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

* 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.

* 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?”

* Wow: Fantagraphics is publishing two books about Love and Rockets this year. One’s a companion volume with interviews, unpublished art, character guides, family trees, and so forth; one’s a Love and Rockets Reader with essays by Marc Sobel. Pretty great timing given that the series is getting as much attention now in its 30th year as it ever has, because it’s as good as it ever was.

* Marvel beat DC in dollar share and market share in the direct market in December. Think for a moment about everything that changed not just at DC but across the entire industry — some for the good, some for the bad, some for the “jury’s still out” — in the name of what amounted to a three-month sales goose. Same-day digital pretty much industry-wide, new continuity, new costumes, all the redundancies and obsolescences created by same in everything from licensing to ongoing storylines to planned and abandoned storylines to licensing images to the recently launched DC MMORPG, a new business model in terms of release schedules for DC, a competing new business model in terms of release schedules for Marvel, a new way of working with talent, new internal procedures for editing and trafficking books, various controversies over race and gender and sex, hirings and firings of creative personnel, new baselines for page count and price point, big-name writers carving out little bubbles of continuity-independence for their books, major media pushes, a shaky retail sector adjusting on the fly to all of the above…and Marvel beat DC in December. Really, really, really remarkable. Tom Spurgeon has more analysis, including the always welcome remonstrance that publishers who complain about the inaccuracy of publicly available sales estimates have it within their power to provide more accurate numbers in seconds, and on a basis more comprehensive than crowing about sellouts when it suits them.

* Speaking of Spurge, I enjoyed quite a few of his final “holiday” posts, including his interviews with Laura Hudson and Chester Brown and his New Year’s resolutions, at least two of which can be summed up with “Don’t be an asshole.”

* I have a pretty low tolerance for other people’s opinions on David Bowie’s songs — through no fault of its own there are few things I’d rather read less than that one blog that’s writing about every single Bowie song in order — but I sure did enjoy Matthew Perpetua’s take on “TVC-15.”

* Michael DeForge’s latest Ant Comic manages to be the most awful one yet.

* Gorgeous cover for SF Supplementary File #2C by Ryan Cecil Smith.

* Lisa Hanawalt does War Horse.

* Plenty of interesting work being discussed in Kevin Czap’s fifth and final BCGF haul roundup.

* Panels of 2011 is an accurately named and visually compelling new tumblr.

* Kali Ciesemier sketches Robyn.

* I’m historically not the biggest fan of the writer doing the adaptation, but the coming Conan comic being illustrated by Becky Cloonan will at least look as good as Conan comics have ever looked.

* Man did I like that one At the Drive-In record, a pretty peerless effort in terms of coming up with lyrics that demand to be shouted. DANCING ON THE CORPSES’ ASHES!!! Glad they’re getting back together.

* Real Life Horror: When is terrorism not terrorism? Related: I wish I’d bookmarked the post where he first made this connection, but in light of the apparent secret campaign of orchestrated murder against Iranian scientists it’s worth reiterating Greenwald’s contention that the wall of state secrecy behind which the United States hides violent overseas acts like these assassinations and our multinational drone wars is in every important way equivalent to the more voluble propaganda to which our despotic enemy regimes subject their populace, propaganda which we never fail to decry when we see it in others. The North Korean who believes the birds are crying over the death of internationally revered statesman Kim Jong-Il is not a world apart from the American who doesn’t know about all the children slaughtered by our army of flying killer robots.

* Gary Groth on his dinner with Christopher Hitchens.

* Go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox, AMC.

* Finally, behold the awesome power of Pizza Boomerang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GANDALF TAKE THE WHEEL

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

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

Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Cartoonist Jerry Robinson has died at age 89. In addition to creating the Joker, co-creating Robin, and basically co-creating what we all picture as “Batman” in terms of the concept’s look and cast, he was a pioneering comics historian and creators’ rights advocate — proof that even those who benefited from the system didn’t have to shy away from trying to better it.

* My BCGC con report can be found at Robot 6. I really like this show — a mainline hit of exactly what I love about comics today — and tried to articulate what sets it apart from comparable cons.

* Secret Acres’ dynamic duo of Barry and Leon always whip up the most well-written con reports, and this time is no exception. I don’t know how they do it. You really get a sense of their whole experience — creative, commercial, cultural, communal.

* Kevin Czap had one heck of a con haul! His brief overview articulates something I’d sort of picked up on myself, which is that Kramers Ergot is now the elder statesman of artcomics anthologies rather than the place you go to find shit you’ve never seen before. It’s interesting how the new volume’s more restrained and refined approach feeds into that vibe.

* And Nick Gazin at Vice has the best of the photo parades. Plus, if you are interested in finding out whether or not he personally finds a given woman cartoonist physically attractive, then boy howdy is it a treasure trove of information. No word on how hot he finds Dan Nadel, pictured below. (Via Jonny Negron.)

* Big get alert: Drawn and Quarterly is picking up Gilbert Hernandez’s forthcoming semiautobiographical graphic novel Marble Season. This could be a pretty interesting effort — I mean, okay, it’s Beto, so it’ll definitely be a pretty interesting effort. But what I mean is that a) the stuff he does for publishers other than Fantagraphics is usually off-brand for him in ways that demand examination, and b) by the sound of it, it’s an account of his childhood love of comics, which means it probably will eschew the extreme sex and violence of most of his Love and Rockets and Fritzverse work these days, and thus may help the audience appreciate just how good he is lately without those potential impediments if that’s not their thing.

* Holy — The 2011 and 2012 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendars featured Cor Blok?? It’s so refreshing to see artists interpret epic fantasy without working in the hyperreal visual tradition — cf. yesterday’s Danger Country review — and Blok was one of the best at it. The first time I saw his Tolkien art was a true revelation. Look what you could do with this material! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* I love it when Zak Smith/Sabbath just tosses out dozens and dozens of great fantasy storytelling ideas like it ain’t no thing. Today he’s doing it with barbarian cultures. Come for the ideas, stay for the oblique George R.R. Martin diss!

* Here’s a sharp little essay from Matt Seneca on John Romita Sr., “the quintessential Marvel artist.” The other week Tom Spurgeon got some José Luis Garcia-Lopez DC character art going around, so I said something on twitter about how José Luis Garcia-Lopez is to DC what John Romita Sr. is to Marvel, that they’re equivalently definitive artists for their respective publishers’ visual identities. Matt says the same thing in the comments. (Romita trumps Garcia-Lopez in terms of the comics themselves.)

* Whoosh, this Sam Hiti piece is hot stuff. (Via Sam Bosma.)

* My favorite band, Underworld, have been named music directors for the opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympics in London. Their longtime collaborator Danny Boyle is the artistic director. And so I’ll be watching some of the Olympics!

* A Goldfrapp singles collection could go a long way to showing just how strong their repertoire is. Most underrated band of the ’00s.

* Kiel Phegley reminds us that this is what Yvonne Craig looked like.

* I feel I’ve been lax in my duty to direct you to my tumblr for photographs of Beyoncé Knowles and David Bowie, Bowie Loves Beyoncé. Perhaps this will remedy that in some way. Some wonderful way.

* Finally, start the weekend off right with an Uno Moralez image/gif gallery.

* Every year as the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival approaches, I start to see my wallet as an object of intermingled pity, dread, and revulsion, like the Eraserhead baby. I’m racking my brain to see if this is an exaggeration, but nope, I don’t think it is: There’s something interesting at literally every table. Can you say that about any other show? Anyway, I’ll obviously be there, so please say hello to me if you see me. I look like this:

The lack of lens glare over my left eye can be attributed to me breaking my glasses last night on the platform of the Jamaica Long Island Rail Road station while overenthusiastically acting out a scene I enjoyed from season one of Breaking Bad.

* Continuing from last Carnival, here are several guides to noteworthy books you’ll be able to buy there. If you read only one, make it Chris Mautner from Robot 6’s comprehensive round-up post. But beyond that, there’s info galore from…

* Zack Soto, who’s repping the new publishing collective Press Gang, his own Study Group Magazine, and about a million lovely prints;

* non-attendee Dustin Harbin, who notes among other things the opportunity to pick up this year’s alt-festival circuit sleeper hit, Ethan Rilly’s Pope Hats #2 from AdHouse;

* Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino at Secret Acres, who in addition to bringing nearly every single person they publish will have a new issue of John Brodowski’s excellent alt-genre series Curio Cabinet on hand;

* Ryan Sands, who’s bringing tons of work from the greater Same Hat!/Electric Ant/Thickness/Chameleon hivemind;

* Closed Caption Comics, who are literally just filling little cardboard boxes with comics they recently made and calling that issue #9.5 of their flagship anthology;

* Benjamin Marra, who’s bringing the whole panoply of Traditional Comics releases, including the brand new Night Business #4;

* Tom Kaczynski, who lists the goods to be gotten from his Uncivilized Books imprint;

* and Unciv artist Gabrielle Bell, who posts the latest in her ridiculously strong year of autobio strips.

* Few things on the comics internet excite me more than a new Tom Spurgeon review of a book I’ve read; each one reminds me that nobody does it better. Here he is on Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Three. And though I haven’t read the comic yet, here he is on Joe Sacco’s new minicomic from Fantagraphics, The Road to Wigan Pier, a review of George Orwell’s book of the same name.

* Here’s another massive TCJ.com interview I’m saving for when I can really savor it: Dan Nadel speaks with the singular talent Marc Bell.

* Meanwhile, Robin McConnell interviews Geof Darrow, who was practically Cartoonist of the Year this year despite not publishing anything simply by virtue of his influence. Over on Robot 6 I noted Darrow’s recent rejected Superman cover, which he talks about (and posts!) in the interview.

* Game of Thrones hits DVD and Blu-Ray on March 6.

* Dark Horse is the latest publisher to go same-day digital, as of a mere two weeks from now. Après DC la déluge.

* Adrian Tomine just says no to making graphic novels instead of short stories. I’m pretty okay with this.

* Will Jonny Negron’s winning streak never end?

* There’s not a great deal to dislike about Power Comics, a new tumblr dedicated, essentially, to the ’80s black-and-white-boom books Benjamin Marra is pastiching in Night Business. (Hat tip: Agent M.)

* Aeron Alfrey reminds us that it’s never a bad time to revisit Charlie White’s Understanding Joshua.

* First U2, now Bryan Ferry: Trent Reznor’s year in cover versions has been a fun one.

* Any time my friend and collaborator Matt Rota posts new art, it’s worth checking out.

* Like most people on the Internet, I enjoy artist Brandon Bird’s unique entertainment-industry surrealism, both in his own paintings and the shows he curates. His latest is dedicated to the humans of Jurassic Park. I find myself hoping that someone chose to immortalize this one low-angle shot I remember quite vividly of Laura Dern’s khaki-clad hind end as she prepares to sprint across an open field to safety — I’m pretty sure it put me through puberty. (That or an En Vogue video, most likely.) Anyway, that’s Lisa Hanawalt doing Jeff Goldblum below. (Via Agent M again.)

* And hey, that reminds me that longtime ADDXSTC fave Robert Burden (not Flaming Carrot Robert Burden, labor-intensive portraits of action figures Robert Burden) recently painted the Thundercats.

* Finally, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: Matthew Perpetua has posted the Fluxblog 2011 Survey Mix! 10 discs, 183 songs, 13 hours of music, yours for the downloading!

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

* Recently on Robot 6:

* The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has announced its programming slate. Phoebe Gloeckner’s spotlight panel and a Tom Spurgeon/CF/Brian Ralph three-for-all are the highlights for me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Tom talk about CF at length, now that I think about it…

* Related: AdHouse is gonna have a hell of a show, by the sound of it.

* And here’s a BCGF debut: Zack Soto and Milo George are (re)launching Study Group Magazine, with a killer initial line-up of comics and journalism that includes work by ADDXSTC faves Chris Cilla, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, as well as interviews with Eleanor Davis and Craig Thompson.

* Does Koyama Press have the coolest publisher backstory ever?

* Inspired by a quote from Chris Mautner’s excellent interview with Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus in which Spiegelman explains the pain of having such horrifying and personal subject matter at the heart of his career for so long, I defend Art Spiegelman against his “what have you done for me lately?” detractors.

* And inspired by Nadim Damluji’s excellent interview with Craig Thompson about Orientalism in Habibi (although I must warn you not to enter the ensuing comment thread unless forced at gunpoint, and even then you might want to consider taking your chances at disarming the guy), I defend Craig Thompson against criticism to the effect that he doesn’t really know what’s going on in his own work.

* I’m really enjoying Ben Katchor’s increasingly explicit anticorporatism.

* Top Shelf is going digital in a big way, with a couple of comics apps. And damn, the price is right on the books they’re launching with. Clumsy for two bucks?

* At last! Image is releasing a collected edition of Brandon Graham’s much-lauded King City in February.

* John Porcellino has a new King-Cat coming coming out on Wednesday!

* So this is the cover for Jonny Negron’s Chameleon #2. That make sense.

* The Matthias Wivel-edited Nordic comics anthology Kolor Klimax sure looks good.

* Here’s a long and excellent piece by Zom on the horror of Uno Moralez. It’s a rare feat to analyze what makes something mysterious and horrifying with this kind of accuracy but with no intention of deflating the mystery and horror.

* Fear Itself ate itself, basically. This certainly isn’t the first time a major event comic involved elements of planned rapid obsolescence — it was the knowledge that they’d be wiping out Spider-Man’s marriage and with it whatever other aspects of his history they wanted to fudge that enabled Marvel to unmask Peter Parker for a mainstream-media bounce during Civil War — but it’s really quite unusual for three epilogue one-shots branded with the event’s name to undo the three biggest status-quo changes of the event, within three weeks of that event’s official conclusion. Still more unusual is that in all three cases Marvel’s clearly better off having undone them.

* Tucker Stone’s interview with Mark Waid about Daredevil is really entertaining on both sides of the tape recorder.

* Wow, they are dropping a lot of characters from A Clash of Kings in Game of Thrones Season Two. In some cases I understand both why they’re doing it and how it’ll work. In a few cases I’m kind of unsure how you do certain things you need to do at all without them. But when you think about it, the challenge faced by GoT the show is unprecedented. It’s one thing for The Sopranos to take bit parts and grow them into main characters at some point down the line — you’ve simply taken a presumably grateful character actor and given him the material of a lifetime. It’s still another to know up front that you’re casting a role who’ll get maybe five minutes of screentime this season but will turn into an opening-credits role in three, four years. What do you do, tell the Shakespearean actor you cast this past summer to clear his calendar for 2014? The answer will likely be not to cast such characters until the big stuff is happening, which of course will mean doing things differently than they were done in the books.

* Can you imagine having a sex ed class in which physical and emotional pleasure were valued and discussed? The clitoris, orgasms, the importance of making your partner feel comfortable emotionally, and being made to feel comfortable emotionally yourself? I can’t remember when that particular lightbulb was switched on in my head, but once the idea of such a sex ed curriculum was introduced to me, it became something that made me just shake my head in disgust that that’s not how things are. That’s absolutely how things should be. And in this New York Times piece about such a class in a school in a Friends’ school in Philadelphia shows you how it works.

* Speaking of the Times, unfortunately: Everyone I know thought Occupy Wall Street intended to shut down the New York City subway system yesterday, because they heard it on the news. I heard it on the news and so it’s what I believed. My in-laws, who are visiting us from Colorado, canceled their usual day in the city yesterday because they heard service would be disrupted on the news and so it’s what they believed. After the shutdown never materialized, today my co-workers said that OWS had simply failed to pull it off, because they’d heard of the plans on the news and so that’s what they believed. It turns out it was total bullshit, invented by Fox and the New York Times. But I heard it on several other outlets besides those, up to two or three days in advance, complete with responses to the supposed planned shutdown by NYC authorities. And it was all horseshit. As I’ve been saying on Twitter, it’s really rather amazing to watch all the organs of a body politic afflicted with terminal-stage capitalism work to expel OWS from the system. And this memetic inoculation against it — “protest Wall Street if you want, but once you start making it impossible for regular working people to get where they need to go…” — will likely never go away.

* Another case in point: The truly routine violation of protesters’ rights by the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD. The impunity with which they assault people, illegally arrest and detain them, illegally spy on them for their political beliefs, and so on is breathtaking. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates (via whom the aforelinked article) always says, we’ve got the police force we want, basically. If we didn’t want it, there are many ways in which we could make sure we didn’t have it.

* To end on a happier note, here are a few music links I enjoyed:

* Mark Richardson on freaking the fuck out over My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Man, we’ve all been there. I think my favorite part of listening to the album is when you get to that end section of “What You Want,” right before the final song “Soon” kicks in, and it’s so lovely you almost can’t bear it.

* Jaimeson Cox has been writing about Drake’s new album Take Care all week, and it’s been great. Actually, that album has coaxed great writing out of a lot of music writers. Off the top of my head: Brandon Soderberg, Zach Baron (the bit about the title track’s a must read), Ryan Dombal, Hua Hsu (terrific point about how disconcerting delivering similar sentiments via both singing and rapping can be). It’s early yet, but I think this may be my second-favorite album of the year after Kaputt by Destroyer? There’s just so much to talk about in the music especially, which is why I may inflict a post about hip-hop on you all in the near future. You’ve been warned.

* My Kraven story in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 got a couple more good reviews: Here’s the big-time spider-fan site Spider-Man Crawl Space, and here’s Robot 6’s Tim O’Shea, who singles out a little layout gimmick I was pretty proud of.

* Monster guest lineup at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this year. Aw, who am I kidding, by “monster guest lineup” I mostly mean “oh my God, Phoebe Gloeckner!!!!” Gloeckner is one of a very, very small number of people with whom I’ve had conversations that I’ve more or less memorized.

* Anders Nilsen reveals his five favorite comics to the AV Club. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Zak Smith/Sabbath explains how to make things weird. The answer may surprise you! As is often the case with Smith’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars blog, this post is applicable to a lot more than just playing D&D.

* Is anything in the world more comforting than Peter Jackson talking about the technological wonkery he’s deploying to make movies about Middle-earth? I’m serious — if you studied my brain chemistry while watching something like the making-of video for The Hobbit below I bet there’d be measurable changes. I love this man.

* My friends Ryan Penagos and Ben Morse have launched the This Week in Marvel podcast.

* Yep, those are Jason’s five favorite post-2000 bands, alright.

* I guess that if you’re going to troll Tom Brevoort’s formspring account, you might as well be a good writer in the process.

* You keep drawing them, I’ll keep linking to them, Tom Kaczynski.

* My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is one of those records about which I could read breathlessly effusive birthday celebrations all the live-long day. The best thing I ever read about that album was by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson: “I’ve long dreamt of an album that was ‘Like Loveless, but more,’ but I haven’t found it.”

* Real Life Horror: I briefly started following Andrew Sullivan’s blog again after one of my periodic hiatuses, though every time he asserted that the way to get both the country and the Obama presidency back on track is to “embrace Simpson-Bowles” I was sorely tempted to decamp again, and a post regarding a “debate” over whether or not liberals value “hard work” broke the camel’s back within less than twelve hours of re-adding the RSS feed back to my increasingly less useful Google Reader. But when he’s not espousing fatuous faith-based economics proposals or rounding up links about total nonsense he’s actually quite good, and indefatigable, on issues like torture, or in this case, pretty much the out and out murder/cover-up of several Guantanamo Bay detainees subjected to a suffocation-torture technique called dryboarding. Land of the free, home of the brave.

* Apparently this is just how Ryan Gosling looks now? Like, when he goes to music festivals and what have you?

* Well, this is certainly nice: My comic in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 is getting good reviews from the folks who enjoy Spider-Man comics. Here’s Ray Tate at Comics Bulletin, and here’s David Walton at The Reilly Factor. Kitty’s Pryde liked my page layouts but didn’t like my jokes, which, hey, fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing if I pass muster with the big Spider-fan sites.

* Oh hey, look, it’s four of the best people in the history of comics. From left: Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Groth, Phoebe Gloeckner. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog, I wrote about the role of social justice in the series, using the conclusion of the Harry Potter series as a counterexample. I elaborated on the point for the benefit of a naysayer, too. I realized yesterday just how important this is to me.

* Recently on Robot 6:

*Good god: Gary Groth interviews Robert Crumb at glorious length. I ran down some of the high points for Robot 6.

* Ng Suat Tong annotated all the flashback panels from Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” I added my two cents at R6 as well.

* Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” has wrapped up. Some lingeringly creepy images in here, as you’d expect.

* And here’s a quick little highlight reel for the Journal’s Habibi roundtable.

* Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books, Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics, and François Vigneult’s Family Style have formed a publishing collective called Press Gang. That’s promising.

* Jesus: The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo put a caricature of Muhammad on the issue that came out yesterday. Later that day, someone blew up their offices.

* The Minneapolis small press show MIX may be having its last hurrah this weekend.

* David Bordwell’s latest absolute killer of a film essay is on visual density, specifically the way leaving objects that previously played a role in the narrative within the frame charges that frame with memories. The relevance to comics is obvious. And in terms of Bordwell’s recurring themes, he argues that this technique has largely been lost with the primacy of the walk-and-talk/stand-and-deliver binary for shooting dialogue.

* Matt Seneca on recent releases from the great Yuichi Yokoyama. While as usual I disagree with many of his emotional and thematic conclusions — I don’t get pessimism from Garden at all; it seems beyond that to me — I enjoy a lot of his specific observations, like the kindly feeling of the book’s slideshow-style finale. Plus, the piece includes a bunch of gorgeous art from Yokoyama’s thus far untranslated Baby Boom.

* Joe McCulloch on pre-Code horror comics for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Local boy makes good!

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the increasingly obvious problem with the NYPD.

* Dan White’s latest Cindy & Biscuit story is an all-Biscuit affair. Such vibrant cartooning!

* Michael DeForge previews his next comic, Kid Mafia. I’m detecting a lot of Tim Hensley/Wally Gropius in this one.

* Oh hey, Jonny Negron decided to mint money by offering prints for sale of his Drive pin-up.

* Andrew White appears to be prepping to post a comic every day this month.

* Keep drawing the sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* More hot stuff from Ryan Cecil Smith. You know, it’s times like these when I wonder if I should put some kind of NSFW tag at the top of the blog, or if it goes without saying.