* Recently on Robot 6: Everybody’s talking about “The Love Bunglers,” and everybody should be talking about Jim Woodring too.

* Dustin Harbin salutes Dylan Williams.

* Lisa Hanawalt draws J.G. Ballard and opens a spiffy new store.

* New comics from Jonny Negron! Not, perhaps, what you’d expect.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two has taken a turn.

* Grant Morrison’s long-discussed plans for a Wonder Woman series seem to be taking shape for sometime next year. Sounds kinky. I wonder if anyone will mutilate a horse, walk around a room naked, or dismember a guy in this one.

* David B. is working on a book on the history of U.S./Middle East relations?

* DC’s relaunch moved a lot of units. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the first time a Big Two publisher has ever brought forth its own set of actual sales figures since I’ve been following these things.

* Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy never seemed to find its way into Wizard’s hallowed halls when I worked there during its run, so I have yet to read any of it. I can’t tell if the NYCC announcement that the title’s moving to Dark Horse means they’ll also be reprinting the previous material in addition to the three new issues they’ve got planned. I hope it does. There couldn’t be a more influential artist than Darrow right now.

* The Sleeper/Criminal/Incognito team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are working on a Lovecraftian noir series called Fatale, surprisingly for Image rather than Marvel’s creator-owned Icon line.

* At Marvel proper, Rick Remender and Gabriel Hardman, one of their best writers and best artists respectively, will be taking over Secret Avengers. It’ll probably be pretty darn good. I read somewhere that Bettie Breitweiser, one of their best colorists, won’t be rejoining Hardman here, though, which is too bad. Also Jack Kirby deserved more credit and rights and money and so do his heirs, but you knew that.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort explains how nearly all of a given superhero franchise’s titles can end up dumped into stores on the same day. I do wonder how DC’s experiment with rigorous scheduling will affect this conventional wisdom.

* Worth noting: Zak Smith/Sabbath wrote an RPG manual for his fantasy city Vornheim.

* Real Life Horror: Wake me when Obama sends military advisors to take down the pope.

* They’re not making movie cameras anymore. My jaw dropped when I read this.

* Roger Corman, ladies and gentlemen.

* Scarlet Witch cosplayer at NYCC photographed by Judy Stephens. Sure, sure.

* Sammy Harkham, Edie Fake, and Michael DeForge lead a strong slate of Ignatz Award nominees this year. Who knows — maybe the voters will throw the obviously undeserving Chris Ware a pity win.

* Here’s the latest in a series of dispiriting interviews with the gifted superhero comics writer Grant Morrison. It’s related to this Rolling Stone profile, which in turn is accompanied by this quite good “best of Grant Morrison” list by Matthew Perpetua.

* The large Arizona comics retail chain Atomic Comics has abruptly gone out of business, with owner Mike Malve filing for bankruptcy. Comics people I talked to about this today were pretty freaked out.

* In a rare return to his home turf Jog the Blog, Joe McCulloch presents a short bit of (also rare lately) writing on art comics, among other things, with his Top Ten Comics list.

* Tucker Stone really liked Ryan Cecil Smith’s SF #1. I liked it too.

* Secret Acres’ Barry and Leon present their PACC con report. They also note that Dylan Williams of the very valuable comics publisher Sparkplug is ill, which I’m sad to hear. Get well, Dylan!

* Wow: Tom Neely is working on one of Matt Maxwell’s Western-horror Strangeways comics.

* Here’s a neat-looking project from Split Lip writer and nascent-horror-blogosphere veteran Sam Costello and artist Neal Von Flue: Labor and Love, a collection of four comics adaptations of American folk ballads. It debuts at SPX.

* Zak Smith on the most disturbing room in D&D.

* Matt Rota draws the Republican Party in action for the New York Times.

* Jerry Leiber, half of the Leiber/Stoller songwriting team, has died. What a monstrous talent.

* Jim Hanley’s Universe is the best comic shop I’ve ever been to. Ten years ago, my adult life in comics began there, when I paid a visit to pick up Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men on a whim. It’s been my “local comic shop” for most of the rest of the decade. So I was stunned and sadden to hear that Hanley’s Staten Island branch was all but swept away by flooding this past weekend. All that they’re asking in terms of help is that you drop by either branch and buy something, so today I stopped in and picked up Jesse Moynihan’s Forming Vol. 1 from Nowbrow and Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #2—1969 from Top Shelf. Spending forty bucks on comics has rarely felt so good. If you’re in the city, please support this wonderful store.

* If you care about Beck or what used to be called alternative music at all, you definitely want to read Ryan Dombral’s career-spanning interview with Beck at Pitchfork. What a thoughtful, honest guy he seems like. I was heartbroken to read that he lost two years’ worth of Sea Change-style music — 35 songs in all — when he misplaced a suitcase full of recordings prior to shifting gears and recording Guero with leftover ideas from the Dust Brothers, but even more horrifying is that apparently he’s never heard anyone talk nicely about his masterpiece, Midnite Vultures, and thus is sitting on 25 songs recorded in the same period. This is a travesty. From now on, if you see Beck, tell him you loved Midnite Vultures.

* Clive Barker has a prose essay collection out? Or coming out soon? Called The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies? Nice.

* Say, did I mention that ADDXSTC-fave bloggers Jim Henley and Bruce Baugh have a new RPG blog called 20 X 20 Room? Probably not, since despite one or the other of them telling me so, I only really realized it yesterday. Well, now you know. They’re two of the smartest and most humanistic writers on gaming and genre art around, and you’d be hard pressed to find two bloggers more influential on my non-blogging life than they.

* John Porcellino presents his personal Top Ten Comics. It’s a pleasure to hear the great cartoonist talk about some of the other great cartoonists (Clowes and Kirby get two books apiece), as well as some off-the-beaten-path choices.

* Kevin Czap of Comix Cube reports from the Philadelphia Alternative Comics Convention, a well-regarded newcomer on the regional alt/art show scene. I don’t think there’s any reason why every city with a decent-sized number of alternative cartoonists can’t put together something like this, even if the result doesn’t end up with the high profile of a BCGF or Stumptown or TCAF or whatever.

* Benjamin Marra crushes the competition with this New Gods tribute. Omega Effect annihilation. MARRA IS!

* Speaking of Ben, who I remind you I’ll bless him for digging this up. It’s like He-Man and Skeletor are fighting in the middle of an issue of Cold Heat.

* I don’t know who Steingrim Veum is, but he sure can draw orgies. This is wonderful stuff. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Aeron Alfrey has put together another astonishing art gallery for his site Monster Brains, this time starring pulp cover artist Hannes Bok. In addition to stippling that’d make Drew Friedman jealous, Bok makes his otherworld creatures and scenes truly otherworldly. If there’s one thing we’ve lost from decades of seeing monsters come to life on movie screens — and don’t get me wrong, I treasure a lot of those monsters — it’s their uncanniness. It’s very very rare to see a monster that makes you feel like you’ve endangered yourself simply by seeing it.

* I literally cheered for this piece by the Comics Grid’s Katlheen Dunley on Ben Katchor and the world as a palimpsest.

* Chester Brown’s Paying For It: The Movie is probably not gonna happen.

* Jordan Crane’s The Last Lonely Saturday: The Movie actually has happened!

* My Spider-Man is black.

* News flash: Fantagraphics’ Jacob Covey-designed Carl Barks Disney Ducks comics are going to be very attractive.

* Tom Spurgeon’s description does a terrific job of selling Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe Back Home, but really, the cartoon on the cover speaks volumes. Can you imagine seeing this at the time? Lately it has seemed to me that deflating America’s self-image of World War II and its aftermath is vital to the country’s long-term health, and man, is this a shot to the face of those notions.

* Maybe I should just outsource this whole blog to Jonny Negron.

* And speaking of ADDXSTC “Hey look at this art” favorites, I don’t know if this Wei Yan piece is an homage to similarly formatted Renee French drawings, but either way, very nice.

* I won’t spoil the latest Zach Hazard Vaupen gag comic for you. Vaupen’s Rusted Skin stuff is fascinating to me, because comedically it’s totally gag comics, but visually it’s not at all. There’s nothing else like that.

* Okay, a Batman video game in which you have the option of playing as Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns Batman is a Batman video game I’d enjoy playing, but only if playing as that Batman.

* You know, it’s been way, way too long since I simply looked at a picture of Katee Sackhoff and went “guh.” Guh.

* I read A Dance with Dragons. I liked it. If you’ve read it, come talk about it with me, artists Matt Wiegle and Sam Bosma, A Song of Ice and Fire superfans/megaexperts Elio & Linda, and other august personages.

* Last week I assembled a massive gallery of great Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire fanart from around the web for Robot 6. Do check it out; there’s something for everyone, or at least every ASoIaF fan. (This piece is by Rory Phillips.)

* Your top comics story: Peter Laird is discontinuing the Xeric Grants for self-published comics following one final round of grants in May 2012. This is terrible, terrible news. Laird says he’s doing that because digital publishing and digital fundraising have abrogated the need for the Xeric, but I think that’s a massive misreading of a) what kinds of comics are made feasible by webcomics; b) what kind of comics are capable of mounting successful Kickstarter campaigns without having first established a network of contacts in online comics fandom; c) the need North American comics have for one of the few awards that really is a mark of quality (for my money it’s the Xerics, the Ignatzes, and then perhaps the awards given by TCAF and Stumptown). This is going to make things a lot tougher on alternative comics creators — you need look no further than the list of past recipients to see how many noteworthy careers were made possible in part by the Xeric. That’s gone, now. It’s tough to object to Laird’s stated goal of transferring his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle millions from funnybooks to actual improving-people’s-lives charities, but I still think the Xerics will be sorely missed.

* Your other top comics story: Borders is dead.

* Your top nerd story: The Dwarves from The Hobbit look awesome. This is a fanmade photoshop of all the pictures released so far, and it fakes Thorin’s body based on the bust shot we’ve been given, but even so, my Hobbit enthusiasm has been officially awakened.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Grant Morrison about his new prose book about superheroes, Supergods. Superlawsuit watchers may want to note Morrison’s take on Siegel & Shuster.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort on what DC does and doesn’t do well: part one, part two. I doubt that many people reading this blog are Marvel or DC partisans, as is the case for the audience of those posts at Robot 6, so maybe you’ll be better capable of seeing just what a gift we readers of superhero comics have in a high-profile top-level editor who’s willing to say what he thinks about most anything, and can do so articulately and with ideas he’s actually thought through over the course of years in the industry, as opposed to regurgitating PR talking points. This is very, very, very rare.

* Speaking of Brevoort, he addresses a complaint I’ve had myself: Though all of his story has been told in Ed Brubaker’s Captain America series, Bucky’s death was relegated to Matt Fraction’s Fear Itself. Brevoort says Brubaker has written an epilogue one-shot that will address the death in the context of his excellent Cap run, which is good news.

* Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons. ‘Nuff said!

* The hardcover for Jesse Moynihan’s Forming Vol. 1 looks terrific.

* Dan White has launched a new Cindy & Biscuit website at Mindless Ones. I like that comic quite a bit.

* Paul Karasik reviews Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits for The Comics Journal. You, whoever you are, ought to read that book.

* Frank Santoro and I ask: Are comics like jazz — a once popular art form become the province of hobbyists?

* Jeffrey Brown of Clumsy and Incredible Change-Bots fame wrote the upcoming wedding comedy Save the Date starring Allison Brie and Lizzy Caplan. That is just wonderful.

* Whoa, NeilAlien resurfaced! It’s like I’ve died and gone to earlier in 2011.

* I’ll admit it, I love this kind of crazy collector’s project: DC is releasing a $150, 1,216-page DC Comics: The New 52 hardcover containing all 52 first issues from its September relaunch. Speaking of which: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! (Cf.) Elsewhere, Toronto’s The Beguiling comic shop is selling all 52 issues for a bundled price of $104; that strikes me as a great idea for retailers.

* Can you imagine getting a letter of praise from a master of your art like the letter Jim Woodring sent Hans Rickheit? Man oh man.

* Jonny Negron’s sexiest illustration, now in color!

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan sure can draw.

* I’m always up for a good look at James Cameron’s Aliens, a film that’s as good at what it does as any I can think of. This one comes courtesy of Edward Copeland.

* David Lynch made an animated video for Interpol’s very good song “Lights” called “I Touch a Red Button.” It’s like an exercise in how much creepy intensity he can wring out of four or five frames. He’s very good at making horrible faces, that’s for sure.

* Wow, watching this attempt to beat Super Mario Bros. with the lowest score possible without saving or cheating made for some pulse-pounding viewing. I was literally cringing and jumping in my seat. The Hammer Brothers sequence is like the 8-bit equivalent of the stairs of Khazad-Dûm.

* Nicole Rudick interviews Jim Woodring at glorious length for The Comics Journal:

RUDICK: Are [the apparitions you’ve seen] usually the same thing or similar things?

WOODRING: No, they’re always different. The last thing I saw was a guy standing upstairs in my hallway, standing bolt upright, with a leather harness on his face.

RUDICK: Does it frighten you to see those things?

WOODRING: That one was extremely frightening. At first, I thought it was my reflection in the mirror. Then I thought, There’s no mirror there. I saw this guy, just standing, wearing black pants and a white shirt, with his face in a leather harness with the number nine on leather tabs at every junction of the straps, and his mouth was open in a rictus. I could see his teeth, and his eyes were staring at me in this beseeching way. He left after a couple of seconds, but it was very vivid while it occurred.

Then a couple of years before that, I saw the Thompson Twins, Thomson and Thompson from Tintin. They were in black and white and were walking down the street with a full-color nine-foot streetwalker in fuchsia hot pants. That resolved into a woman and her two small children. Then the time before that, I was at the mall and my neighbor lady saw me and came up behind me and spoke my name, and when I turned around and looked at her, where her head should have been there was this eggshell of lint, which had the front pushed in, and there was a big gob of chewing gum or something sitting at the base of it. That was a frightening experience. I screamed when I saw that. That just scared the shit out of me.

The thing these all have in common is that they’re not at all vague, they’re very crisp, and I retain memories of them with extraordinary vividness. I’ve drawn all these things out. They’re very sharp, almost more sharp than real life, in the same way that when people meditate and they see the white light—it’s obviously not light, it’s not photons, it’s something else, more vivid than light. Because you’re not seeing with your eyes, you’re seeing with your mind when these things happen, they have sharpness and an intensity that regular visual things don’t.

That’s the juiciest part, but there’s stuff in there about the Surrealists, and horror as the sacred, and symmetry, and struggling with the presence of evil in a world that also contains wonderful things, and all manner of other stuff that hit me right in the gut. You must read this.

* Hey, it’s a new Emily Carroll comic! This contains one of her creepiest images yet.

* Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls will be adapting the Nine Inch Nails dystopian-future concept album Year Zero for Trent Reznor’s long-gestating HBO/BBC miniseries. That sounds fine.

* Too Much Coffee Man‘s Shannon Wheeler, of all people, nails the problem with Chester Brown’s Paying For It, as succinctly as anyone I’ve seen make the attempt. I think calling for a heavier editorial hand is a nonstarter, though, and for good reason. A heavier editorial hand would likely have preempted Chester Brown’s entire career.

* Curt Purcell salutes the proud wearer of Comics’ Greatest Jacket, Death Note‘s Naomi Misora.

* Paging Frank Santoro: Marcos Martin is really approaching page layout differently than anyone else in superhero comics, if this preview page from his and Mark Waid’s Daredevil #1 is any indication.

* I’m really not sure what Darryl Ayo’s comics call to arms is about — the problems, and the people, he’s addressing are described in terms too general to be useful. Mostly I find my enjoyment of comics increasing the less I worry about the state of comics, or more specifically the less I expose myself to the daily scrum of jawjaw about same. That said, he put together a gallery of lovely images to support the post, including these pieces by Al Columbia and Frank Quitely that I’d never seen before.

* Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains has posted a couple of killer galleries lately. First up is the cosmic horror of Anatoly Fomenko, with its wondrous and oppressive sense of scale:

* And next is the scabrous, texture-heavy creature portraiture of Hasama (warning: the image below is fine, but the rest are not for anyone who’s squeamish about facial disfiguration):

* Aled Lewis’s “Video Games vs. Real Life” is similar to a Star Wars-based photography project that made the rounds a while back, but even though I was familiar with the basic idea at play, I still found this Donkey Kong image kind of unnerving. Looking through the foliage and seeing something looking back at you is the great cryptozoological dream/nightmare image.

* If you can’t trust them to straighten their belts, how can you trust them to save us all from Despero???

* I’m pretty excited to discover a Broadway revival of Godspell is in the works for this October. Stephen Schwartz, the show’s creator, is involved, so that leaves me optimistic that they won’t just slap a coat of Rent paint on the thing. It’s my favorite show.

* Over at The Comics Journal, I reviewed Gilbert Hernandez’s Love from the Shadows. I loved this book and think Beto’s arguably doing the work of his career right now.

* Comics is any art you can read.

* Bill Blackbeard has died. Blackbeard was a tireless archivist who saved countless thousands of strips — for all intents and purposes the history of comics — from literal oblivion, and whose combined collection and expertise form the backbone of this the Golden Age of Reprints. A great many people smarter about comics and Blackbeard’s unique and indispensable role in the medium’s history have written obituaries and tributes: Tom Spurgeon, Jeet Heer, Chris Ware, R.C. Harvey (from whom I unwittingly nicked Blackbeard’s nickname), and Dylan Williams, who’s really on fire right now with his longer posts.

* Back in the saddle: Gary Groth absolutely annihilates Jim Shooter’s recent writing on the Jack Kirby vs. Marvel situation back in the ’80s.

* MoCCA and Stumptown crushed Dylan Williams’s soul. It’s not quite as bad as that for the Sparkplug publisher, but it’s close. This line killed me: “There are tons of parties and lots of fun to be had and sense that everyone is getting 10% closer to their goals at each show.”

* Behold, the “teaser cover art” for Tom Neely’s next graphic novel, The Wolf.

* Jonny Negron and Jesse Balmer have a collaborative comic called Demon God Goblin Heaven coming out soon with the astounding cover seen below. Balmer’s posted some stunning interior pages as well.

* Meanwhile, Negron provides the cover for Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge’s new porn anthology, Thickness.

* At Robot 6, Chris Schweizer previews Chris Wright’s graphic novel Blacklung, which has found itself without a publisher.

* Skyscrapers of the Midwest: the play. I can really get behind this trend of theatrical adaptations of great graphic novels.

Skyscrapers of the Midwest video preview from Available Light on Vimeo.

* Zak Smith is redesigning the D&D Fiend Folio, beast by beast.

* Kiel Phegley’s latest “Talk to the Hat” interview with Marvel’s Tom Brevoort is a delightfully wonky affair focused mainly on what makes certain characters “work” as members of the Justice League or the Avengers. If you’ve ever had that kind of conversation yourself, this is worth a gander.

* Chris Mautner lists his six favorite Tokyopop titles. Planetes going out of print is a crime against anyone who’s ever said “I liked Scott Pilgrim; what else should I read?”

* Luba as Batman and Maggie as Robin. Indeed. Indeed.

* 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.

* Over at Robot 6 I pulled some of my favorite parts from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interviews with Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez, two of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Of all time!

* Spurge also interviewed my very talented Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson, who comes at comics journalism and criticism from about a 180-degree remove from virtually everyone else I know. If you care about the field, you should read her interview.

* Kiel Phegley conducts an exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and ongoing Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada. Quesada breaks (I think) the news that Nick Lowe has been promoted to Senior Editor, while Kiel notes that Quesada is the first Editor-in-Chief to depart on his own terms since Stan Lee.

* Tom Brevoort notes that Editors-in-Chief of Marvel comics don’t actually edit comics, which is why he didn’t want the job.

* Are nine of the top 10 bestselling comics of 2010 creator-owned properties, Hollywood tie-ins, or both?

* Theo Ellsworth is working on an ongoing horror-SFF series called The Understanding Monster. Yes please!

* This week, Diamond starts shipping comics to Direct Market retailers a day early, if they want. I hope that works out.

* Frank Santoro on Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the power of drawing comics at the same size they’re printed. “Comments are closed.”

* They’ve given up on making a Wonder Woman TV show. Good. Doing so seemed like an admission that They’re not talented enough to make a movie of one of the most famous characters in the world.

* Rickey Purdin calls the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2010 “a totally insane comics and art show that, per capita, was probably the highest quality of its kind that I’ve ever attended.” Yep.

* Game of Thrones stuff 1: New photo gallery. Direwolf puppies or GTFO. (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Game of Thrones stuff 2: I really enjoyed this report from a roundtable with George R.R. Martin. Martin tells a great anecdote about an asshole at a Lord of the Rings screening who kept shouting shit like “Giant spiders? Oh, come on!” as an illustration of how some people will just never cotton to fantasy; he speculates that A Storm of Swords will be split over the show’s third and fourth seasons; he notes the difficulty of conveying when a character is lying on television, something I thought would be quite a challenge for the series in terms of one specific plot point later in the books; and so on and so forth. If you’re like me and hungry for any kind of smart discussion of the books you can get, you obviously could do a lot worse than a discussion featuring Martin himself.

* Game of Thrones stuff 3: Maureen Ryan posts excerpts of interviews with Martin, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actress Emilia Clarke. I liked Martin’s note of caution that big though the show’s budget may be, it can’t possibly compare to the roughly $15 million spent per hour of screentime on The Lord of the Rings. (Via Westeros.)

* Check out Michael DeForge’s fine Top 15 Comics of 2010 list. And then ask yourself if he ever stops working.

* Now Zak Smith is crowdsourcing an entire RPG: Gigacrawler, about a universe in which every available space on planets and in the void is part of one continuous, contiguous structure. In other words, all of existence is one giant dungeon. He and his crew start brainstorming the game’s major features here.

* Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, talks to Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal about his new album Kaputt, which is really something special. Avalon is referenced, and thus am I vindicated.

* I whipped up a nice long thumbsucker analyzing Axel Alonso’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Entertainment for Robot 6. I hope you’ll take the time to read it. The nutshell version is there are some big question marks even (perhaps even especially) pertaining to the areas where we have the most information by which to judge him, but also a lot of reason to be optimistic in terms of his approach to creators. One thing I didn’t include because because I’m not sure what its actual import is but which still seems worth noting as a positive for the biz: He’s the second Hispanic Marvel EIC in a row. (Memo to Iron Man editor Alejandro Arbona: Patience, grasshopper.)

* I suppose I shouldn’t’ve been, but even so I was surprised by the dominance of media tie-in titles on the list of 2010’s bestselling graphic novels for the Direct Market (as sold through monopoly distributor Diamond). The Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, and Kick-Ass leave a grand total of one slot open on the list, which was taken by a book that got over largely on the strength of a fortuitous “it’s Superman meets Twilight” blurb in the press.

* On the periodical comics end of the list, events still sell–that’s really the only lesson you can draw. Well, that, and books called X-Men #1 trigger some sort of lizard-brain response in the direct Market. One more: The Direct Market is all but a three-man industry at this point, with Brian Bendis, Geoff Johns, and to a lesser extent Grant Morrison dominating.

* Yesterday was the big Game of Thrones presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour. This bums me out because it means that yesterday would have been the day George R.R. Martin made his two big surprise announcements (one surely must have been the release date for A Dance with Dragons, but that pesky plural really has thrown me for a loop beyond that) were it not for his awful-sounding bout of urosepsis over Christmas. It’s also a bit of a bummer because the 15 minutes of footage screened for the assembled critics will likely never air publicly since it used existing film scores as a stopgap soundtrack. The most in-depth summary I’ve seen of the footage is from Chicago TV critic and über-nerd Maureen Ryan. It sounds like it was basically very very good, allowing for some quibbles of the strength of various wigs and Peter Dinklage’s English accent. (Via Westeros.)

* UPDATE: The series debuts April 17th.

* Here’s Drawn & Quarterly’s Fall 2011 release slate. Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray and Brian Ralph’s Daybreak are the big ones for me.

* Chris Mautner runs down six overlooked books from 2010, including my co-#2 best book of the year, Gilbert Hernandez’s High Soft Lisp.

* Alright, I really have no excuses for why I didn’t wise up to Zak Smith/Sabbath’s big “Gygaxian Democracy” experiment, but now he’s croudsourcing things a sea monster can do, so you know I’m all over it.

* Real Life Horror 1: Don’t forget that my representative, Peter King, is okay with terrorism as long as it’s English and Irish children you’re blowing up.

* Real Life Horror 2: Freedom.

* Finally, I’m happy to use Geoff Barrow from Portishead’s anti-record industry twitter screed as an excuse to post the video for “Chase the Tear.” (Via Maura Johnston.)

* Busy day on Robot 6 today:

* Jason Aaron tells Alan Moore to go fuck himself;

* Marvel was Joe Quesada’s Watchmen;

* John Boehner is the new Beta Ray Bill;

* and most especially, this Françoise Mouly interview is comprehensive and awesome. RAW, The New Yorker, Toon Books, Crumb gossip, personal history, the works. Must-read of the day.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Dirk Deppey.

* At long last, The Complete Pogo is about to join Fantagraphics’ ridonkulous reprint line-up. Updates on a lot of other late books of note in there as well, including various Nancy-related efforts.

* There’s something really heartwarming about the creative process for Axe Cop.

* The Star Wars series hits Blu-Ray in Septmember. It’s not clear if the original versions of the original trilogy will be a part of either the three-disc original-trilogy set or the 9-disc set for the enchilada. My hunch is that they’ll do it to please the nerds (and I include myself in that number), but there’s no predicting George Lucas.

* Nerdery at its finest: Zak Smith crowd-sources 60 different D&D dice-roll results for what getting smacked with something called “The Hammer of Exorcism” could do to you. I can’t decide which one I like best: The bit where the possessed victim develops a new orifice that swallows the hammer and allows him to subsequently extract it for use a la Videodrome, or your basic run-of-the-mill vomit hose.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones reviews Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma’s surprise hit series Morning Glories. I haven’t read it, but what Zom says roughly aligns with what I have a hunch I’d think of it based on what I’ve heard about it.

* For some reason, the common desire to wish the sins of America into the cornfield manifested in the bowdlerized Huck Finn now being produced and the bowdlerized Constitution read aloud in Congress today didn’t occur to me until Andrew Sullivan pointed it out.

* Real Life Horror 1: Animals are dropping dead all around the world.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald presents the story of 18-year-old American Gulet Mohamed, tortured in Kuwait and barred reentry into the United States because he’s on the no-fly list, both for crimes he never committed.

* The final installment of Christopher Allen’s Top 50 Albums of 2010 list contains one of the sharpest takes on Sleigh Bells I’ve ever come across. I also like his emphasis on the fun of Girl Talk, like it’s a game you play on road trips.

* Quick note: I am creating this post from 30,000 feet above the American Midwest, so apologies for the airplaine-wireless-mandated lo-res images.

* Like the comics blogosphere’s own version of the Jelly of the Month Club, Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview Series is the gift that keeps on giving. Recent entries of note include interviews with beleaguered Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar, esteemed Drawn & Quarterly associate publisher and publicist Peggy Burns (perhaps my acquaintance of longest standing in all of comics), and garrulous webcomics craftsman Dustin Harbin.

* The most informative of the bunch so far has to be Spurge’s interview with CBR News Editor (and my friend) Kiel Phegley. Kiel serves up a survey of the state of the industry that I think will really impress you with its insight and candor, not just “coming from a CBR editor” if that’s the kind of thing that’s inclined to turn you off but coming from anybody.

* I wrote up Anders Nilsen’s masterpiece Big Questions for the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010.

* Speaking of year-enders, Tucker Stone lists his 20 Best Comics of 2010. Many fine choices on there.

* Tim O’Shea interviews Axe Cop‘s Ethan Nicolle. It’s fascinating to learn that Axe Cop is written largely through actual, literal play. I also had no idea the Nicolle Brothers have a print Axe Cop miniseries on the way from Dark Horse called Bad Guy Earth.

* Marvel’s keeps moving in the direction of day-and-date digital releases, but they’re smaller movements than I expected to see by now.

* Curt Purcell has a few quick thoughts on Battlestar Galactica. He’s also looking for recommendations as to which shows to watch next. Curt, The Sopranos and Deadwood are the best shows. The Wire is very good except for the final season. You know I loved Lost.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM pleads for Bernard Rose’s Candyman. The post includes an anecdote that makes me really disappointed in Philip Glass.

* Fine writing by Zak Smith/Sabbath on the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter of The Hobbit and what it means for fantasy storytelling and RPG storytelling alike.

* Brian Chippendale’s last few Puke Force strips have been really good.

* Aeron Alfrey has posted a fine selection of video game covers over at Monster Brains.

* Whoa, what is up, Michael DeForge?

* Renee French titled this image “Shatner.”

* Real Life Horror 1: TPM’s Rachel Slajda presents the year in Islamophobia — to me the most dispiriting development in an already dreadful year.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald continues to chronicle the harsh treatment of WikiLeak source Bradley Manning by the U.S. government. That’s the “how”; I have a feeling this lengthy round-up of revelations provided by WikiLeaks in 2010 is the “why.”

* Related: The story of #mooreandme, the vociferous Twitter protest of comments made by Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann dismissing and mischaracterizing the rape allegations against WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and a link retweeted by Olbermann to an article outing the accusers.

* Real Life Horror 3: I’ve been remiss not to have linked to this already, but my home land mass of Long Island appears to have sprouted a serial killer.

* Every time I read stories like this — and that’s often — the phrase “of historic proportions” pops unbidden into my head.

* Today Marvel announced its next event comic: Fear Itself, with a core miniseries by Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen. It sounds like fun in the heroes vs. villains mode Marvel’s modern mega-events have traditionally lacked, and best of all if you like me are a giant nerd, the Hulk and the X-Men are neck-deep in this one too. Click that link for my thoughts on what this says about Marvel’s view of its “Heroic Age” experiment with smaller mini-events.

* Also on Robot 6 today: Tom Brevoort’s and Brian Hibbs’s recent diametrically opposed comments on the effect the proliferation or reduction of titles starring the same character(s) has on sales. Some commenters take issue with my read on this, but I do think I have it right: Based on their own constructions of the issue, one of them is flat wrong about this. Or both! Brian himself clarifies things in the comments.

* It’s always fun when folks stumble across the antecedents for Benjamin Marra; in that vein I give you Joe McCulloch on Joe Vigil’s Dog.

* My sudden-onset appreciation for the comics of Gabrielle Bell has been one of 2010’s great comics-reading pleasures for me.

* Longtime ADDXSTC readers may recall that my interest in World of Warcraft first arose from my enjoyment of videos in which players engaged in some grade-A jackassery of the sort not envisioned by the game’s creators. In that vein, I present “300 Naked Orcs”: Three hundred players created entry-level orc characters and simultaneously attacked an 85th level NPC that no one ever expected anyone to be stupid enough to try to kill. And they killed him. It’s a thing of idiotic beauty.

* DeNiro, Pacino, and Pesci in Scorsese’s next Irish-gangster picture? I’ll eat that shit whole. (Via Alex Segura.)

* I’m proud to present Superheroes Lose, a new tumblr in which I’ll be posting comic covers and promotional art featuring superheroes losing. In part I’m doing this because I think these things are unintentionally hilarious; in part I’m doing it because I have some half-baked ideas on what these things meeeeeeeean, and having a lot of them in one place may help me shake those ideas loose.

* That being said, I’m quite excited about the image above even aside from its Superheroes Loseworthiness, because I think it means that the Hulk — the plain old Bruce Banner green Hulk — will be involved in a major, Avengers-driven (was that redundant?) Marvel event for the first time in the modern event-comic era. (World War Hulk doesn’t count — that was really a Hulk comic blown up big, and the event angle came from fighting the Illuminati, not the Avengers, Marvel’s modern flagship team.)

* Here’s a heck of a find: a live-action short-film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole by director Rupert Sanders. As best I can tell it’s sort of smushing several scenes from different points in the book into one long thing, so it’s not necessarily the most accurate adaptation (especially if you have Keith’s first encounter with Eliza memorized panel by panel), but it’s fine work regardless, atmospheric in a way these things usually aren’t and true to the spirit of the thing. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Johnny Ryan (!!!) interviewed Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore about The Walking Dead for Vice, with suitably juicy results. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books imprint is now a going concern, with comics by Tom, Gabrielle Bell, and Jon Lewis. Check it out.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Two Eyes of the Beautiful II by the very talented Ryan Cecil Smith of Closed Caption Comics fame.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the appeal of superheroes — and supervillains — to marginalized groups beyond traditional geeks.

* I’m linking to ComixTalk’s 2010 digital/webcomics roundtable — featuring such august personages as Heidi MacDonald, Brian Heater, Brigid Alverson, Gary Tyrrell, Lauren Davis, and Larry Cruz — because it features my chum Rick Marshall of MTV Splash Page saying very, very complimentary things about Destructor, but even beyond that it’s stuffed with links to comics that come recommended by the participants and as such strikes me as a great way to launch a lazy pre-holiday weekend afternoon’s reading in a couple of days.

* Matthew Perpetua doesn’t like the gratuitous use of rap patois in hip-hop reviews, and the inconsistent application of stage names depending on the genre being talked about. I think in both cases this stuff is mostly showoffy; it’s interesting to see the differing directions that takes depending on whether or not hip-hop’s in the spotlight.

* Congratulations to The Country Club for mashing up Super Mario Bros. and Grand Theft Auto juuuuuuuuust about perfectly. I laughed out loud on the train at the ending. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Presume not to instruct Curt Purcell on matters pertaining to the Groovy Age of Horror when recommending Scissor Sisters videos, for he is subtle and quick to post far, far more pertinent giallo videos. Here endeth the lesson. Seriously, music people who read this blog, if you enjoyed the video for “Invisible Light,” you must click that link and watch Curt’s videos. Nude for Satan, ladies and gentlemen. (But aren’t we always?)

* Slowly George R.R. Martin turned, step by step, inch by inch…

* If you caught my LOVE AND ROCKTOBER wrap-up post early enough, you probably missed the update, in which I added advice as to which Love and Rockets books you should read first if you’re interested in giving either Gilbert or Jaime’s half of the series a try.

* Well, this is the most fascinating and exciting thing I heard all day. (Which says something about me, probably.) Okay, so you know how World of Warcraft’s big Cataclysm expansion/revamp has added various new races from which players can create playable characters, like goblins and so on. The best known of these is the Worgen — werewolves, basically. Now, I figured that the story would be that there’s some preexisting (albeit previously unplayable) race/civilization of werewolves just like the humans and dwarves and orcs and night elves and so on — but no, the story is much more interesting. Basically, when you opt to play as a Worgen, you start out as a human in the isolated, isolationist city of Gilneas. Trapped behind its own massive defensive walls, the city succumbs to a werewolf epidemic, a la a George A. Romero movie or 28 Days Later. You become a Worgen after you fail to save the city and succumb to the curse yourself. How cool is that? A brilliant and sinister approach to werewolves, and a fascinatingly creepy and unexepcted way to storytell this race of characters into existence.

* Am I the only person who didn’t know that Ben Jones was coming out with a new book of comics, art, and interviews about being a man called Men’s Group Black Math in January from PictureBox? And that the covers are denim? (Hat tip: David Paggi.)

* Speaking of Jones, The Problem Solverz is indeed a full-fledged Cartoon Network show for kids, not an Adult Swim show for adults on ambien. Can you even imagine???

* Today on Robot 6: How Scott doin’? He’s survivin’. He was drinkin’ earlier — now he’s drivin’. Where y’all evil exes, hanh? Where you hidin’?

* and yep, Lane Milburn’s Twelve Gems still looks pretty terrific.

* Wow, Chester Brown’s Paying for It and Anders Nilsen’s complete Big Questions can’t get here soon enough.

* Kudos and sympathy alike to the Onion A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps for dealing forthrightly and classily with a really, really lousy situation. Would that the same could be said for the A.V. Club’s commenters, among most insufferable on the Internet and currently deluging Comics Comics.

* Hey, Chip Kidd designed the cover for Andrew Sullivan’s book about weed.

* Real Life Horror 1: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, IRA collaborator Peter King is head of the House Homeland Security Committee. You almost have to admire the chutzpah involved in these Republican committee chair selections; it’s really like putting Doctor Doom in charge of the House Committee on the Fantastic Four. However, not even today’s GOP dares put Joe Barton in charge of Energy and Commerce, so good for them.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald points out, among other things, that most of the people who publicly fret about the innocent lives that could some day be lost due to WikiLeaks are incapable of acknowledging the actual innocent lives already taken by the U.S. government and its military on a daily basis. That lacunae in people’s moral calculus, to which I have obviously been far from immune over the years, bears thinking about. (Of course it’s also possible for the same group of dying innocents to go from visible to invisible, as is now the case with Republicans and sick 9/11 responders.)

* Real Life Horror 3: I always find military invasions of domestic areas in response to out-of-control law-enforcement issues darkly fascinating. I think it captures my inner eight-year-old just like opposite-number villains do. As a kid in affluent suburban America, the idea of a government not having control over part of its own territory, so that they have to send in the army to reclaim control from whatever criminal enterprise is running it in their stead, is pretty much straight-up science fiction, like Jabba the Hutt having the run of things on Tattooine, Empire be damned. And so it goes in Rio de Janeiro, where the military and police invaded and retook the Complexo do Alemão slum, with the predictable mixed results. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)

* Ugh, I can’t leave you with this cavalcade of awfulness over the weekend. Here, listen to this episode of Meltdown Comics’ Meltcast podcast, in which Sam Humphries of Fraggle Rock fame names Destructor his Pick of the Week. Thanks Sam! Hey, it cheered me up…

* Quick housekeeping note first: I posted a quick guide to some of DestructorComics.com’s navigation features. I think they’re pretty neat.

* Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that Fantagraphics will be publishing Daniel Clowes-designed collections of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, arguably the great as-yet-uncollected classic comic. Over on Robot 6 I have a brief spiel about why I think the strip will work in the Tumblr Age.

* Also on Robot 6: Please pay Michael Kupperman, you monsters.

* Here’s more engrossing writing on life after recent developments in World of Warcraft by Bruce Baugh. I think the points he raises here about constructing a player’s early experience to maximize enjoyment in the immediate term and the impact of the story in the medium-to-long term can apply to pretty much any form of narrative storytelling.

* Moreover, as I think I’ve said before, it’s really only after reading Bruce’s posts of late that it’s occurred to me that the “line-wide event” model of superhero comics publishing developed by Marvel and DC over the past half-decade echoes the way WoW is set up. Like, okay, here’s this new expansion pack, and now everyone has to deal with the Lich King, or now everyone has to deal with natural disasters caused by a crazy dragon; here’s this new event, and now everyone has to deal with Captain America fighting Iron Man, or now everyone has to deal with President Obama offering a Cabinet position to the Green Goblin because he shot an alien on live TV. If you figure that there’s some sort of nerd collective unconscious that welcomed both these developments, you can also see why that collective unconscious has rebelled somewhat now that the events aren’t quite so all-encompassing, or indeed jostling up against one another in a way that confuses readers looking for one single direction to march in.

* Benjamin Marra on Fox News. Benjamin Marra in The New Yorker. I’ll take “Sentences I’m Delighted to Be Able to Write” for $1000, Alex. (Via Bill Kartalopoulos.)

* Speaking of which! Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal interviews David Lynch about his burgeoning career as a recording artist.

* I really like today’s Wolverine contribution to the Covered blog from Patt Kelley simply because the header he added to the image, USE YOUR CLAWS MY BELOVED, is a band name waiting to happen. Click the link to see what he’s riffing off of.

* Matt Madden is absolutely right: This photo of Killoffer by Ana Alexandrino is one of the greatest photos of a cartoonist of all time.

And do click that link — it’s a con report on the RIO Comicon from Jah Furry, and he’s got a lot of terrific photos of what looks like a very vibrant artcomics scene.

* Finally, David Fincher should do a shot-for-shot remake of Fight Club with Justin Timberlake as Tyler, Jesse Eisenberg as the narrator, and Kristen Stewart as Marla.

* Ask and ye shall receive! Earlier today I blegged for good critical writing on World of Warcraft and It by Stephen King. So bless Sean P. Belcher for recommending this fine Margaret L. Carter essay on Lovecraftian cosmic horror sans Lovecraftian nihilism in It. Meanwhile, I’ve got the Rob Cockerham World of Warcraft diary that my old All Too flat major domo Kennyb recommended opened tab by tab and waiting to be read. Thanks, fellas!

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Jaime Hewlett’s adaptation of Pulp’s “Common People”;

* and Tom Brevoort’s advice to young comics writers. Clarity and emotional oomph get top billing.

* If you’re in the market for more Walking Dead episode 2 target practice, Sean P. Belcher and Adam Serwer have you covered. Serwer’s last line is almost maybe too harsh, but it’s also pretty accurate for at least a few of the characters we’ve met.

* Brigid Alverson’s exhortation to read Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary may be just the kick in the ass I needed.

* Tim O’Neil lists his five favorite Wu-Tang Clan solo albums. We have three in common; can you guess which?

* Bald Eagles covers Benjamin Marra. This should be submitted to the Covered blog, no?

* Jim Woodring keeps killing it.

* Real Life Horror: George W. Bush is a proud torturer and torture is legal because a lawyer said so once. One day he will die in comfort, surrounded by his loved ones, feted by leaders of both parties.

* There Will Be Blood: The Nintendo Game. Spoiler alert? (Hat tip: Bill Magee.)

* Finally, I love when comics critics calmly use some goofy comic to excoriate the society that produced them top-to-bottom. In that light, behold Tim Hodler on Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey. We haven’t seen its like since Brian Chippendale’s unforgettable take on The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu #34.