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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Michael DeForge started hisself a tumblr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* New Renee French art is always a linkblogging gimme.

* Tom Neely, you rascal!

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

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

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

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

* Chills from this Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Lovely Evan Hayden piece from Electric Ant #2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Last week Tom Spurgeon made a modest proposal: Any time you talk about one of the major corporate superheroes, mention their creators. I will be doing this from now on.

* Kramers Ergot #1-3 are busting out all over! Last week, a small number of copies of these early, extremely hard to find issues of Sammy Harkham’s no-way-to-describe-it-but-seminal art comics anthology (the less artcomixy ones) went on sale at Secret Headquarters in L.A.; I bought the bundle via the Secret Headquarters web store, where it looks like all three individual issues are still available, believe it or not. This week they’re also on sale on-site at the Beguiling in Toronto. About the only downside to all this is that awkward moment when you’re all excited to read and write about the first three Kramers Ergots and then Joe McCulloch does it first and renders anything you’d say redundant. Read that review, though, seriously — such a pleasure to read Joe combine his recent beat of off-the-beaten-path stuff with his old alternative-comics stomping grounds.

* How the hell did the announcement of the sequel to Henry & Glenn Forever escape my attention??? Well, no longer: Tom Neely has announced Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever, featuring him and the rest of the original Igloo Tornado gang, plus Benjamin Marra, Ed Luce, COOP, and more.

* Tom’s also drawing lovely nudes now and then, it seems.

* Local boy makes good! Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith is now a part of Jordan Crane’s peerless What Things Do webcomics portal — they’re currently serializing his Kazuo Umezo/Blood Baptism horror-manga tribute minicomic Two Eyes of the Beautiful.

* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, and the memory of cities. I think that if you were forced at gunpoint to make an argument on behalf of the irreducible necessity of the comics form, Katchor’s work would be one of the first things you would reach for.

* Last time we visited Bruce Baugh’s newly resurgent World of Warcraft blogging, he was investigating the possibility of playing the game without dying. Now he’s examining the potential of playing the game without killing. Amazing how these entirely self-imposed rules can totally alter one’s experience, even mindset.

* Eve Tushnet warns against “evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!” horror movies. A fascinating framework I’d never before considered.

* My favorite t-shirt maker, Travis of Found Item Clothing, interviews my favorite nerd blogger, Rob Bricken of Topless Robot.

* I know there are any number of reasons why people do this, but I’m always baffled when the creators of television shows leave those television shows before the shows end. It’s your show! (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Frank Santoro has discovered that people are wrong on the internet. I imagine him staying up four, five days at a stretch, reblogging and correcting every tumblr post that doesn’t properly credit an artist.

* Speaking of Frank, it’s amazing how clear his imprimatur is on the comics made by students in his comics-making class.

* And still speaking of Frank, I think this post may have been posted and deleted before, but here’s his valuable run-down of all the major formats and dimensions available to comics-makers today.

* I don’t believe I’d ever seen this lovely piece by Jonny Negron, who can and does work in a lot more styles than the one or two that made his name. (Via Lisa Hanawalt’s inspiration tumblr. Oh, right, Lisa Hanawalt has an inspiration tumblr.)

* This is a very pretty bit of Becky Cloonan art.

* Lovely and intriguing work from Jackie Ormes, a Golden Age cartoonist who was an African-American woman.

* Fabulous picture of a young Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly from Mouly’s new mostly-New Yorker-cover-themed tumblr. (Via Robot 6.)

* Real Life Horror: You know, when you think about the clearly illegal surveillance of virtually all aspects of Mulsim life in the tri-state area by Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly’s NYPD, it’s not as though history isn’t littered with instructive examples of what becomes of a society when its politicians and law-enforcement authorities start to routinely and relentlessly scapegoat and persecute a religious minority for no good reason, and when other politicians and the news media line up to support this, and when the public either doesn’t notice or says “Hey, good job.”

* Here’s the latest trailer for Game of Thrones. Surprise! It looks good. The location shoots in Iceland are added-value city, man.

* Finally:

Olympic Games
Lando, writer/artist
Decadence Comics, 2012
44 pages
£10 including international shipping (cheaper in the UK)
Buy it from Decadence

I went back and forth about opening this review with “Whoosh, is this thing good,” but the ayes have it: Whoosh, is this thing good. In fact it’s fair to say that I returned to semi-regular reviewing of comics in large part to have an excuse to read this remarkable-looking self-published small-print-run science-fiction adventure and write about it publicly. The unique, tactile packaging helped draw me in: It’s printed on that rough, cheap paper your third-grade handwriting practice workbooks came on, with a weary-looking blue cardstock/construction-paper cover to boot. But the content is just as fascinating, particularly writer/artist/publisher Lando’s ultrathin, ultraprecise line. It looks as though he took the finest-point rollerball pen available and went about painstakingly constructing each laser-toting astronaut, each toga-wearing revenant, and each weathered Greek column and angular laser beam and grain of sand in their eerie retrofuture wasteland by stopping every few millimeters or so, picking up the pen, putting it back down, and starting the line again, just to make sure he got it right. “Scratchy”‘s the word that keeps presenting itself to me, but it’s not the right one at all. There’s a meticulousness to this roughness that scratchy doesn’t cover, and it elevates the SF story, about a pair of visitors from space attacking their enemies — both living and dead — and defending one another as they make their way toward some maguffiny goal in the center of what looks very much like Greek ruins, but for the desert wasteland surrounding them. That particular irony of setting, and the titular reference to the coming spectacle of sport in the artist’s native country, indicate that this could very well be a scathing metaphorical commentary on kill-or-be-killed austerity economics and its beneficiaries. (Indeed, the artist makes that pretty clear on his website, though I’m loathe to lend too much credence to authorial intent.) Personally, I missed the Hunger Games/Running Man bread-and-circuses nature of the action on first read and instead read it as a savage, though savagely thrilling, war comic of sorts. Either way, Lando’s skill with pacing and action choreography is tough to match among people making these kinds of alt-SFF comics today; his perspectival cross-cutting between embattled areas, and his use of blankly linear lasers to traverse that space and shift our viewpoints, is especially exciting. All told it’s the kind of comic where the main shortcomings are best expressed as matters of personal preference — it’s wordless and soundless, while I tend to feel that silent comics make the most sense when the events depicted involve actual silence; it uses irregular panel layouts, while I believe the elegance of a fixed grid would have been quite complementary to the precision of the linework and character/set design. If this kind of thing sounds at all like your bag, and if you’re reading this blog chances are it does, fire up your currency converter and hope he’s got some copies left.

* Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, SPX 2012. Holy shit. That’s…that’s probably the best possible cartoonist line-up of all possible cartoonist line-ups. Can someone get Gloeckner there so I can truly kill myself afterwards?

* After a link like that I feel like a shitheel for directing you toward some doom and gloom, but needs must: Tom Spurgeon’s five reasons to worry about comics, non-piracy edition. I think that a sixth reason that could serve as an umbrella for the other five is the “tough titties” attitude so many people who ostensibly derive enjoyment from comics throw in the direction of those individuals who fall victim to those five problems.

* Ross Campbell on sexiness in his comics. As always it bums me out to see Campbell distancing himself from his very good comics Water Baby and The Abandoned, and even early Wet Moon at this point.

* Kate Beaton dispenses career advice for cartoonists.

* Matt Zoller Seitz and Steven Santos make the argument for adding a new Best Collaborative Performance award to the Oscars to honor performances created by actors, mocap, digital animators, makeup, puppeteers and so on in tandem. As you’d suspect, they were inspired by Andy Seriks, and as far as I’m concerned any such eventual award can just be called the Andy. The resulting essay series has so far championed Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle/Brundlefly from David Cronenberg’s The Fly as a proto-example of what they’re seeking to honor. Bonus points to the initial video essay for reminding me that every time I see Gollum falling into the Cracks of Doom, I involuntarily burst into tears.

* BK Munn makes the long-overdue case for a long-overdue comics-creator union.

* That Hans Rickheit short story collection Folly is on its way!

* Bruce Baugh returns to World of Warcraft blogging! And there was much rejoicing. I’d need two hands to count the number of times I’ve thought “Gee, I wish Bruce Baugh was still blogging about World of Warcraft” over the past year or so.

* Bruce also penned a couple of lengthy posts on potential new approaches to zombie horror. I’m partial to the idea of zombies as symbolically resonant with economic attrition as opposed to total societal collapse, myself.

* Grim reading from Anders Nilsen.

* Looks like Michael DeForge went and snuck out another comic book, Incinerator, because why not.

* And he posted a comic strip called “Exams” to Study Group while he was at it.

* Real Life Horror: The ever-more-lawless NYPD has been spying on law-abiding Muslim-American citizens not just in the five boroughs but in colleges and suburbs all around the Northeast, including where I went to school and towns near where I live.

* I don’t think you need to know anything about Robert Wyatt, or any of the music he’s talking about, to get a lot out of Ryan Dombal’s wonderful interview with Wyatt about his favorite music throughout his life at Pitchfork.

* This promo video for Game of Thrones season two is basically just a bunch of actors and crew members saying “It’s gonna be great,” but it also contains our best views so far of several key new characters.

* Did I not point out my guest appearance in Puke Force?

Demon God Goblin Heaven
Jesse Balmer, Jonny Negron, writers/artists
self-published, 2011
52 pages
$10
Read a preview at Jesse Balmer’s website
Watch a preview video on YouTube
Buy it from Secret Headquarters

This seamless collaboration between ADDXSTC 2011 Top Tenner Jonny Negron and his Chameleon co-editor Jesse Balmer mines a whole lot of gold from one simple plot vein: the reversal. Every time you get a handle on who’s the biggest shitheel or badass in the book, someone comes along to flip that on its head. Protagonist Charles of Charleston (Balmer’s signature character) is Patient Zero for this technique. The four-page preview sequence linked above was my first exposure to the book, and in the events it depicts the dividing line between victim and victimizer seemed almost painfully clear: Balmer’s goggle-eyed, fleshy, flabby, furrowed, nude, cat-like Charles — a character that seemingly sprung fully formed from the head of one of those grotesque John Kricfalusi close-ups of a smiling or grimacing Stimpy — was undoubtedly at the mercy of Negron’s leering, Wayfarer-sporting, brylcreem-coiffed, switchblade-toting antagonist and his thugs. (Thugs wearing old-timey one-piece swimming costumes and Balinese masks, no less.) But reading the comic itself reveals that Charles was the victimizer up until this point, a rampaging id that consumed or assaulted nearly everyone or everything in his path, including himself, until fate intervened in the form of larger, tougher hombres. The reversal gives the story juice, and reveals a versatility in Charles’ character design to boot: What seems vulnerable and tender in one set of circumstances comes across as priapistic and grotesque in another. The shades-sporting creep, as it turns out, is merely avenging the Casper-like ghost surfer Charles assaulted after washing up on a nearby beach, and is in turn outgunned and outclassed by a dog dressed like Solomon Kane and powered like Doctor Strange. Balmer and Negron’s art styles don’t seem like a natural fit beyond their mutual penchant for the grotesque — Negron’s eroticized coldness has little in common with Balmer’s thick vibrating inks — but in this book, a series of memorable characters doing memorable things in a blackly psychedelic environment, they make a happy match, and that yo-yo pacing is key.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
Shigeru Mizuki, writer/artist
Drawn and Quarterly, 2011
368 pages
$24.95
Buy it and read a preview from D&Q
Buy it from Amazon.com

Here’s a book with a hugely important message to which I am very sympathetic, which is never less than enjoyable to read or look at, which I nevertheless didn’t get a ton out of, in the end. A fictionalized memoir of Mizuki’s participation in the Japanese military’s ill-fated attempt to repel invading American forces from a South Pacific island, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths alternates between expressively cartooned vignettes among the troops that show off Mizuki’s incongruously cute, oblong/oval-headed character designs — seriously, it’s like an army of Berts from Sesame Street — with powerful, passionately drawn photorealistic depictions of both the tropical island environment and the carnage it comes to house. Mizkuki’s disgust with the who-gives-a-fuck pointlessness of the men’s mission, and the callousness with which the commanding officers order the men into suicide runs when the mission inevitably fails, is palpable; interestingly, it comes through equally well in the black-comic cartoony material, which depict the forces’ slow attrition through disease, accidents, enemy forces, and even animal attacks, and in the astonishingly proficient hatching of the realistic scenes, wordless depictions of the island and the ocean and the spectral American G.I.s who bring death to them both. But the characters are more or less incidental to the book’s agenda — few of them are developed any more than is necessary to convey the idea that it was a waste to send this or that funny or annoying or brave or totally ordinary guy to his death for no reason — and thus the book can only get the emotional hooks required for that idea to connect into you in the abstract. If you already believe that war is hell, I’m not sure this book will enlighten you further, certainly not the way it did when it was initially released in Japan in the ’70s. But there’s one aspect that stuck out to me beyond the basics: The suicide-charge ethic of the Imperial Army comes across as a bizarre ideology simply grafted on top of an army full of regular guys, who complain and help each other out and badmouth the officers and make dirty jokes same as any other army, banzai or no. And in that sense, it makes you wonder what people half a world and half a century away from us will think of the ideologies that drove us to kill and die, too.

Optic Nerve #12
Adrian Tomine, writer/artist
Drawn and Quarterly, 2011
40 pages
$5.95
Buy it from D&Q
Read a preview at Boing Boing

Man, is this thing ever happy to be a comic book.

The format of a comic doesn’t matter to me a whole lot, unless the format in question is notably detrimental to the comic it houses. I like the idea of serial alternative comic book series mostly for the promise of seeing a lot of work from alternative cartoonists on a regular basis, but today that need is met by the web. (Which can’t meet all needs, to be sure — it doesn’t meet the need of retailers to have that kind of material showing up fresh every few months and consequently attracting a different clientele to the shops on Wednesdays, but that’s not my bailiwick.) But in Optic Nerve #12, Adrian Tomine reminded me what can make an alt-comic such an attractive and pleasurable way of packaging material, something not even the most well-stocked RSS reader can provide.

In addition to the usual letters page, its weirdly personal mix of praise and criticism as po-facedly selected as always, the issue consists of three comics. The first, “Hortisculpture,” feels like an homage to the apparently final two issues of the greatest of the alternative comic books, arguably the two best single alternative comic book issues by anyone: Dan Clowes’s Eightball #22 and #23. Like them, the story is constructed from individual self-contained strips, in this case a full “week”‘s worth: six black-and-white four-panel strips plus a full-color “Sunday” page, over and over till the end of the story. Said story recounts a family-man landscaper’s quixotic career detour into the world of contemporary art via his own unique blend of sculpture and horticlture, an unappreciated (arguably unappreciatable) hybrid his pursuit of which upends his life. As a crypto-autobiography it’s a corker — a keyed-up, hyperreal representation of the travails of Tomine’s chosen form of self-imposed artistic marginalization. It’s as engrossing to watch him work his way through as, say, Gabrielle Bell’s similar fictionalizations of her family life. (Plus it allows Tomine’s customary preoccupation with the intersection of race and romance a new, markedly less hostile environment in which to flower.) Things have gone a lot better for the cartoonist than the hortisculptor, to be sure — the former just received some of the best notices of his career for the wide release of the comics he made about his marriage to the mother of his kid, while our last glimpse of the latter is of he and his daughter gleefully smashing his work to smithereens — but the anxieties underlying the worst-case-scenario comic are obviously real, and really funny. And once again like Clowes, in Eightball #22 and later in Wilson, Tomine’s working with a much “cartoonier” style — a curvier line, bulbous noses, dot eyes, doughier physiques — that enjoyably invokes similar work from Sammy Harkham or Chuck Forsman. It feels right, somehow, to look at art like this on a staple-bound page.

Next up is that staple of one-man anthology series, the reprint from some other anthology. In this case it’s Tomine’s “Amber Sweet” from the broadsheet-sized Kramers Ergot 7, attractively scaled down to the size of the floppy comic, its muted color scheme even more clearly centered around the nutmeg-colored hair of the young woman who discovers she’s the spitting image of the titular porn star. “Sweet” is fascinating to me in that it’s about how unsexy sex can be: our protagonist’s love life, and more besides, is basically destroyed by her resemblance to Amber, a resemblance the men in her life are either daunted by or way too into. Tomine’s perhaps uniquely suited to explore this plight: his cartooning is as sexy as it gets, I’ve always found — his line elegant, his compositions enticingly icy, his character designs very attractive, from Amber and her never-named doppelganger on down — but his work relentlessly cuts against that with the awkwardness and selfishness of his characters. Here we see a beautiful girl who looks like another beautiful girl who makes her living by taking her clothes off and having sex have sex herself as drawn by one of alternative comics’ great unsung sensualists, but the story denies us the pleasure on every possible level. It’s a blast to watch Tomine so successfully negotiate that obstacle course on the way to the story’s knockout ending, a beautiful and satisfying opening-up of the story’s emotional claustrophobia.

The third and final strip — two pages, 20-panel grids — is Tomine’s Lament, pretty much, a self-effacing mock-autobiographical strip about Tomine as “The Last Pamphleteer,” his adherence to the alt-comic format earning him the laughter of his peers and the indifference of his audience. And here, perhaps, he’s trying a little too hard. Throwing “tweet” into sneer quotes as if the term is an affectation instead of just, y’know, email or website; saying things like “I even liked it when the artist was obviously just trying to fill a few extra pages, and you’d get a pointless, dashed-off autobio strip or something!”, as if both he and we didn’t notice that he had to cram this thing onto the inside back cover to get it to fit; using D&Q publicist Peggy Burns as an antagonist, as if he weren’t still core Drawn and Quarterly artist Adrian Tomine; setting up Anders Nilsen and Kate Beaton as models for the new book-driven publishing model, as if they too weren’t primarily collecting work they published in smaller chunks elsewhere…He doth protest too much, and while the result is amusing, who needs it? He’s Adrian Tomine. He writes great and draws great and is as good at using his chosen format as anyone else is at using theirs. That’s all you need.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force returns!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Your must-read of Comics’ Grossest Fortnight is Tom Spurgeon on More Watchmen. That’s all I can really say — he says it all himself.

* Dave Kiersh fucking funded his Kickstarter book. Alright, man, alright.

* I quite enjoyed this account of the grotesque legal odyssey of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster by Comic Book Comics‘ Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey.

* Andrew White has posted the truly fabulous concluding pages for Sexbuzz Chapter Six.

* I’ll be checking out the Ross Campbell-illustrated Rob Liefeld revival title Glory this week, for sure.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force returns tomorrow! You are not prepared.

* Please go download Vito Delante and Rachel Friere’s genuinely delightful FCHS Vol. 1 for five bucks from Graphic.ly, if that’s the sort of thing you’re wont to do.

* Gabrielle Bell made a poster for Richard Linklater’s Slacker for Cinefamily. Then someone made a video out of it, set to a song by Oneohtrix Point Never, because why not. I’ll never forget how excited I was when I first saw that movie and the one guy said the words “psychic TV” in it.

austin, tx from Tony Groutsis on Vimeo.

* The great Tom Neely is doing a series of his weird one-panel non-gag cartoons for Zack Soto’s Study Group webcomics portal. This is great news, as these seem to be getting better and better as Tom goes.

* I think most all of it has been bought by now, but if you hurry you can buy some original art pages from Brandon Graham and James Stokoe to benefit Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich in his legally mandated time of woe.

* It’s been a while, but it looks like Uno Moralez is resurfacing.

* As with Michael DeForge, at a certain point it feels cheap of me to keep posting illustrations from Renee French. Shouldn’t you be willing to click on a French link sight unseen? I think you should.

* Finally, I should note that Clive Barker slipped into a coma and almost died recently due to toxic shock syndrome brought on by a trip to the dentist. Fortunately, he’s on the mend now. Clive is one of my favorite human beings — one of the best human beings — I’ve ever known. Get better, Clive.

* The new Game of Thrones characters look fucking great, if you’ll pardon my Tyroshi. I’m giving you the ones you really want to see below; many more publicity stills of faces new and old at the link.

* Wow. Michael DeForge’s Rescue Pet is astonishingly troubling.

* “Cartoonist Chris Ware on why other cartoonists fear Clowes”

* Gabrielle Bell is serializing her Kramers Ergot 8 contribution “Cody” on her website. I’m not clipping anything from it — you need to read the whole thing as it unfolds.

* Check out the comic Mark P. Hensel/William Cardini made for Frank Santoro’s comics correspondence course, Moon Queen. You can really see Frank’s fingerprints on this.

* Young altcomix journo of the moment Ao Meng interviews French altcomix maker of the moment Boulet.

* I’m only running the black-and-white version of Jim Rugg’s Sleazy Slice #5 cover here, because the full-color version is a must-see and his site deserves your traffic for showing it to you.

* Nice art by Renee French, and by nice I mean not nice at all.

* I found these early Dave Berg pin-up gag comics pretty sexy. (Via Tom Spurgeon, from whom I got the Rick Trembles link I posted earlier, too.)

* Saving this for later: Rob Clough’s massive TCJ interview with 1-800-MICE cartoonist Matthew Thurber. I think I’ll read this and the Dan Nadel/Marc Bell monstrosity from a while back back-to-back.

* Matthew Perpetua makes the case for Goldfrapp, the most underrated band of the past decade.

* Real Life Horror: A majority of self-described liberals love President Obama’s army of flying killer robots. A majority of self-described liberals are assholes.

* I don’t pretend to understand George Lucas.

* Finally, one last way to feel a little better about your involvement in comics: Donate to Steve Niles’s fundraiser page for Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to help defray the $17,000 judgment against him on Marvel’s behalf.

We’re now reaching what I sincerely hope is the end of Comics’ Grossest Fortnight, two weeks full of disgraceful behavior by the industry’s major publishers Marvel and DC and dire news for creator rights and ownership. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) If you want to feel better about being a reader of or active participant in an industry that routinely abuses the writers and artists responsible for the existence of that industry in the first place, I think I can point you in the direction of two ways to do that.

First, the great cartoonist Rick Trembles needs help. Trembles is the man behind Motion Picture Purgatory, unique movie rant/reviews that combine all-caps praise and/or damnation with weirdly detailed cartoon depictions of scenes from the movie (His take on Transformers 3 is a recent fave of mine.) Trembles was forced out of his long-time apartment by his landlord under suspicious circumstances, and the subsequent costs of moving and storing his stuff with next-to-no-notice have left him destitute and in need of work. If you’ve got freelance illustration work you can throw his way, or (according to him) more importantly if you’re a Montreal resident and can offer him full-time work, do it by contact him via the above link. (You can even donate directly to him via PayPal, though he says he prefers work, naturally.)

Second, with just three days to go, Dave Kiersh’s Kickstarter for his graphic novel Afterschool Special is in grave danger of going unfunded. Kiersh is one of my favorite cartoonists, and pound for pound and panel for panel, I think he’s the most underrated alternative comics creator in North America. If you’ve ever enjoyed a single note played by M83, for example, I think you’ll go nuts for his curvy cartooning of life in the ’80s/’90s teenage wasteland. A donation of $20 gets you the book when it comes out; a donation of $35 gets you the book and his previous collection as well. You can’t miss.

These are cartoonists who live and die by their own work, pursuing their own aesthetic and their own obsessions. Support them. They deserve it.

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

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

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

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

* New Sexbuzz pages by Andrew White.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call it Hunter/Hunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* My friend Matthew Perpetua invented the mp3 blog when he launched the mighty Fluxblog ten years ago. He’s celebrating the anniversary with a series of his trademark, massive “survey” mixes, each one a multi-disc affair spotlighting the best music for each year Fluxblog’s been around. Here’s the 8-disc Fluxblog 2002 survey mix. I’m particularly gratified to see the big response in the comments for the Azure Ray and Doves songs — two of my all-time favorites.

* Fantagraphics will be publishing Ron Regé Jr.’s The Cartoon Utopia! That’s a big vote of support for a risky artist. Good for everyone involved.

* Ross Campbell is sorta semi-serializing Wet Moon Vol. 6 on his website, along with a bunch of bonus materials. I know he was bummed that Oni couldn’t fit the book into their publishing schedule until next Fall, so I’m glad they worked this out in order to get the work out there sooner.

* This interview with the Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor about his and Jim Rugg’s soon-to-be-re-released graphic novel about a leftist art-rock band One Model Nation reminds me that Taylor-Taylor is one of the great rock and roll talkers. Of all the interviews I’ve ever done, I probably think about stuff he said the most frequently. You’d be amazed how applicable a passionate endorsement of seeing Cinderella perform live is to any number of situations in everyday life.

* Tucker Stone reviews a couple dozen comics for The Savage Critics, i.e. more comics than I’ve reviewed in the last four or five months. Lots of gems in there, with two caveats: 1) He’s dead wrong about Garden being worse than Travel; 2) The impetus for the post is that these are comics he “couldn’t find the time (or space) to write about in a more ‘professional’ capacity,” which means that no website or publication out there is making it worth Tucker’s while to write about Acme Novelty Library or Kramers Ergot 3 and so on, which is a crime.

* Terrific review of Habibi and Paying For It by comiXology’s Kristy Valenti, who refers to them cheekily as “Dick Lit.” It’s hardly as dismissive a piece as that would make it out to be, though, and it’s stuffed with why-didn’t-I-think-of-that observations: Seth and Joe Matt as the Charlotte and Miranda to Chester Brown’s Carrie Bradshaw; the highlighted, isolated, orderly beds upon which Chester and the prostitutes he hires have sex as an operating theater. And by focusing on sex and love as the driving force behind Habibi she points the way to just how interesting it ought to be to see Craig Thompson do an out-and-out porn comic, as he apparently plans to do.

* Kate Beaton is signing off of Hark, a Vagarant! for a while, which is a bummer but an understandable one given the whole world throwing itself at her feet and all. I just hope she keeps getting to draw people’s hair, eyes, and hands.

* That’s a gorgeous Jillian Tamaki illustration is what that is.

* And Kali Ciesemier ain’t no slouch either.

* Yeesh, this is quite a page from Geoff Grogan’s Nice Work, which he’s begun serializing on his website.

* Mark P. Hensel interviews Ryan Cecil Smith. And Ao Meng also interviews Ryan Cecil Smith. Saving these for when I can read them back to back.

* Saving this for later, too: Amypoodle’s Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! annotations, part two. Any post on Batman comics that kicks off with a Oneohtrix Point Never video is okay in my book.

* At the always excellent Comics Grid, Peter Wilkins writes about the wonderful heartachey North No. 2 piano-playing interlude in Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto.

* I look at the villain mini-figures for Lego’s Lord of the Rings line and can see nothing but the hours and hours I will spend smashing them to bits in some future Lego LotR video game.

* Allow me to be the last to direct you to the latest Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

* Finally, D’Angelo presents the feel-good clip of the year, if you’re a D’Angelo fan. Try not to grin like an idiot during this. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Links to new pages of comics on What Things Do don’t really work, but I assure you that Jordan Crane’s morbid, masterful Keeping Two updated this week.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley is posting some very rough roughs from his upcoming project Seconds.

* Frank Quitely does Star Wars.

* Gorgeous short weird fiction from Sam Bosma.

* Woof–this page by Leiji Matsumoto explains why Ryan Cecil Smith was moved to do an Emeraldas tribute comic.

* Golly, these Arthur Rachkam Alice illustrations are stunning. James Jean city. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Kiel Phegley talks to Jeffrey Brown about the movie he co-wrote, the forthcoming Lizzy Caplan/Alison Brie wedding comedy (not to each other, alas) Save the Date.

* Tom Spurgeon lobbies for his Eisner Hall of Fame picks this year: Bill Blackbeard, Jesse Marsh, Mort Meskin and Gilbert Shelton.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his crowdsourced debunking of claims that the Civil War could have been avoided, this time focusing on other anti-slavery wars.

* Woop! Woop!

* America: We’re #47! (Scroll down.) This post also contains this quote, which should be tattooed on my forehead: “Convincing well-intentioned people to support a war in order to depose a wretched tyrant is an easy thing to do — alas, it’s probably too easy to do, since it’s usually what leads to great mischief, human suffering, and even more tyranny under a new name.”

* I assure you, Nitsuh Abebe, there are those of us who have not forgotten Hooverphonic. The North Remembers.

* Sometimes I like to picture an alternate timeline in which Pearl Jam made a video for “Black.”

* Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

* Finally, my friend and collaborator Matt Rota has a show coming up: It will contain art that looks like this.

The latest installment of my interview column for The Comics Journal features Julia Gfrörer, author of Too Dark to See, one of the ten best comics of 2011.

* Sparkplug has announced that Katie Skelly’s Nurse Nurse is to be their first new comic. Best of luck to both halves of this arrangement.

* Oh look, Lisa Hanawalt may have just done her best weirdo strip ever and best gag strip ever, back to back.

* It took me a while to find it, but Zack Soto and Milo George’s relaunched Study Group website has a blog component with its own RSS feed that you should certainly consider subscribing too. Highlights thus far include a Noah Butkus spotlight (Jesus Christ, “Forces”!) and an interview with cartoonist Maré Odomo, who cites writer and ADDXSTC fave Kevin Fanning as an influence, which was unexpected and exciting to see. Odomo also cites the influence of Blaise Larmee and Aidan Koch, but in terms of the beauty of their pencil art rather than any of Larmee’s theory trolling, which until relatively recently was rarely made manifest in his comics themselves.

* John Mejias draws our attention to an upcoming Shawn Cheng art show. He’s a printmaking master, and he’s doing stuff you don’t see any other cartoonist/printmakers doing, I don’t think.

* Anders Nilsen responds to his critics.

* At a certain point pulling art from Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic in order to show you how horrible and beautiful it is becomes a waste of time: Surely you already know how horrible and beautiful it is. At any rate, here’s the latest Ant Comic.

* Rickey Purdin has been posting nightmarish little sketches unlike any art I’ve seen from him before. This one’s called “All the Weapons You Needed Were Over Here.”

* The Ashcan All-Stars group art blog, staffed mostly by interesting mainstream/genre artists, is doing a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe week, and it’s been pretty glorious. Below are contributions from Nick Pitarra and Aaron Kuder.

* The Mindless Ones’ Amypoodle has begun annotating Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes.

* Jeez, this Jason Karns fellow is a goddamn gold mine.

* It’s The Best of Zak Smith/Sabbath’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars! I can barely conceive of what a timesuck following all those links would be.

* I’m just waiting very patiently for the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit Lego videogames.

* God bless Uno Moralez.

Who wants to talk comics? Tweet me a book or name or creator or critic or topic or whatever and I’ll tell you what I think. #tgif

* Dang, Ken Parille’s Comics Journal year-in-review piece tackles Habibi, 1-800-MICE, Holy Terror, Optic Nerve #12, The Death-Ray, Mister Wonderful, Crack Comics #63, and Ganges #4 as well as any individual review of any of them has done. (And I say that as a person who wrote about 5/8 of those books for the Journal myself.) Parille’s writing is like a really delicious sampler platter — you get the sense he just picked the tastiest morsels of insight on any given book and presented them to you for your delectation, but that there’s a whole lot more where that came from.

* Wonderful piece on Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve #12 by Tim Hodler. I like what he says about the unique characteristics of structuring a longer story as a series of funnypages-style strips, and this: “his storytelling displays a subtlety so far beyond most of what’s being published at the current moment.” Ayup. As alternative comics has begun looking less like RAW and more like Heavy Metal, we’ve lost something in exchange.

* I don’t know why, but a day or two ago the feed for Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures blog dumped like half a dozen posts on me all at once, and there were gems galore in there: Rundowns of their Best American Comics series’s 2010 Notables and 2011 Notables (aka honorable mentions/bigger-picture selections), and notes on Asterios Polyp and Ice Haven.

* Not that I’m opposed to all the Heavy Metal stuff. Duh. I mean, Lane Milburn, holy shit, look at his next book Mors Ultima Ratio:

* On a similar note I suppose, I just happened to really like the drawing of what looks to me like Grendel and Beowulf by Thomas Yeates that Tom Spurgeon selected for his birthday post on the artist. I am a sucker for big monsters in the Hulk/Rawhead Rex vein, admittedly.

* Still on that same note, Sam Bosma reminds me of a lesson I once learned the hard way: Never trust a Mindflayer.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates lets Jay-Z off the hook for his avowed intention to continue using the word “bitch” in his lyrics. While Coates is correct in saying that the context of the use of the b-word in rap is part of the problem, he’s wrong to say “Rap’s ‘bitch’ problem has never been about the word itself” — of course it is. It’s about that among other things, but it’s certainly still about that. Coates does that sort of thing throughout the post: “There is a whole school of thought that holds racism is impossible unless attended by the word ‘nigger.’ And there are plenty of ways to regard a women as bitches, without ever saying the word.” Certainly. But just because Newt Gingrich can go on national television and receive standing ovations and become the presidential frontrunner for a major political party by saying enormously racist things without using period-piece movie-villain epithets doesn’t mean you should ignore it when people do use them. And just because hip-hop and pop culture generally’s misogyny runs deeper than calling women bitches, you still shouldn’t do it. The way to disprove that “bitch” is problematic in and of itself would be to provide examples of a non-problematic, non-sexist way to use it in hip-hop. Coates goes straight for the strawman of “I have never wanted a world where white people were forever banned from using the word nigger,” but of course no one’s actually arguing for expurgating hip-hop’s theoretical equivalent of Huck Finn, because the difference between saying these words and using them is crystal-clear. I guess the closest Jay-Z has come to that sort of thing is “That’s My Bitch,” but for me that isn’t close enough. The long and short of it for me is that there’s no need for bitch as an insult when “asshole” exists, and even less of a need for it as a simple term for “woman” when “woman” exists; continuing to use it despite these genderless equivalents indicates a problem with that gender. I’d be interested to hear of cases where this didn’t hold.

* Tom Ewing and Matthew Perpetua on Lana Del Rey and the issue of “authenticity” in art. Man, are sneer-quotes ever called for there. I thought that most of the controversy around Del Rey centered on whether or not she was any good, and whether or not her sexual politics were retrograde, and the degree to which a major record label was involved in her initial burst of ostensibly organic/viral/indie success. Those are rubrics I can understand: hype vs. talent, and anti-sexism, and not wanting to be lied to by a giant corporation. But I was quite aghast to learn that apparently some people were holding it against her that she used to perform under a different name with a different sound and look and vibe. A world where artists must emerge fully formed in their teens or early twenties with their first quasi-professionally recorded work and then remain preserved in amber for all eternity is a scary, scary world. A Bowie-free, Beatles-free, Dr. Dre-free, Underworld-free, P-Funk-free, Ministry-free, Gaga-free world! Not to compare LDR to any of those artists on a qualitative basis, mind you — see the three aforementioned potential issues with her work — but all I can tell you is rejecting the notion of the authentic self is one of the top five best things ever to happen to me, not just as a consumer and sometimes maker of art, but as a person. By all means try on personae like clothes in a dressing room until you find one that fits you, and take it off and put on new ones whenever you feel like it. What on earth is the harm in that?

(Related: I can’t help but wonder if the backlash against LDR specifically is tied to the phenomenon Scott Plagenhoef addresses in online music culture’s quest to be the first to seize upon a new artist within very narrow, inoffensive aesthetic parameters. If that’s the filter for your interaction with music, a person who radically changes very early on in her career, and changes into a very divisive mode of presentation, is anathema.)

* Chris Ware, Building Stories, Pantheon, Fall 2012. Start clearing out that #1 slot on your year-ender list.

* Game of Thrones Season Two, HBO, April 1 2012. Start clearing out that Sunday night slot on your DVR.

* Whoa: Zack Soto’s StudyGroupComics.com has launched with a gorgeous line-up of mostly alt-fantasy strips, including previous ADDXSTC faves The Mourning Star by Kazimir Strzepek, Doppelganger by Tom Neely, and Danger Country by Levon Jihanian; strips from Press Gang co-founders Soto, Jason Leivian, and Francois Vigneault; UTU by Malachi Ward (below) and more. Ambitious and impressive.

* I love Dave Kiersh’s work…

…so I’m happy to pitch into the Kickstarter for his next book, Afterschool Special. $20 puts you down as a pre-order for the finished product.

* The Pizza Island comics studio is calling it a day. Lots of good comics came out of that outfit, as did many funny tweets.

* I have very little experience with or interest in any of the cartoonists covered in this post (okay, maybe I’m interested in Manara), but I was still totally fascinated with Dan Nadel’s seemingly off-the-cuff post on high-end genre cartoonists Milo Manara, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, and Richard Sala — that’s how good Dan is at what he does.

* Gabrielle Bell’s latest strip concludes, with a weirdo rhythm and tone all its own.

* Robert Beatty: the sensational character find of Kramers Ergot 8! (Via Sammy Harkham, appropriately enough.)

* Junji Ito, ladies and gentlemen.

* A collection of Bruce Timm’s good girl art? Don’t mind as I do.

* Tim O’Neil has strong words for the militarized superhero. The pop sociology books-about-comics from 30 years from now truly write themselves. It’s to the point where Warren Ellis can funnel his contempt for the genre and its audience into a wink-wink-nudge-nudge endorsement of torture by Captain freaking America in a recent Secret Avengers issue and no one in a position to know better and ask for something different from him even notices. On the scale of cosmic injustice it’s not as bad as mistreating Jack Kirby and his family, but that’s a low bar to clear.

* One day Blue Ivy Carter will turn to Jay-Z and ask “What did you do during the Sean T. Collins/Shit Comics War, Daddy?”