The pursuit of an Awesome Job is not something I think of as particularly worthwhile endeavor. I say this as a person who likes his job a lot. The idea that there’s a Really Awesome Job that will be totally fulfilling and provide all kinds of meaning and value to your life is not helpful. People deserve jobs where they can use their brains, feel respected as a human beings, and not hate themselves or feel like they are settling. That is a Good Job. Once you have that, you can focus on finding value in the other parts of your life. That’s the shit that matters.

—Kevin Fanning

One of the vocal styles in question comes from band member Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, who sings in starry-eyed, raise-your-voice harmonies that can resemble, at various moments: earnest children baying around a campfire; lonely goatherds calling from hill to hill; some sort of monkish or liturgical concern dedicated to solemnly singing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” in the apses of Gothic cathedrals; or possibly the way two people might try to sing in harmony on clear quiet nights if they were stranded on South Pacific islands about 200 yards away from each other. Which is to say: Lennox’s vocals are distinctive and hard to hear without dreaming up slightly fantastic settings for them to belong in.

—Nitsuh Abebe, “Panda Bear’s Tomboy is Animal Collective’s Latest Magic Trick”

Friends have been recommending Martin’s books to me for a while, but I chose not to read them (for now, at least), wanting to see if the series could stand on its own and be both comprehensible and interesting to a newcomer. And it is. I probably struggled with identifying the members of the Barksdale crew in the early episodes of “The Wire” as much as I did trying to sort out the members of the House of Stark.

—Alan Sepinwall, “HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ an epic, mature, well-crafted fantasy series”

–Richard Hawley, “The Ocean” live in Holmfirth, October 1, 2009. Unexpected and breathtaking guitar solo at the end.

I’ve been reading a lot of Game of Thrones reviews as they’ve gone up today, mostly from mainstreamy sites or their nerd (or TV-nerd) subdomains, and it’s one of those times when you realize just how idiosyncratic the critical enterprise really is. People will single out the exact same thing for discussion, then characterize it in diametrically opposed ways. The first few episodes are talky and have a lot of storylines, and this is either brilliant television with which newcomers to the material will be enraptured, or bad television with which newcomers to the material will struggle. Daenerys has a lot of sex scenes, and this is either one of the season’s strongest storylines given additional heft by a brilliant performance embodying the book’s most complex heroine, or an embarrassing throwback to the clumsy sexuality of countless dimestore fantasy novels and b-movies endured by an actress who has to try to find something for the books’ least interesting character to do. Peter Dinklage is such a stand-out that he either deserves an Emmy or throws you completely out of the show any time he opens his mouth.

Personally I get the sense that normals will follow things just fine. A friend who screened the first few episodes but hadn’t read the book loved them, as did critic Alan Sepinwall from that same vantage point, so I think the sorts of people who are civilian enough not to have read the books but who would be predisposed to checking out an HBO adult-fantasy series to begin with will be alright. As Sepinwall points out (see links below), it probably took most people a long time to tell a Landsman from a Weebay on The Wire, too. Moreover — and again, credit to Sepinwall here — HBO’s great shows have tended to need a while before they went from “ooh, interesting” to “holy shit, best ever”; Sepinwall pegs this to a point a few episodes into Season One for the shows he talks about, but I can tell you that for me, The Sopranos only became The Sopranos with “University” in Season Three, while it’s quite literally impossible to grasp how ambitious The Wire was gonna get until a few episodes into Season Two, when you realize that nope, they’re not kidding about the dockworkers.

Judge for yourselves:

Nick Baumann, The Atlantic

Dan Feinberg and Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

Ryan McGee, Boobtube Dude

Alyssa Rosenberg, The Atlantic

Maureen Ryan, TV Squad

Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

* This is the first year since the festival’s inception that I was unable to attend MoCCA. How was it? The first report I came across was from Secret Acres’ Leon Avelino, and it jibes with the overall impression I’ve gotten on Twitter and the like of a successful show, moreso perhaps than its previous two years in the Armory location.

* Nick Bertozzi debuted Rubber Necker #5 at the show! OMG I can’t wait

* Two of my favorite critics have reviewed Chester Brown’s Paying For It. Here’s Chris Mautner; here’s Tom Spurgeon. And here’s my review, if you missed it.

* Must-read of the week: The Comics Reporter’s Bart Beaty on the death of L’Association, arguably France’s best comics publisher. L’Asso is a bit like if Image Comics were founded not by a bunch of hot Marvel artists, but by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, Chester Brown, and Los Bros, and its acrimonious break-up and potential downfall is therefore that much more fascinating and train-wreck compelling.

* I quite enjoyed this 25-minute making-of documentary on Game of Thrones. I dare say it was mostly stuff even I hadn’t seen yet, and I’ve watched a whole lot of these preview video things. The Eyrie is stunning.

* I think the latest GoT trailer, titled “Poison,” is my favorite so far. It plays up the mystery angle, which I think will be important to a lot of newcomers’ understanding of what it is that they’re watching.

* This New Yorker profile of author George R.R. Martin is well worth signing up for the free four-issue digital-edition subscription to read. It has an especial focus on Martin’s anti-fandom, the people who’ve loved all or most of the books released so far but now hate Martin for taking so long to produce the remaining installments. The depth and dedication of this anti-fandom is far, far greater than I ever imagined, and reading about them is fascinating, in a “What hath Internet wrought” sort of way. (Via Westeros.)

* Hope Larson basically got her gig adapting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time into a comic by saying “I wouldn’t mind adapting A Wrinkle in Time” in an interview the book’s publisher read. Love it.

* This is pretty neat: Gollum actor Andy Serkis will be the second unit director for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

* The extremely talented cartoonist Dustin Harbin is ending his diary comic. I still owe him a review of the collection that came out through Koyama Press. In the meantime, I’ll be staring at this drawing he did.

* ComicsAlliance has posted a series of interviews with the folks who run the production of those Marvel Super Heroes: What The–?! videos for which I am a contributing writer. Here’s Alex Kropinak, here’s Jesse Falcon, and here’s Ben Morse.

* Michael Shannon is General Zod. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and Frank Miller’s The Spirit, making me sadder than ever that I haven’t seen either one yet.

* Related: Frequent ADDXSTC commenter rev’D really didn’t like Sucker Punch.

* Jason (yes, Hey, Wait… Jason) reviews Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale.

* Here’s an enormously uplifting look at the surprisingly, faith-in-humanity-inspiringly progressive treatment of race in Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie by Jeet Heer.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones takes a look at Frank Miller’s rewardingly off-model, possibly Bowie-inspired Joker in The Dark Knight Returns. It’s really tough to have the DKR Joker as your first in-comics exposure to the character, because it really is so different from how he’s portrayed pretty much anywhere else — he barely speaks, and smiles twice — yet so effective for all that. I think part of why the “evil homosexual” subtext (if anything in a Miller comic could be called subtext) of the character has never bothered me the way it otherwise might is because he’s not portrayed as a figure of giggling, creepy revulsion, but as this sort of godlike, implacable killing machine. There’s a feminized elegance to him, but it’s the elegance of Pinhead.

* Rob Clough reviews the intriguing-looking international comics anthology Gazeta.

* Tom Brevoort on Jim Shooter.

* Alt Screen lists all of New York City’s special film screenings — revivals, previews, festivals, repertory, special appearances, and so on. Very cool resource. (Via Chris Weingarten.)

* Dave Kiersh’s latest comic is partially about my current place of residence, Levittown, NY.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan will kill himself if he doesn’t finish this comic that’s “kinda about suicide” within one year. Draw, Isaac, draw!

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force webcomic drops episodes like this on you without warning every once in a while.

* Jonny Negron draws David Bowie. And draws him well.

* Another rollicking Fight or Run battle from Kevin Huizenga. I’d have run, too.

* Michael DeForge’s abandoned comics are better than most people’s not-abandoned comics.

* Finally, my God, Frank Quitely draws He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Look at the way this thing bristles. It’s all swords and spears and blades. He gets it.

* Here are the first 14 minutes of Game of Thrones season one episode one. Good God did it look gorgeous in HD. I ordered HBO for this.

* My pal Rob Bricken republished my list of reasons to read A Song of Ice and Fire on Topless Robot. Besides being flattering, this also gave the piece the potential to reach a lot more people, and at this point I’ve read enough people saying it convinced them to give the books a try to make it hard for me to keep track of them all, which is hugely gratifying. Do check out the comment thread to see the shape of Larger Nerddom’s reaction to the books, pro and con.

* Please don’t forget I have my whole own VERY SPOILERY ASoIaF blog now, ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED. I think that if I end up doing a “Game of Thrones thoughts” series of posts about the show as it airs, I’ll probably put it up there, just to avoid confusion about the level of spoilers involved.

* Zack Soto has started an all-ASoIaF fanart Tumblr that I helped him name, which is rad. Here’s his version of the Hound.

* Reviews of the advance copies of the first six episodes sent out to select critics have been coming in. Of particular interest to me and possibly to you if you’ve been following my Game of Thrones updates over the months are the ones by Winter Is Coming, Myles McNutt, and Westeros. That last one goes in-depth into what has changed, and when those changes do and don’t work, but not in apoplectic fanboyish fashion at all. Both inside and outside ASoIaF fandom and general nerddom, to say the reviews have been rapturous is not overstating things.

* George R.R. Martin finished another couple chapters in A Dance with Dragons last week. At this point he’s finished more chapters than he originally said were left to finish and he’s still not finished with the book, which is kinda funny.

* He’s also been making the big-media interview rounds. This New York Times interview with him is worth clicking over to for the title alone.

* Other interviews I’ve enjoyed include Den of Geek’s chat with Alfie Allen (Theon) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys); the Evening Standard’s interview with Clarke, Harry Lloyd (Viserys) and Richard Madden (Robb); and Den of Geek’s interview with Jason Momoa (Drogo). In all cases you get the sense of young, ambitious, attractive actors getting their first taste of being involved with an extraordinary, potentially very popular project; it’s vicariously exhilarating. (Via Winter Is Coming and Westeros.)

* Very endearing stuff here: Winter Is Coming interviews the young actresses Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, who play Arya and Sansa respectively.

* Martin holds up Lost as an example of how not to end a series; Martin fan Damon Lindelof says “ouch.” So did I.

* Finally, do NOT click this link unless you’ve read all four books, but Tower of the Hand’s recent series on Littlefinger is precisely the sort of in-depth, intelligent writing about ASoIaF I’ve been hungering for.

* I started a tumblr dedicated to (SPOILERY) thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, in case you missed it.

* I reviewed Thomas Ott’s best-of collection R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004 for The Comics Journal. I didn’t care for it.

* Over at Robot 6, I wrote about site stats for Wizard’s digital magazine.

* You’ve only got a couple more days to take advantage of an awesome sale on Lane Milburn comics. Go!

* Tom Tomorrow is Daily Kos’s new Comics Editor. Lots of intriguing possibilities there.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Chris Mautner wrote a terrific introduction to the work of Frank Miller, listing the books to read first, the ones to read next, and the ones to avoid. I don’t agree with him on all of it, but it’s a cogent and at times passionately argued piece.

* Groovy Age of Horror indeed: Curt Purcell reviews Gossip Girl! Sometimes I think I have too much influence. Anyway, Curt brings his usual eye for unusual, revealing detail and his attention to structure and expectation to the proceedings.

* Curt’s also up to A Clash of Kings in A Song of Ice and Fire.

* Michael DeForge has been posting remarkable material on the daily lately. Here’s a few pages from a graphic novel he actually destroyed rather than finish and publish.

* Geoff Johns is writing an Aquaman series. Hooray!

* I’m saving this for when I have more time and energy, but Sean Belcher reviews Dragon Age II at length. I really have no idea what Dragon Age is, other than a thing a lot of people get excited about when it comes out, but I link to this anyway because the mere existence of this sort of writing seems to put paid to the notion that video games can’t be art. (Cf. this idiocy.)

* Buy more stuff from Tom Neely!

* Reach for it! J.H. Williams III channels funk for a Static Shock cover. Wouldn’t it be rad if more superhero artists did things you hadn’t seen before with color?

* Wow, this is a great Seth Fisher piece. Thanks, Corey Blake.

* Fresh from his triumphant run of drawing sexy women, Tom Kaczynski is now drawing ’80s action figures. It’s like he’s reading my mind.

* Robert Goodin covers Johnny Ryan. Indeed.

* Anders Nilsen reveals the cover for the collected Big Questions…

* …and Anders Nilsen draws some covers for Richard Brautigan books.

* Really digging these promotional images for Strangeways‘ new online iteration.

* Well played, Iron Man 2.0.

* This Axe Cop kicker made me laugh and laugh.

* Uno Moralez, man. Uno Moralez. (Wait for it.)

* Sucker Punch as camp is one of the few reads of that film that could persuade me to see it. Nothing against Zack Snyder — until now he’s made three films, all of which I enjoyed, two of which I enjoyed immensely — but it occurred to me that lo and behold, I really don’t have any interest in schoolgirls fighting robot samurai. The fanservice failed to service me, in essence.

* Hey, congratulations to my old boss and friend Brian Cunningham on taking over the editorial reins for the Green Lantern line, DC’s biggest franchise.

* LOL: The Xorn retcon happened Grant Morrison didn’t write Magneto well enough. Well, they certainly showed him!

* It’s quite telling, but also strangely depressing given that he’s the person who introduced me to the phrase “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” that Andrew Sullivan believes he must formulate and articulate a position on literally every issue of import. That’s simply crazy. You’re not an expert on everything; you’ll be outright stupid on some things. So I learned to my eternal regret.

* Real Life Horror: This chart is hilariously awful, just on a “something is obviously wrong with this picture” level.

* Real Life Horror 2: War oughta be fun! People really think this way about the enterprise of killing large numbers of people to achieve a political goal, and feel no shame about saying so. Fuck those people.

* On the other hand, I do enjoy the Captain America trailer. Rob Bricken is right: The emphasis it places on Steve Rogers having been a bullied weakling until very recently reveals an element of the character too often forgotten. (I find Ultimate Captain America all but unreadable any time I come across him now for that very reason.)

* Another Game of Thrones trailer? Don’t mind as I do.

* Finally, George R.R. Martin has finished two more chapters in A Dance with Dragons. He says the end is truly nigh.

* The interview with Phoebe Gloeckner about her Juárez project to which I link in this Robot 6 post is the must-read of the year. Great cartoonists like Chris Ware and Joe Sacco and Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez are cutting closer and closer to the bone lately; this great cartoonist is already sawing through. Her next project will be a multimedia ebook for tablets, it seems. Christ, I can’t wait.

* Here’s some information on how you can help fund the next projects for Hans Rickheit (who recently lost his job) and Tom Neely, two of my favorite cartoonists.

* Whoa, Achewood is going on indefinite hiatus.

* Grant Morrison and (mostly) Yanick Paquette’s Batman Incorporated will likely face further delays, but it’s almost okay now that DC has signed Chris Burnham to an exclusive contract so he can draw more of it.

* There have been so very, very, very, very, very many bits of new news on Game of Thrones I hardly know where to begin. But I can tell you that none of them were more eagerly anticipated by me than Curt Purcell’s post-read review of A Game of Thrones. In all seriousness, every time I opened Google Reader during my little baby-hiatus, his was the first feed I checked for, just to see if this post had gone up yet. Worth the wait; I’ll have more to say about it at some point, I should think.

* Meanwhile I started my own A Song of Ice and Fire blog STRICTLY FOR PEOPLE WHO’VE READ ALL FOUR BOOKS, I.E. SPOILERS AHOY.

* And HBO has just been pumping out the promotional video featurettes. Of late they’ve rolled out an entire series, each focusing on one House or one character. Check out the HBO GoT YouTube channel for most if not all of them: Stark, Baratheon, Lannister, Targaryen, Ned, Catelyn, Bran, Sansa, Arya, Robb, Jon, Jamie, Cersei, Tyrion, Danaerys, Drogo, and Robert are all out there somewhere iirc, if not more besides.

* Brian Ralph drew a brand-new epilogue for the collected edition of his first-person zombie comic Daybreak. Could be a pip, could be a pip.

* Kevin Huizenga says that Or Else #2, his best comic and I think potentially the best single issue of any comic ever pound for pound, is soon to be reprinted. (Either that and/or Supermonster #14, of which OE2 was a remake, will be.)

* Speaking of Huizenga, here are some very pretty Fight or Run images.

* Hooray: My pal Matt Maxwell is relaunching his quite good Weird Western comic Strangeways as a webcomic. He’s posting both of the completed Strangeways graphic novels first, so check ’em out.

* Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul’s lovely and underrated Flash series is ending, or I suppose I should say “ending.” This is a book that featured a gigantic mirror the Rogues found labeled “IN CASE THE FLASH COMES BACK, BREAK GLASS” or something like that.

* The Comics Grid continues to be very good, lately on the work of Daniel Clowes: cf. Tony Venezia on architecture and environment in Ghost World and Greice Schneider on the use of the visual vocabularies of different modes of comics in David Boring.

* I’m with Ben Morse: The recent match-up between Iron Man and Doctor Octopus courtesy of Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s Invincible Iron Man has been fun so far. I’m almost positive I’m cribbing this insight from Tom Spurgeon, but the unexpected hero-villain match-up is a lot harder to pull off than it used to be. I was flipping through The Essential Thor phonebook, and there’s this truly awesome battle between Thor and Magneto. Unlike today, where such a fight would consist of giant two-page spreads of Thor causing electrical storms and Magneto hitting Thor with magnetic fields big enough to level skyscrapers with no discernible effect to any given stage of combat, this was as close to a fistfight as a God of Thunder could have with a Mutant Master of Magnetism. Neither combatant really knew the extent of his opponent’s powers, so their moves were intimate and all business; the one I remember most vividly was Magneto sealing Thor in a room apart from his hammer (so he reverted to his human form as Donald Blake), then using his powers to firing metal rivets out of the wall in hopes of shooting him to death. Nowadays, nearly all the Marvel Universe characters have met each other so many times that their every meeting has the feel of a high school reunion. But back then, there really was an air of the unpredictable about such confrontations: The readers truly had no way of knowing who might come out on top. Visit Tom Brevoort’s Formspring account sometime to see how much the accumulation of “statistics” from various encounters by battle-board users has sucked the fun out of these things.

* Over at the Nu-Journal, Matt Seneca offers an intriguing but to my mind not entirely convincing take on Brecht Evens’s gorgeous Night Animals, labeling it a sex comic that kind of fails to perform. I’d say that the ending of that second story—”brusque,” as Matt puts it—is a statement of its own, not a cop-out, albeit not a sex-positive statement and therefore one apt to engender a bit of head-scratching in the subculture that is the book’s natural audience.

* Saving this for when I have time to read both the book and the review: Beth Hewitt reviews Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark for The Panelists.

* Another day, another wonderfully unpleasant comic from Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, here’s a preview of Johnny Negron’s contribution to DeForge and Ryan Sands’s porno anthology Thickness.

* And speaking of wonderfully unpleasant, I actually have a hard time reading Lisa Hanawalt’s “Extra Egg Room.” Keee-rist.

* Eleanor Davis is working on a YA comic about medieval Uzbekistan with her mom. In other news, Eleanor Davis can fucking draw. (Via Tom Spurgeon, I think.)

* Dave Kiersh presents three whole chapters of his next book, Afterschool Special.

* Hooray, weekly (I think) comics from Michael Kupperman!

* Love this Jeffrey Brown Incredible Change-Bots piece. Click for a link to the full-sized thing.

* Benjamin Marra draws the Savage Dragon. YES. Click for the full size thing.

* Please keep drawing those sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* Jason (yes, that Jason) draws Tin Machine.

* It’s great to see Frank Santoro draw ol’ Senator Wastmor again.

* Renee French runs the gamut.

* David Slade is directing the new Daredevil movie; Darren Aronofsky is not directing the new Wolverine movie.

* Hahahaha, the Red Dawn remake is digitally replacing all the China stuff it already shot with North Korea stuff to avoid screwing up its international box office? Hahahahaha! WOLVERINES! hahahahahaha

* The doofus who started a fake twitter account under the name of Powr Mastrs artist C.F. doesn’t think there was any harm done–this explains why throughout all of human history people have been so thrilled to discover that other people were going around impersonating them–while Chris Ware’s The ACME Novelty Library #20 has failed to live up to Jason Overby’s exacting standards. Hopefully you’ll get there some day, Chris! (That said, the Comets Comets redesign is gorgeous.)

* Tim Hodler asks: Who did Tarantino really crib the Superman/Clark Kent Kill Bill speech from?

* Congratulations to my old boss and friend Pat McCallum on his new gig as an editor at DC.

* Finally, thank you, everyone. It has meant so much.

Apparently a good way to while away the hours while your baby is in the NICU is to start yet another blog, so do check out ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED, my new site dedicated to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, strictly for people who’ve read all four books. SPOILER ALERT, in other words. I think the best way to describe it is a “noteblog” — I’m just jotting down a few quick thoughts about the series and the show here and there as they occur to me. If you’ve read the whole series so far, I hope you enjoy it.

He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood.

In the dream his friends rode with him, as they had in life. Proud Martyn Cassel, Jory’s father; faithful Theo Wull; Ethan Glover, who had been Brandon’s squire; Ser Mark Ryswell, soft of speech and gentle of heart; the crannogman, Howland Reed; Lord Dustin on his great red stallion. Ned had known their faces as well as he knew his own once, but the years leech at a man’s memories, even those he has vowed never to forget. In the dream they were only shadows, grey wraiths on horses made of mist.

They were seven, facing three. In the dream as it had been in life. Yet these were no ordinary three. They waited before the round tower, the red mountains of Dorne at their backs, their white cloaks blowing in the wind. And these were no shadows; their faces burned clear, even now. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, had a sad smile on his lips. The hilt of the greatsword Dawn poked up over his right shoulder. Ser Oswell Whent was on one knee, sharpening his blade with a whetstone. Across his white-enameled helm, the black bat of his House spread its wings. Between them stood fierce old Ser Gerold Hightower, the White Bull, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.

“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.

“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.

“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell.

“When King’s Landing fell, Ser Jaime slew your king with a golden sword, and I wondered where you were.”

“Far away,” Ser Gerold Said, “or Aerys would yet sit the Iron Throne, and our false brother would burn in seven hells.”

“I came down on Storm’s End to lift the seige,” Ned told them, “and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dipped their banners, and all their knights bent the knee to pledge us fealty. I was certain you would be among them.”

“Our knees do not bend easily,” said Ser Arthur Dayne.

“Ser Willem Darry is fled to Dragonstone, with your queen and Prince Viserys. I thought you might have sailed with him.”

“Ser Willem is a good man and true,” said Ser Oswell.

“But not of the Kingsguard,” Sir Gerold pointed out. “The Kingsguard does not flee.”

“Then or now,” said Ser Arthur. He donned his helm.

“We swore a vow,” explained old Ser Gerold.

Ned’s wraiths moved up beside him, with shadow swords in hand. They were seven against three.

“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light.

“No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death.

—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

* I want to thank everyone for all your kind words and warm wishes about the Missus and baby Helena. They have meant a great deal to us over the past few days. They also give me a great excuse to run this piece of Destructor/Helena fanart by Isaac Moylan.

* Two new Game of Thrones videos: One’s a new trailer that sets up the basics and show some skin, the other a featurette on House Stark.

* They did a really nice job with the official Game of Thrones poster. click to see it at its full huge size.

* Looks like GRRM managed to add hisself an extra chapter to the still-unfinished A Dance with Dragons. Slowly he turned, step by step, inch by inch…

* Curt Purcell has finished watching Lost. What did he think? The ANSWERS await you!!!! Seriously, Curt has maybe the sharpest take yet on why what didn’t work didn’t work.

* I just like reading Tom Brevoort talking about how comics are made.

* Nice little piece on the infant section of ACME Novelty Library #20 by The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual.

* This is a fine suite of nominees for the Stumptown comic con’s awards program, with what seems to my eyes like a unique and considered emphasis on illustrative chops.

* Speaking of awards, I found myself quite happy to see that Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream won About.com’s Readers’ Choice Award, just because I’m happy to see Hagio’s book win anything anyone cares to award it, but also because a “readers’ choice award” indicates that it’s clicking with more people than just dudes on the internet who don’t read a lot of shojo with which to compare it, like me.

* Bookmarking this for a likely imaginary future in which I have enough free time to read it: The Mindless Ones annotate Batman Inc. #3, an unusually dense issue in terms of annotable things, even by Grant Morrison Batman standards.

* Over at the Nu-Comics Journal, Matt Seneca reviews the revised/expanded edition of C.F.’s City-Hunter Magazine #1.

* I’ll take a new full-color Ben Katchor comic strip, sure.

* Benjamin Marra needs to keep on doing pin-ups for people’s pulp comics.

* Tom Kaczynski needs to keep sketching sessy ladies.

* I really like this Shining piece by Matt Rota.

* “Involuntary Collaborations: I buy other people’s landscape paintings at yard sales and Goodwill and put monsters in them.” (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* Jacob’s Ladder is one of those films that I saw for a class in college, liked a great deal, but then never watched again for some reason. I feel like I should.

* Prepare to flash back to your childhood like whoa: Rue Morgue takes a look at the Crestwood House series of books about classic horror movies. I’ll never ever forget those orange hardcovers.

* What, are you dense? Are you from Harvard or something? What the hell do you think I am? I’m a goddamn Yalie.

* Now that the newsy element of the new Comics Journal website has receded into the background a bit, I’m better able to appreciate the actual content. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into Bob Levin’s report on the civil war between members of Frank Frazetta’s family, or Patrick Rosenkranz’s piece on the history of autobio comics. I’m also really thrilled that Tucker Stone is writing reviews for them, too — if you only know him for his “Comics of the Weak” smackdowns, this is a whole new side to discover, and a great look. And back on the newsy tip, Tim Hodler has a morning-after piece on the relaunch and reactions thereto.

* One of the cooler things I discovered via those reactions was Graphic Ladies, a Tumblr by Erin Polgreen that collates and collects links to comics and comics criticism by women. There are only a few days’ worth of entries up at the moment, but so far it’s got excellent taste — it’s not just throwing in anything done by people with the right set of genitals, if you were worried about that sort of thing. (And if you’ve spent any time in any kind of parameter-based publishing ecosystem — the horror Internet, anyone? — you know how important it is to apply standards on top of meeting your basic coverage criteria.) A great idea with great execution so far.

* And via Graphic Ladies I discovered a rock-solid-looking group blog called The Comics Grid, featuring mostly European mostly academic critics writing short, sweet pieces on good books. (I recognize the name of contributor Ernesto Priego.) Right now I’ve got posts on The Wrong Place, The ACME Novelty Library, Footnotes in Gaza, and Maus cued up.

* I was pleased to read that the wildly overrated ex-Hobbit director Guillermo Del Toro has left yet another fantastic-fiction adaptation dear to my heart, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

* Speaking of The Hobbit, Sam Bosma’s Hobbit illustrations are gorgeous.

* Andy Khouri put together some killer cool-image galleries for Comics Alliance and Moviefone lately. The latter is all Tyler Stout movie posters, while the former includes such wonders as by-god Gilbert Hernandez drawing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

* I’m really impressed by this Monster Brains gallery of A. Paul Weber illustrations. Yeesh.

* Behold the new Game of Thrones paperback edition!

* Speaking of GoT, it’s a pleasure as always to follow Curt Purcell as he makes his way through a well-done work of genre fiction.

* Real Life Horror: It’s always worth reminding ourselves what an immoral, dangerous, genuinely bad person my Representative, Republican Peter King, really is.

* The Comics Journal has relaunched its website under the auspices of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler. They run down its major features and contributors in this welcome letter. They say bid adieu to their old hangout, Comics Comics, in this farewell note. They speak about the changeover and their plans at length in this Tom Spurgeon interview. Spurgeon bids adieu to the old TCJ.com’s genuinely evil message board in this Comics Reporter post.

* I write at some length about the Journal’s past, present, and future in this Robot 6 post. I make my first contribution to the new site in this review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise. And I will be a regular contributor via my soon-to-launch interview column, Say Hello.

* Phew! I’m very excited about all of this. PS: I recommend tapping into the Journal’s soon-to-be-online-in-their-entirety archives with this Gary Groth interview with the great Phoebe Gloeckner, one of my all-time artistic heroes and one of the all-time great cartoonists.

* Artist Guy Davis is leaving B.P.R.D., one of the very very very best superhero(ish) comics of the past ten years thanks in large part to his contributions. Click the link for my take on Davis’s work on the title. What he and main writer John Arcudi and co-plotter/overseer Mike Mignola did on that book is a genuine achievement. And this is one of my all-time favorite comics pages.

* The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition is coming out in a Blu-Ray box set at last. It contains all three extended-edition films, all the bonus materials from the Extended Edition DVDs, and those weird behind-the-scenes docs from the Limited Edition releases. I don’t think it includes the theatrical editions, but that’s fine. I already preordered it.

* Jay Babcock is discontinuing Arthur magazine’s online incarnation. Even after the print version was shuttered, it continued to be an underrated source of good comics. Best of luck to Mr. Babcock.

* Carol Tyler on her series of memoirs You’ll Never Know and “the legacy of war.”

* Tom Cruise really is starring in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. I still think that this works remarkably well.

* Writer Nick Spencer is now Marvel exclusive, though his creator-owned Morning Glories will continue at Image and, remarkably, his T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents revival will continue at DC. That’s a big get for Marvel.

* The very good cartoonist Tom Kaczynski has launched a blog for his publishing imprint Uncivilized Books. Also, his comic in Mome Vol. 21 looks sick, and he drew a sexy woman.

* This is a beautiful spread from Amazing Spider-Man #655 by artist Marcos Martin (and writer Dan Slott). It also basically crushes any given similar image or sequence of images in Inception, by the by. (Via Agent M.)

* Topless Robot’s Chris Cummins lists the 20 Greatest Liquid Television Segments. Man, what a marvel that show was. I so vividly remember feeling like I was watching something genuinely strange and genuinely adult. I still remember the “Cut-Up Camera” and “Dog Boy” theme music, and those silent Aeon Flux shorts crush the property’s later iterations.

* For some reason I really like this very simple poster for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. (Via Agent M.)

* Michael DeForge remains very talented.

* Kevin Huizenga revisits the ongoing debate over the existence of Hell, the topic of one of his (or anybody’s) best comics, “Jeepers Jacobs.”

* Real Life Horror: Every day, the Obama Administration’s military agents force non-violent, non-suicide-risk Army whistleblower Bradley Manning to sleep and stand for inspection fully naked during his solitary confinement on charges for which he has yet to be convicted and for which he is eligible for the death penalty.

* Finally, sink your teeth into this meaty Tom Spurgeon interview with Renée French. It’s fascinating to see an artist of French’s caliber talk so frankly, and yet without hyperbole or self-pity, about her artistic struggles. Also, I really love the declaration “Fuck narrative.”

* Hip hip hooray, the latest Game of Thrones trailer is now available in hi-res! I really don’t know why you’d land an exclusive trailer and then not post it properly, but what do I know. Unsurprisingly the thing is a lot more impressive when you can actually see it clearly.

* Related: I started re-reading A Game of Thrones yesterday–before the news about A Dance with Dragons hit, no less!–and I’ve now had to put the book down twice in the first few chapters because I was literally too excited by everything to come in this volume and all the subsequent ones to concentrate properly on the page at hand.

* Ron Moore, Michael Rymer, Jamie Bamber, and now James Callis — whose Gaius Baltar was one of my favorite television performances of all time — are all part of the big Battlestar Galactica reunion that Moore’s new supernatural-cop show 17th Precinct is turning into.

* Here’s a typically thoughtful Tom Brevoort Q&A at Comic Book Resources, tackling issues of pricing, title cancellations, submissions and talent recruitment, the status of the X-Men/mutant franchise, character gluts, continuity glitches and more — the difference this time around being that the questions are from one selected message-board user. It’s interesting to see how these issues are approached, and what about them is prioritized, by someone with the perspective of pure fandom.

* Now that’s a good idea for a listicle: Steve Erickson presents the Top 10 Artsploitation Films. Worth the price of admission for the Fat Girl screencap alone. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I first discovered the art of Johnny Negron via Ryan Sands a few weeks ago and had been waiting for the right image to come along to send you his way as well. This was the one.

* Real Life Horror: “Nine Years of Nudity in American Detention.”

* Be a birther, be a racist dogwhistler, be an anti-Muslim bigot, be a homophobe if you must, Mike Huckabee. But what kind of idiot fuckface can’t get behind the idea of impregnating Natalie Portman?

* Golly gee willikers, today was a big day for Game of Thrones. In addition to the news about A Dance with Dragons‘ release date (and btw, you can preorder it now on Amazon), HBO debuted a full-fledged two-minute-plus trailer for the show. Right now it’s only available in a streaming, unembeddable, non-HD crappy version exclusively on EW.com, but hopefully we’ll get a better version soon that I can share.

* It looks as though the two Hobbit movies will be subtitled The Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again. (I’m just assuming they’ll use the definite article for the former.) I’d figured “There and Back Again” would be involved but wasn’t sure about the other one.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part one: Ron Regé Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #16: The Chronically Hallucinating Insomniac is being republished by him after a sold-out 100-copy limited edition from French publisher Kaugummi as an even more limited 15-copy edition for $25, with a free drawing from GR2’s latest Post-It note art show thrown in for good measure. Wish I could afford it these days.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part two: Tom Neely has completed his new graphic novel The Wolf.

* “Martha I’d Like to Fuck.” (I actually think I may have gotten there first.)

* Johnny Ryan draws Junji Ito’s Gyo, courtesy of Ryan Sands.

* Real Life Horror: Today was one of those days where the atavistic, sociopathic, autarchic, bigoted shittiness of our great nation really fucking got to me. Those are links to fully five separate instances of nightmarish heartlessness and idiocy, and I haven’t even gotten to union-busting or Mike Huckabee yet. The Others take it all.

I picked the right day to start re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire.

(via George R.R. Martin)

* Neilalien, the first comicsblogger, has retired after an astonishing eleven years of blogging. I talk a little bit about what this means, and what it means to me personally, over at Robot 6.

* Quentin Tarantino has apparently finished putting together the long-promised Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which will debut theatrically on March 27th with seven new minutes of O-Ren Ishii anime.

* Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, Videodrome/Thriller/The Ring make-up effects demigod Rick Baker, and Velvet Goldmine/Reign of Fire star Christian Bale all won Oscars at the Academy Awards last night. That’s three for the good guys.

* Jinkies, get a load of the new Game of Thrones trailer. This looks pretty much exactly how I’d want it to look. I do feel, however, that I should say I found myself a bit concerned today that it could devolve into a bit of a harridan-off between Catelyn and Cersei. Hopefully it won’t, but after The Walking Dead I think people will certainly be paying attention to this sort of thing, and rightfully so. (Via Westeros.)

* Variety notes that the pending TV show is already boosting book sales in a big way. This link was also via Westeros, which has more.

* Speaking of Westeros, HBO’s official Game of Thrones site interviews Westeros co-founder Elio Garcia. What a delightful story of the impact A Song of Ice and Fire fandom has had on his life.

* Very very pretty A Song of Ice and Fire fanart by Kali Ciesemier: Sansa Stark, Jon Snow, and Brienne of Tarth. (Via Westeros yet again.)

* Finally, they’re a bit pricey, but there are now official Game of Thrones t-shirts featuring the emblems and words of various major Houses. Have we reached Peak Nerd? (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Zack Soto is relaunching his much-missed alt-superhero/fantasy comic The Secret Voice as a weekly webcomic! Very exciting news.

* FX has greenlit a pilot for an adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s very good cops-and-capes series Powers. Lots and lots of potential there.

* It’s looking more and more like the upcoming Marvel event Fear Itself will indeed be about giant dudes getting Asgardian warhammers and wrecking shop with them. I fully support this, even given the Tron costume piping.

* Curt Purcell is still working his way through Lost: Here he is on Season Three and Season Four. I have a lot i want to say about all this but I’ll probably wait till he’s finished the series.

* Are these new Cenobite Halloween costumes, designed by Clive Barker himself, the greatest Halloween costumes of all time?

* The Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson won’t be working on The Hobbit due to prior commitments. That’s really a shame, and evidence, perhaps, of the potential tolls on talent and experience the films’ endless delays have taken.

* A John Hankiewicz comic I totally missed? Folks, I count on you to prevent things like this from happening.

* Black Swan/Red Hulk.

* Hey, I made Kanye + Comics!

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force: the book — due in 2012.

* Solid crop of Eisner Award Hall of Fame selections this year. Good on the judges for increasing the number of inductees to ensure key figures get the recognition they deserve.

* Tell ’em, John Porcellino.

* Nick Bertozzi talks process, with ample illustrations. Really looking forward to reading his new Lewis & Clark book.

* The Comics Journal #301 looks pretty good.

* Benjamin Marra is a constant delight.

* Wow, Paul Pope can draw the crap out of tigers. Now I want to see him do a Captain Marvel story just for his Mister Tawky Tawny.

* I can get behind a version of math-rock behemoth Battles with Gary Numan (among others) on vocals instead of the squeaky-voiced muppet guy. I mean, Gary Numan plus Helmet drummer John Stanier on a song called “My Machines”? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Matthew Perpetua explains why Led Zeppelin were a better band than the Rolling Stones.

* This Game of Thrones promo kit is some serious swag. Apparently every person they sent it to got a different set of stuff.

* First, a quick programming note. I’d prefer not to go into the details of the IRL situation that has kept me away from the blog for the past several days — you can find them on my Twitter account if you’re so inclined — but I would like to thank everyone for their patience, and everyone who’s reached out to me and my family in whatever way for their kindness and support. I have a few minutes here on the train to play catch-up, so that’s what I’m gonna do, but I would expect blogging to remain sporadic, as I must prioritize external commitments during the bulk of what free time remains to me, which is likely to be insufficient to fully fulfill them anyway. Sorry!

* Game of Thrones continues to look very very good. This video is about the first season’s major settings.

* Speaking of, congratulations to George R.R. Martin and his girlfriend of 30-plus years, Parris, for tying the knot.

* Still speaking of, Curt Purcell notes that the book is temporarily out of print as a TV tie-in version is put into production.

* Still still speaking of, here’s an interesting first-hand report on a screening of the show’s first two episodes for European network reps. He says the show doesn’t necessarily really show its stuff in the first couple eps, which is actually a standard HBO thing, in my experience. He also really likes Maisie Williams, the child actress who plays Arya Stark; I’ve heard that a lot.

* I’ve barely read or watched anything by the late Dwayne McDuffie, but from what I can gather he had a model career for a “mainstream” comic-book and animation professional: He created many brand-new things, he made fine use of many old things, and he not only worked ethically, but ethics, in the form of more and better representation of non-white people in superhero comics, were central to his work. It’s rotten that he died so young.

* Great artists drawing monsters part one: Guy Davis draws Pennywise the Dancing Clown. (Via Alex Segura.)

* Great artists drawing monsters part two: Daniel Clowes draws Glenn Beck. (Via DanielClowes.com.)

* I always dig Dennis Culver’s portrait line-ups, like this one of Batman, Inc.

* Oooh, this is good. Curt Purcell, one of my favorite genre-fiction writers of all, is watching and reviewing Lost. Here he is on most of Season One, half of Season Two, the beginning of Season Three, and more Season Three. Curt brings very, very few preconceptions and hang-ups to his reviews, just a sense of what he wants out of art and an ability to explain why a given work does and doesn’t deliver it, which makes him perfect for the critical minefield that is this show.

* CBR has posted a pair of interviews focusing on two of the best superhero comics of the past decade: Grant Morrison talks about All-Star Superman (the best one), while Ed Brubaker and Tom Brevoort talk about Brubaker’s Captain America run (a top tenner, I think; I need to crunch some numbers).

* Congratulations to the latest round of Xeric Grant winners. The Xeric is one of those things that you’d say “man, wouldn’t it be great if…” if it didn’t actually exist, so thank you, Peter Laird, for the fact that it does.

* I don’t want to give it away, but Jeffrey Meyer’s Covered version of the cover for Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius is really clever if you are a comics nerd, and in the spirit of the original too, I think.

* Diplopia, a series of collaborative, interlocking paintings by Eleanor Davis (one of the great contemporary alt-fantasy cartoonists, when she does alt-fantasy) and Katherine Guillen, is really quite something. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* I guess I had no idea that Alan Sepinwall invented the prevailing mode of TV criticism today — the weekly review/recap, seasoned with fannish advocacy (and/or outrage). I’ve alternately enjoyed Sepinwall’s work a great deal and gotten pretty fed up with it from time to time, and I think both phenomena can be attributed to that fannish quality. His passion and devotion makes him a fine close-reader and strength-susser-outer, but it can also lead him to form ideas about what a show is doing or should do that the actual show can’t ever hope to dislodge. (Via Matthew Zoller Seitz; Sepinwall himself responds to the Slate piece in question here.)

* Weird — to me the apparently controversial idea that Black Swan is a horror movie is utterly uncontroversial. It’s more like the fact that Black Swan is a horror movie. (Just not a very good one!)

* That’s funny: Just today I was listening to Wild Beasts and wondering when their next album would come out, and lo and behold, new Wild Beasts album called Smother due May 10th. God I loved their last record.

* Real Life Horror: In light of recent events, this 2006 New Yorker profile of Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya by Andrew Solomon is morbidly fascinating. The regime he describes reminds me of Ian Kershaw’s argument that the Nazi regime was not one of merciless and uniform top-down control, but an all-encompassing morass of bureaucracies and para/militaries untied in “working toward the Führer” — i.e. moving independently to fulfill the goals expressed and embraced by Adolf Hitler, sometimes issued in direct orders and crystal-clear public statements, often not. Since Hitler’s main goals were few in number and easy to grasp — eliminate the Left; conquer the Soviet Union, extirpate its population, and give its land and resources to Germans; blame the World Wars on Jewry and collectively punish them with death for this imagined crime — it was easy enough for these sometimes complimentary, often conflicting, often wholly redundant agencies to stay moving in the same direction, even after several years of ignominious defeat, merciless attacks on their own soil, and near-total public silence from Hitler. Since Qaddafi’s goals, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, self-contradictory, and downright bizarre enough to make Hitler’s absurd and grandiose schemes look like your local library board of trustees’ eminently sensible plan to refurbish the restroom, his regime appears to have completely disintegrated the first time a large group successfully opted to no longer “work toward the Leader.” And since he cannot imagine a Libya without Qaddafi, he will now do his best to ensure that if Qaddafi must go, there won’t be much of a Libya left. Awful, just awful. (Via Christopher Hayes.)

* By the sound of it, George R.R. Martin needs to wrap up three chapters in order to complete A Song of Ice and Fire Book Five, A Dance with Dragons. But I feel as though this has been the case since the New York Comic Con this past autumn.

* The promising group comics blog The Panelists has moved from The Comics Journal‘s website to their own site. Change your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly.

* The legendary Bay Area comics shop Comics Relief is closing after a precipitous decline resulting from the death of its guiding light, Rory Root, and subsequent management by Root’s family; a new store run by various Root employees and associates will open in the same location (I think) under a new name. I only know Comics Relief and Root from their welcome presence in that retail-anchor area of the San Diego Comic-Con show floor, with Bud Plant and Mile High; I bought many comics there in the first few years of my grown-up comics readership, and think of the store fondly. Best of luck to all involved.

* Not only do I really like the idea of “Graphic Details,” a touring art show featuring the work of Jewish women autobio cartoonists, but I also really like the Miss Lasko-Gross poster image for it.

* Here’s a fun, geeky Tim O’Neil post on the cosmologies of the DC and Marvel Universes and the way they lurk in the back of your mind when you’re reading about any given street-level DC or Marvel character.

* Late to the party link #1: Frank Santoro uses the occasion of hanging out with cartoonists John Pham and Jon Vermilyea to wax digressive on how we follow cartoonists’ careers, which works fall through the cracks, and the way animation work serves the putting-food-on-the-table purpose that assembly-line tasks like inking or coloring once did for alternative and underground cartoonists. Françoise Mouly was a Marvel Comics colorist, don’t let’s forget.

* Late to the party link #2: Gabrielle Bell talks to Bitch about feminism in comics in general and her work in particular. (Via Drawn & Quarterly.)

* Hot cha, look at the cover for the Strange Tales II hardcover! Art by Kate Beaton, design by Paul Hornschemeier, very silly jacket copy by yours truly.

* Very useful: HBO’s official pronunciation guide for Game of Thrones. The “CAT-lin” thing blows my mind, but I’ve heard George R.R. Martin pronounce it that way, so it’s canon. Westeros notes that one difference between GRRM’s preferred pronunciations and the show’s is that they’ll be pronouncing the honorific “Ser” as “SAIR” rather than “SIR.” This makes sense to me, actually: In the books, the changed spelling was sufficient exotification, but viewers can’t hear a spelling change.

* Oh man, JEEZ, this Kate Beaton panel. JEEZ.

* Another fine, candid CBR interview with Marvel’s Tom Brevoort. This time he reveals that Nick Spencer is taking over Secret Avengers because Ed Brubaker wasn’t having a good time writing it, just for example. And whoa, those are some nice colors on that Thor #620 preview! Is that Pasqual Ferry doing his own colors? I forget. Anyway, you may disagree with some of what Brevoort says, but wouldn’t it be marvelous if all the major figures in the North American comics industry were this vocally opinionated and forthright?

* Real Life Horror, Actual Class Warfare Edition: Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is threatening to deploy the National Guard to help him take away the collective bargaining rights of state employees. (Via Atrios.)

* Bilbo and the dwarves!

* The San Diego Comic-Con 2011 completely sold out in one day. Zoinks. Tom Spurgeon has further thoughts, centering on the fact that the show still puts up a world-class slate of comics programming and exhibitors and that the programming end, at least, is better attended now than ever — but that none of that may matter if the way that tickets to the show are sold redound to the movie-trailer crowd’s near exclusive benefit. It’s not clear that that’s the case, however. One thing that seems abundantly clear is that the days of SDCC being something a casual or curious person could plop themselves into the day of, or even the month of, are loooooooong gone, never to return; everyone’s expectations should be recalibrated from there.

* Saving this for when I have the chance to really listen: Inkstuds interviews Al Columbia for two hours. Worth it for the below header image alone:

* Tokyopop is looking into publishing a collection of Brandon Graham’s King City at the extra-large trim size of its Image Comics serial-comic incarnation. I look forward to reading it! Via Frank Santoro, who has more.

* Now this is freaking heartwarming, doubly so if you’ve read the books: The girl who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones has adopted the dog who plays Sansa’s direwolf Lady. That’s the happy pair with the young actors who play Bran and Arya. <3 <3 <3

* Speaking of A Song of Ice and Fire, I agree with the assessment of regular commenter Hob, who emailed me a link to this astonishing map of Westeros by Other-in-Law with the message “Possibly the best fan art I’ve ever seen.” Click the image to see the whole thing, and more maps from ASoIaF besides.

* The Hobbit starts shooting on Monday, March 21, 2011.

* The Australian magazine The Lifted Brow looks interesting — the current issue boasts contributions from comickers Eddie Campbell, Lisa Hanawalt, Noel Freibert, Ron Regé Jr., and Lane Milburn. (Via Mr. Freibert.)

* Interesting list of the Seven Deadly Sins that crappy horror movies commit from Tawnya Bhattacharya. I don’t agree with them all — what inner demon of Sally’s did Leatherface represent in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Her childhood fascination with the zebras on the wallpaper in her grandparents’ house? — but so many horror movies are colossal wastes of time that it behooves us to try to understand why. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Rob Humanick reminds us that Shutter Island > Inception.

* Headline of the Day: One in 50 Troops in Afghanistan Is a Robot

* He’s certainly an expert on leadership vacuums, I’ll say that much.

* Is it just me or does R. Fiore’s review of Acme Novelty Library #20 get just about everything wrong, from matters of basic reading comprehension (the veracity of Lint’s son’s memoir) and aesthetic judgment (the quality of the memoir’s art) to the overall assessment (Ware needs to buckle down and tell a by-god STORY already!).

* Finally, do not tl;dr Lawrence Wright’s enormously long, enormously compelling New Yorker article on the Church of Scientology, as seen through the eyes of its most socially prominent defector, Crash/Casino Royale/Million Dollar Baby writer and director Paul Haggis. I tend not to go for South Park-style Scientology skewering, because it seems clear that the only thing keeping the tenets and traditions of all the world’s religions from sounding just as ridiculous as Scientology (or Mormonism) when laid out in just-the-facts terms is centuries of faith and familiarity. Start a faith thousands of years ago in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent rather than decades ago in the United States of America and they magically become a lot harder to mock as bad science fiction, Moroni and Xenu be damned. However, the CoS’s alleged financial shakedown and apparent physical intimidation of its members, as well as the extraordinary lengths to which it goes to ensure they don’t leave, rise above and beyond the illogic all religions definitionally share and enter the realm of Roman Catholic Chuch-style criminal conspiracy. Moreover, no one who’s spent as much time in the occult/conspiracy underbelly as I have can fail to find the story of L. Ron Hubbard’s shake-and-bake religion, Jack Parson’s black-magick orgy house and all, deeply and darkly hilarious; and the article is coldly ruthless in the way it exposes Hubbard’s self-aggrandizing legend as hokum. Equally damning is its quiet but emphatic and repeated contrast of the Church’s official line about this or that claim by its detractors, however mild or innocuous, with the claim itself: Not only are the particulars of any given apostate or non-member’s recollection of an event denied, but the event in question is said to have never taken place, and indeed the participants are alleged to have never even met. Finally, the way it just tosses out the occasional wholly chilling detail makes for bracing reading. Fun fact: Church leader David Miscavige has apparently had his own wife disappeared for insubordination; no one outside the Church has known where she is for years, and the Church isn’t talking. (Via Anne Laurie.)