* Recently on Robot 6: Lots of Avengers news, to match lots of Avengers news elsewhere. That is a lot of Avengers product. If I were Tom Spurgeon I’d now deliver a funny “whodathunkit” gag about the Avengers and Green Lantern being the biggest franchises in comics.

* Rob Bricken hoists plagiarist Nick Simmons with his own petard. If you read any single post about this whole debacle, make it that one. But if you want, you can throw in Tom Spurgeon’s depressing analysis of the moral relativism of many young artists and fans commenting on the matter.

* Oh God! Oh Christ! Oh Jesus Christ! A Muppet Wicker Man! The ending, as you’d expect, is a killer.

* I always enjoy Chris Butcher’s Previews liveblogging: Part One and Part Two, for your pleasure.

* HBO has officially greenlit A Game of Thrones Season One. I’m looking forward to it, even though I don’t have HBO.

* Just a reminder: I typically have my weekly Lost thoughts post up by, oh, 11:30pm Eastern time at the absolute latest, frequently way before then. (I tend to watch it starting at 10 rather than 9, hence the delay.) I’ve really enjoyed the comment-thread discussions lately, and the more the merrier.

* Amy Sedaris and George Takei are among the voice actors in the amazing pilot for Neon Knome, Paper Rad/Cold Heat impresario Ben Jones’s Adult Swim series-in-waiting. But it will never end up on the air for you to abuse Ambien to unless you vote for it in this contest. Team Comics already pissed away a decade’s worth of increased clout by failing to get Michael Kupperman’s Snake ‘n’ Bacon over; let’s not let this happen again.

* More Destructor fan art over at We Are The LAW, this time from the great Chris Ward. Look for a tease of a future Destructor storyline in the comments!

* Looks like Zak Smith/Sabbath’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars is going to be regular reading for me: Dig this entry on a creation of his called the Vomiter, which is basically a postapocalypitcally infected human who pukes a creature selected from the monster section of the guidebook with a roll of the dice out of an internal dimensional vortex. Damn.

* Todd VanDerWerff may well be the only Lost critic worth reading. It’s delightful watching him think about Jack, even as someone who (unlike VanDerWerff and about 90% of the show’s audience) has never not liked the character.

* Speaking of Lost, things are cooking with gas in the comment thread for this week’s post on the show, so be sure to chime in if you’re interested.

* Speaking of lotsa interesting comment-thread fodder, many smart people have chimed in about George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones books, in such a way as to intrigue me, even if I can immediately grok Tom Spurgeon’s reservations about them.

* ADDTF fave Ross Campbell is doing a new superhero book from SLG called Shadoweyes, but because it’s a Ross Campbell comic, it starts with two gothy girls lying around on a bed and eating vegan food, so that’s good news. My chums at Robot 6 have an interview about it and a preview of it.

* Gary Groth’s grudging admission that TCJ.com is the pits rapidly became as irritating as his initial “We’re now gracing your shitty comics Internet with our presence–you’re welcome, America” post, so it’s nice to see Chris Allen smacking the new post around a bit. I’ve said it before and it looks like I’ll be saying it again and again: You can’t win just by showing up anymore.

* This one goes out to Blaise Larmee.

* Want to reignite interest in your bloated, overlong, shit-the-bed-in-the-third-movie Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy in two easy steps? Cast Ian McShane as Blackbeard and break open the fuckin’ canned peaches.

* Though she is a supporter of motion-capture performances like that of Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Kristin Thompson writes a compelling essay about why they nevertheless shouldn’t qualify for the traditional acting Oscar categories. This is a mitzvah, as the argument really should be hashed out by people with an appreciation both for the technology and the reasons why it’s different than traditional acting, and not as some Internet-style “LUDDITES VS. THE FUTURE” flamewar. One thing though: Zoe Saldana was getting Oscar buzz for her performances as Love Interest in Avatar? I thought that character and everything she brought to it was just as rote as everything else in the movie.

* I haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, though it’s very very high up on my list of “next big prose series I’m reading.” (Right now in my head I’m going through a long digression about how there’s only so much time in the day and how much my Comics Time reading and reviewing prevents me from reading long serialized works of both comics and prose, and moreover how I’ve had the first two discs of Mad Men Season One in my backpack for like four months, and how I’m only up to World 5 of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and god only knows how long it’s gonna take me to get through all of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster now that I have all 18 volumes finally, and hey what about the long-promised revision of my anti-Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets thing that would require me to read all those digests, and for Chrissakes I’m not even up to First Bull Run in the John Keegan American Civil War book, and on and on and on. But you can take it as read.) But it seems to me that an HBO grown-up fantasy series could be to die for, and casting Sean Bean in the lead seems like a great way to start. The whole rest of the cast can be seen at that link, too. Maybe readers can chime in as to who’s good and who sucks in the comments.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch sings the praises of Soldier X. My great hope is that all this Internet attention will spur someone at Marvel into saying, “Ah, what the hell, let’s collect the damn thing.” Help us, David Gabriel–you’re our only hope! Anyway, here’s a nice bit from Marc-Oliver’s review:

This is the point where Soldier X reveals its kinship with Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’ Omega the Unknown, but also with Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Like those works, Soldier X treats superheroes as a metaphor for the literal limitlessness of the human imagination–easily the single most compelling aspect of the genre, as well as, unfortunately, the single most overlooked one.

* A shadowy cabal of my chums from one of my ex-employers has started up a sketch blog called We Are The LAW, where we’re taking turns drawing characters we like. We’ve actually kicked things off with two characters of our own devising: Justin Aclin’s Geist from Hero House, and mine own Destructor from my comics with Matt Wiegle. I want to emphasize that only a handful of us can actually, you know, draw, but hey, what the hell. Below is Geist by me, Destructor by Ben Morse, and Destructor and friends by T.J. Dietsch. Click the links for the full-sized versions.

* Elsewhere, Rickey Purdin draws the Black Flame from B.P.R.D. The sequence where he walks into the Zinco boardroom in full Nazi supervillain regalia with his head on fire and announces “You’re all fired” is one of the all-time great comic book moments I’ve ever read. Full stop.

PS: I wonder if Zinco and Cinco have any connection?

* A good way to prep for tonight’s Lost is to read what Kiel Phegley’s mom Lynn thought of last week’s episode. Imagine a recap column written by Lapidus and you’re pretty much there.

* When I step back and take a look at my tastes–in comics, in music, in film, and in literature–the former two appear to be much broader than the latter two. Provided a first-glance look at the art doesn’t make me want to close the book and not look again, I’ll read virtually any comic, I’m rather voracious about it, I enjoy the experience of reading a lot by a lot of people, etc. With music I’m almost obnoxiously eclectic, and while I’m not necessarily a first-adopter when it comes to new artists (particularly compared with dedicated music bloggers) I do indeed enjoy an enormously wide range. In neither case is this an “eat your vegetables” deal–I truly like a lot of different stuff.

But when you look at my film-viewing habits over the past year or two or perhaps even longer, I’m basically only ever watching and talking about genre films from major studios. That’s due in part to the parameters of this blog during its all-horror incarnation, and to the fact that I really do love horror and a lot of other genre entertainments, and to the fact that tracking down genuine independent and art-house fair involves an expenditure of time and money, but I don’t feel the movie-review sidebar of my blog is actually representative of what I’m interested in overall. I’m a little more expansive in what I’ve been reading prose-wise, but only a little. Again, this is striking me as odd. There’s probably no reason why my movie-watching and book-reading habits shouldn’t be as wide-ranging and reliant on independent outlets as are my music-listening and comics-reading habits.

* In a few weeks I will have spent a year reviewing three comics a week every week without fail. I’m proud of this achievement and I’ve gotten a lot out of it. I still have a bunch of Comics Journal backlog to post and a pile of review copies I really want to get to, so it may stretch into the New Year as well. But one thing that’s really fallen by the wayside, particularly as the year has gone on, is my prose reading. (Actually that’s probably a good reason why the books I’ve read haven’t been all over the map–I haven’t read enough one way or the other.) I think it would be a lot of fun to be reading prose at the rate I’ve been reading comics lately, or at least close to it. I sometimes sit around and think of how much fun it’ll be to finally read The Master and Margarita, or the two or three Chuck Palahniuk books I haven’t gotten to yet, or Moby-Dick, or maybe taking a crack at those George R.R. Martin fantasy novels HBO is going to adapt, or diving into Robert E. Howard because I feel like my pulp pump has been duly primed, or Nixonland, or the Stephen King short story collections that aren’t Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, or Four Past Midnight, or or or or or. Nearly all of my dedicated reading time is taken up by comics, though. Maybe I’ll change that in the New Year, despite how much I’ve dug my thrice weekly Comics Time.

* Oddly, I don’t feel like my writing time has been impacted nearly as much, even though I’ve spent more time on the blog than ever before. I think that’s because my writing habits have always been weird and dependent on long periods of simmering and stewing and mulling culminating in several-hour bursts of creativity, rinse, repeat. That’s an easy schedule to fit into existing frameworks. Meanwhile, having Murder come out scratched a big part of that itch to Be A Comics Writer, obviously. And I have two separate “graphic novels” (in this case meaning “book-length collections of interrelated short stories) largely in the hands of their artists right now, plus a separate short story or two, so I don’t feel like I’ve been slacking.

* One thing you will not see me do, no matter how much I blog enthusiastically about it, is start playing World of Warcraft or any other video game, because that would so clearly be a disaster for me it’s almost comical. There goes the little time I’m not spending at my day job, doing freelance work, doing personal writing and reading, or doing blog writing and reading–poof, gone. No can do!

* My pal Rachel Molino takes a look at Rafael Grampa’s Mesmo Delivery for Wizard.

* Dig AdHouse honcho Chris Pitzer’s eBay auctions, man. Lotsa good, often OOP stuff for cheap.

* Kevin Eastman says that David Fincher, Zack Snyder, and Gore Verbinski will be directing segments in the new Heavy Metal movie, and I totally believe every word he’s saying, don’t you? (Via Splash Page.)

* Bruce Baugh explains why he thinks World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King events are working so well: It’s optional, it’s containable, it’s graspable, and it makes it worth your while.

* Speaking of which, I know I’m spending an awful lot of blog time on something I don’t participate in in any way, but I could not help but dig the hell out of the cinematic intro to the Lich King expansion pack:

One thing Bruce has discussed in his “WoW for N00BS” posts is that the game has a zesty sense of scale, embiggening stuff to make it more awesome. Good! One of the advantages of doing something as unrepentantly nerdy as designing World of Warcraft is that you don’t need to be ad hoc apologists for your material, making sure it’s as realistic as a historical epic or as rooted in readily graspable allegory as possible. If you want to show a giant Sauron guy in skull armor and furry boots break free of a throne encased in a glacier and unleash a gigantic zombie dragon thing in order to psyche up your undead army over music that launches every salvo in the generic-fantasy-score arsenal and narration that’s one vowel away from namechecking the Forest of Lornadoon like it’s straight outta Bored of the Rings, you can knock yourself completely out with it. You can commit.

* In the comment thread downblog, Bruce, Tom Spurgeon, and Strange Ink’s Sean B. offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the soon-to-be-seen-on-not-TV-but-HBO fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Bruce and Sean are mostly pro, Tom mostly con.

* ReFlogging part one: Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit!

* ReFlogging part two: deeply delightful Hulk sequence!

To the extent that things like World War Hulk work, it’s because that angry, savage Hulk can be seen as a reaction against the world failing to work like it does for him in stories like this. The Hulk is both the world as it is and the world as it should be. Batman is the same way, I think, only in his angry version he’s trying to beat the world back into making a sense it fails to make in his non-angry version rather than lashing out against the world when its pre-fallen splendor is interrupted for him. In other words, Batman’s innocence aspect is without hope, while the Hulk’s experience aspect is without hope, if that makes sense.

* Why would you mess with Manuel? (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Apparently the next, possibly Danny Boyle-directed 28 Units of Time Later movie will not be called 28 Months Later. Once upon a time there was an idea for a prequel that took place before the bulk of the events in 28 Days Later—28 Hours Later, perhaps–and maybe that’s what’s going on here. (Via STYD.)

* My pal Rob Bricken, editor of Topless Robot, gets the interview treatment from Poe Ghostal.

* So it looks like They’re making “>an HBO series out of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, to be called Game of Thrones after the first novel in the series. My reaction maps to Rob’s in virtually every particular, including the whole “never read ’em” angle and the “fantasy give the HBO drama treatment could be pretty spectacular” vibe.

* Curt Purcell takes a swing at a pair of frequently voiced memes among horror fans: “it’s scarier because it could really happen” and “what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see.” I will say that I’ve found myself having more intense reactions to horror films in which the “monster” is a human, but I think that has more to do with me being frightened by human cruelty than with plausibility; perfectly plausible “nature gone wild” movies wouldn’t have the same effect.

* Finally, rest in noise, Mitch Mitchell.

Dig this, post-apocalyptic fiction fans: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection of eschatological short stories by everyone from Stephen King to Jonathan Lethem to Cory Doctorow to George R.R. Martin. (Via GalleyCat, via Justin Aclin.)