his new album Kaputt, which is really something special. Avalon is referenced, and thus am I vindicated.

* I whipped up a nice long thumbsucker analyzing Axel Alonso’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Entertainment for Robot 6. I hope you’ll take the time to read it. The nutshell version is there are some big question marks even (perhaps even especially) pertaining to the areas where we have the most information by which to judge him, but also a lot of reason to be optimistic in terms of his approach to creators. One thing I didn’t include because because I’m not sure what its actual import is but which still seems worth noting as a positive for the biz: He’s the second Hispanic Marvel EIC in a row. (Memo to Iron Man editor Alejandro Arbona: Patience, grasshopper.)

* I suppose I shouldn’t’ve been, but even so I was surprised by the dominance of media tie-in titles on the list of 2010’s bestselling graphic novels for the Direct Market (as sold through monopoly distributor Diamond). The Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, and Kick-Ass leave a grand total of one slot open on the list, which was taken by a book that got over largely on the strength of a fortuitous “it’s Superman meets Twilight” blurb in the press.

* On the periodical comics end of the list, events still sell–that’s really the only lesson you can draw. Well, that, and books called X-Men #1 trigger some sort of lizard-brain response in the direct Market. One more: The Direct Market is all but a three-man industry at this point, with Brian Bendis, Geoff Johns, and to a lesser extent Grant Morrison dominating.

* Yesterday was the big Game of Thrones presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour. This bums me out because it means that yesterday would have been the day George R.R. Martin made his two big surprise announcements (one surely must have been the release date for A Dance with Dragons, but that pesky plural really has thrown me for a loop beyond that) were it not for his awful-sounding bout of urosepsis over Christmas. It’s also a bit of a bummer because the 15 minutes of footage screened for the assembled critics will likely never air publicly since it used existing film scores as a stopgap soundtrack. The most in-depth summary I’ve seen of the footage is from Chicago TV critic and über-nerd Maureen Ryan. It sounds like it was basically very very good, allowing for some quibbles of the strength of various wigs and Peter Dinklage’s English accent. (Via Westeros.)

* UPDATE: The series debuts April 17th.

* Here’s Drawn & Quarterly’s Fall 2011 release slate. Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray and Brian Ralph’s Daybreak are the big ones for me.

* Chris Mautner runs down six overlooked books from 2010, including my co-#2 best book of the year, Gilbert Hernandez’s High Soft Lisp.

* Alright, I really have no excuses for why I didn’t wise up to Zak Smith/Sabbath’s big “Gygaxian Democracy” experiment, but now he’s croudsourcing things a sea monster can do, so you know I’m all over it.

* Real Life Horror 1: Don’t forget that my representative, Peter King, is okay with terrorism as long as it’s English and Irish children you’re blowing up.

* Real Life Horror 2: Freedom.

* Finally, I’m happy to use Geoff Barrow from Portishead’s anti-record industry twitter screed as an excuse to post the video for “Chase the Tear.” (Via Maura Johnston.)

* Busy day on Robot 6 today:

* Jason Aaron tells Alan Moore to go fuck himself;

* Marvel was Joe Quesada’s Watchmen;

* John Boehner is the new Beta Ray Bill;

* and most especially, this Françoise Mouly interview is comprehensive and awesome. RAW, The New Yorker, Toon Books, Crumb gossip, personal history, the works. Must-read of the day.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Dirk Deppey.

* At long last, The Complete Pogo is about to join Fantagraphics’ ridonkulous reprint line-up. Updates on a lot of other late books of note in there as well, including various Nancy-related efforts.

* There’s something really heartwarming about the creative process for Axe Cop.

* The Star Wars series hits Blu-Ray in Septmember. It’s not clear if the original versions of the original trilogy will be a part of either the three-disc original-trilogy set or the 9-disc set for the enchilada. My hunch is that they’ll do it to please the nerds (and I include myself in that number), but there’s no predicting George Lucas.

* Nerdery at its finest: Zak Smith crowd-sources 60 different D&D dice-roll results for what getting smacked with something called “The Hammer of Exorcism” could do to you. I can’t decide which one I like best: The bit where the possessed victim develops a new orifice that swallows the hammer and allows him to subsequently extract it for use a la Videodrome, or your basic run-of-the-mill vomit hose.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones reviews Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma’s surprise hit series Morning Glories. I haven’t read it, but what Zom says roughly aligns with what I have a hunch I’d think of it based on what I’ve heard about it.

* For some reason, the common desire to wish the sins of America into the cornfield manifested in the bowdlerized Huck Finn now being produced and the bowdlerized Constitution read aloud in Congress today didn’t occur to me until Andrew Sullivan pointed it out.

* Real Life Horror 1: Animals are dropping dead all around the world.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald presents the story of 18-year-old American Gulet Mohamed, tortured in Kuwait and barred reentry into the United States because he’s on the no-fly list, both for crimes he never committed.

* The final installment of Christopher Allen’s Top 50 Albums of 2010 list contains one of the sharpest takes on Sleigh Bells I’ve ever come across. I also like his emphasis on the fun of Girl Talk, like it’s a game you play on road trips.

* Well, shit and double shit: George R.R. Martin was hospitalized on Christmas Eve with the urinary tract infection from hell. Fortunately, he’s okay; unfortunately, the “big announcements” he’d planned for HBO’s TCA reception (why whatever could they have been!!!) are kaput. Get well soon, George.

* You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! Poor Steve Lyons does what he can with a thankless task.

* There’s a passage in my friend Ryan “Agent M” Penagos’s exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and reigning Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada that I find very revealing about the man’s approach to his job: He sees his tenure and the projects he helped develop as the Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns he didn’t have it in him to produce as a cartoonist.

* Springboarding off Fantagraphics’ Complete Carl Barks announcement, Graeme McMillan asks what it means that Disney is publishing comics starring its characters through publishers other than Marvel. The long and the short of it is that Disney sees Marvel as being not in the comics business, but in the Marvel business. That’s consistent with their approach to many of their other brands: It’s not like they made Jim Henson start building all the puppets for their theme parks or had Pixar do Tangled for them. But it also tells you something about what Marvel’s approach to comics will likely be for the foreseeable future.

* Elsewhere, Graeme and Jeff Lester ponder at length why Axel Alonso got the Editor-in-Chief gig at Marvel over Tom Brevoort, who’s both more visible to the public and more integral to the company now-flagship Avengers franchise and nearly all of its big line-defining crossover events. But I don’t think it’s a mystery at all, frankly: Brevoort has said multiple times that he had no desire to take that job. I also don’t think it’s any mystery what Quesada will be doing, as it’s what he’s already been doing for quite a while.

* DC goes day-and-date digital with its Batman Beyond ongoing series. I note these things because they seem noteworthy, not because I have any idea what they really mean. I also note that I hear a lot of these series have had problems actually coming out day-and-date even when announced as such, particularly at Marvel.

* Gosh, Yanick Paquette has come into his own as the artist for Batman Incorporated.

* Cliff Chiang does Jaime Hernandez doing the Archies, basically.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan does Jeffrey Brown doing MMA.

* I haven’t seen Gareth Edwards’s much-lauded first-person giant-monster romance Monsters, but what little I’ve heard about it makes him sound like a pretty good choice to direct the next American Godzilla remake. Then again, wasn’t that basically what Cloverfield was? I mean that as a compliment by the way.

* Good news: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an FCC fine against boobs and butts on NYPD Blue.

* Real Life Horror headline of the day: “Severed head full of bullet holes found dangling from bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, official say.”

* Real Life Horror photo of the day: I’m not posting it here because even though it’s not graphic, its immediate implications are disturbing enough that doing so might be hurtful to some readers. But basically, a family photo snapped by Filipino city councilman moments before he was shot to death reveal his assassin with gun drawn and pointed directly at him right behind his unsuspecting family, and you can see it at the link. (Via Heidi MacDonald via Ivan Brandon.)

* My Representative, IRA supporter and anti-Muslim bigot Peter King, is the new head of the Homeland Security Committee; he says the New York Times should be indicted under the Espionage Act. He is a terrible person, and a dangerous one.

* Lighter-note time! Hahahaha, Tom Ewing reviews “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme for Popular, the blog on which he reviews every UK #1 single ever. A number-one hit that misattributed leadership of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Raphael!

* Three music videos of note today:

* My gosh, what a song “Film Music” by Family Fodder is! (Via Douglas Wolk, through whom I first heard it a while back.)

* Here’s the hugely enjoyable video for master pasticheur Destroyer’s late-period Roxy Music homage “Kaputt.” (Via Ryan Catbird.)

Destroyer – Kaputt from Merge Records on Vimeo.

* Finally, this one’s unembeddable so you’ll just have to click through: Wubba wubba wubba, goodbye, God bless, not only in the USA but in the UK too, it’s Hercules & Love Affair’s “My House.” Perhaps only my wife, who hears me sing “Everybody Everybody” on the daily, has any idea just how ready I am for Club MTV/House of Style nostalgia. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Another huge news day: Axel Alonso is the new Editor-in-Chief of Marvel; Joe Quesada is now focusing solely on his Chief Creative Officer (read: multimedia) duties; Tom Brevoort has been promoted to Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing. The end of a ten-year era, although if any editor can be said to represent continuity with Joe Quesada’s approach it’s probably Alonso. The moves made by Quesada in the early days of his reign played as big a role in my getting back into comics as anything this side of Highwater Books, so I’ll miss him and wish him well.

* Related: Brevoort sounds off on DC’s “drawing the line at $2.99” pricing initiative. He paints a picture of a Marvel-Disney relationship that’s very different from that of DC-WB.

* DC is finally releasing a Flex Mentallo collection. Of course, I’ve had a Flex Mentallo “collection” on my hard drive for a while now, but still, awesome!

* YES: Curt Purcell on the relationship between Laura Roslin and Bill Adama in Battlestar Galactica.

* Frank Santoro is having some kind of art show in West Hollywood starting January 20th, it would seem. If I were in West Hollywood, I’d go to this.

* Joe McCulloch on the Batman comics of David Finch (and Scott Williams). I thought the Finch written/illustrated Batman: The Dark Knight #1was good silly fun, for what it’s worth.

* Here are two very different Best of 2010 lists from Ben Morse and Ryan Sands.

* Wow, Michael Hoeweler draws a mean Robyn. (Via Shaggy.)

* Anders Nilsen presents “The Allegory of the Apartment.”

* Spider-MODOK as designed by Gabriel Hardman? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio is joining Jane’s Addiction. Uh, okay, sure. One thing many critics are wrong about is the greatness of Jane’s Addiction up through and including Ritual de lo Habitual, that greatness being very very great. I understand that Perry and Dave’s subsequent self-parodic antics cast a long shadow, but man, before that? Goth Zeppelin.

* Would you like to hear Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” as rendered through the dulcet tones of Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV? I don’t see why you wouldn’t! (Via Cindy Hotpoint.)

* Here are links to the three Carnival of Souls posts I did over the break through today: post-Christmas/blizzard, pre-New Year’s, post-New Year’s.

* Here’s a guide to all of Robot 6’s big 2nd anniversary special content, including some cool stuff involving yours truly;

* And here’s Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010, all in one place. This also includes a list of the list’s participants, which I think is helpful.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Bill Sienkiewicz is telling the story of his (mostly) unpublished collaboration with Alan Moore Big Numbers;

* Becky Cloonan is posting pages from her unpublished Tokyopop book East Coast Rising Vol. 2;

* and DC Comics makes a slew of announcements: all ongoing series are $2.99, letters pages are returning, Peter Milligan on Red Lanterns, and Sean Murphy on an American Vampire spin-off. That’s a pair of shots fired in the PR war, hopefully a step in the right direction for the Direct Market on pricing, a sign that Green Lantern is joining Batman as the two core franchises of the DCU, and a sign that American Vampire is joining Fables as the two core franchises of Vertigo.

* The Comics Journal has launched The Panelists, a new group blog featuring Derik Badman, Alex Boney, Isaac Cates, Craig Fischer, Jared Gardner, and Charles Hatfield. That’s a formidable crew.

* Dark Horse’s Facebook page hosts a very useful and thorough guide to the state of Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics.

* Which reminds me that the use of Facebook for PR was, along with now largely confirmed claims that the iPad is a digital-comics gamechanger, one of the big hobbyhorses of the late great Journalista blogger Dirk Deppey. “Seriously, what idiot ‘advertises’ their event solely on a website that requires registration to see the advertisement?” The kind of idiot who wants to advertise on the country’s most popular website, I guess.

* Chris Allen and Alan David Doane think that good superhero comics are the very least we should expect and demand. I see their point, although a good superhero comic is a good comic, after all.

* From good to bad: Graeme McMillan and the Comics Alliance crew explain what made some of 2010’s worst superhero comics so awful — very little schtick, lots of dragging very bad writing and art choices into the light of day and investigating what went wrong. Well done.

* If you’ve ever wondered what a smart critic with zero experience with any comics or video games would think of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, check out Edward Copeland’s review. He situates the movie in the (500) Days of Summer/Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist sphere, as you might expect, and preferred the rom-com stuff to the fighting and video-game stuff, as you also might expect.

* I’d need to reread the Fourth World saga to be sure — it’s been a few years — but I’m pretty sure that, contra Tim O’Neil, Jack Kirby’s Anti-Life wasn’t fascism, or more accurately it wasn’t just fascism — it was war. I cribbed that from Tom Spurgeon and I think it squares — after all, anti-fascist superhero comics from the World War II generation were a dime a dozen, but the Fourth World Saga stood out for a reason. Regarding Tim’s contention that Morrison’s Anti-Life is less powerful a concept than Kirby’s because it’s imposed rather than embraced, I think that’s probably true, but there certainly are people who want to impose Anti-Life’s real-life equivalent and it’s a valid avenue of exploration.

* Tom Spurgeon’s interview with the comics critic and journalist David Brothers helped me get at something I’ve often found frustrating about Brothers’s work. He’s a fine writer who brings welcome eye-on-the-ball focus and deserved indignation to his commentary on industry ethics, diversity issues, and business practices, but I’ve been frustrated by his tendency to focus so much on superheroes and other fantastic-action genre work and his occasional lapses into his particular character-specific version of “Wolverine would never say that!” But regarding the former, Brothers reveals that he only this year started reading Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez — and what a year to start! — and regarding the latter, he owns up to “basic fan entitlement.” In other words he’s young and (like all of us, hopefully) growing as a writer. Read the interview for his smart rejection of “hey, true art takes time!” defenses of late books and for a great bit on superhero comics’ civilian fashions (although I strongly disagree with his contention that “part of being an adult is wearing a shirt that has buttons on it every once in a while”):

The lack of attention paid to fashion in comics is baffling to me. We all pay a certain amount of attention, time, and money on what we wear, but you wouldn’t know it when you look at mainstream comics. Guys still wear Solid Colored T-Shirt and Latex Tight Jeans, with maybe a loose, formless leather jacket on top. Women wear Solid Colored Belly Shirt/Baby-T, Low Rise Jeans, and Visible Thong Straps. Belts, jackets, suspenders, and even something as simple as logos tends to be almost nonexistent, barring the relatively few artists who take the time to do it right.

The visible thong thing really is the post-millennial equivalent of ’70s and ’80s shirtless vest-wearing street toughs and ’90s mullet-based hairstyles.

* Can you imagine a world in which Lord of the Flies, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Waiting for Godot, Rear Window, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were in public domain as of this year? Yeah, neither can I. Fuck Thank you very much, Congress!

* Real Life Horror 1: I’m always up for reading about the giant octopus of that washed up on the shores of St. Augustine in 1896.

* Real Life Horror 2: Here’s a wonderfully written history of the bubonic plague by writer Mark Sumner on, of all places, Daily Kos.

* Real Life Horror 3: It’s always worth pointing out that my Representative, Peter King, supported IRA terrorism, especially given that he’s planning McCarthyite investigations of American Muslims who didn’t.

* Real Life Horror 4: The political blogger Digby has been doing yeoman’s work reporting on American law enforcement’s willy-nilly use of painful, frequently lethal tasers on non-violent non-criminals.

* Real Life Great Job: I can’t believe that one of the candidates for Republican National Committee Chairman is named Reince Priebus. Are we sure he’s not a Tim and Eric character? What do Prance Stuard, Bilb Ono, Doug Prishpreed, and Dun Dorr have to say about this?

* Cinema just got a lot less convincingly simultaneously genteel and dangerous.

* Whoa oh oh oh, ohhh.

* Oh, so that’s what’s up, Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, who apparently never stops drawing, he has a funny new strip up at Vice.

* I’m glad to hear that I played some small part in getting Curt Purcell psyched about blogging about horror again.

* Speaking of: I can’t help but be a bit disappointed with the (leaked and/or official depending on what post you’re reading) video for Kanye West’s monster, especially given such recent direct points of comparison as the clips for Scissor Sisters’ “Invisible Light” or West’s own “Runaway.” To the table occupied by the former’s dizzyingly trashy recreation of giallo and other groovy-age staples and the latter’s go-for-baroque parade of sexual, racial, and self-mythological neurosis, “Monster” brings a cornucopia of played-out “sexy dead model” visuals I saw in a fashion magazine, like, ten years ago. Moreover I think the whole sentiment behind “Monster” loses something when removed from the self-loathing draped all over My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; conflicted tracks like “Runaway” contain both sides of Kanye’s macho-asshole schtick in the way that the tough-guy songs just don’t. Finally, once you’ve read Nitsuh Abebe’s suggestion that Nicki Minaj should have been represented by a shapeshifter rather than a pair of good/evil twins, you really can’t unsee it. It’s like (as I’m fond of mentioning) when I learned that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was supposed to be filled by Pete Clemenza until it fell through over a wage dispute with Richard S. Castellano.

* Happy birthday to my favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien. I love you, Professor!

* Finally, HOLY SHIT

* Happy New Year!

* In case you missed it over the holiday weekend, I posted my list of The 20 Best Comics of 2010. It was really some year.

* I also uploaded a three-part mix of the Best Songs of 2010. That’s always one of my favorite projects to do.

* Meanwhile, my blog-away-from-home Robot 6 celebrated its 2nd anniversary yesterday with a slew of sweet stories…

* Obviously, none was sweeter than the announcement that Fantagraphics will be publishing the complete Carl Barks Disney duck comics. That announcement was a long time coming, so kudos to everyone on both ends who made it happen, especially Chris Mautner and Jacq Cohen. And kudos to Gary Groth and Fantagraphics for landing not one but two of the most anticipated projects of the year, between this and the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics. I can’t wait!

* Also on Robot 6, I interviewed Brecht Evens about his eye-catching new book The Wrong Place. There’s an anecdote about a disco ball you really want to read. And you really want to read the book, too — Evens is clearly one to watch.

* I also interviewed the great Ben Katchor about his upcoming book The Cardboard Valise. This was one of the great thrills of my cartooning-interviewing career. I say it over and over, I know, but there’s nothing else in the world like Katchor’s comics.

* My colleague JK Parkin interviews Chris Pitzer, publisher extraordinaire of AdHouse Books. Between Afrodisiac, Duncan the Wonder Dog, its publishing and charitable efforts on behalf of Josh Cotter, and the creation of AdDistro, AdHouse had a hell of a year. Actually I think you can say that on behalf of just about every alternative comics publisher of note, which speaks to just how strong a comics year it was. Also, I either forgot or never knew that AdDistro is picking up Birchfield Close and Benjamin Marra, so that’s good/old news.

* You see a lot of jaw-jaw about comics “selling out,” i.e. going through all their available copies at the distributor level. You basically never see a publisher explain what that means with hard numbers. So a round of applause is due to Archaia Editor-in-Chief Stephen Christy for doing exactly that in this intriguing interview with Michael May. The authors of the books in question, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard‘s David Petersen and Return of the Dapper Men‘s Jim McCann, chime in as well. Another independent publisher with a rock-solid year, but that’s likely to be true any time you have the combined PR clout of McCann and Mel Caylo behind you.

* Brigid Alverson runs down the year in digital comics. Her opening paragraph reflects everything I’ve heard unofficially from the big publishers, which is that the iPad completely changed how they see digital comics.

* I caught a couple of newsy bits in Robot 6’s survey of creators on the year that was and the year to come:

* Dan Nadel says PictureBox is collecting Tales of Greenfuzz by Will Sweeney and has a new Yuichi Yokoyama graphic novel called Garden on the way;

* James Kochalka says Top Shelf is working on an iPad app;

* and John Rogers says Vertigo recently changed its residual structure to the implied detriment of creators.

* I also liked Gail Simone’s analysis of the effect that high price points for individual monthly comics had on consumers’ reading and purchasing habits.

* The whole Robot 6 crew lists our respective favorite/best comics of 2010. Chris Mautner and I may be the same person; I’ll get back to you on that.

* Meanwhile, you can see what pretty much everyone who works for Robot 6, Comic Book Resources, and Comics Should Be Good has been reading lately in our latest, giant-sized What Are You Reading column. The big news there on my end is that I’ve got enough of a comics-review cushion right now to dig back into Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence. Fantasy books whose big confrontations consist almost solely of infodumps have no right to be that evocative.

* They’ll look familiar to you if you’ve read my own 20 Best Comics of 2010 list, but I have some more write-ups in Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010 countdown: Weathercraft, Special Exits, Wally Gropius, Wilson, Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, Grant Morrison’s Batman comics, and The ACME Novelty Library #20. Given CBR’s mission and audience, that’s a really solid Top 10.

* Reading Paul O’Brien’s latest report on Marvel’s monthly sales made me realize the havoc that variant editions must wreak on retailers’ ability to properly judge how many copies of comics to order for their customers. I mean, read this paragraph about the publisher’s best seller, Avengers:

This is the start of the book’s second storyline, but don’t read too much into the big sales increase just yet. The first five issues were heavily supported by variant covers, including 1:75 “character” variants by John Romita Jr. Issue #6, for some reason, was allowed to fend for itself. But with issue #7, it’s back to business as usual – this has a 1:15 Tron variant, a 1:25 Ed McGuinness variant, and a 1:50 Marko Djurdjevic gatefold variant. It also introduces the Red Hulk into the cast, which might be something of a draw; HULK sales may have passed their peak, but there’s still a significant audience there who might not have been buying the book before.

DC, of course, does the same thing:

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 and Batman and Robin #16, both of which were meant to be out in September, each had a 1:25 variant-cover edition to boost sales. Batman: The Return #1 (originally scheduled for October) and Batman, Inc. #1 had 1:200 variant editions in addition to the 1:25 ones. Batman and Robin #17, finally, which was solicited with a different creative team and ended up being the first part of a three-issue fill-in run, came with a plain old vanilla 1:10 variant-cover edition.

That’s a lot of hoops to jump through, and I have to imagine that’s the last thing the Direct Market needs right now. (Bonus points to DC analyst Marc-Oliver Frisch for reacting to the shenanigans the way that card dealer reacts to being able to leave the table after dealing to a drunk and belligerent Joe Pesci in Casino.)

* Chris Mautner interviews Eric Reynolds about Mome: part one, part two. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Alex Dueben interviews Joyce Farmer about Special Exits. Farmer says she worked on the book for 13 years, and threw away the first 35 pages after she finished them because she felt they weren’t up to snuff.

* I think this is the only time I’ve ever found eyebrowless-era David Bowie attractive.

* Quick note: I am creating this post from 30,000 feet above the American Midwest, so apologies for the airplaine-wireless-mandated lo-res images.

* Like the comics blogosphere’s own version of the Jelly of the Month Club, Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview Series is the gift that keeps on giving. Recent entries of note include interviews with beleaguered Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar, esteemed Drawn & Quarterly associate publisher and publicist Peggy Burns (perhaps my acquaintance of longest standing in all of comics), and garrulous webcomics craftsman Dustin Harbin.

* The most informative of the bunch so far has to be Spurge’s interview with CBR News Editor (and my friend) Kiel Phegley. Kiel serves up a survey of the state of the industry that I think will really impress you with its insight and candor, not just “coming from a CBR editor” if that’s the kind of thing that’s inclined to turn you off but coming from anybody.

* I wrote up Anders Nilsen’s masterpiece Big Questions for the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010.

* Speaking of year-enders, Tucker Stone lists his 20 Best Comics of 2010. Many fine choices on there.

* Tim O’Shea interviews Axe Cop‘s Ethan Nicolle. It’s fascinating to learn that Axe Cop is written largely through actual, literal play. I also had no idea the Nicolle Brothers have a print Axe Cop miniseries on the way from Dark Horse called Bad Guy Earth.

* Marvel’s keeps moving in the direction of day-and-date digital releases, but they’re smaller movements than I expected to see by now.

* Curt Purcell has a few quick thoughts on Battlestar Galactica. He’s also looking for recommendations as to which shows to watch next. Curt, The Sopranos and Deadwood are the best shows. The Wire is very good except for the final season. You know I loved Lost.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM pleads for Bernard Rose’s Candyman. The post includes an anecdote that makes me really disappointed in Philip Glass.

* Fine writing by Zak Smith/Sabbath on the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter of The Hobbit and what it means for fantasy storytelling and RPG storytelling alike.

* Brian Chippendale’s last few Puke Force strips have been really good.

* Aeron Alfrey has posted a fine selection of video game covers over at Monster Brains.

* Whoa, what is up, Michael DeForge?

* Renee French titled this image “Shatner.”

* Real Life Horror 1: TPM’s Rachel Slajda presents the year in Islamophobia — to me the most dispiriting development in an already dreadful year.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald continues to chronicle the harsh treatment of WikiLeak source Bradley Manning by the U.S. government. That’s the “how”; I have a feeling this lengthy round-up of revelations provided by WikiLeaks in 2010 is the “why.”

* Related: The story of #mooreandme, the vociferous Twitter protest of comments made by Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann dismissing and mischaracterizing the rape allegations against WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and a link retweeted by Olbermann to an article outing the accusers.

* Real Life Horror 3: I’ve been remiss not to have linked to this already, but my home land mass of Long Island appears to have sprouted a serial killer.

* Every time I read stories like this — and that’s often — the phrase “of historic proportions” pops unbidden into my head.

* Dirk Deppey’s farewell post at Journalista is big-hearted and gracious, and thus out of character for the irascible sonofagun. Aw, I kid — Dirk gave me my “big break” as a comics critic, as he did with many other denizens of the then-nascent comics blogosphere, by hiring me to write for The Comics Journal, an institution that, whatever its subsequent faults, he opened to manga and “mainstream” comics like never before. Even before that, his facilitation of conversation between distant blogs made him a pioneer in online comics discourse and thus a central figure in the last decade of comics criticism. If NeilAlien is the father of comics blogging, Dirk Deppey is the father of the comics blogosphere. Good luck, Dirk!

* If you can forgive Time’s absurd hit-whoring slideshow format, which is not the sort of thing that should be rewarded but is also not the fault of the fine critic and swell person Douglas Wolk in any way, then you can read his Ten Best Comics and Ten Best Graphic Novels of 2010.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews the fine young critic Matt Seneca. I say “young” not because age matters, but because seriously, here is a person who started blogging about comics after Afrodisiac came out. He’s a new breed.

* Real Life Horror: The Obama Administration unveils their kinder, gentler indefinite detention policy.

* Today Marvel announced its next event comic: Fear Itself, with a core miniseries by Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen. It sounds like fun in the heroes vs. villains mode Marvel’s modern mega-events have traditionally lacked, and best of all if you like me are a giant nerd, the Hulk and the X-Men are neck-deep in this one too. Click that link for my thoughts on what this says about Marvel’s view of its “Heroic Age” experiment with smaller mini-events.

* Also on Robot 6 today: Tom Brevoort’s and Brian Hibbs’s recent diametrically opposed comments on the effect the proliferation or reduction of titles starring the same character(s) has on sales. Some commenters take issue with my read on this, but I do think I have it right: Based on their own constructions of the issue, one of them is flat wrong about this. Or both! Brian himself clarifies things in the comments.

* It’s always fun when folks stumble across the antecedents for Benjamin Marra; in that vein I give you Joe McCulloch on Joe Vigil’s Dog.

* My sudden-onset appreciation for the comics of Gabrielle Bell has been one of 2010’s great comics-reading pleasures for me.

* Longtime ADDXSTC readers may recall that my interest in World of Warcraft first arose from my enjoyment of videos in which players engaged in some grade-A jackassery of the sort not envisioned by the game’s creators. In that vein, I present “300 Naked Orcs”: Three hundred players created entry-level orc characters and simultaneously attacked an 85th level NPC that no one ever expected anyone to be stupid enough to try to kill. And they killed him. It’s a thing of idiotic beauty.

* DeNiro, Pacino, and Pesci in Scorsese’s next Irish-gangster picture? I’ll eat that shit whole. (Via Alex Segura.)

* Dang: Dirk Deppey has been let go. Take it from someone who was there: Dirk midwifed the comics blogosphere as we know it. Vaya con Dios, Journalista — most of us wouldn’t be here if not for you.

* Two great Quotes of the Day today on Robot 6: Ta-Nehisi Coates on comics as the literature of outcasts (fun, potentially corroborative fact: all of my gay friends are also big nerds);

* and Joe Casey finds today’s superhero comics boring. Oddly, so do I, for the most part, and judging from multiple conversations I’ve had recently, so do a lot of people I know. There are some counterexamples, certainly, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to talk about them if I can collect some thoughts. (Here’s one that’ll be going in: the conclusion to Brian Hibbs’s year-ender essay on the troubles faced by the Direct Market.)

* The Joe Casey quote comes from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interview with him, which kicks off Spurge’s Holiday Interview series for the year. Curling up next to my in-laws’ dogs in Colorado while reading these things on my laptop genuinely is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. I look forward to the rest of ’em. As for this one, Casey’s Ben 10 insulation from repercussions for calling a spade a spade has made him one of the most consistently entertaining interviews in comics on a “here’s where the bodies are buried” level.

* Speaking of Spurge, in this piece on his favorite WildStorm comics he makes the case for that incest storyline from Alan Moore and Zander Cannon’s Smax, the idea being that it’s a jarring enough custom that it makes us feel the kind of response that the characters themselves would feel, instead of setting up afterschool-special-type mustache-twirling antagonists who are racist or homophobic or some other thing we in the audience can gloss right over as “bad guys!” The idea is that it’s sort of the narrative equivalent of the way Shaun Tan used the fantasy elements of The Arrival to better simulate for readers the disorientation of the immigrant experience. It’s smart; given that Moore has shown himself to be prone to afterschool-special literalism in this area — including in Smax‘s fellow Top 10 spinoff The 49ers — I’m not sure I buy it.

* Marvel has made a big deal out of how Fantastic Four will be ending after the current “Three” storyline, which ostensibly will kill one of the Four; today they announced that the Fantastic Four creative team will be launching a new series called FF in March. I don’t understand these kinds of maneuvers. Do they even really goose sales anymore beyond the #1 issue? I mean, these things can work fine if you’re Grant Morrison, but Hickman and Epting are having a swell run on Fantastic Four, and to me the gimmickry just distracts from it.

* Kevin Huizenga has posted three new Fight or Run strips! Someone with more influence over Kevin Huizenga than I have should beg him to make this a weekly webcomic.

* The great Norwegian cartoonist Jason, of all people, pretty much nails Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, or at least what I think of it, right down to some very specific points of comparison with how it probably ought to have been filmed, and to calling out the silliness already present in the original. That said, it seems pretty clear that I like both the comic and the movie a lot more than Jason does.

* Vice’s Nick Gazin says some smart things and some stupid things in his latest comics review round-up, which is par for the course, but it’s entertaining either way, which is also par for the course. (Seriously, PictureBox haters are the new Fantagraphics haters.)

* Ooh ooh, Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Movie Uncut by J.A. Kerswell — a Portable Grindhouse/Destroy All Movies!-style book about slasher flicks!

* Benjamin Marra’s ROM: Spaceknight art is now available as a one-of-a-kind print to raise money for Bill Mantlo’s medical bills. Bid on the thing — as of this writing it’s available for freaking $9.99! (Via Zack Soto.)

* Emily Carroll is a real talent.

* Dave Kiersh is a real talent.

* I can’t wait to talk about Battlestar Galactica with Curt Purcell.

* And here’s another Quote of the Day, this time music-related: Scroll to the bottom of this page from Pitchfork’s Artist Guest List Best of 2010 feature to read OMD’s Andy McCluskey thoughtfully and passionately explain the brilliance of Robyn.

* I think this Alyssa Rosenberg piece on Game of Thrones for the Atlantic (WARNING: more spoilery than I’m comfortable with) fairly misses the boat. Rosenberg argues that the show will require more “sustained leaps” of belief than not just series like The Sopranos and The Wire, which require us to suspend our potential disbelief that murderers struggle to behave decently and contribute usefully in other ways, but also shows like True Blood or The Walking Dead, which depict fantastical things happening “firmly within the existing world” and “in a world discernibly our own” respectively. But the appeal of the Song of Ice and Fire books, and presumably the series, absolutely is that the characters’ motives and their societies’ constructions are recognizable from where we stand, the occasional dragon or bit of sorcery notwithstanding. The fact that it doesn’t take place on “Earth,” not even the alternate near-future Earths of Sookie Stackhouse and Rick Grimes, makes no difference in terms of the show’s approach. (Its reception might be a different matter, but only because swords and armor and accents make a lot of people think “old-timey” and tune out, and that’s not what she’s talking about; she’s saying things like that the show’s in a class by itself because it’ll have “to convince viewers not only that dragons are real, but that they are a literal bulwark against a real and frosty evil,” which in reality is just a difference in degree from “vampires exist and want marriage rights,” not in kind.) “The Sopranos with swords” is dead-on, if the show is done right.

* Finally, no idea how I missed this, but on December 16th George R.R. Martin wrote that he “might have an exciting announcement…maybe two” on January 9th at the Game of Thrones TCA thingamajig in Los Angeles. I suppose it’s easy enough to guess what the first exciting announcement is, but what about the second? I’ll bite: I’ve often wondered if he was actually writing the next two Song of Ice and Fire books at once…

* Craig Thompson says “Habibi production is stuck in limbo.” In a good way, I hope?

* Mike Mignola tells CBR some more about his forthcoming Hellboy plans, including collabos with Kevin Nowlan, Richard Corben, and his own bad self. I especially enjoy the news that he may start treating Hellboy like an altcomic in terms of numbering; rather than label things “issue #2 of 6” or whatever, he’ll just start from #1, and they’ll come out when they come out, and the stories will finish when they finish. Hell yeah.

* Murderers’ Row: Sammy Harkham, Gabrielle Bell, Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga.

photo by Dan Nadel

* Tucker Stone has his “WE are the walking dead!” moment. This is a great column on some of the year’s worst comics, worth both reading and just scanning through the horrifyingly awful panels Tucker picked out to illustrate. And seriously, stop buying terrible comics. (I do straight-up enjoy those last two images, though.) Moreover, right near the top of the piece Tucker rattles off a rock-solid best of 2010 list that covers superhero comics, alternative comics, and “fusion comics” alike. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Hey, Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith has his own blog! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* This episode of a geek podcast named Bear Swarm! leaves no doubt that it is an episode of a geek podcast with a name like Bear Swarm!, if you know what I mean, but it also features a lengthy, geekish interview with George R.R. Martin about the Song of Ice and Fire novels, so I do recommend listening to that part.

* Eve Tushnet on Eyes Wide Shut and the pleasure of finding pleasure in occasionally less-than-pleasurable art:

I don’t think I’ve been nearly attentive enough about restraining this tendency in myself: the tendency to summarize, to grade. To say, “This movie was fantastic in ways x, y, and z, but ultimately failed/succeeded because q.”

It’s that “ultimately” which I need to work harder to avoid. Art is not an exam! You don’t pass or fail.

* Mark Bagley is returning to Ultimate Spider-Man, one of my favorite superhero titles for years and years on end now. I think it’s safe to say that his work for DC showed that Ultimate Spider-Man is where he belongs, although let’s be honest, David LaFuente creams anyone else who ever drew that book.

* In further news related to the good Brian Bendis comics, They’re making a TV show out of Alias. I’m not confident it’ll be any good, based simply on the track record of adaptations of any and all genre comics. It occurred to me yesterday that I could list all such adaptations I consider to be genuinely creatively successful on one hand and still have fingers to spare.

* Pure Sean crack: Ta-Nehisi Coates slags superhero movies for their smallness, praises The Lord of the Rings for its bigness. I’m telling you, I remember so vividly the 20-minute sneak-preview I was able to attend after the Cannes Film Festival, when they were screening the Mines of Moria sequence for critics. I went with a skeptical friend, and we left astonished. The instant Legolas fired that arrow and we traveled with it as it traversed that vast chasm and hit that orc, who then plummeted into the abyss, I realized: They’ve gotten the scale right, for the very first time in the history of fantasy cinema.

* Speaking of Coates, I understand why American fiction writers used to be so smitten with the idea of ex-Confederate soldiers righting the wrongs inflicted on them and theirs by Union thugs. I don’t understand why they’d still be smitten with it today. Or maybe I do, sad to say.

* Finally, a little Real Life Horror (and let’s face it, for the next two years that could be the name of any given Congressional Beat column) for your weekend: My congressman, the odious, racist (and not incidentally IRA-supporting) Peter King, will be heading up a McCarthyite committee to “investigate” American Muslims come the next Congress. Fuck this asshole, fuck anyone who thinks this is a good idea, fuck this failed-state country of ours, hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the Tylenol.

* I’m proud to present Superheroes Lose, a new tumblr in which I’ll be posting comic covers and promotional art featuring superheroes losing. In part I’m doing this because I think these things are unintentionally hilarious; in part I’m doing it because I have some half-baked ideas on what these things meeeeeeeean, and having a lot of them in one place may help me shake those ideas loose.

* That being said, I’m quite excited about the image above even aside from its Superheroes Loseworthiness, because I think it means that the Hulk — the plain old Bruce Banner green Hulk — will be involved in a major, Avengers-driven (was that redundant?) Marvel event for the first time in the modern event-comic era. (World War Hulk doesn’t count — that was really a Hulk comic blown up big, and the event angle came from fighting the Illuminati, not the Avengers, Marvel’s modern flagship team.)

* Here’s a heck of a find: a live-action short-film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole by director Rupert Sanders. As best I can tell it’s sort of smushing several scenes from different points in the book into one long thing, so it’s not necessarily the most accurate adaptation (especially if you have Keith’s first encounter with Eliza memorized panel by panel), but it’s fine work regardless, atmospheric in a way these things usually aren’t and true to the spirit of the thing. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Johnny Ryan (!!!) interviewed Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore about The Walking Dead for Vice, with suitably juicy results. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books imprint is now a going concern, with comics by Tom, Gabrielle Bell, and Jon Lewis. Check it out.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Two Eyes of the Beautiful II by the very talented Ryan Cecil Smith of Closed Caption Comics fame.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the appeal of superheroes — and supervillains — to marginalized groups beyond traditional geeks.

* I’m linking to ComixTalk’s 2010 digital/webcomics roundtable — featuring such august personages as Heidi MacDonald, Brian Heater, Brigid Alverson, Gary Tyrrell, Lauren Davis, and Larry Cruz — because it features my chum Rick Marshall of MTV Splash Page saying very, very complimentary things about Destructor, but even beyond that it’s stuffed with links to comics that come recommended by the participants and as such strikes me as a great way to launch a lazy pre-holiday weekend afternoon’s reading in a couple of days.

* Matthew Perpetua doesn’t like the gratuitous use of rap patois in hip-hop reviews, and the inconsistent application of stage names depending on the genre being talked about. I think in both cases this stuff is mostly showoffy; it’s interesting to see the differing directions that takes depending on whether or not hip-hop’s in the spotlight.

* Congratulations to The Country Club for mashing up Super Mario Bros. and Grand Theft Auto juuuuuuuuust about perfectly. I laughed out loud on the train at the ending. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Presume not to instruct Curt Purcell on matters pertaining to the Groovy Age of Horror when recommending Scissor Sisters videos, for he is subtle and quick to post far, far more pertinent giallo videos. Here endeth the lesson. Seriously, music people who read this blog, if you enjoyed the video for “Invisible Light,” you must click that link and watch Curt’s videos. Nude for Satan, ladies and gentlemen. (But aren’t we always?)

* Slowly George R.R. Martin turned, step by step, inch by inch…

* If you caught my LOVE AND ROCKTOBER wrap-up post early enough, you probably missed the update, in which I added advice as to which Love and Rockets books you should read first if you’re interested in giving either Gilbert or Jaime’s half of the series a try.

* Well, this is the most fascinating and exciting thing I heard all day. (Which says something about me, probably.) Okay, so you know how World of Warcraft’s big Cataclysm expansion/revamp has added various new races from which players can create playable characters, like goblins and so on. The best known of these is the Worgen — werewolves, basically. Now, I figured that the story would be that there’s some preexisting (albeit previously unplayable) race/civilization of werewolves just like the humans and dwarves and orcs and night elves and so on — but no, the story is much more interesting. Basically, when you opt to play as a Worgen, you start out as a human in the isolated, isolationist city of Gilneas. Trapped behind its own massive defensive walls, the city succumbs to a werewolf epidemic, a la a George A. Romero movie or 28 Days Later. You become a Worgen after you fail to save the city and succumb to the curse yourself. How cool is that? A brilliant and sinister approach to werewolves, and a fascinatingly creepy and unexepcted way to storytell this race of characters into existence.

* Am I the only person who didn’t know that Ben Jones was coming out with a new book of comics, art, and interviews about being a man called Men’s Group Black Math in January from PictureBox? And that the covers are denim? (Hat tip: David Paggi.)

* Speaking of Jones, The Problem Solverz is indeed a full-fledged Cartoon Network show for kids, not an Adult Swim show for adults on ambien. Can you even imagine???

* Today on Robot 6: How Scott doin’? He’s survivin’. He was drinkin’ earlier — now he’s drivin’. Where y’all evil exes, hanh? Where you hidin’?

* and yep, Lane Milburn’s Twelve Gems still looks pretty terrific.

* Wow, Chester Brown’s Paying for It and Anders Nilsen’s complete Big Questions can’t get here soon enough.

* Kudos and sympathy alike to the Onion A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps for dealing forthrightly and classily with a really, really lousy situation. Would that the same could be said for the A.V. Club’s commenters, among most insufferable on the Internet and currently deluging Comics Comics.

* Hey, Chip Kidd designed the cover for Andrew Sullivan’s book about weed.

* Real Life Horror 1: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, IRA collaborator Peter King is head of the House Homeland Security Committee. You almost have to admire the chutzpah involved in these Republican committee chair selections; it’s really like putting Doctor Doom in charge of the House Committee on the Fantastic Four. However, not even today’s GOP dares put Joe Barton in charge of Energy and Commerce, so good for them.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald points out, among other things, that most of the people who publicly fret about the innocent lives that could some day be lost due to WikiLeaks are incapable of acknowledging the actual innocent lives already taken by the U.S. government and its military on a daily basis. That lacunae in people’s moral calculus, to which I have obviously been far from immune over the years, bears thinking about. (Of course it’s also possible for the same group of dying innocents to go from visible to invisible, as is now the case with Republicans and sick 9/11 responders.)

* Real Life Horror 3: I always find military invasions of domestic areas in response to out-of-control law-enforcement issues darkly fascinating. I think it captures my inner eight-year-old just like opposite-number villains do. As a kid in affluent suburban America, the idea of a government not having control over part of its own territory, so that they have to send in the army to reclaim control from whatever criminal enterprise is running it in their stead, is pretty much straight-up science fiction, like Jabba the Hutt having the run of things on Tattooine, Empire be damned. And so it goes in Rio de Janeiro, where the military and police invaded and retook the Complexo do Alemão slum, with the predictable mixed results. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)

* Ugh, I can’t leave you with this cavalcade of awfulness over the weekend. Here, listen to this episode of Meltdown Comics’ Meltcast podcast, in which Sam Humphries of Fraggle Rock fame names Destructor his Pick of the Week. Thanks Sam! Hey, it cheered me up…

* Here are some ways to kill time until Bruce Baugh blogs about Cataclysm.

* Radagast, Balin, and Beorn have been cast and Cate Blanchett has been re-signed as Galadriel in The Hobbit. Yes, ex-Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy is Radagast.

* Holy moley: Problem Solverz, the upcoming Adult Swim cartoon from Ben Jones, is almost literally unbelievably gorgeous. Do yourself a favor and watch this fullscreen at 720p. The colors are astonishing. It’s also really funny! Well done. (Via Sammy Harkham.)

* Here’s a very informative interview from the Innsmouth Free Press with artist and blogger Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains fame. It includes the breaking news that Alfrey and Mat Brinkman are making a board game together.

* Today on Robot 6: Early and rare Bill Watterson art.

* Check out these effusive BCGF reports from AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer and pood‘s Adam McGovern.

* Speaking of AdHouse, AdDistro has added Revival House Press, publishers of the entertaining Trigger and Shitbeams on the Loose.

* AMC will be re-running Breaking Bad in its entirety, two episodes every Wednesday night starting tomorrow through March 2011. Sold.

* I don’t think all that much of the films of Christopher Nolan, and this post by Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken struck me as a pretty efficient film-by-film explanation of why.

* Today the New York Times’ RSS feed for Paul Krugman’s blog uploaded a post with the headline “Ice And Fire Update” and the synposis “The saga is getting better.” Man oh man was I disappointed when I clicked through to see it was a post about Iceland’s economy and not, you know, Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman blogging his thoughts on the chapters he recently read from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

* Real Life Horror: This Telegraph piece on potential UFO/extraterrestrial-related documents in the WikiLeaks diplomatic document dump is a Real Life Horror candidate for two reasons. One, hey, awesome, confidential government cables about aliens! Two, the litany of astonishingly bloodthirsty statements by various American conservative politicians and pundits calling for the state murder of Julian Assange and anyone who helps him. It’s almost as if the movement had been waiting with bated breath for a political enemy whose death they it could call for without reproach.

* America is Number One!

* Good eye, Ben.

* The inclusion of Bryan Ferry’s Olympia on Pitchfork’s Worst Album Covers of 2010 list is just bizarre. Like they’re asking, “Can you believe Bryan Ferry put a recumbent model on his latest album cover?!?” Um…yes?

* This weekend I attended the second annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. It was the best comic con I’ve ever been to; on a pure comics level it was simply staggering, and of course that’s the level that matters. I wrote a full con report for Robot 6, so please do check it out.

* Last night HBO aired an 11-plus minute making-of/preview of Game of Thrones. I’ve embedded it twice below: The first video is the full 11:46 preview that ran on TV, while the second is a shorter version from HBO’s official YouTube account that runs about 10 minutes. Watch the longer one, provided it’s still up. What can I say? Everything looks rock-solid, and again, they seem to be emphasizing the stuff you’d want them to emphasize; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who plays Jaime, nails the mega-plot of the whole series right to the wall, for instance. Also? The Hound. (Via Winter Is Coming.)

*Here’s a lengthy and to my mind insightful essay by Myles McNutt on Game of Thrones and the HBO brand. (Via Westeros.) Sample bit:

In earlier conversations on Twitter where I tried to find just where Game of Thrones fits within the HBO Brand, there were some logical parallels: the scale of the series is perhaps matched only by Rome (which was both a BBC co-production and an actual historical series), and the kind of fan interaction necessary for its success most closely mirrors True Blood. And yet, the show doesn’t fit easily into either of those categories, in that the show lacks the romantic and camp elements of a show like True Blood but has a greater expectation for authenticity (oddly enough) than Rome – it seems strange to suggest that viewers are scrutinizing a fantasy more closely than an historical drama, but such is the nature of a literary adaptation of a beloved series with an intelligent fan base whose expectations of this story go beyond what Sookie Stackhouse readers might have expected from the adaptation of their beloved novels or what history nuts might have anticipated from Rome (which was also sold as a fictionalized account of the historical event in question).

I’ve thought about the “accuracy” angle a lot versus True Blood, which I’m told plays fast and loose with the details, and even some major elements and characters, of Charlaine Harris’s novels while remaining broadly faithful to the overall plot, and versus The Vampire Diaries, which I’m told has almost nothing to do with the novels anymore. (Clearly the same is true of Gossip Girl.) I’m tempted to say that female-based fandom is more forgiving of deviations from orthodoxy, but then I remember that a) The Walking Dead seems to be doing just fine by most of the fans of its source material despite increasingly massive deviations from the original (and despite not being all that good, but that’s not really relevant here), and b) The Lord of the Rings, which mentally I’ve constructed as the gold standard in fandoms that demand absolute fidelity, actually made quite a few changes itself. Tom Spurgeon has argued that fans don’t want fidelity, they want flattery — flattery of what they the fans believe to be the most important aspect of the work at hand. I tend to agree with him. But in a case like Game of Thrones, where so much of the story is driven by byzantine plotting by the characters, I think fans will get a bit restless of there’s too much mucking about with it.

* Game of Thrones t-shirts!

* Jim Woodring Frank t-shirts!

* Hyphen magazine profiles my pal Shawn Cheng of Partyka. (Via The Daily Cross Hatch.) Worth reading for the pronunciation guide to “Partyka” alone!

* Ben Morse on Juliet, the best villain in Gossip Girl history. Money quote, in more ways than one: “In the weird dynamic of this show where the spoiled brats are the heroes, it just makes twisted sense that the girl who has to do her own dishes is the villain.”

* Thank goodness someone’s finally going to put the spotlight on the Marvel Comics work of Brian Bendis. Aw, I kid. I actually think a PR initiative based on talking up the writers who help decide the direction of the Marvel Universe in an almost editorial capacity is a good idea, insofar as that’s a pretty unique set-up in terms of the history of superhero comics and worth talking about as such.

* Please subscribe to the RSS feed for Jesse Moynihan’s webcomic Forming; I don’t see how you’ll be disappointed in terms of the sheer visuals.

* I’m sure I must have seen this illustration of Lady Liberty and Lady Justice making out somewhere before, but only in seeing it now do I realize how cool it would be if there were a giant Statue of Justice on the West Coast somewhere, with the two of them bookending America like the Argonath.

* The bargain of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics festival: All five of the books in Benjamin Marra’s Traditional Comics line for $10 total. You are nuts if you don’t buy them at that price.

* Great interview alert: Arthur magazine’s Justin Farrar talks to Ron Regé Jr. about Yeast Hoist — both the comic series and the beer that is its latest installment.

* Jeet Heer sings the praises of Todd Hignite’s The Art of Jaime Hernandez. I don’t know why things always get so nasty in Comics Comics comment threads — I think they may have imported bad behavior from their various sparring partners, or maybe it’s just that any site with the word “Comics” in the name brings out the worst in people — but check it out anyway to watch various smart people (eg. Evan Dorkin) try to figure out why no one talked about this and other recent books of note.

* Destructor item of the day: Thanks to Agent M, NeilAlien, Comics Alliance, Xaviar Xerexes, Brian Warmoth, and Family Style for recommending the site to people.

* Anyone know if there’s a way to acquire back issues of Desert Island’s house anthology Smoke Signal? Can’t get ’em through the website except for the most recent one. If they’re at the Festival tomorrow then by God I’m grabbing them!

* Quick housekeeping note first: I posted a quick guide to some of DestructorComics.com’s navigation features. I think they’re pretty neat.

* Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that Fantagraphics will be publishing Daniel Clowes-designed collections of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, arguably the great as-yet-uncollected classic comic. Over on Robot 6 I have a brief spiel about why I think the strip will work in the Tumblr Age.

* Also on Robot 6: Please pay Michael Kupperman, you monsters.

* Here’s more engrossing writing on life after recent developments in World of Warcraft by Bruce Baugh. I think the points he raises here about constructing a player’s early experience to maximize enjoyment in the immediate term and the impact of the story in the medium-to-long term can apply to pretty much any form of narrative storytelling.

* Moreover, as I think I’ve said before, it’s really only after reading Bruce’s posts of late that it’s occurred to me that the “line-wide event” model of superhero comics publishing developed by Marvel and DC over the past half-decade echoes the way WoW is set up. Like, okay, here’s this new expansion pack, and now everyone has to deal with the Lich King, or now everyone has to deal with natural disasters caused by a crazy dragon; here’s this new event, and now everyone has to deal with Captain America fighting Iron Man, or now everyone has to deal with President Obama offering a Cabinet position to the Green Goblin because he shot an alien on live TV. If you figure that there’s some sort of nerd collective unconscious that welcomed both these developments, you can also see why that collective unconscious has rebelled somewhat now that the events aren’t quite so all-encompassing, or indeed jostling up against one another in a way that confuses readers looking for one single direction to march in.

* Benjamin Marra on Fox News. Benjamin Marra in The New Yorker. I’ll take “Sentences I’m Delighted to Be Able to Write” for $1000, Alex. (Via Bill Kartalopoulos.)

* Speaking of which! Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal interviews David Lynch about his burgeoning career as a recording artist.

* I really like today’s Wolverine contribution to the Covered blog from Patt Kelley simply because the header he added to the image, USE YOUR CLAWS MY BELOVED, is a band name waiting to happen. Click the link to see what he’s riffing off of.

* Matt Madden is absolutely right: This photo of Killoffer by Ana Alexandrino is one of the greatest photos of a cartoonist of all time.

And do click that link — it’s a con report on the RIO Comicon from Jah Furry, and he’s got a lot of terrific photos of what looks like a very vibrant artcomics scene.

* Finally, David Fincher should do a shot-for-shot remake of Fight Club with Justin Timberlake as Tyler, Jesse Eisenberg as the narrator, and Kristen Stewart as Marla.