SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – if you haven’t read the books, you can still read this . Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* That was tough to watch. Who knew? Maybe months of anticipating what would happen in this episode were enough to recreate a week of wondering what would happen in this episode. By that final scene my pulse was racing, and I had that elevator-dropped-out feeling in my stomach I’d grown familiar with from The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, shows that at one point or another had me convinced that anyone, literally anyone, might not make it to the end of a given episode. Only this time, I knew, and still got that feeling.

* It was the show’s best scene as filmmaking, certainly. Sweeping camera movements to create a sense of immersion and environment, intelligent sound design that highlighted or dropped this or that element to hyperfocus our attention, terrific performances from Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams and Sean Bean. Even little details, like how Joffrey was framed when he ordered the execution, or the way Ser Ilyn Payne just materialized out of nowhere, slapped on his mask, and brought the sword down, delivered.

* You’re primed to think the big question is “Will Ned sacrifice his honor or die?”, not “Will Ned sacrifice his honor and die?” The misdirection goes well beyond “they’ll never kill the main character…will they?” and into how the whole back half of the season/book is constructed.

* Jeez, the Hound is huge. Did you see him holding Ned on the steps when Ned got beaned by the crowd? He towered over Sean Bean.

* And speaking of sound design, the sounds from Drogo’s tent…woof, that was good stuff. I actually think this was a more frightening way to approach it than the scary shadows of the book. It’s actually more of a challenge to make a tent feel like a mouth into hell in broad daylight, but those horrible bellows and screams were more than enough. I wouldn’t have gone in there.

* I’m glad to see Varys’s motives being revealed and treated as sincere. Even Ned seems to get that. Conleth Hill was especially good in that scene, every bit the practiced liar finally letting his guard down and delivering some real talk.

* Michelle Fairley continues to improve as Catelyn. Her anger and frustration with Walder Frey’s pettiness and her tears of joy upon seeing Robb return from battle were her two most human displays in the whole series. Catelyn’s our main character now, for all intents and purposes, and this episode made me a lot more optimistic about that prospect.

* Tyrion’s sleepover party with Bronn and Shae was a blast. You’ve got to hand it to Jerome Flynn and Sibel Kikelli, who took two characters we barely know, including one we just met, sat them alongside a main character played by a beloved actor, and made it feel like yeah, absolutely these three people would stay up into the wee hours drinking and goofing around together. I’m a softie, so I’m happy anytime characters in fiction about how hard the world is manage to respect and befriend one another.

* Just a lot of fine moments sprinkled throughout the whole episode, actually. Sticking Tyrion on the dolly for that shot as he comes to was inspired, just as discombobulating as you’d imagine it was for Tyrion. Maester Aemon comes out of nowhere to reveal that he’s one of the most important people in the world. Jon’s fellow grunts flip out over his sword like the teenage boys they are, while Rast and his fellow raper sit in the corner glowering. It was a really, really good hour of television, good enough to get me too keyed up to sleep properly.

* I’ve long said it’s a mug’s game for people like me to try to speak for viewers who’ve never read the books, but I do wonder what they made of this episode’s two major battles taking place off-screen. Since I’ve been following the production of the show from day one, I was aware that budget limitations constrained them from going too crazy in the battle department, but I did expect that they’d get at least one in before the season was over, and it stood to reason that Tyrion riding into battle at the front of a horde of screaming tribesmen was going to be the one. Instead he got clocked on the head and slept through the battle. While this was certainly true to the material’s penchant for puncturing the glory balloon and letting all the air seep out, it also felt like what it was — a way to save money. Ditto Robb’s victory in the Whispering Wood, despite it being presented in much the same off-screen way it was in the book. Since the show isn’t wedded to the book’s POV-character structure, it’s show itself to be perfectly capable of showing us what was going on when our POVs were elsewhere. Robb Stark’s direwolf-aided sneak attack on Jaime Lannister would be a logical choice in that regard, you’d think. It’s a testament to the filmmakers that this episode felt as epic and portentous as it did even though both battles were presented as a fait accompli.

* And boy, there’s nothing quite like feeling disappointed about the lack of battle scenes to make you question if you’ve truly internalized A Song of Ice and Fire’s anti-war message as much as you’d thought. I think I’m okay with my desire to see a good battle scene despite my growing (and ASoIaF-aided!) pacifism — after all, it is okay to enjoy things in art you’d never enjoy in real life. Certainly someone as apt to freak out over animal cruelty as I am had to come to grips with that fact if I were to watch the show at all. But more than that — and here I credit Maureen Ryan, who’s been something of a killjoy about the show, for the insight — A Song of Ice and Fire is a series about war, and it’s tough to be about war without showing war. I still think the message gets through thanks to all the other horrible killings we’ve seen, but seasons down the line, things like Septon Meribald’s monologue about broken men are going to have less of an impact if we’ve never seen why men might break. Or maybe I just want some exciting and thrilling carnage. Maybe it’s both.

* DC’s line-wide relaunch/day-and-date digital push has dominated industry news since its announcement last week. A few links of note:

* The line will get a new flagship title in the form of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee’s Justice League. That should sell like gangbusters.

* DC’s mostly taking an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to its two most successful franchises: The creative teams behind both the Green Lantern and Batman lines stay more or less the same, though several of them trade titles.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort emerged as one of the move’s most persistent and persuasive defenders — I mean, he’s not cheerleading the thing, but he’s not lambasting it or laughing it off, and is defending it against some fans who are doing so. One caveat: He said this stuff before the creative-team announcements started rolling out.

* Some of the better reaction/analysis pieces I’ve seen: Tim Hodler, Tom Spurgeon.

* Finally, Kiel Phegley rounds up retailer reaction; any such piece that includes such divers hands as Floating World’s Jason Leivian, DCBService.com’s Cameron Merkler, and Midtown Comics’ Gerry Gladston is well worth your time.

* If you’ve been wondering how Michael DeForge manages to be so prolific, his first entry in the Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has your answer: 16-hour workdays. And if you’ve been worried, here’s how he’s been keeping busy lately.

* He’s also got a strip of his usual excellence called “Teen Wolf” up at What Things Do. It’s almost like a riff on Dave Kiersh.

* Bow before the might and majesty of Gary Groth’s interview with Joe Sacco for The Comics Journal #301.

* Dan Nadel talks about differing approaches to reprinting old comics. If you’re familiar with Dan’s approach you’ll know what side he comes down on, but he’s quite fair with and accepting of several different styles, and notes the difference between reprinting comics and reprinting comics art.

* The Comics Grid’s Esther Claudio takes a look at a page from Craig Thompson’s Good-bye, Chunky Rice; the Comics Grid’s customary high-quality close reading ensues. I’m certainly stealing the phrase mise en page.

* I used some new Spider-Man comics as an excuse to link to every single superhero comic Kate Beaton has done. I think the Kraven piece for Strange Tales 2 is the best of the bunch.

* This is one of Kevin Huizenga’s better Fight or Run strips.

* This Moebius drawing is like the Rosetta stone for Uno Moralez. Via Shit Comics, an inspiring altcomix tumblr.

* Speaking of inspiring altcomix tumblrs, I spotted this image from Panayiotis Terzis’ new book Time Tunnels at Same Hat!

* Wow, Ron Regé Jr. sure can draw cats! All of his commissions look well worth the cash, actually.

* Always glad to see new comics from my friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan.

* I fully support Jillian Crowther’s concept of “pinball music”: shiny, slightly overcooked rock pop circa 1979-1981, a la “Ah! Leah.” It reminds me of my own personal place-based subgenres, centered on my memories of the defunct Long Island roller rink Laces (freestyle, electro) and the heterosexual side of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach (Steve Perry, things that sound like “Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga, which of course would also work on the gay side of Rehoboth Beach).

* George R.R. Martin certainly keeps busy. I can’t imagine his detractors will be super happy about the order of items on his to-do list.

* I’m extremely happy my “Happiness Is a Focused Totality of My Psychic Powers” gag made it into the latest Marvel Super Heroes What The–?! video, featuring Professor X and Magneto’s madcap ’60s adventures.

* This supercut of the 100 Greatest Movie Threats is hilarious, not gonna lie to you. Still, I’m disappointed it doesn’t include “Let her go, or I’ll fill your guts so full of lead you’ll be using your dick for a pencil” from The Three Amigos or the bit from Casino where Nicky Santoro explains to the banker what it is he does. (Via Ed Gonzalez.)

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* Goodness, but George R.R. Martin sure carved himself a big slice of cake by choosing (?) to handle this episode! He said on his blog that the material with Tyrion and Bronn and Shagga early on was a holdover from a previous episode written by the showrunners that was moved here during editing, but that aside, he still had to handle the massacre of all the Winterfell staff in King’s Landing; Syrio’s standoff and Arya’s escape; Sansa’s capture and attempts to ingratiate herself with/blackmail by the Lannisters; Barristan’s firing; the Dothraki raid on the Lamb People, Dany’s defense of their women, Drogo’s wounding, and the introduction of Mirri Maz Duur; Jon’s insubordination against Thorne, the wight attack, burning his hand while saving the Lord Commander, finding out about Robert and Ned; Tyrion’s arrival at Camp Lannister with the tribesmen and their subsequent arrangement with Tywin; the scenes with Varys and Ned; Catelyn’s rejection by Lysa; some Bran business; and Robb’s entire march to war. That is a lot of ground to cover. I don’t really wanna use the word seamless, but, well, there you have it.

* The bloody business at the beginning was quite effectively staged. After the on-screen gore of the initial sneak attack on unarmed Northmen by the Lannister goons, the rest is all implied, which somehow makes it even worse by making the viewer complicit with the deaths we don’t see — since we don’t see them, only infer them, we’re the ones cutting the throats of Syrio Forel and Septa Mordane. And the scene in which Arya flees from Syrio’s standoff only to stop short as she hears the screams and sees the shadows of the combat raging what had been her home that very morning was somehow the most brutal bit of all. You can’t go home again.

* Good for the show for giving Septa Mordane a moment of bravery. In the book she’s just a foolish old woman with a bug up her ass — you imagine this coming to her as a total shock to her conception of proper behavior, an affront to her sensibilities. Here she seems like someone who knows how the world works, knows what’s happening and what’s about to happen, and faces it anyway. I like this Septa Mordane better!

* I didn’t see this coming: The Stark daughters’ most unpleasant actions during the downfall of their father were both significantly altered. Arya’s killing of the stableboy was changed from a clumsy but still deliberate act to an accident, and Sansa didn’t narc on her father’s plans to send her back to Winterfell. I actually don’t think I have a problem with either of these. In Arya’s case, for both her and the stableboy I think the outcome is pretty much the same. In Sansa’s, I think the audience would have had a really, really hard time not just forgiving her, but even watching her scenes from then on out. (I worried about that before the show premiered.) But moreover, I couldn’t figure out how the timing would have worked out. The way it’s all conveyed in the show, it seems clear that Cersei springs into action the moment Ned tells her he knows about her and Jaime and warns her to leave before Robert returns. Sansa’s snitching would have been not just unnecessary but confusing unless the show took time it probably didn’t have to explain the precise timing. Heck, I just read through the relevant chapters and even in the book I can’t quite understand why the Lannisters saw Sansa spilling the beans as the just-in-the-nick-of-time intervention that saved their collective bacon, what with Ned going directly to Cersei and Littlefinger’s susbequent doublecross.

* Zombies need a pop-cultural season of rest worse than any other monster, so kudos to the show for figuring out a way to still make one unpleasant and uncanny and dangerous. I’m glad he was fast, and I’m glad that he moved a bit like an automaton, a terminator. Jon’s lamp toss was well-played as well.

* You’re going to lose some of the visual impact of the younger characters by aging them up, and that’s certainly true of Robb, who seems young but not a high-school sophomore suddenly placed in charge of a war. But his physical appearance still manages to work in his favor, with actor Richard Madden’s big brown eyes constantly widened with emotion — fear, anger, uncertainty, grief, whatever. He looks like someone who’s new to all this, doing his best but still very very new to it.

* Greatjon’s fingers — great stuff. That was the “What do you mean I’m funny?” of Game of Thrones.

* Every once in a while, the Monty Python-ness of it all hits me in an amusing way. The Greatjon sounds like one of John Cleese’s broader accents, while Shagga looks like Tim the Enchanter. And obviously, the Holy Grail rule of being able to tell who the King is because “he’s the only one who hasn’t got shit all over him” is very much in effect.

* It’s unfortunate that we haven’t seen enough of the Westerosi way of war yet to realize that the depredations of the Dothraki aren’t a mark of their intrinsic savagery, but a mark of everyone’s intrinsic savagery. Generally speaking, that’s a problem the show is going to have throughout due to its decision to sort of half-ass its depiction of Dothraki culture relative to Westerosi culture. These kids of comparisons are just gonna be harder to make when one of the two cultures being compared is more sketched than drawn.

* Michelle Fairley as Catelyn….aaallllllmost won me over in this episode. It had to be her turn for the hardass that did it, I guess. The performance is still too one-note and Catelyn’s still too mother-hen, but being a mother hen by urging your chicks to launch themselves at bigger meaner birds is finally the complicating character trait that TV-Catelyn needed.

* I didn’t doubt Varys’s sincerity about serving the realm because “someone has to.” That really sounds about right.

* I have to admit, I get a kick out of Tywin’s acceptance of the tribesmen. Even though I knew better, I still expected him to reject these savages out of hand, but one of the things that make Tywin such an effective leader is that he’ll act against type if the means are justified by the ends. In this case, as pathetic as he finds Tyrion and loathsome as he probably finds his low-born new friends, he also recognizes effective (and useful) warriors when he sees them, and I don’t doubt that his compliments to their prowess are sincere as well.

* This episode had some of the show’s strongest images so far. Winterfell’s entire flock of ravens being sent out to all the bannerman was beautifully done, and something I wouldn’t have thought to show at all, sort of like how the lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King went from a throwaway event to one of the most talked-about sequences in the whole series of films because Peter Jackson came up with an interesting way to shoot it — well, because he chose to shoot it at all. But I think my favorite image was of Sansa kneeling before the throne, her sleeves and gown pooling down around her like silk chains. She looked sad and little and deflated. And that was a nice little visual pun right at the end, closing an episode called “The Pointy End” by having one of the points of the Iron Throne slowly swallow the screen.

* Rickon’s scene was sad and creepy. It reminded me of Newt at the beginning of Aliens: “It won’t make any difference.”

* The rumors (which weren’t so much rumors as they were lots of people knowing exactly what was going to happen and talking about it privately but not being able to say so publicly just yet) are true: DC is scrapping, re-numbering, and relaunching its entire superhero line, launching fully 50 different #1 issues in September. What’s more, the entire line will go day-and-date digital, with digital versions of the books going on sale the same day as their print counterparts. Much more on this anon.

* The two Hobbit movies, subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again, will be released in December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013 respectively. See you there opening night.

* Ed Brubaker on superheroes, violence, and closure — one of the most interesting things I’ve read about superhero comics in a long time, from Tom Spurgeon’s very interesting interview with the writer.

* Bruce Baugh on John Carpenter’s The Thing:

Third, there’s a useful lesson in plotting in this story. You absolutely don’t have to nail down everything for it to feel like a tight, connected whole if you give the audience—or players—enough solid points for them to stand on while speculating about the rest. In the case of the Thing’s subversion of the various station members, we can tell with great confidence when some happened, and even get to see some right on screen. Others we can only wonder about. And that’s fine. Players often like to chew over the unresolved questions, if it doesn’t all just feel like an exercise in futility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this sort of thing, about questions left unanswered by various genre fictions, and how sometimes those un-answers remain a huge part of the work’s appeal years later while other times they’re the reason we rarely return to it, all in the context of how Twin Peaks seems to be a case of the former while it’s still unknown what side Lost will eventually fall on. I think it has to do with…I guess I’d call it a matter of “full absences” versus “empty absences”? You want a given absence of information to feel like it’s full of information that for whatever reason you can’t see, rather than just a gaping hole where information should be, but I’m not sure if I can nail down what the difference would be other than “I know it when I (don’t) see it.” I need to hash that out some more.

* This is exactly why I keep Corey Blake in my RSS reader: Here he’s collected links to all of my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” columns, which offer advice to newcomers on where to begin with the work of the great cartoonists.

* I wish there were an apostrophe after the author’s last name–that would make the title of Michael Kupperman’s next book even funnier.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in fine form today. First he coined the phrase “the fiscally fantastic” to describe fiction about the extravagantly carefree wealthy. My wife and I were talking about this just this past weekend, in reference to how Frasier, despite being more consistent over the course of its however-many seasons than its predecessor Cheers and the similarly ubiquitous-in-syndication sitcom Roseanne, really doesn’t hold a candle to either one. In the end, stories about Roseanne‘s nuclear family of working poor and Cheers‘ adopted family of three-time losers feel more inherently…I dunno, worth telling than the travails of the Brothers Crane as they try to balance failed romances with getting time on the squash court, drinking aged scotch and fine wines, and snagging season tickets for Seattle’s most expensive cultural attractions. I know I’ve also gotten kind of tired of movies about billionaire vigilantes and rich young beautiful urban professionals who learn something about life and laughs and love.

* Then there’s this piece on why male readers should read women writers. Basically, Rooney Ruling yourself to account for gender opens you up to the output of over half of the human population, which can only redound to your benefit compared to sticking just to the Y-chromosome set:

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

I think it’s worth murdering your inner sexist pig, but yes. One thing that the “eat your vegetables” metaphor for doing less-than-immediately-easy things undervalues is that when you eat your vegetables it’s not that the only benefit is that you’ve satisfied your mom and dad, you’re also getting vital nutrients necessary to stay alive. Plus, broccoli is delicious. You know?

* It’s been great to see Brian Hibbs, Graeme McMillan, and Jeff Lester — the Big Three of the fractured Justice League that is The Savage Critic(s) — return to regular capsule-review writing. You should go and browse through the past several weeks of entries, but for now let me direct you to Jeff’s most recent contribution, which contains this beautiful bit of writing on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy:

By [the ’50s], it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid’s world where nothing can be dismissed.

Ooftah, that last bit is good.

* Though I think Nitsuh Abebe is being too hard on Lady Gaga, who’s a better pop star than we deserve, and that he ultimately stops short of where he could have gone with his argument that provocation and “being yourself” are value-neutral concepts — that’s as may be, but surely we could look at the actual form these things have taken with, say, Odd Future and Lady Gaga and evaluate their respective value, no? — the rest of his column on the message of Born This Way is so stuffed with great ideas, expertly delivered, that I hardly know where to begin excerpting it. But here’s a start: “Aren’t ‘be yourself’ and ‘be what you want to be’ totally different instructions?” That’s an underexplored aspect of Gaga’s persona. “Born This Way” — what if you weren’t? Her embrace of artifice is so complete that it’s odd to think of how she’s simultaneously arguing for the primacy of personal authenticity.

* Some sweet, He-Man-cartoon-reffing fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit by Marc Palm.

* This looks like sketches for a new Uno Moralez comic.

* Always good to see a new Ben Katchor strip.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister brings a certain steely intensity to the role, which granted isn’t super-tough when you’re introduced as you butcher a stag. (I’d bust the show’s chops for laying the symbolism on a little thick, but as a Law & Order judge might have said to George R.R. Martin when he kicked things off with a stag and direwolf killing each other, “You opened the door, counselor.”) As far as new scenes go it was a fine one in that it allowed Tywin to advance an alternate system of morality to the one espoused by Ned: Since your house is all that will last, it’s all that matters. It also enabled Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to make Jaime look like a frightened, wide-eyed little boy around dear old dad, which did more to convey the man’s menace than skinning a dead animal did.

* It’s a shame that the “sexposition” technique the show uses to convey backstory while someone gets their tits out has worn out its welcome by now, because Littlefinger’s turn with this technique was its best and most appropriate use so far. If anyone is in a position to coach people on how to lie for a living, it’s Littlefinger. And even if you strip away the extra layers of meaning, his little walk-through of the thought process by which johns delude themselves into think they’re the one who finally showed this whore the time of her life was simply a well-done bit of writing on the subject.

* Moreover, the filmmakers cleverly set up some echoes of American Psycho’s similarly staged threesome (“Play with her arse” is the new “don’t just look at it, eat it”) to convey the idea that Littlefinger is concealing something vicious under his mask of smarm. Littlefinger unnerves me more and more the more I think about him, so the flat beady-eyed way he said he wanted “Oh, everything” got under my skin.

* And on a practical level, I feel like his monologue sold me on the apparent age difference forced by the casting of TV-Petyr and TV-Catelyn-and-Lysa versus how those women were portrayed in the books. I buy Littlefinger as a just-into-puberty kid when he first fell for Catelyn, who by then was an older teen.

* You know, I’m a bit surprised that Robert’s fatal run-in with the boar was kept off screen. I thought they might show it, because I could think of some fun and dramatic ways to stage it. Perhaps it was best to keep it off screen, though, since that’s how most of our major players experienced it.

* Wow, Ser Barristan’s life is really not working out the way he thought it would, is it?

* It occurred to me in thinking about the Dothraki in light of the many complaints about their portrayal here that they and all the other “foreign” (i.e. non-Westerosi) cultures in the series have the disadvantage of archaiac and idiomatically different speech patterns above and beyond any other problems they have. It’s hard to think of anyone from across the Narrow Sea as a normal person when they talk funny, you know? So Khal Drogo’s little “let’s braid each other’s hair and talk about invading Westeros” chat with Daenerys went a long way toward humanizing him. He wasn’t quite speaking regular conversational English (via subtitles), but he was given the opportunity to banter and smile and be warm and even correct his wife’s linguistic muff-up. It reminded me a bit of the scene several episodes ago when Dany’s handmaiden and bodyguard sat around jawing with Jorah. It made them feel like people rather than props.

* I’d imagine that for some people, Drogo’s big declaration of war came off a bit too much like a locker room pep talk, but I bought it. It looked and felt like a guy fanning the flames of his own perfectly understandable anger about someone picking on his special lady in order to psych himself into doing something extravagantly dangerous, dangerous enough to feel commensurate with the underlying anger. (Loved the gratitude on Dany’s face, too.)

* Some funky shooting here and there in this episode, no? I didn’t think that POV shot of Cersei approaching Ned and looking down at him with the sun behind her worked. I was a bit more favorably disposed toward the tight close-ups during the wine merchant scene.

* As everyone I’ve read about this episode has said, the Wall scenes trod familiar territory: Jon is simultaneously arrogant and self-pitying until someone points out how good he really has it. Honestly, Jon simply has less to do during the first book than any of the other main characters, so the filmmakers are up against it if they want to keep showing him to us. That said, man, the Wall is well cast. Thorne, Sam, the Old Bear, and Maester Aemon look and act pretty much exactly how they ought to.

* I said this last week, and if anything it was even truer this week: Seeing Sean Bean hobble around with a cane and stooped shoulders and a pained look on his face amid more vital characters ranging from Renly to Joffrey shouts “This dude’s in serious trouble” a lot louder than simple prose could.

* I wonder: If Ned had gone along with Littlefinger’s suggestion to back Joffrey with an eye toward installing Renly eventually, would Littlefinger still have betrayed him?

* It was nice to see the Hound in action in full regalia, however briefly. Without his menacing origin-story speech to Sansa to go on (in the show it was delivered by Littlefinger instead), I’m not sure that viewers will get the message that the Hound’s the scariest motherfucker in King’s Landing.

* Ned’s long walk toward the Iron Throne, his forces arrayed against Cersei’s, was wonderfully done — it looked for all the world like the making of a stand-off, and then surprise! It’s a massacre.

* Saving this for when I can really sink my teeth into it: Ken Parille compares the creation stories of Jack Kirby and Chris Ware, the two best cartoonists, for the Comics Journal.

* Speaking of the King and the Journal, TCJ.com has posted the infamous Gary Groth/Jack Kirby interview in which Kirby claims sole credit for most of the great Marvel comics; as I say over at Robot 6, the claims are dubious, the emotion behind them understandable.

* Also at Robot 6, a few brief thoughts on the importance of Kramers Ergot.

* Winter Is Coming rounds up the latest batch of Game of Thrones reviews and recaps. This feature is great one-stop shopping for GoT crit, if you’re looking for such.

* Curt Purcell returns to the topic of religion’s role in Battlestar Galactica. He’s harder on the show than I am, certainly, but he wields his criticism with far more precision than “OMG NO JEEBUS IN MY SF!!!”, which was as far as many reviewers got.

* Great Renee French drawing, or greatest Renee French drawing?

* Hans Rickheit gets his Mutter Museum on and draws medical deformities.

* Is this a new Kevin Huizenga strip, or is it an old one I missed someplace? Either way it expresses a sentiment I’m sure anyone who’s ever freelanced has felt.

* The Rapture reunites with DFA? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* A 33 1/3 book about prog? Sure, I’ll eat that too.

* I was really sad to hear of the death of Macho Man Randy Savage. The man was like an entertainment elemental: Everything about how he looked, sounded, and acted was a delight. Ben Morse reflects on his unique gifts as a pro wrestler, a gig in which he combined mic skills, stage presence, and technical prowess in a way few have before or since.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

*The entire Tyrion trial sequence, from jail cell to exit, was really well done. It was also perhaps the single most faithful-to-the-book sequence in the series so far. The backs and forths, the mind games, Tyrion’s desperate scramble to stay one mental step ahead of his captors while not looking desperate — that’s all straight from the book. The sequence has a forward momentum all its own, one step after another, one maneuver leading to the next, leading eventually to mortal combat and a man’s death. The filmmakers really let that momentum carry the scene, so that you barely notice the moment when wordplay and medieval legal wrangling slip into the kind of situation where a man gets stabbed through the collarbone and tossed out a trapdoor to oblivion. Now that I think of it, that’s sort of the magic trick of the whole series: Beneath words and codes, blood.

* I think what’s undoing the Dothraki material is scale more than anything else. Their Savage Other-ness would seem a lot less shabby and boilerplate if they weren’t just a couple dozen random half-naked brown people in some tents, but the vast horde of the books, in their city of art and architecture pillaged from a hundred cultures they smashed, with their dozens of old widowed queens presiding over a ritual conducted at the intersection of a mountain and a lake instead of in someone’s barbecue pit. Even the shittiest, most venal or brutal Westerosi — and we’ve met several contenders — takes on a certain grandeur by virtue of living in these massive, beautifully designed castles and keeps, surrounded by disciplined-looking troops by the score. The Dothraki just look like a bunch of topless dolts by comparison, every bit the primitive savages Viserys constantly mocks them as. Intellectually we can see that eating a horse’s heart really isn’t any more savage than the notion of trial by combat, but the visuals are constantly telling us otherwise.

* That said, the material in Vaes Dothrak still worked for me here, on the strength of the performances, especially Harry Lloyd as Viserys. He has arguably the least sympathetic character in the show on his hands — well, him and Joffrey — but in a handful of lines with Ser Jorah Mormont in Dany’s tent, he makes us realize why he’s so awful. He was crushed by the weight of great expectations before he even began to live. At this point he’s realized just as Dany did a couple weeks ago that he’ll never be a true king, but acting as though he will be is all he knows. Worse, it’s all he has.

* That same exchange gives Mormont a line that sums him up pretty neatly. “And yet here you stand,” Viserys spits at him as the knight blocks his king despite professing that loyalty means everything to him. “And yet here I stand,” Mormont replies, throwing the words back in Viserys’s face, revealing that this is a man who feels the pull of honor intensely, but other things even more so. That’s how he gets into trouble.

* As for Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys, Alan Sepinwall gave me a real “in” to her performance when he noted that the heart-eating ritual revealed not just the Dothraki’s love for Dany, but Dany’s love for the Dothraki. That’s when I recognized Dany’s assimilation into the khalasar as being of a piece with any teenager’s induction into a group of weirdoes that allow her to be stronger and freer than her constricting family. Viserys might as well be watching in horror as Dany performs as Janet during “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” at a midnight performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

* The metallic clank of Viserys’s head hitting the floor gets my vote for best foley art of the show so far.

* Tonks laid it on a little thick in her debut as the wildling woman Osha, but Stephen Don as the wildlings’ ringleader sold that scene by doing the opposite. His menace was in how matter-of-fact he was about it. He didn’t seem like some bwa-ha-ha villain, but just a desperate guy willing to do what it takes to survive. His icy blue eyes didn’t hurt either.

* Robert punching Cersei–woof, that was nasty, and it really toyed with the audience’s sympathies. After all, we all hate her, we all wanted her to shut her lying mouth too. So they gave us what we wanted, only for us to discover we didn’t want it at all. Moreover it conveyed just how dissolute Robert has become. When a man like that is the best hope for keeping the kingdom together…yikes.

* This episode surprised me with just how much impact on the story the physicality of a performance can have even when you’re already familiar with that story’s basic contours via a medium where performance isn’t a factor. Mark Addy’s watery-eyed, burst-blood-vessel ruddiness and penchant for raising his voice in anger over the least inconvenience or slight, for example, does more to sell King Robert’s physical and moral downfall than prose can, while seeing Sansa sneer at Septa Mordane anchors that character in the kinds of sullen, spoiled teenagers we all know and love in a way that simply reading about her petulance and delusions can’t equal. (In fact, contra Todd Van Der Werff, I find Sansa a lot more palatable here than in the books. Here she’s the kind of kid I understand; there her short-sighted idiocy is so overpowering that it’s difficult to recognize.) And most importantly, the results of Ned’s wounding at the hands of Jaime and his men — the sheen of sweat he exudes on his sickbed, his limp, the way Sean Bean plays him with every move and step an evident labor — demonstrate the way King’s Landing has already beaten and broken him down. In the books, without seeing him, it’s difficult to separate his post-injury weakness from the vital man of the North we’d spent all our time with. Here, the break is obvious, and meaningful.

* Renly’s “Jesus Christ, enough is enough” freakout at Robert over the Good Old Days was another fine addition by the writers, fleshing him out as an alternative to Robert’s sordid macho bluster, to the Lannisters’ cold cunning, and to the Targaryen’s high madness. In his interview with Westeros.org, actor Gethin Anthony said that the key word for his creation of Renly’s character was “enlightened”; in scenes like this it’s easy to see how important that is to Renly’s self-conception.

* This isn’t to sell her short at all, I think she’s been doing good work, but I haven’t seen Maisie Williams as Arya in the revelatory light that many viewers seem to see her — but she played her mounting irritation with Syrio as he whacked her and taunted her until she could take no more beautifully. Chills from “There is only one God — and his name is Death,” too.

* Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen: Kramers Ergot 8! Now from PictureBox, the latest issue of Sammy Harkham’s seminal artcomix anthology will be a tighter, smaller affair, with comics of 16-24 pages each by about a dozen creators: Gary Panter, Gabrielle Bell, C.F., Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, Jason T. Miles, Sammy Harkham, Leon Sadler, Johnny Ryan, Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw, Anya Davidson, Ron Rege Jr., Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullally. Watch the video for more.

Kramers Ergot #8: The Trailer from Dan Nadel on Vimeo.

* Speaking of Harkham, he recently sounded off on Chester Brown’s Paying For It in a fashion that was equal parts colorful and insightful. I agree with him about the ending.

* So this is kinda neat: Over at The Cool Kids Table, my friend Megan Morse and I will be talking about Game of Thrones every week — her from the perspective of a newcomer to the material via the show, me from the perspective of a grizzled veteran with a tedious obsession. This week’s opening installment may betray its roots as an informal email exchange, but now that we know what we’re doing, I think it’ll be a real pip.

* Speaking of GoT, George R.R. Martin talks about the development and completion of A Dance with Dragons in fascinating and exhaustive detail. He gives you ample warning if you wanna bail out halfway through the post, just so you know, but he does reveal three of the viewpoint characters and all but reveals a fourth. Very much worth a read if you’d like some behind-the-scenes information about the making of the most infamously delayed SFF book since The Last Dangerous Visions.

* Nick Gazin talks to Dan Nadel about Yuichi Yokoyama and Garden. Nick’s questions get Nadel to flesh out Yokoyama’s personal history and personality a bit, which is welcome.

* Geoff Grogan serves up a process post on his excellent comic Fandancer.

* Michael DeForge joins the crew at What Things Do with a new strip.

* True American Dog is a treasure.

* Matthew Perpetua is right: This footage of Tune-Yards performing “Powa” in April 2010 is absolutely remarkable and riveting. The album this song was on wouldn’t come out for another year, and Tune-Yards was an opening act at a show whose audience had largely never even heard of them…yet watch Merrill Garbus perform with such confidence that you can slowly feel her pinning down the audience, where by the end they’re screaming their approval. Now I understand what all the critical fuss was about last year.

* The San Diego Comic Con International gets its first comics-centric counterprogramming slate in the form of Tr!ckster, a mini-con centered on indy guys like Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and Scott Morse. Now we need an artcomix show and we’re all set.

* Over at Robot 6, I talked a bit about Tom Brevoort talking a bit about how Marvel’s Avengers movies and Marvel’s Avengers comics help each other out versus the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises.

* Dan Nadel rounds up recent reviews of Yuichi Yokoyama’s excellent Garden, including efforts by ADDXSTC faves Chris Mautner and Douglas Wolk.

* Curt Purcell on religion in A Song of Ice and Fire and Battlestar Galactica. This is spoilery as hell for both series, but if you’re all caught up with them, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to read this. Very astute comparisons.

* When Josh Simmons draws things like this you know they can’t be headed anywhere good.

* Another day, another wondrous Uno Moralez image/gif dump.

* I can’t post an image without ruining the gag, but Axe Cop gets better and better.

* Aeron Alfrey has been spotlighting some real treasures at Monster Brains lately, from some ornate skeletal creatures by Pedro Izique to multiple He-Man and the Masters of the Universe galleries, about which I wrote a bit for Robot 6.

* Finally, this picture of January Jones as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class is truly a joy.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* It’s a mug’s game for people who’ve read the books to try to figure out what people who haven’t read them think of the show, but I’ll tell you what, this episode made me wish I were in their shoes more than any so far. Not even for the bigger developments necessarily, but for…well, the bit I keep coming back to is Gregor Clegane grabbing his sword and decapitating his own horse with a single blow. What would a tyro make of that, I wonder? I think I’d have done a comical spit-take with the beer I was drinking.

* And this episode was laden with visual hooks of that sort. The Eyrie: its high-fantasy layout, its mad ruler and her breastfed boy, its three-walled sky cells. Theon Greyjoy’s wiener. Renly and Loras’s foreplay-by-way-of-barbering. Tyrion bashing that tribesman’s face in. The enormous dragon skull. Jory’s knife in the eye. In positing it as the best of the series so far, much of the writing I’ve seen about this episode focuses on either the increased action quotient or the fine new scenes added by the writers, as well they should, but these visual moments of “whoa” were what stuck with me as I went to sleep.

* Moreover, both Gregor’s Godfather impression and the whole Eyrie sequence went a long way to rectifying my main complaint about last week’s otherwise excellent episode, the way completely understandable constraints stripped the spectacle from settings like Vaes Dothrak or the Hand’s tourney. Clearly the Eyrie of the books, with its multiple ascending fortresses connected by precarious stairways and winches and leading to a mountaintop stronghold it takes a full day to reach, wasn’t going to work with the time and the budget available to a television show. But unlike Vaes Dothrak, where the art department realized it couldn’t portray an ad hoc assembly of pillaged architecture and artifacts from all over the world but didn’t do anything to compensate and just saddled us (no pun intended) with a bunch of tents, the Eyrie is different but still suitably spectacular, with its towering arches and soaring dome construction and gorgeous weirwood throne. The tournament, meanwhile, still feels way smaller than the Westerosi Super Bowl it ought to be, but having a giant chop his own horse’s head off after losing to a dude with the most ornate armor you’ve ever seen, then duel with his burned brother nearly to the death, goes a long way toward making the event as memorable to viewers as it’s supposed to be to the in-story spectators.

* The new scenes were well worthwhile. Robert and Cersei’s conversation did the necessary work of simply demonstrating how their marriage works and why hasn’t had the other killed yet, but for my money the best of the bunch was Littlefinger and Varys’s duel of words/dick-measuring contest in the throne room. Just a pleasure to watch Aiden Gillen and Conleth Hill be sleazy with an undercurrent of genuine danger.

* After the stagey Dothraki wedding fight, the battle with the hill tribe, the Clegane duel, and the Stark/Lannister massacre went a long way toward reassuring me that the show can handle action properly. It’s worth noting, too, that both of the major battles ended with shots of the survivors standing (or kneeling) amid a pile of bodies. Action’s a bloody, murderous business in this world, or at least it should be, and those shots reinforce the way swordplay is depicted as people swinging huge sharp chunks of metal at each other in the hope that they’ll cut something off of their opponent.

* This episode once again used the show’s penchant for rapid-fire scene transitions to illustrate just how byzantine the court intrigue can be. In back to back scenes, Varys meets with Ned to warn him that the king is in danger and keep him on the trail of the Lannisters; Varys meets with Illyrio to warn him that the Starks and Lannisters are fighting and that Ned will soon discover Jon Arryn’s secret, complicating their ostensible shared goal of overthrowing Robert with the Targaryens at their own pace; Varys meets with Littlefinger to talk shit and maneuver against one another; a few scenes later, Varys sits in the Small Council, encouraging Robert to have the Targaryens murdered. We don’t have any more of a prayer of untangling the Spider’s web than Ned does.

* Murderers’ Row, from left to right: Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, John Porcellino, Peter Birkemoe, Chris Butcher, Chris Oliveros, and Dan Nadel. That’s five of comics’ best cartoonists, two of its best retailers, two of its best publishers, and two of its best convention organizers (there’s some overlap). This photo comes courtesy of the equally magisterial Tom Devlin’s TCAF photo parade, which along with Robin McConnell’s is one of my favorites so far. Meanwhile, Secret Acres’ Barry & Leon and cartoonist Tom Neely contribute fine prose reports. I’ll tell you what: For me, this is the year that TCAF went from “that sounds really nice for people who live in Canada, but I’m all set with MoCCA and BCGF and SPX down here” to “road trip!”

* Every silver cloud has a dark lining, however, and in this case that’s the seizure by customs officials of the Ryan Standfest-edited black-humor anthology Black Eye and Blaise Larmee’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Young Lions, neither of which is smut.

* Hooray: Jordan Crane’s webcomics emporium What Things Do is revving up again, starting with Kevin Huizenga’s Kramers Ergot 7 contribution “Balloon”. I remember flipping through the printout of the book that Alvin Buenaventura brought to SPX that year and marveling at the colors in this one, mouth agape.

* This actually made me say “whoa”: Flashpoint #5, the final issue of DC’s big summer event comic this year, will be the only comic DC will release the week of August 31. That’s an unusual and gutsy strategy — it has an antecedent in that issue of Blackest Night that DC shipped early with instructions to retailers to sell it during Diamond’s skip week between Christmas and New Year’s in 2009, but this time it’s DC that’s making August 31 a skip week, not the distributor.

* Meanwhile, the cover for the fourth issue makes me think that perhaps making Wonder Woman and Aquaman the villains of an event comic is the best way to get these two iconic but historically underserved characters over with audiences right now.

* Joyce Farmer’s run in The Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has been fascinating. Here’s a post on her career as the owner of a bail bond agency; here’s one on her abortion.

* The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual uses Richard McGuire to make an important point, which is that aesthetic coldness does not equal emotional coldness.

* A list of everyone who’s been in Ryan Sands’s zines. As a fan of impressive lists, I am impressed by this list. Speaking of which, you can buy his and Michael DeForge’s smut anthology Thickness #1 now, and get psyched for the just-announced Brandon Graham/Lisa Hanawalt-led line-up for issue #2.

* Everything you need to know about Uno Moralez’s aesthetic project, you can learn from the massive jpeg and animated gif dump he just posted.

* New York sports cartoonist Bill Gallo has died. I do not watch sports, but any time I’d come across one of his comics in the Daily News I’d just sit and appreciate the fact that he filled such a niche with such evocative and comforting cartooning.

* WAT

* Finally, you Game of Thrones folks, including the ones who’ve only just seen the show, oughta get a lot out of this gorgeous infographic guide to character relationships by HauteSlides. Click the link to see it at its full, elegant size.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

I’m struck once again by how Game of Thrones: The Show is establishing its aesthetic identity by what it does, for want of a better word, “wrong.” Episode Three’s breakneck scene transitions felt off versus what we’re accustomed to from television, yet complimented the byzantine complexity of this world’s alliances and rivalries. This week’s episode was one long violation of “show, don’t tell,” with character after character telling other characters lengthy stories about the past or filling them in on information about the present. Yet the conversations never felt boring or superfluous, because they told us so much not just about their ostensible topics, but about how this world works. The society of the Seven Kingdoms is held together by the stories its people, particularly people in positions of influence and power, tell each other. The victories and defeats of the past, the valor and ignominy of the competing Houses, the traditions that dictate the positions of men relative to women and the highborn relative to the smallfolk and knights relative to men at arms — in the absence of widespread literacy and with political power a precarious held-at-swordpoint thing, these stories are the glue that binds everything. Telling the right story at the right time can move the world in the storyteller’s desired direction.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

—

* This was my favorite of the three episodes, and before this I preferred the second episode to the first. I could certainly get used to the series getting better and better with each episode.

* The funny thing is that it was the best episode yet not despite the rapid-fire scene-to-scene transitions and abundance of new character introductions, but because of it. The swiftness with which the episode bounced from place to place and character to character and moment to moment could easily have gotten disorienting or obnoxious; instead it felt like the show finding its aesthetic voice as television art — an editing choice that served to underscore the can’t-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard complexity of the show’s world and the byzantine plots and counterplots, alliances and conspiracies and doublecrosses that drive the narrative. It felt like its own thing rather than an illustrated version of the book, perhaps for the first time.

* In many cases it actually was its own thing, since so many of the scenes were brand-new material invented by the writers. And now I’m starting to understand why so many critics who saw episodes in advance said that the new scenes were probably their favorites: They were the first time I could just sorta sit back, relax, and enjoy the show, rather than comparing each moment to its prose counterpart. For some reason GoT is much, much harder for me to deal with in this regard than my other much-beloved epic-fantasy adaptation, The Lord of the Rings — perhaps because so much more of GoT‘s story arises from intrigue and character development than the grandeur/danger/action/spectacle of LotR, so it demands more attention to detail? But in the new scenes, we move away from the familiar material and swivel around to see existing relationships from a new angle, and the freshness of it makes it much easier to simply enjoy. It helped that the scenes were good, of course, and character-revealing to boot: Benjen ladling on the Stark self-righteousness to Tyrion, who could be the best friend the Watch has; both Robert and Ned hectoring Jaime, demonstrating that others have a hand in constructing his insufferable persona; Robert making himself more or less unbearable, to either the visible dismay or studiously cultivated indifference of his underlings.

* And as with Episode One, there were new characters galore: Renly, Viserys, Littlefinger, Grandmaester Pycelle, Barristan the Bold (never named, unless I’m mistaken), Lancel Lannister, Syrio Forel, Old Nan, Rakharo, Lord Commander Mormont, Maester Aemon, Ser Alliser Thorne (also never named), Yoren, Pyp and Green and all the other members of Jon’s class at the Wall. Yet because we were coming to these newbies through the eyes of characters we already knew, it never took on that stop-and-start, receiving-line feel that Episode One was a bit bogged down by.

* You say “mayster,” I say “meister,” let’s call the whole thing off!

* Arya’s first dancing lesson was a balancing act in itself. For quite some time it was “Swordfighting is exotic! Swordfighting is fun!” Then along comes Ned and his aural flashback, and we’re reminded that swordfighting is fucking awful. It’s gutsy of the show to take a big wish-fulfillment moment like plucky tomboy Arya’s chance to follow her dream and root it back in the nightmarish reality of dead butcher’s boys and green young men shitting themselves after having their ribs cracked by a warhammer.

* The moment when Cat stuck her head out the brothel window and yelled “Ned!” was endearingly goofy, almost Britcommy. A little comic relief stemming from the outlandishness of some of these situations — a bug-up-their-ass lord and lady being reunited in a brothel, for example — could go a long way toward leavening the grimness, ultraviolence, and nudity.

* Impressive effects shots at the Wall. I know it probably shouldn’t, but it gives me hope for future effects-heavy moments.

That is all.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

—

* Better, I thought.

* The first episode’s biggest problem, it seems in retrospect, wasn’t exposition so much as introductions. I mean, the two go hand in hand to an extent, yeah, but it was simply the need to name each new face that bogged down the dialogue and gave the proceedings an unpolished feel from time to time. Here — with the exception of goggle-eyed mute executioner Sir Ilyn Payne in a scene where stopping everything to tell another character who he was made perfect dramatic sense — that need was gone. Instead of meeting the characters, you’re living with them now, and unsurprisingly the show benefits from familiarity.

* This episode also saw the pilot’s brief flashes of delight blossom into more sustained ones from time to time. Tyrion’s conversation with/interrogation of/lecture to Jon Snow is the strongest example: a self-consciously showy yet controlled performance from Peter Dinklage of a character using his bitterly earned smarts to dismantle another character. I actually laughed out loud in sheer enjoyment, the sort of thing I associate with the great HBO revisionist-genre dramas of yore. Fingers crossed for more of that.

* On the other hand, I think last week I was too easy on Michelle Fairley as Catelyn, if anything. The way the character was rewritten is still the major problem — the fact that she started out as the concerned mama bear makes her post-Bran behavior feel less like the nervous breakdown from which she desperately needed to recover that it was and more like par for the course — but I think there’s still enough wiggle room in there for an actor to do something, anything we wouldn’t see coming. Fairley just alternately tears up and crackles her voice or stiffens up and sounds clipped and posh. Actually, I’m not sure “predictability” is the right rubric here; after all, Sean Bean is playing Ned Stark exactly the way everyone, the show’s creators included, pictured Sean Bean playing Ned Stark ever since the idea first crossed their minds, and he’s a blast to watch. You can see him coming, but beneath that I feel like there’s a big chasm of thought and emotion and conflict. With Fairley’s Catelyn, it’s all on the surface. I was happy to see the savagery of her response to the assassination attempt, it felt like a glimpse of a new, more vital Catelyn, but then bam, back to noble, protective, boring Catelyn, now with Hardy Boys investigation action. Bleh.

* The Dothraki…man, the Dothraki. I wonder if the filmmakers’ idea is that the Dothraki “race” is an assemblage of conquered and assimilated. I’m struggling to come up with any other explanation for the United Colors of Vaes Dothrak casting decision besides laziness. I mean, they have to know that we can see that there’s a bunch of white people and black people and brown people ruled by a Hawaiian — it’s not like they’re trying to sneak it past us. Right?

* The Daenerys/Drogo relationship is not going to get any less problematic for viewers who had a problem with it in the pilot, that’s for sure, whether their objections were based on sexism or Orientalism or both. Even if Dany’s making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation approach is a perfectly realistic way for a young woman sold into a marriage as a form of slavery to deal with her plight, it’s going to be hard for people to get on board with the progression from rape to sex-as-power-play to genuine enjoyment to actual love. In response, for example, USA Today’s Whitney Matheson’s pilot-episode indignation has evolved into condescending sarcasm. As always it bums me out to see people, especially professional-critic people, mistake the depiction of a thing for an endorsement or celebration of that thing, but on the scale of cosmic injustice, “being unnecessarily concerned with potential misogyny/racism in pop culture” doesn’t even register. We’ll all live.

* Moreover, maybe it’s the show’s fault after all. I don’t like to purport to speak for people who haven’t read the books — I’m not a mindreader — but I think Adam Serwer may be right that whatever the nature of the sex/gender (or racial) stuff in the book, and whatever the intentions of the filmmakers, the end result just isn’t getting across to viewers who are new to the story. It’s much tougher for the television show, with its limited screen time and inability to access interior monologues and lengthy ruminations on history and culture, to convey that (say) the Dothraki’s idiosyncracies really aren’t any more or less “civilized” than those of the Westerosi, or that the treatment of women is essentially a war atrocity rather than some grab-your-nuts-and-grunt-like-Tim-Allen, John-Norman-Gor-novel pandering to slavering fanboyism. On HBO itself, shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood have directly addressed the misogyny of their protagonists and the society in which they live without being read by very many people as misogynist themselves. If Game of Thrones, based on a series that upon my current re-reading strikes me as being in large part about misogyny and gender inequality’s detrimental effect on everyone involved, can’t get this across, perhaps it’s on the show, not the viewers. I have enough faith in the strength of the original material to believe that eventually the real point of it all will be hard to miss for everyone who either isn’t dopey or doesn’t have their mind totally made up about the show, but that eventually’s a killer.

* This is less about the show than it is about talking about the show, but I’m really bummed out by Douglas Wolk’s recaps so far. Douglas is one of my favorite critics, because even when he’s writing about something with which I’m totally unfamiliar (this happens frequently with his music criticism) or articulating tastes that diverge dramatically from mine (this happens frequently with his comics criticism), I still feel as though he’s speaking to me in a language I can understand — he roots his writing in clear points of reference within the work being discussed, and thus you can get something out of his criticism even when you disagree with his conclusions or, literally, don’t know what he’s talking about. In both cases, that’s an exceedingly rare gift. And that’s why it’s so disappointing to watch him crack half-hearted jokes and pour snark all over a show that it’s pretty clear he’d be perfectly happy to never watch again, rather than either really engage it for all its faults or simply write about something else. I find myself wondering who the target audience is for this sort of thing: Fans of the show will be turned off by the rimshots in lieu of analysis, while detractors have probably stopped watching and thus have no need to keep reading. I understand that the hit counts must be kept up, but I feel like there’s probably a better way for everyone involved to spend their time and resources. To be fair, it’s not all played for the yuks: The comparison between Joffrey Baratheon and Ziggy Sobotka was fun, and calling Dany and Drogo’s sex life “the quintessence of Orientalist camp” is a perfectly legit critique. But the piece ends with an invitation to finish a dirty limerick rhyming “Targaryen” and “barbarian.” Y’know? And even some of his actual analysis goes astray in really obvious ways: It’s not a function of the fantasy genre’s supposedly inherent elitism that makes Lady’s death more affecting than that of the butcher’s boy, it’s a function of how every human being on earth reacts to the death of animals in fiction.

* Anyway, back to the show. In the books, the Hound comes across instantly as probably the scariest dude going, no matter how bad Sansa’s POV chapter says Sir Ilyn freaks her out. But in the show, we first “meet” him in long shot as he engages in some good-natured ribbing of Tyrion; next he comes across as the slightly less scary mass murderer compared to Sir Ilyn; and even his murder of the butcher’s boy is presented as an awful but all-business act, rather than the act of a guy who kills children and laughs about it. As with Cersei, the Hound got hisself humanized.

* Mark Addy is enjoyably “predictable” in the same way that Sean Bean is: He’s what you thought Robert would be, right down to the flash of ugly, sneering might-makes-right savagery when he mocks Ned for his compunctions about having Daenerys killed.

* I want Iain Glen to read me a bedtime story. So soothing!

* Do you think the final shot is enough of a cliffhanger for people? Do you think people understand what it means?

* I saw it first via George R.R. Martin himself: Game of Thrones has been renewed for a second season. EW’s James Hibberd talks to some HBO suits about the renewal, ratings, viewership, the length of the second season, the DVD release, and so on.

* I enjoyed the measured reviews of the pilot episode from Sean P. Belcher and Jason Adams. Room for improvement, reasonable confidence that it will.

* Wow: Tokyopop folded. I like Becky Cloonan’s take on it as much as any. A smooth operator with no real interest in publishing got lucky, basically. The film is a saddening bore ’cause we’ve seen it ten times or more.

* Chris Mautner’s interview with Gilbert Hernandez is an absolute monster. Beto publicly walks away from his career-making work. Gutsy and admirable.

* Make sure to check out Alex Dueben’s interview with Daniel Clowes as well.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force is going on hiatus, so now’s a great time to read the whole thing.

* 30% off everything PictureBox sells until April 30th. Buy that Mat Brinkman print for me, will ya?

* Clive Barker reports that Abarat III draws closer and closer.

* This year’s excellent roster of Stumptown award winners includes Emily Carroll, Zack Soto, Michael DeForge, Johnny Ryan, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Lisa Hanawalt.

* Matt Maxwell talks Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Brandon Graham, Nate Simpson and more in his epic Stumptown con report. He also got Marra to draw goddamn Pinhead.

* Michael DeForge, still great.

* Jonny Negron sighting!

* Ganges #4 appears to be on the way.

* Chris Mautner salutes Mome with a list of his six favorite stories from the anthology.

* I think these two MoCCA con reports from Darryl Ayo and Alex Dueben indicate that despite it being a small, focused show, people’s experiences are very different depending on what they’re there for.

* New Ben Katchor strip!

* I liked this “The Strokes vs. the ’90s” piece by Tim O’Neil very much, maybe the most of any of his music posts.

* Finally:

Alright, fuck it, this is for people who haven’t read the books, or at least haven’t finished reading them.

I realized that with minimal tweaking, the post I wrote for my dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire blog could just as easily appear over here. Since perhaps there are people who haven’t read the whole series but would like to discuss the show over here, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Keep in mind that by “NON-SPOILERY” I mean “this review will spoil nothing that takes place after the events depicted in the pilot.” It will, of course, be SPOILERY for the pilot itself. I’d like this to remain true for the comments, please — stick only to the events of this episode.

So if all you’ve seen or read of all this is what aired last night, here you go!

—–

* Quibbles up front! And yes, they’re pretty much just quibbles.

* I think my biggest problem with the pilot episode, and given how much of that problem arises from changes the filmmakers made to the material from the book we can perhaps extrapolate that to the series in general, is Michelle Fairley’s Catelyn Stark. There’s nothing wrong with her performance, I suppose; she’s just doing what she must with the material, and there’s the rub. The combination of aging all the characters up and changing her motivation in this early part of the story — in the book, she wanted Ned to take the job as the King’s Hand, thinking his increase in power and prestige would make the family much safer than they’d be if he had the stones to turn his friend down — makes Cat’s character a lot less interesting. As a woman in her mid-thirties who was married off during a time of war and basically got right to work bearing her teen husband some heirs, and who then advocates for her husband to take an influential, potentially dangerous gig in the capital rather than risk the equally potentially dangerous dimunition of prestige and power that not taking the job would entail, and who worries after a brood of children none of whom are older than sophomores in high school, Book-Catelyn feels a lot more vital and interesting and difficult to predict, and her plight less familiar, than her middle-aged mama-bear TV-Catelyn counterpart. It’s very early yet, and things may change, but nothing Fairley has been given in the pilot or in any of the previews I’ve seen have enabled her to complicate the character or do much more than play the warm but concerned and stern protective mother and loving wife. She’s a dramatically inert character, far too easy to get a handle on versus pretty much all of the other major players, and that’s no good, because her relationship with her family is the emotional heart of this volume, and we need to find her interesting so that we find that relationship interesting as well.

* The aging-up bothered me more across the board than I thought it would, actually. In re-reading the series, I’ve found that everyone’s relative youth makes their plights so much more powerful. Book-Ned is supposed to be, what, 35? My wife’s 35, and we just had our first child, who’s still negative two weeks old; imagining the two of us with five children, two of whom are teenagers, is one of the book’s most rewarding frissons for me. So too is Book-Bran’s young age—thrown out the window at what, eight? And Book-Robb, who’d be the Lord of Winterfell if Ned takes the job, is what, 15? And so on and so forth. I miss all of that.

* And I miss the subtle message that this medieval lifestyle forces you to do a whole lot of living before you live very long, too. For a long time my mind had a hard time wrapping around the idea of the Targaryen’s as this storied dynasty given that they were only around for 300 years; I was used to Tokien’s millennial timeframes. But when girls are married off the moment they get their first period, and when the cream of your soldiery is 17 years old or so, and when people are considered very, very old at 65, 300 years is an awful long time.

* The critics were right—there was a lot of exposition in this episode. Fewer long stories and explanations of relationships than I anticipated however. For the most part it came in the form of ADR dialogue like “That’s Jaime Lannister, the Queen’s brother!” So it was more clumsy than boring.

* The Dothraki were a bit ad-hoc, no? Perhaps the intention was to avoid any stereotyping of a specific ethnic group, so they cast people from many different ones and combined them. This is what Peter Jackson did with the scary natives in King Kong, if I recall correctly. And in that sense, okay, fine, but when so much care is given to the details of the Westerosi societies, the Dothraki look a bit too much like a casting call for tan-skinned actors.

* If you’re going to call them the White Walkers exclusively, doesn’t that increase your obligation to actually make them white? Don’t get me wrong, they were creepy as heck, but it’s still a bit odd. (In the books, they were mostly called the Others, which I guess the show felt it couldn’t do due to Lost.)

* Finally on the quibble front, Ramin Djawadi’s score was about half-very good (the spooky scenes, the opening credits) and half-“you’re kidding, right?” The “heroic” music when the King’s party enters Winterfell…I was hoping a few of them would be clip-clopping along with coconut shells.

* That said, well done overall.

* Obviously the big critical question raised by nearly everyone who’d seen the pilot early is whether or not newcomers to the material could follow it. It feels weird to be able not to address this central issue, but since I’m not a newcomer, I really can’t. It seemed easy enough to follow to me; yes, there are a lot of characters, but surely serialized television has taught us it’s okay not to have everyone straight by the end of the first episode. But I’m not going to stake my take on the episode on a yay or nay proclamation on this score.

* With that removed from the equation, I can focus more on what I liked best about it: the acting. It’s as though both the filmmakers and the cast realized how hard their task was in this first episode, and went out of their way (Cat excepted) to give everyone little bits of business to separate them out from fantasy cliches. I loved the “shaving Jon, Theon, and Robb” scene with its weird forced intimacy between three very different kinds of “sons” to Eddard Stark and the jokey, casual, but fraught with tension locker-room relationship that’s evolved between the three of them. I loved Daenerys’s dead-eyed stare as she endured first her brother’s inspection and then the scalding water of her bath—these are eyes that have seen too much and prefer to look inward. I loved Viserys’s foppish trot and alarmed exclamation as Drogo rode away without a word. I loved the opening shot of the ill-fated Night’s Watch trio, waiting for the gates to open, already playing the roles they’ve selected—smug, grim, hyper-alert—to help them survive in this world. I loved Tyrion’s unique, booze-seasoned combination of arrogance and self-loathing in his conversation with Jon. I loved Jaime’s “I heard you the first time” to Cersei at the end, already knowing what she wants him to do, trying in vain to put it off, coming to grips with knowing that he’ll do it anyway. There’s enough of all that sort of thing to give me a lot of confidence about the rest of the season. When the exposition and introductions die down, the material will have more room to breathe, and if the cast and crew keep filling the space with these idiosyncratic moments, we’re in good shape.

If you have read all four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, I invite you to read my thoughts about last night’s premiere episode over at my ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. As always, the post contains some spoilers for the books if you haven’t read them, so please beware.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to write weekly “Game of Thrones thoughts” posts, but if I do, they will appear on my SPOILER-FILLED blog for people who’ve read all four volumes in A Song of Ice and Fire so far, All Leather Must Be Boiled. I’ll link to each post from here, but please, do not click through unless you’ve read all four books so far.

If I end up partcipating in a less spoilery discussion of the show somewhere, I guess I’ll link to that, too.

Brilliant idea: Random House has made the first 80 pages of A Game of Thrones available to read for free online or as a downloadable PDF. When I tell people to read the book, I say, “Give it till page 80 or so. If you don’t like it by then, hey, no harm no foul.” But in all honesty, I literally don’t know anyone whose picked it up on my recommendation, read till page 80, and didn’t like it. Seriously, not one. You have nothing to lose but, I dunno, an hour or two on the train tonight or on Sunday afternoon this weekend or whatever. Give it a shot, see what you think.

(via Westeros)