* The headline says it all: ICv2’s Digital Conference In Depth. CBR’s Kiel Phegley presents an exhaustive report from Friday’s retailer/press/publisher confab at the New York Comic Con, and it’s filled with eye-opening information beyond the dire sales stats that headlined the initial reports: July and August, the traditional summer-event blockbuster months, had notably weak sales; manga publishers are losing money hand over fist by providing no legal digital venue for readers to turn to; the iPad is a big deal (surprise!); anecdotal evidence suggests digital sales may help print sales in some early and isolated cases. Provided your interest in the ICv2 conference extends past 9am the following morning and goes beyond haranguing everyone for not reporting on it properly before cobbling together a report from their reports, this is worth reading from start to finish.

* Meanwhile, John Parkin at Robot 6 has a thorough round-up of the con’s big news.

* Also at Robot 6, Kevin Melrose a dedicated round-up on Marvel’s strange semi-announcement about dropping the price of new titles next year.

* Brian Michael Bendis made several announcements the effect of which seems to add up to “Even less Powers than usual,” so I’m not really that thrilled about any of them; that said, I’ll check out an Alias reunion with Michael Gaydos, absolutely.

* According to the NYCC Del Rey/Spectra panel, George R.R. Martin is just five chapters and two months away from finishing A Dance with Dragons. I’ll believe it when I see it, but yay.

* Alan David Doane’s series of interviews with retailers about DC’s restoration of the $2.99 price point continues with Earthworld’s J.C. Glindmyer. Meanwhile, writing at his own site, Brian Hibbs expresses what it seems like a lot of the retailers Alan has spoken with believe: Scrapping the $3.99 price point is a good idea, but its institution “broke the habit” of collecting those series for a lot of readers in such a way that they probably won’t return.

* Tim O’Shea interviews Renee French about H Day, her new PictureBox graphic novel. Turns out it’s inspired by the imagery that came to mind when she had migraines. In other words, this oughta be good.

* Wow, this is a pretty terrific line-up for the new Studygroup12 anthology: Trevor Alixopulos, T. Edward Bak, Chris Cilla, Max Clotfelter, Farel Dalrymple, Eleanor Davis, Vanessa Davis, Michael DeForge, Theo Ellsworth, Jason Fisher, Nick Gazin, Richard Han, Aidan Koch, Amy Kuttab, Blaise Larmee, Corey Lewis, Kiyoshi Nakazawa, Tom Neely, Jennifer Parks, Karn Piana, Jim Rugg, Tim Root, Zack Soto, Ian Sundahl, Jon Vermilyea, Angie Wang, Steve Weissman, and Dan Zettwoch.

* Frank Santoro takes us to layout school. The “lose the center” concept hit me like a ton of bricks.

* I love Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force.

* Danny Boyle wants to direct a third 28 Days Later movie. I want him to! (Even though Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later was the better film.)

* The Scissor Sisters are writing the songs for a musical adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.

* Real Life Horror #1: The Republican Party’s repeated intimations of militarization have disturbing implications–wait, what? Oh, Jesus.

* Real Life Horror #2: As Glenn Greenwald runs down a number of jaw-dropping factual reasons why this isn’t in fact the case, I think it’s impossible to overstate the damage that the concept “America is the greatest country in the world/in history” has done to America. If we’re the greatest country on Earth, how bad could our problems possibly be, right? We’re a nation of Lord Summerisles, proclaiming “They will NOT fail!”

* Anders Nilsen presents “What Doesn’t Kill You…”: variations on a theme.

* Another big big day on Robot 6…

* Both DC and Marvel are reducing prices on their comics. DC is scrapping the $3.99 price point for ongoing series in favor of $2.99, and dropping page counts as well to a 20-story-page standard. Marvel hasn’t made their plans clear but they’re working on it, I guess. In both cases the changes will take effect in January. I’m glad to see both publishers basically say “We tried something, it didn’t work, so now we’re gonna do something else”–I think that $3.99 price point on all the most popular titles was absolutely murdering the midlist, and not doing wonders for the most popular titles either. Of course, reducing content means reducing creator income.

* Fantagraphics is having a 20% off/free shipping on everything sale, as long as you can wait till October 20th for your order to be shipped. Worth the wait.

* New Hellboy and B.P.R.D. miniseries are launching in January.

* Hellen Jo has joined Jordan Crane’s webcomics portal What Things Do by posting Jin & Jam #1 in its entirety. This site, man, I’m tellin’ you.

* Scott Pilgrim vs. the X-Men! Well, he already fought Captain America and Superman, so why not.

* Today’s must-read: Curt Purcell on Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie: Golden Bear Days, which got my vote for Best Comic of 2009 if you recall. Money quote: “Honestly, as I closed the book upon finishing it, I almost regretted having exposed myself to it, and I’ve since experienced some intrusive thoughts of unwanted imagery from its pages.” Yes.

* Aw man, I screwed up the link to CRwM’s very awesome Great Slasher Research Project. That’s the right link–please go visit and put your two cents in. My take so far is that people are painting with too fine a brush, although now I also see flaws in my own suggested definition.

* Without linking to anything in particular, I just wanna point out that Alan David Doane and Christopher Allen have relaunched Trouble with Comics and it’s been rock-solid so far: Linkblogging, reviews, interviews, commentary, minimal invective. ADD relaunches his blog almost as frequently as Marvel relaunches its Hercules comics, but I hope this version sticks. It looks nice, too.

* Stalwart HBO-drama director Tim Van Patten, late of Boardwalk Empire and best known for The Sopranos, will be working on Game of Thrones. That’s very good news.

* Lately my pal Rob Bricken of Topless Robot has been on a “my sentiments exactly” tip with regards to nerd news of note. Here he is on Zack Snyder directing Superman:

At least — and I mean at least — with Snyder directing, I can take solace that in this movie Superman will probably fucking punch somebody.

And here he is on the triumph of James Cameron and Avatar:

Look, I know that pretty much none of us give a shit about Avatar any more, if we ever did. But every time this movie gets brought up, it makes me more and more upset. Seriously. It’s the #1 movie in the world, and the #1 Blu-ray. And yet it’s not very good. Oh, I still think the 3-D was impressive and worth seeing in theaters, but buying it on home video? Watching it again without 3-D? Or hell, watching it again in 3-D in the theaters? I just can’t fathom who would want to do that or why. I feel like I’ve woken up in a parallel universe where everything’s the same except an exceedingly mediocre, albeit expensive, film is the most popular movie in the world. I do not understand.

Nerd bafflement is vastly preferable to nerd rage, don’t you think?

* Real Life Horror #1: I’m not sure which side–the ones who concocted the stupid thing or the people who got really upset that other people would sink so low as to concoct it–Nate Silver was picking on when he tweeted about how the “ground zero mosque” has disappeared from the news and thus it might be time to “start making fun of those who called it a ‘game-changing issue,'” but my first thought was that “it sure changed the game for Muslim-Americans,” and sure enough.

* Real Life Horror #2: Here’s a solid post by Daniel Larison on the egregiousness of the Obama Administration’s extra-legal American-citizen assassination program. Or murder, if you prefer. (Via Glenn Greenwald.)

* Now here’s a great idea for a comic: A period piece about three junior high kids roaming around town one night trying to rent a copy of Dead Alive before the video store closes. Make it high school instead of junior high and I have been that kid. Cartoonist Brent Schoonover, creator of The Midnight March, if you’re listening, please get in touch so I can read this thing!

* Your must-read of the day: Every once in a while an article or interview or essay comes along that’s a sort of “The Way We Live (If We Are Awful) Now” kind of deal. This New York Times piece by David Carr on the misogynistic, mismanaged nightmare the Tribune Company has become under the reign of Sam Zell and Randy Michaels is such an article. Rich white sexist assholes enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else in an almost emblematic fashion.

* Now here’s a way to fulfill your civic duty this October: Over at And Now the Screaming Starts, CRwM has launched The Great Slasher Research Project of ’10. [UPDATE: Link fixed.] He’s looking for potential definitions of the slasher subgenre–the necessary and sufficient conditions that make a slasher movie a slasher movie. You start with “I think the elements common to all slasher movies are” and then submit a numbered list. I took a stab at it (rimshot!)

I think the elements common to all slasher movies are:

1. A killer

2. Killing a succession of people

3. With a bladed weapon

4. After stalking/chasing most of them

This was fun; it reminds me a lot of back when I tried to come up with a definition for torture porn. Please go over to CRwM’s and give it a shot.

* io9’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast interviews George R.R. Martin. Cue it up to 52:54 for Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones talk, and then to 1:03:03 for further discussion of the books by the hosts (who include anthologist John Joseph Adams, who put together a post-apocalyptic collection called Wastelands that was actually too bleak for me to finish. Me!). Everyone’s story about coming across these books is the same story: Someone enthusiastically recommends it, the person’s like “yeah, okay, fine,” and within an hour’s reading they’re enthusiastically recommending it to someone else.

* Robot 6’s Chris Arrant interviews my chum Ryan Penagos, aka Twitter deity Agent M.

* Chris Ware New Yorker cover! Exclamation point!

* Behold: Steranko and his youthful ward Gary Groth.

* Renee French is a national treasure.

* John Porcellino comics online. What a country!

* I thought Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 stunk on ice aside from that shot of that worm-eaten zombie that everyone knows, but in the interest of equal time, here’s Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s David Carter making the case for the film as an exemplar of an Italian-horror version of surrealism.

* Jeet Heer offers some thoughts on Daniel Clowes’s Wilson. I particularly like the idea that Wilson represents a synthesis between Clowes’s earlier, shorter, more outwardly funny rant-comics about sports and art school and things like that and his subsequent turn to longer narratives.

* Rob Liefeld says he’s writing a screenplay about Image Comics in the ’90s. Who am I to say he isn’t? Too bad he didn’t finish it before Sorkin wrote his Facebook thing.

* Evil Christopher Hitchens from Speed Racer is now in Game of Thrones. Looking forward to it!

* Kiel Phegley writes more than anyone needed to about the ’90s West Coast Avengers’ x-treme revamp Force Works…and yet it turns out to be exactly the amount of writing about Force Works you needed. It’s also a backdoor analysis of superhero story structures circa today, so give it a shot.

* Somehow I missed the trailer for Marilyn Manson’s long-mooted directorial debut Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, so it was with some surprise that I read today that fan backlash against the trailer may have led to the shuttering of the entire project. So I watched the thing and, well, it’s pretty much what you’d expect a Marilyn Manson movie about Lewis Carroll to look like–perhaps with more exposed labia, but still. Did people think it was gonna look like The Grand Illusion?

* Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon at the Onion A.V. Club covers Demonlover. I know nothing about this film except that my then-therapist recommended it to me because Connie Nielsen takes her top off in it or something. That’s how my therapist rolled.

* Today on Robot 6: Both Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly, two of the best publishers in comics, are having massive, and I mean in some cases quite ridiculous, sales right now. You should take advantage of this.

* Also, please let Tom Brevoort know what you think of Marvel’s current event-comics strategy, whereby the company publishers miniature events/crossovers for individual families of titles/franchises rather than one massive line-wide thing. Personally, there’s an attraction to me in linewide crossovers, for all their faults, that the smaller things lack. I mean, I remember franchise-specific crossovers from the bad old days, and it’s hard to get all that excited about them now; by contrast, the sheer chutzpah it takes to make all of your comic books about Green Goblin, Secretary of Defense feels like it’s taking advantage of the shared-universe and serialized-publication models inherent to Marvel and DC in a way that the umpteenth X-over doesn’t.

* Finally, let me entice you to look at some of Frank Santoro’s stupid-gorgeous Silver Surfer art for Strange Tales II.

* HBO aired two previews for their upcoming series adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Game of Thrones. One’s your basic teasey early trailer deal, and one’s a quick behind-the-scenes thing. Neither says all that much about what we can expect, I don’t think, beyond the fact that Martin is very excited and Gregor Clegane is very well cast. (Seriously, if you’ve read the books you’ll know him when you see him, he’s a beast.) The trailers are at the links or below, and there’s a still of Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen below that. Also I guess they’re doing some sort of production blog at the show’s homepage.

* Tim and Eric Awesome Tour, Great Job! Plus an hour-long holiday special on December 5th. Nice. Bullseye.

* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #3 is up on What Things Do. Pretty different from what you might be used to from Rege.

* Jordan Crane draws Dario Argento’s Deep Red. Wow, that’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d be writing today.

* Anders Nilsen covers The Great Gatsby.

* I thought this little portrait of mostly video-era horror icons was fun and admirably thorough; there are a couple on there even I’m not sure I recognize. I wish I knew who drew it; here’s where I found it.

* Curt Purcell reviews the circus comics of Josh Simmons. It’s great to have Curt back in the game, and this stuff’s right in his wheelhouse.

* I hadn’t heard of In a Glass Cage before Jason Adams reviewed it; not sure how I feel about the fact that this has changed.

* I don’t know how I missed this–I think it’s one of those things I was vaguely aware of but didn’t ever actively consider the fact of its existence, sort of like when someone tries to talk to me when I’m watching that Geico commercial with the little piggy who goes wee-wee-wee all the way home–but Eve Tushnet has an infrequently updated blog on which she mostly offers spoilery thoughts on mostly geeky entertainments. Here she is on X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Watchmen, Night of the Living Dead, The Descent, Iron Man 2, and Battlestar Galactica.

* Here’s a fine, lengthy essay by Eric Harvey on the rise of the washed-out Polaroid/Instamatic aesthetic on the cover of indie rock records. I’d probably have just said “Because they look nostalgic and pretty,” but he takes it a lot farther than that for our edification and enrichment.

* This piece on how J.R.R. Tolkien used maps simply to document what he’d already written rather to suggest the existence of a world beyond that was a real lightbulb-over-the-head moment for me. I’d never thought of it this way before: “His maps were always just organizers: they only echoed the text, they never extended it.” I think the fervor with which fandom has seized upon lesser-detailed (both visually and textually) areas to the South and East of the books’ territory is evidence of how much more juice Tolkien could have wrung from those maps.

* As a former writer/editor for A&F Quarterly and thus one of the people partially responsible for Abercrombie & Fitch’s holistic approach to lifestyle branding, I couldn’t have enjoyed Molly Young’s essay on Hollister for The Believer. The part about marijuana was more or less revelatory:

Weed was another great equalizer. It is hard to overstate the importance of weed as a determining factor in the lives of West Coast teenagers. Weed was the reason girls selected clothes based on fuzziness, the reason boys sounded dumb, the reason we inflected every sentence as a question and used like and you know as phatic communications. In an era of T9 input, text messages begun with I would automatically fill in mstoned. Anyone familiar with the dim and spray-scented bedrooms of a weedy adolescence will recognize in Hollister’s decor an environmental proxy of the average Friday night. Weed may not be for sale at Hollister, but its exigencies are everywhere.

It gets better from there. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Comics folk, Geoff Grogan’s piece on the hard truth about small-press conventions is an eye-opening, spirit-deflating must-read. In all fairness, however, I don’t know that alternative comics has that many cliques you can’t infiltrate simply by throwing some elbows and barging in. Comics types respond to Type A personalities like a bichon frise responds to the Dog Whisperer.

* I’m very happy with my interview with Frank Santoro about his Silver Surfer strip for Strange Tales II over at Marvel.com. I think he says some surprising things.

* Some kind of preview for Game of Thrones will air before this Sunday’s True Blood season finale. Keep your eyes peeled.

* Brigid Alverson argues that shoujo manga’s generic tropes, not the gender of its audience or creators, are the reason it’s not taken more seriously. Veterans of the Twilight and Taylor Swift Wars, take note.

* Hahaha, no more Heroes.

* It’s really funny to me that Nerd Nation sees Julie Taymor as the weak link in the Spider-Man musical, and not late-period Bono and the Edge. Maybe this’ll get them to reconsider.

* Abner Dean was a monster.

* Martin Scorsese runs down his favorite pre-1970 gangster movies. In addition to the educational value of these choices, I just want to say how comforting I find the way Marty refers to movies as “pictures.”

* Finally, I find the current shitstorm surrounding this dumb fuck in Florida who wants to light a pile of Korans on fire illuminating regarding another, more comics-centric such debacle, the Danish Muhammad cartoons. You might recall that for just about as long as he’s been covering it, the issue’s most indefatigable chronicler Tom Spurgeon has argued that even while he’d always defend the cartoonists’ right to draw whatever they want and the publisher’s right to publish whatever they want, and even while he’d decry the notion that anything they did in that regard justified intimidation, violence, or murder by anyone against them or anyone else, the actual act of publication of the cartoons was less some brave act of artists speaking truth to power than a politically minded provocation cum publicity stunt. This can be a bitter pill to swallow for a free speech absolutist like myself, one who moreover is temperamentally inclined toward supporting the smashing of religious taboos as a public good. (Andres Serrano could urinate for fifty years straight and still not produce enough piss in which to dunk everything about the world’s major religions I’d like to see good and submerged.) And this is to say nothing about my feelings regarding violent Islamic extremists in particular. (My feelings: Let me show you them!)

But by removing the act of provocation from any artistic context, this dumb fuck in Florida clarifies the underlying act a bit. I don’t mean to diminish the fact that there was an artistic component to the Danish cartoons while the would-be Koran burning is just an out-and-out act of religious and race hate, and a classically fascist one to boot, by some shitkicking faith healer. But I think what made it all come together for me the most was this post by antiwar blogger Thoreau:

I’m proud to live in a country where even the most odious speech is protected along with our right to criticize that odious speech.  I am dubious that there will be any blood spilled in response to his stunt if he does it (I mean, it’s not like the insurgents in Afghanistan were originally planning to lay down their weapons before  some dumbass in Florida decided to pull a stunt), but if there is, well, this is America.  Free speech is one American thing that genuinely is worth dying for, as civil rights protestors and revolutionaries and soldiers and numerous other patriots can attest.  We spill lots of blood over things that are far less worthy than free speech, so if this jackass’s stunt does cause somebody else to attack us, well, this ink doesn’t run.  (And that’s about as jingoistic as I can get.)

The thing that the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy taught us, though, is that in the main it wasn’t the cartoonists or the editors or the publishers or even just Danish nationals who suffered (admittedly not through lack of trying on the part of bloody-minded fundamentalist fucks around the world), as if any of that would have been okay. No, mostly it was random people caught up in riots and violence, incited by people who not only knew better but actually made things worse by lying about the cartoons and including even more offensive ones in the mix. Like Thoreau, I doubt any Americans really would die if this dumb fuck in Florida burns his Korans, certainly no Americans who wouldn’t have been at grave risk in Afghanistan or Iraq anyway. But some people would die, that I don’t doubt at all. That’s the common thread that links the two situations.

Now, you can’t live your life to please the sorts of people who murder people over a book or a cartoon. Moreover I think there is value in pissing off the right people; the dumb fuck in Florida, being the right sort of person to piss off himself, removes this aspect from the equation as well as the artistic one. But perhaps more importantly than all of that, you also oughtn’t risk the lives of other people simply to express how much something irritates you. I guess after all these years I’m sick of bravely arguing for my rights from behind the safety of my laptop, while people I will never meet die for the argument.

* Today on Robot 6: read Mark Waid’s keynote address on copyright and piracy;

* and Scott Pilgrim in space!

* Zak Smith brainstorms for his post-apocalyptic mutant-ninja-animal-hybrid RPG. Possible setting: “Labyrinth of The Black Wyrm, District of Columbia.”

* A student/teacher’s guide to the Bordwell/Thompson blog 2009-2010.

* Animal Kingdom, you say? Hm, alright.

* Peerless contemporary choral composer/heartthrob Eric Whitacre talks about assembling his own private choir and recording his upcoming collection Light and Gold. One thing I love about Whitacre besides the fact that he’s handsome for a man is that he talks about his music the same way I talk about his music–like its beauty is almost something to be endured.

* I wonder how many people will fall in the pop-cultural Venn diagram overlap of caring that guitarist Wilko Johnson from UK pub-rock progenitors Dr. Feelgood has been cast as the executioner in Game of Thrones.

* Big new books from Ben Katchor and Daniel Clowes on the way from Pantheon next spring. The Cardboard Valise is Katchor’s first book in ten years plus, while Clowes’s Mister Wonderful will apparently include 40 new pages.

* Whoa, Fantagraphics is rereleasing Hans Rickheit’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Chloe through its Eros imprint? I wish it were being done by Fanta proper–the fact that it isn’t explains why I didn’t know about it until today–but even still, run, don’t walk, to get that book. Rickheit’s a major talent and that book is something erotic and special. It’s like a dirty secret.

* Spectacularly talented alternative cartoonists: They’re just like us! Kevin Huizenga rents random popular comedies and genre movies from the library!

* I’m glad this worked out for all concerned, but still, threatening a licensed publisher of a franchise over infringing the copyright of your fan-film based on that franchise? How would that work, exactly?

* Alyssa Rosenberg considers A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, world-building, and emotional wiggle room.

* These Brian Ralph sketches sure look like Daybreak collected-edition cover mock-ups to me…

* The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Blu-Ray. Don’t know why that never occurred to me before.

* Nor had it ever occurred to me to look for the Predator soundtrack album, which apparently is only now coming into existence.

* Tom Ewing is right: that new Arcade Fire song is not hot. Personally, I tuned out when they rhymed “sprawl” with “shopping malls,” like a Bad Religion album cut. I wouldn’t go quite as far as Mike Barthel because I think it’s perfectly legitimate to remain aghast at a lot of what goes on in suburbia even as an adult; I just think it’s bloated, boring music and trite lyrics delivered with irritating vocals, which is what I’ve always thought of the Arcade Fire.

* Real Life Horror: When I, a proven fool or worse on such matters, talk about politics on this blog these days, it’s usually in the horror-tinged context of torture or the action/sci-fi framework of a militarized Republican party. But of course these two phenomena are not unrelated. And now we can perhaps add a third category, as articulated by Jim Henley: the degree to which the ugly bigoted sentiments of a swathe of the American right are now being made manifest as actual discriminatory policy, from already nationwide attempts to thwart the construction of mosques anywhere for any reason, to attempts to revise or reinterpret (or repeal?) the 14th Amendment so as to deny birthright citizenship to so-called “anchor babies” on the basis of no one knows what exactly. To a degree, we’re all the blind men feeling the elephant when it comes to the darker forces at work in American political life today. Well, here we have a movement that supports the government’s ability to imprison and torture its perceived enemies at will; that makes a habit of arming itself and discusses this as a potential way to redress its grievances with its political and governmental opposition; and which seeks to abrogate basic constitutional rights for minority ethnic and religious groups deemed insufficiently American. What does that elephant look like to you?

* For years now I’ve longed for someone to make a movie as scratch-your-eyes-out crazy as Rob Zombie’s fake trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS from Grindhouse, “starring Nicholas Cage as Fu Manchu.” Now Neveldine/Taylor, writer-directors of Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage, have signed on to direct Nicholas Cage in Ghost Rider 2, and provided the studio lets Neveldine/Taylor be Neveldine/Taylor, I may just get my wish.

* Dan Nadel reviews Jacques Tardi’s motherfucker of a World War I comic It Was the War of the Trenches.

* George R.R. Martin presents HBO’s complete factsheet on Game of Thrones, including everyone who’s been cast so far, all the writers, all the directors, etc. Getting excited.

* Here’s a Not Coming to a Theater Near You piece on Lost Highway, one of my absolute favorite movies of all time, that I’m going to avoid reading until I’ve seen goddamn Mulholland Drive, just in case.

* Tom Kaczynski draws Lightning Bolt.

* Raymond Sohn presents a brief survey of heta-uma style depictions of the penis. Viva la comix!

* I love this poster for a Fred Dekker night at in Rochester and I don’t even like Night of the Creeps.

* Ah, I knew there was a reason I was looking forward to the Green Lantern movie. “You’re Star Sapphire?” “(Sigh.) Look, Hal, I was gonna tell you…”

* Dead Wrestler of the Week is back with an entry on Road Warrior Hawk, my favorite pro wrestling archetype ever.

* Paul is dead.

* BREAKING: RETURN OF THE KING RIFFTRAX NOW AVAILABLE

* Alex Dueben speaks with Megan Kelso at length about Artichoke Tales, one of those Black Hole/Big Questions-style decade-in-the-making graphic novels, as well as pretty much the entirety of her career.

* I’m glad Ken Parille decided to un-delete his post on “hyper-aggressive misreading” by critics, i.e. when someone goes completely buckwild on a book in a fashion that’s both disproportionate to the offense and ultimately inimical to actual insight–into the book, that is; it provides plenty of insight into the creator. Be sure to read the comments, too–the first sentence of the first response made me laugh out loud.

* Is the new AT-AT the greatest toy in the history of mankind?

* The best part about this Walking Dead set-visit report is that it heavily features Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull, who was visiting the set the same day.

* Mark Waid makes a funny at J. Michael Straczynski’s expense.

* Good on Paul Cornell for signing an exclusive with DC–I look forward to his Lex Luthor book–but count me among the millions upset that this is a definitive no on further Captain Britain and MI-13.

* Here’s a cute reminiscence from Anne Groell, editor of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, about her long history with the books. Sounds like Book Five is…well, I don’t wanna say imminent, but… (Via Tower of the Hand.)

* My favorite LCD Soundsystem song is probably “Sound of Silver,” in large part because James Murphy’s vocals sound like Heaven 17’s. Turns out that was exactly what he was going for. I dunno, I get really excited when I accurately trainspot. The aforelinked Fresh Air interview with NPR’s Terry Gross comes via Matthew Perpetua, who pulls the following killer quote from Murphy on the sort of hipster-band checklist at the end of “Losing My Edge”:

At the end, the reason why I yell all the band names, is because I suddenly realized that this is what you do when you know things. Knowing things, knowledge, or your attachment to things, your self-association with other bands, or books, or whatever. It’s often like this weird amulet that protects you. Like “No, I am serious, look at my library, listen to this!” I can list all the books I’ve read, and now you know I am a serious person. And so it’s just supposed to be this amulet swinging around me to protect me from being seen as anything I didn’t want to be seen as.

* Go buy a bunch of mostly decent, mostly recent superhero paperbacks, as well as assorted manga and a bunch of Bacchus and 30 Days of Night stuff, for super-cheap in Barnes & Noble’s big bargain graphic-novel sale.

* This interview of Benjamin Marra by GQ’s Alex Pappademas is really fabulous for a variety of reasons, even beyond the fact that it’s an interview with Benjamin Marra in GfuckinQ. First of all, it’s the longest interview with Marra I’ve seen so far. Second, it was done over the phone rather than by email, so you’re getting more or less unadulterated Marra as himself, rather than the more studied “man of art, man of lust” voice you get whenever he sits down in front of a keyboard. Third, because it’s long and because it’s done in real-time, it goes in all sorts of directions–like this part, which may be the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen anyone say about, of all things, True Blood:

I think about that show True Blood, which is this awesome sex and violence soap opera, it’s total cult stuff, and people love it–and that’s done by Alan Ball, who’s done some really arty kinds of things.

Right. American Beauty and stuff. And now he’s doing this show–and I say this positively–that’s complete trash, in a lot of ways.

Yeah! And that’s the reason why I like it so much. It’s not apologetic in any way. It is what it is and it makes no bones about it. It’s really just stripped-down, basic, well-executed entertainment.

I remember talking long, long ago about Invasion U.S.A. and how difficult it would be today to recapture that level of unthinking mayhem without resorting to Shoot ‘Em Up-style ugly self-consciousness. I think the two great arguments that no, this can be done are the Crank series and the comics of Benjamin Marra.

* Much like the Bavarian Illuminati, Kevin Huizenga is spreading his shadowy tentacles throughout the whole Internet: In addition to his regular blog, and his drawing club’s blog, and his recently unearthed Fight or Run blog, and all the goodies he’s got hidden on USSCatastrophe, he also has a blog I hadn’t seen before called New Construction, which focuses on “cartooning practices and concerns.”

* At the latter, he’s got a great post up on Bushmiller, Nancy, iconicity, and “pure cartooning,” the gist of which is (I think) that it behooves us to divorce value judgments from our descriptions of the relative simplicity or complexity of a cartoonist’s visual style. “Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to keep clear the distinction between description and prescription,” he says. Smart stuff that reminded me of his last push back against the notion of “pure cartooning”, which he brings back up himself.

* And he takes a little time out to call out the default mode of dismissing alternative comics.

* Oh yeah, here’s another blog, where Huizenga and his wife list the books they’ve read.

* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #15 is a beer. Not even kidding. Could I love him more?

* Do not read this unless you’ve read all the books, but George R.R. Martin’s latest blog post reveals that he wrote a certain chapter in a certain book last even though it wasn’t the last chapter in that book, which makes a lot of sense given what happens in it.

* Why don’t let’s take a stroll through Psycho with Ali Arikan.

* This Sunday sale at Jim Hanley’s Universe in NYC is one of the nuttiest things I’ve ever heard of: You buy a longbox for $25 and can stuff it with as many back issues as it can hold. Frank Santoro, clear your calendar.

* Today on Robot 6 I asked Johnny Ryan, Matt Furie, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Reynolds, Brett Warnock, and Chris Pitzer for their reaction to the closure of Buenaventura Press. I also rounded up online commentary from Ted May, Tom Spurgeon, Heidi MacDonald, Jason Leivian, Frank Santoro, Tim Hensley,Tom Neely, and Chris Butcher, whose post on the matter deserves a link all its own.

* Yesterday HBO aired a teaser for Game of Thrones (note the absence of the indefinite article), its upcoming series based on the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, as well as a still of Sean Bean as Boromir Eddard Stark. I am over the goddamn moon for these books, so I’m quite excited about this.

(Initial news via Winter Is Coming. Embed via Show Tracker. Still via Westeros.)

* In addition, Martin has declared his blog a spoiler-free zone, so now you ought to be able to read it if your’e interested in the TV series but haven’t read the books.

* Ian McKellen says The Hobbit is in good shape: the sets and script are ready, the movie’s casting this month, and he expects shooting to begin by the end of 2010. So that’s good news.

* Also on Robot 6 today: DC is working on a live-action Blue Beetle series.

* Kevin Huizenga has a Fight or Run blog! So far it doesn’t seem to be as exciting as you probably think it is, but I have high hopes. (Via Douglas Wolk.)

* I’m starting to thing willfully misreading an argument and then making mincemeat out of it is just what the rump Comics Journal does. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Zak Smith asks “What’s the Matter with Unicorns?”

* Johnny Ryan is getting blacker and blacker.

* So is Josh Simmons. I’m not even posting that one here.

* Patrick Rosenkranz visits the R. Crumb Genesis exhibit in Portland.

* Scott Pilgrim videogame trailer! To quote me sainted mother, Holy Moses Gaboses. Of course I will never play it because it’s not on the Wii, but still, this is hitting Double Dragon nostalgia buttons I didn’t know I had.

* I love Batman. I’d have included the horseback shot or that shot of him jumping out of the Bat-Tank to fight the Mutant Leader, though.

* Good stuff from Noel Freibert, as per usual.

* I’m normally not the sort of person who gets all excited when a zombie thing releases a picture of one of its zombie for promotional purposes, since the least you should expect from a zombie thing is impressive zombies, but this is some pretty strong work from Greg Nicotero for AMC’s The Walking Dead, sure.

* Real-Life Horror: “Congratulations to the U.S. for winning the right to wrongfully abduct people and send them to their torture with total impunity.”

* The loyal opposition. The Republican Party’s repeated intimations of militarization have disturbing implications.

* My chum Matthew Perpetua reviews the self-titled EP by Trent Reznor’s new band How to Destroy Angels for Pitchfork. Having listened to the EP again this afternoon I think I’d have been harder on it than Matthew; aside from the first song, “The Space In Between” (which is truncated in such a way as to reward listens on repeat), the rest is pretty much in one ear, out the other. But everything about the record, up to including Reznor’s comments about it, screams “transitional project,” so we’ll see where things go from here.

* Finally, the majesty of Diamondhead.

* Ken Parille goes mining for gold in the rich vein that is Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius. There’s so much to talk about in that damn book!

* Recently on Robot 6: How to successfully pitch a superhero comic;

* and Cameron Stewart on leaving The Return of Bruce Wayne.

* Any gamers out there know much about Monster Hunter Tri? Because Sumantra Lahiri’s review at The House Next Door makes it sound like something I’d love.

* Holy crap, this is like the nerd motherlode: The guys who are creating the Dothraki language for HBO’s A Game of Thrones adaptation respond to the Scientific American article that presented a linguist’s wishlist for potential features of the language.

* Cute stuff, Jim Rugg.

* Tom Neely updated his website with hella stuff.

* Real-Life Horror: President Bush breaks his silence to let everyone know how much he loves torturing people.

* Quote of the day:

I think that there’s a whole school of story-tellers presently working who are fascinated by the aesthetics of the weird and supernatural, the fantastic and unseen, but utterly bored with whole people and tight narrative. The Sixth Sense ruined it up for everybody. We’re all sitting around waiting on some undisclosed secret. You don’t need a great protagonist. But you do need a twist.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates on Firefly.

* I’m very sad that Rue McClanahan died. She’s my favorite Golden Girl because the episodes where something sad or touching happens to her just tear my heart right out.

* In less than twelve hours, my post on the Lost finale became the most commented-on post in the history of this blog by a comfortable margin. There are over 50 posts in there, and I claim about one-fiftieth of the credit: The regular crew of Lost watchers who’ve been good enough to do their thing in those Lost thoughts threads week in and week out have created a conversation about the show a million times better than anything I’d ever hoped to find online. Thank you so much, all you participants–and if you haven’t joined in, what better time than now?

* I’ve linked to these posts in the aforementioned thread, but I was pretty taken by some of the thoughts on the episode and the series offered up by Todd VanDerWerff, Alan Sepinwall, and Rob Bricken.

* To that list I’d add Steve Murray/Chip Zdarsky’s magisterial interactive illustration of almost the entire cast of characters. I don’t think he gets any of the women right, but the men are pretty much wall-to-wall impeccable, especially the ones with the craziest or saddest eyes. (Via Kate Beaton.)

* In the sense that last night saw the conclusion of a serialized genre drama I’d been heavily emotionally invested in for almost six years, I couldn’t help but think of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the future installments of which I’ll be waiting for with the proverbial bated breath. Turns out I’m not alone: this is spoilery for the series so be warned, but the GRRM fan site The Tower of the Hand is asking its readers if they’d be okay with a certain loose end remaining forever untied.

* Tom Spurgeon on three comics arguments we could be having instead of all the old, tired, stupid ones. Much more on this anon.

* CRwM spots a passage from C.S. Lewis on fear vs. dread that reads like something H.P. Lovecraft could have written. Sharp stuff from the Don of Narnia.

* That’s some crazy Frank Quitely Green Lantern art. Who colored this thing?

* If Dave Kiersh keeps drawing ’em, I’ll keep linking to ’em.

* If Zak Smith keeps writing ’em, I’ll keep linking to ’em. This one’s on Weird vs. Noir storytelling. Think of the subway episode of Seinfeld when you read it.

* Recently on Robot 6: Tom Neely draws the bloody bejesus out of Conan;

* Jim Woodring draws the bloody bejesus out of whatever the hell the things he’s drawing are;

* and the comics argument I’m interested in having, spinning out of this provocative post by Tom Spurgeon.

* Whoa, local boy makes good! Jason Adams talks A Nightmare on Elm Street–original, sequels, remake–for NBC. He’s even got a separate piece on the seven best Nightmare kills! Today My New Plaid Pants, tomorrow the Peacock Network, apparently. Jason, this is great–congratulations! You know I’ve always believed in you. <3 * A couple of big interviews with A Song of Ice and Fire/A Game of Thrones‘ George R.R. Martin popped up over the past couple of days. First, here he is in the Cover to Cover podcast at the Dragon Page. There are a few interesting tidbits in this one.

* First, he confirms that HBO’s plan is to dedicate one season to each book in the series. I wonder if each one will have a new title, or if that’ll be too confusing? It’d look cool on your DVD shelf, at least.

* Second, he talks about the extensive delays for the publication of volume four, A Feast for Crows, and the still-unfinished volume five, A Dance with Dragons. Martin says that one of the main obstacles for these two books was a five-year jump in the storyline he’d initially planned to take place between books three and four. He spent a full year writing the fourth book with that device in place before coming to the conclusion that it just wasn’t working, scrapping it and starting over. That’s what led to the publication of A Feast for Crows as we know it, and of course in that book’s afterword he explained that the story expanded in the writing to such a degree that one book essentially became two, with A Dance with Dragons following the characters we don’t really see in Crows. However, in the podcast he notes that while the five-year gap didn’t work for most of the story, it did work for some of the story. But to get rid of all that bathwater, he had to lose the baby too, and it’s reworking the parts that worked fine with his original plan that’s giving him so much trouble.

* Third, he comes out and says that he knows A Song of Ice and Fire is his magnum opus, the work for which he’ll be remembered, so he’s become a perfectionist about it. When the interviewers point out that this is self-applying an ungodly amount of pressure, he kind of sighingly acknowledges it. Poor dude. (Link via Martin’s LJ.)

* The other big interview is with the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan, the Battlestar Galactica superfan whose nerd-centric TV writing for a mainstream publication has established her as a sort of less annoying man’s Doc Jensen. Ryan confirms through HBO that the actress playing Daenerys Targaryne is indeed being recast, along with the previously switched-up Catelyn Stark. The interview itself focuses on Martin’s long history with Hollywood, his role in the creation of the HBO series, and of course the lateness of A Dance with Dragons, plus the upcoming comics adaptation of Martin’s vampire novel Fevre Dream from Avatar. Nothing earthshattering, but I am such a fucking whore for these books I’ll take whatever I can get. And you, dear readers, get to take it with me! (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Recently on Robot 6: Ross Campbell is too sexy for his comics;

* and Brian Chippendale explains it all. Audio and video previews of If n’ Oof abound. (Via Frank Santoro.)

* Rich Juzwiak watches Tom Six’s The Human Centipede so you don’t have to. Sounds like the torture-porn equivalent of Snakes on a Plane.

* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles Neil Marshall’s The Descent as part of his New Cult Canon series. It’s a solid piece, but I really don’t understand the very popular notion that the original cut of the film is somehow bleaker and more uncompromising than the revision. There are more horrifying things than monsters, you know?

* Post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction set in a world where Cthulhu has successfully risen? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Real Life Horror: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Cue Locke-in-the-Hatch video, roll credits. (Via everyone.)

* Allow me to be the 3,892nd person to direct you to Jay Pavlina’s Super Mario Bros. Crossover, an online simulator of the original Super Mario Nintendo game wherein you can play as Link, Samus Aran, Simon Belmont, Mega Man, or one of the dudes from Contra–complete with their customary moves and weapons. Good golly, as soon as I finish New Super Mario Bros. Wii I know how I’ll be spending my weekends.

* Jeepers Creepers, dig this “Middle-earth metro map” t-shirt. I wear a Men’s size M if anyone’s interested in buying me a belated birthday present, is all I’m saying. (Via Topless Robot.)

* It’s Wilson Day!

* Also, Tom Spurgeon wrote a book about the John Romitas! Sort of!

* I am quite flattered and surprised to see that my and Isaac Moylan’s The Side Effects of the Cocaine: David Bowie April 1975-February 1976 made the illustrious NeilAlien’s Favorites of MoCCA 02010!

* Lots of good news on Robot 6: Graeme McMillan is back, Graeme and Kevin Melrose are also working on our new Hollywood/nerd-culture-centric sister blog Spinoff Online, and we’ve revised our comment guidelines. I know there are people reading the blog who wouldn’t touch the comments with a ten-meter cattle prod; we’re going to change that. The “MARVEL/DC/BENDIS/JOHNS SUXXXX” days are over.

* Case in point: Inspired by Tom Spurgeon and Tim O’Neil, I asked Robot 6’s readers what makes them say “okay, that’s enough” when it comes to a comic, creator, or character. The responses have been smart, civil, and in some cases provocative. Check ’em out.

* Holy cow, is this fascinating: Scientific America’s Joshua Harthshorne whips up a linguist’s wishlist for heretofore largely theoretical features of language he’d like to see the creators of the Dothraki tongue for HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones pick up, just for the experiment of seeing how the fans who’ll make it a point to learn the language work with them. For example:

Action verbs. For action verbs in English and possibly all languages, the subject is the doer and the object the do-ee (“Mary broke/kicked/threw the vase”). Though again there are a few more complicated languages, prominent theorists posit this pattern is an innate part of our linguistic minds. However, others argue the dominance of this pattern is an historical accident and verbs where the doer is the object and the do-ee is the subject should be perfectly learnable. Numerous studies have shown that both adults and preschoolers find it very difficult to learn subject-do-ee verbs (“The vase shbroke Mary” = “Mary broke the vase”), but again these studies are short, so perhaps the participants simply didn’t spend enough time learning and using the new verbs. Use this pattern for Dothraki — or, even better, have some verbs follow one pattern (“break”) and other verbs the other (shbroke) — and we’ll see how well students can do given more time.

You’ll want to click the link to read the whole thing and catch all the linkage and annotations that my rudimentary copypasta won’t convey. (Via Westeros.)

* Eric Heisserer, who will always be known around these parts as the creator of maybe my favorite web-horror project Dionaea House, tells io9 that the Thing prequel he’s now working on (revising a screenplay by Ronald Moore) will be as direct a prequel to John Carpenter’s version as he can possibly manage. So that’s nice. (Via Dread Central.)

* Grab yourself a cold one and treat yourself to a Matt Maxwell con report, this one on Stumptown.

* Zom from the Mindless Ones talks about Batman & Robin colorist Alex Sinclair and glo-fi. With Brendan McCarthy referring to his current style as such not just in interviews but within the printed pages of his “Doktor America” strip with Matt Fraction in Marvel’s Who Won’t Wield the Shield? one-shot, I wonder if this concept is gaining some actual currency in comics circles…?

* David Bordwell on (among other things) the decline of the DVD and Apocalypse Now Redux (they’re unrelated).

* CRwM trounces the sneak preview of Jonah Hex in grand style. I LOL’d.

* They’re making The Ring 3D. It’s going to be “teen-centric.” There you have it.

* Heidi MacDonald catches that that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle head from yesterday isn’t part of the upcoming movie, it’s from a class taught by Tom Savini. On the other hand, this Jon Vermilyea zine cover she found is totally real.

* Henry & Glenn Forever!

* The heck is this?

* Scott Pilgrim vs. Star Wars? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I wish our shitty fantasy movies were as weird and pretty as Red Sonja apparently is, at least when you take five frames from the movie and divorce them completely from, you know, Brigitte Nielsen and the whole rest of the movie.

* A horror movie should actually do what these Indian anti-texting-while-driving PSAs are doing. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* The new M.I.A. video could be improved if it ended with a title card reading “GET IT????” in giant block letters, but as it stands you’ll just have to supply that message yourself. Trust me, it won’t be difficult.

* You ever wanna shatter your innocence? Visit Loch Ness, where the big walk-through museum exhibit thing ends by telling you all the most famous pieces of evidence are either misidentified or outright hoaxes and that the Monster is most likely a series of landlocked sturgeons. Anyway, the locals used to believe a lot more than they do now, I guess. (Poor form on the part of that article for labeling the deathbed-revelation hoax Surgeon’s Photograph as “an undated file photo of a shadowy shape that some people say is a photo of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.”) (Via Loren Coleman, who in addition to cryptozoology appears to be investigating the outer limits of the fair use doctrine.)

Here’s how you know the Night’s Watch ain’t what it used to be: They let Matt Wiegle slip past their defenses and graffiti some birthday wishes for me on the Wall. Poor Jon Snow must be wondering what he’s gotten himself into!

Yes, if you’re wondering, getting personalized George R.R. Martin/A Song of Ice and Fire birthday art for my birthday is a pip and a half.

* The first annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, or C2E2, was held this past weekend. Apparently attendance was unexpectedly light, and sales were subsequently spotty, but beyond that the show appears quite well received.

* Regarding the attendance figures, I’ll say this: 1) I figure San Diego casts a long shadow over the other big shows. Given several years of widely derided Chicago cons, a new con in Chicago will probably have to wait a while before attracting some of what could be seen as its natural constituency back from Southern California.

* 2) The Con War storyline may be Reed’s best friend, in that it’s difficult to look worse than Wizard tends to. Simply releasing an honest attendance figure already puts them a step ahead of the game, and I figure there’ll be plenty of “oh man this is so much better than Rosemont” buzz going around the city by this time next year.

* Beyond that, as Tom Spurgeon notes, it obviously crushed Wizard’s concurrent Anaheim show in terms of fan and media buzz. But that’s to be expected given the near-total lack of industry support for Wizard’s shows following Gareb Shamus’s decision to pit his Big Apple show head to head against Reed’s New York Comic Con, and the much-rumored behind-the-scenes antics that followed that decision. Without the publishers playing ball, there’s nothing to buzz about, after all.

* Beyond Heidi and Tom’s aforelinked ruminations, my colleagues at Robot 6 have posted three catch-all round-up posts for Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.

* Announcements that caught my eye: Steve Rogers: Super-Soldier by Ed Brubaker and Dale Eaglesham; a street-level Marvel crossover miniseries called Shadowland; more Ultimate [Cryptic Noun] minis by Brian Michael Bendis; Powers going (arrrrgh) bimonthly; Jonathan Hickman saying that Secret Warriors has a natural end-point coming up before issue #30, making it almost a manga-model run; Casanova moving from Image to Marvel/Icon with new colors; maybe the strangest-sounding X-Men line relaunch ever.

* Ah, I thought I remembered Frank Miller saying Batman was out of his anti-terrorist graphic novel, but that the book itself was going ahead without Batman anyway–in fact, I thought that when he said at MoCCA that he wasn’t doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore, he meant he was abandoning the whole idea. But it sounds like he’s not, and like Xerxes, the 300 prequel, is proceeding apace. Good news.

* Now that I’m finally allowing myself to follow news about the production of A Game of Thrones on HBO, I’m pretty surprised to discover that one of the two female leads has been recast following the completion of the pilot, while the other is the subject of persistent recasting rumors herself. Now, shit happens, even on great fantasy projects–Peter Jackson recast Aragorn after shooting started, after all. And supposedly HBO suits are still making all the right noises about the pilot being good. But it’s weird.

* Hope Larson’s adapting A Wrinkle in Time! That’s a good match.

* I’m glad to see Doctor Strange superfan NeilAlien is on my side re: the dialogue in Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man: Fever #1.

* John Allison does the ’80s X-Ladies.

* John Cassaday drawing Superman covers? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Johnny Ryan gets darker and darker, if that’s possible. It’s like Prison Pit is infecting his strip work.

* Speaking of dark, Renee fucking French.

* The comics Dave Kiersh has been posting on the New Bodega blog over the past week or so are like the perfect cross between his old, wistful stuff and his more recent teenspolitation-type things.

* Wow, that’s a beautiful (and ominous!) Batman & Robin #12 variant cover by Andy Clarke.

* It’s weird that cryptozoology expert Loren Coleman reprinted this whole article on his own site–slightly less weird than the time he heavily implied that the reason the Destination Truth guy wasn’t gonna do as many cryptozoology episodes of his series was so he could be a sex tourist in Asia, but still weird–but please don’t let that put you off this very cool piece on, among other things, how escaped snakes and crocodiles from medieval menageries helped give rise to reports of dragons in England. It gets a little wild and wooly after that part, but the material on actual animals is delightful.

* See if you can guess the plot point mentioned in Ed Gonzalez’s review of Tom Six’s The Human Centipede that made me decide that no, I won’t be seeing this movie.

* The video for “Drunk Girls” by LCD Soundsytem looks like it was pulled from the Joker’s Director’s Series DVD. I feel like this is what unlucky henchmen have to deal with all the time. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Finally, on Saturday the Missus and I went to see Eric Whitacre conduct a program of his work at Carnegie Hall. Christ, what beautiful music. He word-premiered a piece that moved me to tears based on its sheer loveliness alone; how often can you say that?

* Sean on Dead Tree alert: I have a piece on Grant Morrison’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne in the new issue of Maxim, featuring a lovely young lady with brown hair whose name eludes me on the cover. It’s on page 34, I think. Woo!

* Speaking of Morrison, here he is being interviewed by Comics Alliance, io9, and MTV Splash Page, all on the topic of Batman. If I were the assistant principal at time-displaced Tom Spurgeon’s middle school I would make him copy all these by hand for detention. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* They are softening a bit about releasing a Nightbreed director’s cut on DVD. Just a bit, though. Apparently the names being collected by Barker’s official fan site are having some effect, so if you think you’d buy a copy and you haven’t done so already, please email them with an intelligently written message of support. It’ll help!

* Diamond and the comics retailers it distributes comics to are talking about moving new comics day to Tuesday, bringing it in line with music, movies, and books. How about just getting in step with every single other form of media and not shipping everything a day late when there was a holiday the week before? That is the romper room-est thing about this romper-room industry.

* Ed Brubaker’s writing another Captain America spinoff miniseries. Fine with me!

* Gene Philips has me ever-so-slightly reconsidering my position on Desmond from Lost.

* Oh man, Virgil Partch. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Yesterday I finished A Feast for Crows, the fourth and at this point latest book in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, which is being adapted on HBO as A Game of Thrones. Holy shit, you guys, these books. Anyway, I decided to put aside the prospect of hunting down and reading the three prequel novella’s he’s written and just dive right into the Song of Ice and Fire sections of the internet. This means I finally got to read his story about Jaime Lannister, aka the Kingslayer, fighting Cthulhu. Good golly miss molly. WARNING: The Ice and Fire-verse characters in the story are situated in-continuity, so the story’s spoilery for all the way up through the third book in the series or so. That said, it’s also awesome.

* Thom Yorke covering “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division! This had me so excited that by the time the main keyboard melody kicked in I was laughing out loud. Had I been there I would have totally and completely misplaced my shit.

* The Diary of a Teenage Girl: The Play is extending its run through May 1st. If you live in or near the city you should see it.

* Brian Chippendale on Captain America and the teabaggers. ‘Nuff said, to coin a phrase.

* My buddy Rickey Purdin went to MoCCA and all he got was like a million comics.

* Tom Spurgeon on Todd Hignite & Jordan Crane on Jaime Hernandez.

* Gorgeous retro-paperback comic cover designs from Fonografiks.

* I love that A Game of Thrones has a “language creator” on staff.

* Oh yeah, had I not mentioned Spinoff Online?

* Lost tonight! Give last week’s Lost thoughts one more once-over, then come by later for this week’s discussion!