I’m excited to announce that I’ve made my debut at Wired, writing about recent developments in Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham’s Batman Incorporated #8. I tried to place the event in the context of Morrison’s run, and Morrison’s run in the context of the other things going on both with him and with Batman and DC Comics in recent years. Thanks to Laura Hudson for the opportunity.

And at Vorpalizer, I’ve written about Ron Howard’s Willow and the art and comics of Uno Moralez. Running the gamut!

I’ve been keeping pretty busy these days.

At Cool Practice, I wrote about “Missing You” by John Waite and the kinkiness of crystalline-sheen ’80s pop rock. This is the sound of my soul.

At Vorpalizer, I continued my series of posts on alt-genre webcomics with entries on SuperMutant Magic Academy by Jillian Tamaki and Forming by Jesse Moynihan. I also posted the second in a series on formative fantastic fiction, focusing on Taran Wanderer and the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.

And at Rolling Stone, I updated my list of the Dowager Countess’s best quotes from Downton Abbey Season Three with a few from the season finale.

A while back I wrote a comic called “1995” that an artist working under the name Raymond Suzuhara drew. It is not safe for work. Now it lives at its own tumblr. I hope you like it.

Prison Pit Book Four
Johnny Ryan, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2012
116 pages
$12.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

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

I’m going to be writing about science fiction, fantasy, horror etc. with some dayjob coworkers at our new group blog Vorpalizer.com. I got started with posts on Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. Come check it out.

Over at The Cool Kids Table, Ben Morse interviewed me about me and Dan White’s Gossip Girl comic “Who He Is, and How He Came to Be: The Secret Origin of Chuck Bass,” and about Gossip Girl in general.

* Clive Barker revealed that he worked as a hustler through the publication of Weaveworld in 1987, in a Facebook conversation with the artist Dave McKean. By that point he’d published all six Books of Blood, The Damnation Game, and The Hellbound Heart. Barker is one of my very few heroes, a man who seems to have lived his life and pursued his art the way these things are meant to be done; I’m sad that he clearly remains so saddened by this secret part of his life.

* Julia Gfrörer is publishing a book version of her comic Black Is the Color through Fantagraphics and she posted a hugely impressive comic called “World Within the World” that feels like getting slapped in the face repeatedly.

* Somehow I’d managed not to read “Cody,” a story Michael DeForge serialized on one of his websites last autumn — it’s now all on one continuously scrolling page so there’s no excuse anymore. Turns out it’s a weird, funny, really precise and thoughtful exploration of subcultures and the sacrifices we make of parts of ourselves that are surplus to our chosen identities.

* Also, I somehow whiffed on the announcement that Koyama Press is putting out Michael DeForge’s collected short stories in a volume called Very Casual. It’s a very good time period for that kind of thing, with killer collections from Josh Simmons, Gabrielle Bell, Hans Rickheit, and Sammy Harkham coming out last year as well.

* Zak Smith devises a table of 100 random Tolkien/Jackson elements for your RPG needs. Listing these elements in this way does a few things. First, it’s funny. Second, its list-format-derived fantasy-potpourri feeling gives lie to the notion that Tolkien had a hemmed-in, orderly imagination that made its impact primarily through “realistic” worldbuilding. Third, it gives some shine to Jackson as an interpreter and remixer of Tolkien’s foundational work. Fourth, it demonstrates that both artists have a facility for conjuring very specific and unique emotional or tonal images arising from setting and/or character (eg. “a depressed warrior princess,” “magnificent fireworks”), to go with the genre-related images of creatures and plot points and so on (eg. “enormous, intelligent birds of prey,” “a horde of climbing goblins.”)

* Not unrelated: The Gygaxian lawful/neutral/chaotic//good/neutral/evil schematic for character alignment was some revolutionary ideological rebooting.

* Hellboy colorist Dave Stewart will be coloring Craig Thompson’s forthcoming all-ages graphic novel Space Dumplins. That will look nice.

* Speaking of the Mignolaverse, BPRD cowriters Mignola and Arcudi are doing an armored-supersoldier WWII period piece called Sledgehammer 44 with artist Jason Latour. I hadn’t even heard this was in the works.

* An all-too-rare new comic by Uno Moralez!

* And a less rare but still always welcome Moralez-assembled image/gif gallery!

* My collaborator Matt Rota’s art is getting to that “was this made by human hands?” point. Those pink fleshtones!

* Had to happen eventually: Jonny Negron and cocaine.

* Had to happen eventually: Jonny Negron and animated gifs.

* Had to happen eventually: Jonny Negron and full-color comics. Negron is inevitable.

* I can’t say enough good things about the elliptical fantasy one-pagers my collaborator William Cardini has been putting up lately. What an innovative marriage of format, genre, pacing, and effect.

* How lovely (and unexpected) have Zach Hazard Vaupen’s experiments with color been?

* Andy Burkholder, q v i e t.

* Renee French, “That nightmare goat.”

* This is some immaculate cartooning by Gabrielle Bell. There’s an intensity here I’ve never seen from her before, and her off-kilter way of spotting blacks is really cohering into a statement.

* Colleen Frakes goes dark.

* COOP draws Crowley.

* You’d be hard pressed to find better value for your illustration-enjoying dollar than a “Here’s all the stuff I drew in 2012” post by Hellen Jo.

* Tom Neely started a tumblr for his porn drawings. They’re gorrrrgeous. (They get much dirtier than the ones below.)

* On a not-dissimilar wavelength, I support these pieces by Garry Leach and John Romita Sr. and thank Benjamin Marra for posting them.

* Robin McConnell interviews Noel Freibert for Inkstuds. His work keeps getting better and white-hotter.

* Simon Hanselmann’s talented and funny enough that his comics have no need to be as raw and powerful as they are.

* I’d love to see Jillian Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy become the Achewood of the 20teens.

* Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring and The Pirates of the Caribbean, is adapting…Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang?

* Was Kylie Minogue the first person to make music that “sounded like Kylie,” or is there some antecedent of which I’m unaware? (Via Jamieson Cox.)

* I got a great deal out of BuzzFeed’s rundown of 16 great musical happenings from the past month — fine writing about fine music in a variety of styles. One of those things is “Full of Fire,” the 9-plus-minute new single by the Knife, which is relentlessly intense yet never ever aggravating. How they can keep you in that edge-of-panic listening state for that long across repeated listens is beyond me, but I’m glad they’re doing it. I’m glad they’ve constructed this aggressive industrial edifice at the heart of critical attention.

* Before I saw this video for “Heidi’s Head” by Kleenex I’m not sure I’d ever really internalized the way in which punk and post-punk were threatening to the existing rock paradigm, perhaps because I always loved them all equally. But man oh man is this ever the sound of a bunch of young people telling the dinosaurs “We don’t need you.” (Thanks, Douglas Wolk.)

* On the dinosaur side of the equation, I’ve been enjoying Steven Hyden’s “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” series on enormously successful critic-proof rock bands. The link takes you to the opening installment, on Led Zeppelin, the second-greatest band of all time, isolating the Jimmy Page-concocted “sound” of how the band recorded itself as the key to its lasting success, which seems dead-on to me. He also tackles Kiss and Bon Jovi, the worst and second-worst bands of all time, and Aerosmith, who were very good through Pump and then stopped being good.

* Hey look it’s pictures of Kate Moss and Foxy Brown and Kate Winslet and Michelle Dockery Beyoncé and Beyoncé again and Beyoncé again and Dave Gahan and Rainer Andreeson, for your looking at pictures of attractive people needs.

* Drawings of criminal conduct are not criminal conduct. No one should go to prison for having drawings.

* “we are all responsible for the dialogue we foster, the culture we create, the criticism we enable; a few more hits aren’t worth it”—Tom Spurgeon. I’d forgotten about this quote of Tom’s before browsing some old tweets just now, but I was thinking of something very similar after the long-awaited new album by My Bloody Valentine was suddenly released this Saturday — I found myself preemptively dreading the smartest seen-it-all, above-it-all guy in the room quips I suspected I was bound to see about it online. I’m trying to adopt what my Catholic school teachers used to call “an attitude of gratitude.” With something like MBV and their landmark record Loveless, which is so special and singular, it comes down to acknowledging it as such, and not spraying a bunch of diarrhea into the discourse surrounding a beautiful unique thing or the people that made it. The same thing could probably be said about Beyoncé, a monumental talent who seems to draw out the worst and most dismissive parts of some people. I’ve had a tough run for a while now, and the art that moves me is important to me, and I’m trying to conduct myself in a way that respects that, and surround myself with other people who do the same.

The final page of “Destructor Meets the Cats” by me and Matt Wiegle has been posted.

Read the complete story on one continuously scrolling page here.

I interviewed the great Heather Benjamin of Sad Sex fame for my column at The Comics Journal. Very excited about this one.

Pages 24 & 25 of “Destructor Meets the Cats” by me and Matt Wiegle have been posted in a special double-sized installment.

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

I like the comics that Mike Mignola (with a lot of help from John Arcudi and Guy Davis, primarily) has written, drawn, and/or plotted about his demonic character Hellboy, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense to which he once belonged, and associated characters, collectively called the Mignolaverse. There are an awful lot of them, collected under an awfully large number of titles, with an awfully large variety of numbering systems. Below is my stab at a reading order that incorporates all of the Hellboy/B.P.R.D./related titles. Enjoy!

Hellboy Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction
Hellboy Vol. 2: Wake the Devil
Hellboy Vol. 3: The Chained Coffin and Others
Hellboy Vol. 4: The Right Hand of Doom
Hellboy Vol. 5: The Conqueror Worm
B.P.R.D. Vol. 1: Hollow Earth & Other Stories
Hellboy: Weird Tales Vol. 1
[Hellboy Junior]
B.P.R.D. Vol. 2: The Soul of Venice & Other Stories
Hellboy: Weird Tales Vol. 2
B.P.R.D. Vol. 3: Plague of Frogs
B.P.R.D. Vol. 4: The Dead
Hellboy Vol. 6: Strange Places
B.P.R.D. Vol. 5: The Black Flame
B.P.R.D. Vol. 6: The Universal Machine
Hellboy Vol. 7: The Troll Witch and Others
B.P.R.D. Vol. 7: Garden of Souls
B.P.R.D. Vol. 8: Killing Ground
Lobster Johnson Vol. 1: The Iron Prometheus
Hellboy Vol. 8: Darkness Calls
Abe Sapien: The Drowning
B.P.R.D. Vol. 9: 1946
B.P.R.D. Vol. 10: The Warning
B.P.R.D. Vol. 11: The Black Goddess
Hellboy Vol. 9: The Wild Hunt
Witchfinder Vol. 1: In the Service of Angels
B.P.R.D. Vol. 12: War on Frogs
Hellboy Vol. 10: The Crooked Man and Others
B.P.R.D. Vol. 13: 1947
B.P.R.D. Vol. 14: King of Fear
Hellboy: Masks and Monsters
B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth Vol. 1: New World
Hellboy Vol. 11: The Bride of Hell and Others
B.P.R.D.: Being Human
Witchfinder Vol. 2: Lost and Gone Forever
B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth Vol. 2: Gods and Monsters
Hellboy Vol. 12: The Storm and the Fury
Abe Sapien Vol. 2: The Devil Does Not Jest
B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth Vol. 3: Russia
Lobster Johnson Vol. 2: The Burning Hand
B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth Vol. 4: The Devil’s Engine and the Long Death

* Tom Spurgeon’s complete holiday interview series is up at the Comics Reporter. Go ye and click; so far I’ve really enjoyed the interviews with writer Mark Waid, cartoonists Dean Haspiel, Derf Backderf, Sammy Harkham, and Tom Kaczynski, and critics J. Caleb Mozzocco and Rob Clough.

* You should absolutely read “Sticky-Icky-Icky,” a stoner-sex-slice-of-life comic by Box Brown. I said “whoa” when I saw this page in particular.

* Ooh, it’s a master list of the tumblrs for all the members of Closed Caption Comics who have tumblrs. Thanks, Ryan Cecil Smith!

* Wow, the colors on this cover for Lisa Hanawalt’s forthcoming book from Drawn & Quarterly.

* Always glad to see smut from Julia Gfrörer.

* Very very Barkerian work from Mr. Freibert.

* This painting by Charles-Frédéric Soehnée is a nightmare. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Just for fun, Dresden Kodak creator is doing a whole series of drawings and sketches and posts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Many of them are idiosyncratic and beautiful.

* The addendum at the end hurts a bit because Coates in scold mode is the worst Coates, but otherwise this is a nice scales-from-the-eyes piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Kendrick Lamar’s excellent album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City.

* Here are all of Chris “Shallow Rewards” Ott’s posts on the Cure from his stint on the themed music blog One Week, One Band last year. If you want to read a good writer write a whole lot about a good band he happens to love, then this is just like heaven . (Just note that in this case, when you’re clicking the arrows to navigate the pages, “older” actually means “newer,” since it’s arranged chronologically but tumblr gets confused by this.)

* Great piece on Downton Abbey and Lady Edith by Alyssa Rosenberg.

* John Brennan belongs in prison, not running the CIA. If you did half the shit this guy says it’s okay for the government to do, you bet your ass you’d be in prison.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Very sad news: Wilko Johnson, guitarist for Dr. Feelgood and Ser Ilyn Payne on Game of Thrones, is dying of pancreatic cancer. Man that guy played with style.

* Scientists have filmed a live giant squid in its natural habitat. I can die now.

* New The Winds of Winter sample chapter from George R.R. Martin!

My David Bowie sketchbook has been showcased at BuzzFeed Music. (The drawing above is by Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio.)

* Gossip Girl aired its series finale a few weeks ago. I watched every episode of that show and spent much of that time delighted in smiling-while-shaking-my-head-and-muttering-“you-magnificent-bastards” fashion. My friends Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley have reviewed the finale and the entire series in a two-part conversation that’s my favorite writing about Gossip Girl I’ve ever read. Here’s part one and here’s part two. The final two episodes of the show included two major events I’m still trying to wrap my head around; they both leave a bad taste in my mouth, but as Kiel and Ben convincingly argue, a Gossip Girl climax that didn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth wouldn’t be Gossip Girl.

* Edie Fake has come out of nowhere with a series of gouache and ballpoint-pen pictures of buildings called Memory Palaces that are among those rare works of art that make me go “Wow, I had no idea you could do that.” If you took the castles at the end of a Super Mario Bros. level and imagined that culture evolved forward a thousand years, you’d get something like this. It also puts me in mind of the old NES game Milon’s Secret Castle, or at least my hazy memories of same. Finding out where the buildings are from only makes it more remarkable. I sit and stare at this art like an apeman at the monolith. Never saw it coming.

* Still the best: Matthew Perpetua has released the Fluxblog 2012 Survey Mix, a TEN-disc overview of the year’s best music. It’s an overwhelming number of songs in a dizzying variety of genres and styles, but Matthew puts each disc together with thought and care and attention to flow, so you should feel free to DL ’em all but listen to them one at a time. Find one with a few songs you dig or are intrigued by and let the rest come at you.

* My wife is a teacher and we are parents, and Chris Ware is the greatest cartoonist, so virtually every aspect of Ware’s New Yorker cover and essay about Newtown resonated with me deeply. This passage in particular evokes the way all of my personal and political anger and dread runs together lately:

In the course of the next few days, I was privy to the exchanges among my wife and her colleagues about Newtown, culminating in flabbergasted e-mails and Facebookings following the farcical N.R.A. press conference. Memes abounded, like, “First they call us union thugs and now they want to arm us?!” and self-mocking jokes about their own forgetfulness: “Do you really want to trust people like us with guns?” (Teachers are notoriously overworked and so occasionally forget their two pounds’ worth of keys in one classroom or another.) What astonished me most was that the gun lobby seemed to imply that it was somehow partly the unarmed teachers’ fault that the Newtown shooting occurred at all. Well, why not? Isn’t everything lately always somehow the teachers’ fault?

Meanwhile, our government revved its engines to Evel-Knievel itself over the fiscal cliff, civilization’s rock face having partly crumbled away because a clot of representatives seem to feel that government shouldn’t be funded at all. Over the holiday break, news arrived that thirty-seven Philadelphia public schools were closing because of budgetary cuts, and meanwhile the whole idea of public education continues to be cored out nationwide by taxpayer-funded private “charter” schools in a sleight of hand that I still can’t believe is legal. (Meanwhile, my union-thug wife is too busy grading papers and planning lessons to be able to get properly mad about it all.)

* A pair of standouts from Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview series: Tom Kaczynski on his surprisingly ambitious micropublishing outfit Uncivilized Books and Dean Haspiel with a startlingly frank and harsh assessment of his own career.

* Spurge also put together a list of 50 good things that happened in comics in 2012. That’s a usefully ameliorative list.

* The Comics Journal has self-selected its best posts of 2012. Something for everybody.

* Forgot to link to this before, but wow: The MoCCA Festival, now under the new management of the Society of Illustrators, has announced a new steering committee for its 2013 show: Anelle Miller, Kate Feirtag, and Katie Blocher from the Society, as well as Leon Avelino (Secret Acres), Charles Brownstein (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund), Karen Green (Columbia University), William Hatzichristos (CollectorZoo), Paul Levitz (Writer/ Educator), Barry Matthews (Secret Acres), and Tucker Stone (Bergen Street Comics). That’s an institution that’s getting serious about a small-press show that suffered from years of malign neglect — as ably detailed by Barry and Leon, who are now helping to guide it. Also I’m sure Tucker Stone and Paul Levitz will have a lot to talk about.

* Please go read First Year Healthy by Michael DeForge, now available in its entirety on one continuously scrolling page. Subtly effective horror with an extravagantly inventive sense of design. This is one of the best things he’s ever done.

* Mr. Freibert’s hot streak continues. It’s seriously like he’s a new artist.

* In contrast with the previous few links, all of which involve artists breaking their own mold in some way, this jaw-dropping Julia Gfrörer piece is more a matter of her becoming the most Julia Gfrörer she can be. I said “Jesus, Julia” out loud when I opened it.

* Always good to see new Uno Moralez work, no matter how small.

* Gorgeous cover by Zach Hazard Vaupen. Makes me wish he’d work in color more often.

* Dave Kiersh continues to post his old minicomics, which are ungainly and funny and pervy and immature and romantic and which put it all out there.

* Chris Mautner talks to Frank genius Jim Woodring about his super-fun sketchbook Problematic.

* Finally, congratulations and come back soon to Chris Ott, who says he’s wrapped up the initial run of his Shallow Rewards music-criticism video essays with (oh boy oh boy oh boy) the first two installments of a promised shit-ton of videos about shoegaze.

SHALLOW REWARDS // 24 SHOEGAZE (PART ONE) from Shallow Rewards on Vimeo.

SHALLOW REWARDS // 25 SHOEGAZE (PART TWO) from Shallow Rewards on Vimeo.

My Friend Dahmer
Derf Backderf, writer/artist
Abrams ComicArts, March 2012
224 pages
$17.95
Buy it from Amazon.com

In introductions, afterwords, and interviews alike, Derf Backderf makes it abundantly clear that his sympathy for Jeffrey Dahmer, his old high school acquaintance and serial killer of young men and boys, ends when Dahmer’s murders begin. By coincidence, so does the story he tells in this book, pretty much: Dahmer began killing upon graduation from high school, at which point he also dropped out of touch with Backderf and his circle, thus closing Derf’s window on his darkening world.

But while My Friend Dahmer abhors Dahmer’s crimes, it also does him, and his victims, the courtesy of never saying what they are. No body counts; no grim stories of the homophobic cops who returned a nude, wounded underage boy who’d escaped Dahmer’s clutches to his eventual killer before making jokes to their dispatcher about getting de-loused; no gruesome accounts of body-part altars and DIY trepanation attempts. The endnotes in the backmatter deliver the basic facts, but in the comic itself he consigns his old friend’s crimes to the void, perhaps the most empathetic thing he could possibly do with them.

The story Backderf chooses to tell is one of uncontrollable urges. At one point he describes them in the purple terms of mass-market true-crime paperback back-cover blurbs, as otherizingly and alienatingly as you please: “What spawned this perverse sexual hunger? What deep, fetid part of his psyche gurgled up this miscreant desire, so powerfully voracious it immediately devoured him whole?” But immediately before that he makes the direct connection between Dahmer’s necrophilia and his own irresistible adolescent lust for his female classmates, one of whom he draws walking alluringly down the hall in tight jeans, her spherical asscheeks drawing his attention as inexorably as a local jogger commands Dahmer’s far more lethal lust.

The girl’s body points to the great strength of Backderf’s resolutely unstylish art: Everyone’s a collection of lumps and bulges, molded into shape by his thick, blunt ink line. This isn’t the only prominent ass we see drawn this way, as it turns out: Another belongs to Dahmer’s mom, clenched in unflattering high-waisted mom pants as she seizes uncontrollably due to a morass of psychological, neurological, and pharmaceutical problems. Her trembling, sweat-soaked, jut-jawed body locks into bizarre, almost vogue-like positions, her neck craned upward at a 90 degree angle like a modernist portrait. She’s reduced to her body in these moments. “This,” Backderf writes, “is what Jeff came home to.” Dahmer’s mind rapidly reduces all life to mere bodies, bodies over which he can exert control. In fact, it’s his imitation (unbeknownst to his classmates, who think he’s making fun of someone else) of his mother’s symptoms that makes him a legendary character among his classmates.

The implicit connection Backderf draws between all these things is that Dahmer couldn’t help how he felt about dead men any more than Derf could help how he felt about pretty girls’ rear ends or than his mother could help having fits. What they all could control is how they responded to them, or to anything else. That’s where Backderf’s real anger is directed: at the choice of Dahmer’s parents to abandon their son — first emotionally and then quite literally, leaving him to live by himself in their house as they went their separate ways following an acrimonious divorce — and at the apparent choice of their high-school teachers and administrators to ignore the heroic quantities of alcohol Dahmer was consuming during the school day to self-medicate his urges away. The moment his parents left and school let out, even the minor impediment of negligent adults was removed entirely, so the alcohol was no longer enough, and the last few tethers holding Dahmer to sanity snapped. If some adult had cared enough to wrestle those urges to the ground, Backderf argues, Dahmer’s lonely life would still have been a sad one, but the lives of dozens and dozens of other people would have been far less so. The goal of this book is to lead you to the chasm between the potential and the actual and scream into it. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the Shadow.

Page 23 of “Destructor Meets the Cats” by me and Matt Wiegle has been posted.

This is a big one.

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

“Read the whole thing”

* It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Tom Spurgeon has begun his annual series of lengthy holiday interviews with comics luminaries, with Alison Bechdel kicking things off. I’ll probably get less enjoyment out of these this year than previously because I just haven’t read as many comics this year as I used to do, but I’m telling you, curling up with my in-laws’ dogs and sinking into the couch with the Comics Reporter Holiday Interview series on my laptop is one of life’s great pleasures.

* Liv Siddall’s essay on Chris Ware and Tavi Gevinson’s interview with Ware himself, both for Rookie, are both very good, but more importantly they both come with the most life-affirming comments sections you’ve ever seen on anything involving comics. Just a slew of kids saying “Wow, this sounds great, I’ve gotta check it out, thanks.” Gevinson uses her power to rep hard for the High Alt comics makers, and she does it well, and I’m glad.

* You can look at this lengthy post by Grant Morrison on the history of his feud with Alan Moore and think “good for him, sticking up for himself” or “yikes for him, living in this headspace.” A bad thing to do would be to troll the detractors or supporters of the writer of your choice with it — even at their crankiest and crank-iest, these guys have earned better than that.

* Big comics interviews I’m saving for later: Tim Hodler talks to Tom Kaczynski, Alex Dueben talks to Charles Burns, Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro talk to Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez.

* Speaking of Frank the Tank, he’s an Eisner judge this year, so I think it’s safe to say the days of Jaime shutouts are over.

* Christopher Tolkien’s disgust for Lord of the Rings licensed products, including the movies, is a depressing fact of life for those of us who’ve enjoyed both his father’s life work (which also became his own) and the work derived from it.

* The television critic Alan Sepinwall recently self-published a book called The Revolution Was Televised, outlining the New Golden Age of TV Drama with a chapter apiece on twelve landmark shows: Oz, The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Friday Night Lights. I’ve been reading Sepinwall on and off for years and years now — he more or less invented weekly reviewing and he’s a central figure in the TV-critic back-and-forth I follow on twitter and in the field’s seemingly countless podcasts and such — so there’s something of a local-boy-makes-good element to the book getting a rave review from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times before she put it on her top 10 list for the year. Anyway, here Sepinwall talks about the books to one of my favorite TV critics, Willa Paskin.

* It’s the end of the year so it’s best-of time. BuzzFeed Music, Alyssa Rosenberg, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Jamieson Cox should get you started.

* Lots and lots of people wrote lots and lots of words attacking or defending Homeland season two, but my podcasting pal Stefan Sasse bucked the trend and took some shots at Homeland season one instead.

* I quite liked Jessica Hopper’s interview with Grimes, who made one of the year’s best records and who emerges here as a forcefully thoughtful presence.

* The oral history trend has clearly reached its baroque period, where instead of culture-defining/altering movements or mega-masterpieces, they’re now about the “Blackwater” episode of Game of Thrones or Interpol’s first album. That’s a wonderful use of the form if you ask me.

* How embarrassing was Richard Cohen’s column decrying the physical fitness of Daniel Craig’s James Bond as some sort of affront to the masculinity of book-readin’ types like Richard Cohen? I’ve had a coworker walk in on me while I was using the restroom in the altogether and I still found this thing more mortifying.

* If you were wondering when the next time Michael DeForge would level up was gonna be, you’ve got your answer: “First Year Healthy.”

* Jonny Negron has — ha, like I even need to say anything at this point. Like I don’t put Jonny Negron art in every linkblogging post I do. It occurs to me that what Jonny does is invest “cool” imagery with the sense of mysterious and sinister don’t-try-this-at-home-kids intimidation it held for me as a kid. As alluring as these people are I’d be afraid to walk into a room where they were hanging out. For what it’s worth I think his last couple months of work are much more strongly erotic than anything he’s done in a while, but that could just be me. And look at the skintone on this one! LOOK AT IT

* Big new Gilbert Hernandez books coming in the new year: Julio’s Day! Marble Season! A now-completed collection of work he serialized during Love & Rockets‘ second volume and a pseudoautobiography, these could send him in the direction of critical and audience reappraisal that the outré sex and violence of his recent comics have denied him.

* I’m super-excited to purchase Magical Neon Sexuality by Kevin Fanning, though I’m waiting until I’m flush with Christmas cash. Fanning is the genius, the literal genius, behind The Cold Inclusive, which is sort of like magic realism only it’s sex with celebrities instead of angel wings and shit and which is one of my favorite things I ever saw on the Internet. I gather this book is in that vein. I realized today that Fanning’s stories are a big unconscious influence on me in that Drake comic I did with Andrew White and two or three other things I’m working on now.

* Kevin Mutch has begun serializing a slightly recolored version of his Xeric-winning graphic novel Fantastic Life online. I liked that book a lot — it’s kind of like a lo-fi X’d Out.

* Has everyone noticed Andy Burkholder has revived q v i e t, his marvelous wordless expressionistic sex comic? And that he’s doing a new thing called entphs?

* Eleanor Davis made a comic about her friends skinning a fox and it’s brutal and beautiful. Go through the last month or so of her blog, because Davis is on fire right now the way, say, Gabrielle Bell was two summers ago.

* So too in his way is Mr. Freibert.

* Sally Madden’s book about working at Philadelphia’s gross, awesome medical-oddity showcase the Mutter Museum, Gray Is Not a Color, has maybe the best cover of the year. Herb Alpert’s throne of skulls grows taller by the day, I’m told.

* New Cindy & Biscuit by my man Dan White! Some publisher with a solid and adventurous kids’ comics program should snap this up, for real.

* Not for kids: Patrick Hambrecht and Dame Darcy review Heather Benjamin’s Sad Sex for the Comics Journal.

* This comic by Benjamin’s fellow Collective Stench member Tom Toye seems to vibrate off the page.

* Jesus Christ, Renee French.

* Wow, Chris Day.

* If you didn’t like the liberties Peter Jackson took with The Hobbit, then man oh man are you going to have complaints about Josh Simmons’s commissioned portrait of the Witch-King of the Nazgul.

* Guy Davis fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Zak Smith asks and answers the question: “Why is this picture so good?” (It’s by Adrian Smith.)

* Uno Moralez’s first image/gif gallery in a long time is also the scariest one in a much longer time.

* I don’t know of any rationale for keeping a nonviolent offender who’s not a risk to himself or others in literally torturous solitary confinement like the Obama administration did to the Army’s Wikileaks whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning, I just don’t. Who does?

* This Glenn Greenwald piece on the horror of Newtown as reflected in the drone and bombing deaths of Pakistani and Yemeni children at American hands (or Palestinians at Israeli hands, and let me warn you the photo that leads that link is enormously upsetting) is literally the most important thing to think about in the world right now. It is so vital for us to see that all lives are of equal value, and to understand that the mass death of children caused by the American military/intelligence apparatus abroad is just as devastating and horrifying to their loved ones, and to the conscience of the universe, as the mass death of children caused by maniacs here at home. Once you make this connection you can never unmake it, which is why it’s so important to make it. This has in one way or another been the topic of almost everything I’ve written this year. It’s never far from my mind, ever.

* Fittingly finally, David Chase explains the end of The Sopranos. None of the above?

Flayed Corpse
Josh Simmons, writer/artist
Oily Comics, 2012
12 pages
$1
Buy it from Oily

I reviewed Flayed Corpse by Josh Simmons for The Comics Journal. Happy Holidays!

I’m very, very happy that two comics I did in 2012, “Hottest Chick in the Game” with Andrew White and Thickness #3 featuring “The Cockroach” by me and William Cardini, made it into the Truth Zone gang’s Best of 2012 list (via Simon Hanselmann). If you’re guessing that I frantically scanned this thing to see if I made the cut, you are a good guesser.