A while back I answered a question about the intensity of my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones fandom that wondered whether I’d ever felt this strongly or invested this much time and energy into another author’s work. The answer was yes and no: felt this strongly, sure; invested this much of my life, no. (Not unless you count “comics” as a whole; writing and thinking about comics has basically been my life’s work.) Even today I think I could just as easily be operating a tumblr and opining professionally about Los Bros Hernandez, or Clive Barker, or the band Underworld, or David Bowie (hey, wait), or ’70s glam rock, or Chris Ware, orThe Sopranos/Twin Peaks/Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Battlestar Galactica/Deadwood, or or or. But A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones it is. And it’s really remarkable how quickly my little “career” as an ASoIaF pundit took off, given how vanishingly little effort I put into getting it started!

I started my ASoIaF blog All Leather Must Be Boiled in March of 2011. My daughter had just been born two months prematurely via emergency caesarean section following another two and a half months of pregnancy complications that required my wife’s repeated hospitalization and lengthy bedrest stays, during which time one of our cats was diagnosed with cancer and was also both hospitalized for surgery and confined to a bedroom for recovery. I’d spent a quarter of a year running from work to hospitals to home, caring for the beings I loved as they suffered. A work as grim as ASoIaF was an odd choice for “escapism” to be sure, but it seemed to do the trick, because it confronts serious issues — issues that truly haunt and hound me day to day — in a way that also helps blow off steam about those issues.

So one day I got back from visiting my daughter in the neonatal intensive care unit during my lunchbreak, sat down at my desk, and decided to fire up the old tumblr dashboard and launch a new ASoIaF-only blog. This way, the things I wanted to say about the series would neither spoil it for readers of my other outlets who were interested in catching up, nor drown out everything else I write about for readers who weren’t. Simply choosing to use Tumblr instead of, say, WordPress indicated, to me at least, how casual the thing was going to be. Most of my initial posts were written for an audience of one: me — stray thoughts, things I caught myself, passages I loved, a play-by-play of my journey of discovery through Westeros.org’s archives and forum, fanart drawn by cartoonist friends and acquaintances, anticipatory effusion about the then-upcoming HBO show. It was truly the tumblr of a fan, not a scholar, barely even a critic.

The point is, I learned as I went, simply through going. The more I wrote, the more I found myself able to articulate what was important to me about the books, to formulate coherent questions about the things I didn’t understand, to provide answers about the things I thought I did understand, to find answers on my own and put them in front of other people. Very quickly, “other people” expanded to include people who really were experts. Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson from Westeros.org said nice things, popped up in the comments, and eventually got me hired to work on the official annotations of A Game of Thrones alongside Elio and the books’ freaking editor, Anne Groell. That happened within six months of me starting this tumblr. Stefan Sasse from Tower of the Hand liked what I was doing enough to suggest we start a podcast together, and voila, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour was born. The writing I was doing about the show (and other shows) was apparently solid enough that when I mentioned how much I’d love to get paid to do what I’d been doing for free to my friend Matthew Perpetua, who was an editor at Rolling Stone, he passed my name to his fellow editor Evie Nagy, who hired me to recap Game of Thrones within days of me just idly “wouldn’t it be nice”-ing this during a google chat. Because of the way I write, and the things I write about, and the place I write about it, I find myself in the central overlap of a Venn diagram that includes traditional, Westeros-style fandom, professional pop-culture critics, and the tumblr ASoIaF/GoT community. Best of all, this doesn’t only work in one direction: One day I clicked on a tumblr that had just followed this one, discovered an incredible, fully-formed music critic at the tender age of 18, and passed his name along to the right people, so that I think he was offered his first pro music crit gig within literally hours. (What up, Jaimeson?) To call All Leather Must Be Boiled the most rapidly rewarding writing I’ve ever done would be to understate the case considerably.

And the rewards, in the form of knowledge and enjoyment of that knowledge at least, never stop. As I said earlier, one of the best things about this blog is the chance it gives me to be wrong about things in public. That way, the people who know more than I do can provide me with the right information, and I can grow and learn and get more right in the future. What a wonderful opportunity! It’s a joy to be corrected by Elio, or enlightened by Stefan, or challenged or outright debunked by another tumblr. I want to get better, and that’s how you get better. I think that because I started this tumblr with no pretensions to expertise, simply the desire to talk about these fun books I read, I was responded to in kind. The vituperative, “SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET” responses I’ve gotten to anything I’ve ever said there can be counted on one hand; even then I try my best to put the tone aside and focus on what they’re telling me that I wasn’t seeing or hearing myself. Sometimes they’re just wrong, of course — hey, I’m a critic, I’m going to think other people are wrong, that’s what they pay me for — but most of the time they’re shining a light on something I could’ve used a clearer look at. You can bet your bottom dollar that I take that experience to heart and try my best to apply it to everything I do, online and IRL. There’s no better way to become an “expert” than to do, and do, and do, and sit back and see what comes of the doing.

The new episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! It’s the first in what sure looks like it’s going to be a hella long series of discussions about the women of Westeros, starting with Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister. Enjoy!

still funny to me; thanks, George R.R. Martin

* Drop what you’re doing and download Matthew Perpetua’s 8-disc Fluxblog 2008 Survey Mix. Ooftah, the first half of disc 2.

* Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is now a trilogy. Whoever tells me this and expects me to complain, he understands nothing about Sean, nothing.

* The Secret Acres hivemind weighs on in the Comics Journal/Kickstarter/SP7 fight in high Secret Acres thinkpost style, while Dan Nadel clarifies a couple of his points from the middle of what’s either the best-timed or worst-timed internet hiatus in comics history.

* Another day, another enormously dispiriting interview with Grant Morrison about (among other things) the legal issues surrounding Superman and Watchmen. This one sees Morrison go full Barkley, saying “I’m not a role model” while not-so-subtly mocking Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for the shitty contract they signed in “hey, I got mine” fashion, in addition to positioning his own refusal to stick up for Siegel & Shuster in any way besides celebrating their artistic accomplishments as a noble refusal to treat them like victims. Yeah, it’s a bummer alright, especially coming from a guy who argues that superheroes are contemporary mankind’s greatest and most inspiring artistic exemplars. Given that his goal is for all that to rub off on the culture to which he exposes them, it’s weird that he finds it so baffling his readers would expect some of that to have rubbed off on him as well.

* Semi-related: Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich is appealing the appallingly punitive decision against him in his copyright fight with Marvel.

* A pair of fine reviews of very important collections are up at The Comics Journal: Nicole Rudick on Gloriana by Kevin Huizenga and Brandon Soderberg on The Furry Trap by Josh Simmons. “The Sunset” in the former and “Cockbone” in the latter would make a list of my top favorite short comics of all time; “The Sunset” would top it in fact.

* Dan Clowes is going to make a show called The Landlord for HBO with the directors of that nightmarish-looking Ruby Spears thing.

* I’m kind of the opposite of Tom Spurgeon here: I knew Fantagraphics would be collecting the Ignatz series New Tales of Old Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez, but apparently I never said so on this blog, if my search function is to be believed.

* I’ve really been enjoying Dorothy Berry’s posts on Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy for Comics Workbook, like this one about how rare Nancy is as a fictional female child who is neither a tomboy nor a girly-girl. My daughter is young enough to still be in that limbo state where she dresses more or less like a girl because we buy girl’s clothes for her but her behavior is essentially genderless, and I can tell you that in flipping through the Nancy Is Happy collection, I see a lot of that kid in her.

* The Mindless Ones’ Bobsy gives the business to Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, a comic I did not like at all.

* Gabrielle Bell has wrapped up her July Diary series for the year. If it wasn’t quite the revelation that last year’s effort was, it still contained a freaking zombie comic, and a two-panel autobiography that just slays me.

* The Burning Brothel, a Raymond Pettibon tumblr, is a delightful resource for an increasingly influential-on-comics artist.

* Eleanor Davis is laying it on the line in her comics and sketches these days. Don’t miss it.

* Well, Arsene Schrauwen #1 by Olivier Schrauwen sure looks good.

* I think every artist should be required by law to do a series of Batman character portraits, and I will be introducing this legislation as the Bill Finger Bill. Jordan Crane caught Michael DeForge’s stab at it, which I’d never seen before and which is awesome. Who’s the smiley guy next to the Joker, though?

* Jonny Negron.

* I always enjoy it when Frank Santoro works a little blue.

* Nice little comic by Mr. Freibert.

* Jordan Crane’s been posting processy glimpses of an upcoming contribution to the next issue of the Fort Thunder-centric Monster anthology (! did we know this was on the way?) to his tumblr, and I know this’ll come as a huge surprise but it looks gorgeous.

* Go buy comics from Andy “q v i e t” Burkholder’s Bigcartel store. Guy’s talented. (Via Michael DeForge.)

* Jeez, C.F. makes a lot of comics.

* Real Life Horror: This is what policework in America looks like now.

* Glenn Greenwald, inspired by Chris Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites:

I see no evidence that “rich people are very, very afraid” — at least not by their actions. And that, to me, is the problem. That fear — a lot more of it — is necessary. Their ability to rope themselves off from the society they are degrading, combined with the para-militarization of domestic police forces (aggressively displayed in response to the Occupy movement and related protests), and the rapidly increasing domestic powers of surveillance and detention (designed to intimidate the citizenry and thus deter and guard against mass protests), have convinced them, I think, that they need not fear any protest movements or social unrest, that America can and will become more and more of a police state to suppress it. An elite class that is free to operate without limits — whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior — is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.

*Attention A Song of Ice and Fire fans who’ve read all five books: This EXTREMELY SPOILERY George R.R. Martin interview is unusually informative on various obscure but fervently debated plot points.

* I am allergic to watching anything Olympics, but I understand the opening ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle and music-directed by Underworld, was quite something — basically a tribute to socialized health care, rock and roll, and children’s literature. Most of the people I know from the U.K. feel about the place the way I feel about the U.S., but those people should take comfort in knowing that it’s unimaginable, unimaginable for America to conceive of itself in terms that humanistic. Anyway the soundtrack, Isles of Wonder, is out, and though most of the big famous songs I understand were in the production don’t show up here, there’s still a whole lot of terrific Underworld music, so I’m happy.

* Today in and around the San Diego Comic-Con International:

* Your absolute A-#1 top story of the day, the show, the year: It’s a picture of George R.R. Martin and Los Bros Hernandez. Their beards are full of MAGIC. I love these wonderful men. (Via Fantagraphics, who clearly took this picture just for me.)

* Tom Spurgeon breaks two major announcements from Drawn and Quarterly: They’ll be publishing Art Spiegelman’s latest odds’n’sods collection Co-Mix, and collecting Michael DeForge’s webcomic Ant Comic as Ant Colony. Spiegelman is justifiably legendary and insight into his process is always welcome; DeForge is the best cartoonist of his generation and Ant Comic is one of the two or three best things he’s ever done.

* Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III are doing a prequel to Gaiman’s beloved series The Sandman for DC/Vertigo. I’m reporting this as news rather than as “hey I’m looking forward to this” since Sandman’s not really my thing. It’s newsworthy for a couple of reasons, I think: 1) This is going to be an absolutely colossal bestseller, I’m guessing the bestselling comic in a decade or more; 2) I’m surprised Gaiman’s doing it in light of the Before Watchmen situation, since he’s been an outspoken creators’ rights advocate for years and has (I think) a relationship with Alan Moore. That makes him returning to the company in such a big way seem much more like a tacit endorsement than does the work of most DC employees and freelancers who aren’t directly involved in the project, I think (myself included).

* Tom Spurgeon’s daily floor reports are thus far as thorough on a day-to-day basis as many are for the entire show, a mix of anecdote, opinion, temperature-of-the-room stuff, and actual news and reporting. Here’s Preview Night; here’s Thursday. Of greatest interest to me: Josh Cotter isn’t doing comics for now; Douglas Wolk isn’t writing for ComicsAlliance for now; Gary Groth liked Joe Lambert’s excellent Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller.

* Derf Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer is headed for the big screen. Still haven’t read it. Shameful.

* Frank Santoro has a limited edition book on the way from PictureBox called Pompeii, a “straightforward comic book narrative, chornicling the lfie of two artists in the doomed city.” I like the sound of that.

* I defy you to find a more loathsome way to talk about making comic books or any kind of art whatsoever. This one’s a news story as well, in that Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson has been so outspoken in his criticism of Before Watchmen while his new partner J. Michael Straczynski has been so outspoken in his defense of it.

* Finally, meet your new Game of Thrones castmembers, including Diana Rigg, aka Emma Peel, aka costar of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. III: Century #3: 2009, as the Queen of Thorns.

* In other news…

* Jeeeeeeez, look at Chris Ware’s Building Stories. That’s no moon. That’s a space station.

* Dave Kiersh’s new book After School Special is out and available through Giant Robot! I’ll say it until everyone listens: Read Dave K. If we could get his work into the hands of the millenials there’s no telling what might happen.

* Theo Ellsworth is debuting his new book The Understanding Monster Book One at SPX. Also, it wasn’t until I saw this poster he designed for the show that I realized what a power-packed lineup that show has this year: Ware, Clowes, Mouly, Jaime, Beto, Tomine. And something new from me and a special collaborator, maybe?

* There’s something quietly unnerving about the way Breaking Bad actor-director Bryan Cranston refers to “Walt” and “Bryan” as separate entities in his excellent, insightful two-part interview with Alan Sepinwall. I say that not to diss him as some third-person phony but as a testament to the power of Walt. Of particular note in the interview are the sections where Cranston describes moments where his conception of the character and showrunner Vince Gilligan’s diverged, and what he’d learn from them.

* The A.V. Club’s Noel Murray gets a great interview out of Kevin Huizenga, perhaps the prickliest interview subject in altcomix. I’ll never not get a charge out of it when Huizenga describes his comic “The Sunset,” for my money the best short comic of all time, in precisely the terms I’d use to describe it myself.

* I haven’t been following Fantastic Life cartoonist Kevin Mutch’s webcomic Moon Prince except to admire it visually from time to time, but that’s because I suck at following webcomics, not because it doesn’t look crazy and beautiful, because it does:

* Beautiful work by Jordan Crane. His finished pages are so uncannily devoid of human error that it’s unusually interesting to see the artifacts of their construction. Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands should try to get a contribution out of him for the Thickness collection, by the way.

* Read an excerpt from Frank Santoro’s excellent graphic novel Storeyville and Crane’s webcomics portal What Things Do.

* At last: Jonny Negron turns his attention to MILFs.

* It’s been a while since I linked to Monster Brains, and this sensuously sinister gallery of Carlos Schwabe art seemed like as good an excuse as any. Look at the eyes.

* I’m happy to use the occasion of Phil Jimenez’s birthday as an excuse to post this spread from Infinite Crisis again. One of my favorite pieces of superhero-comic art by anyone ever.

Elio & Linda of the venerable A Song of Ice and Fire super-site Westeros.org join Stefan Sasse and I for a discussion of Romanticism in the series in our podcast, the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. Lots of provocative ideas about how the way the characters view history shapes their present. Check it out!

* “I had a lot of fun with it – it gets extremely gross and gooey!”—William Cardini on our collaboration “The Cockroach” from Thickness #3. Order your copy today!

* According to Midtown Comics, new comics from Joe Sacco, Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Kevin Huizenga, David B., Gilbert Hernandez, and Josh Simmons come out tomorrow. And for fans of more traditional genre serials, there’s also new Grant Morrison/Chris Burnham, Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips, Mike Mignola/Cameron Stewart, and Brandon Graham. That’s a fantastic new comics day right there.

* American film critic and auteur-theory pioneer/popularizer Andrew Sarris died last week, as you no doubt heard. It’s tough to think of another critic who had as much of an impact on popular understanding of their chosen field of coverage. Run, don’t walk, to David Bordwell’s lengthy and thoughtful post comparing Sarris to his arch-rival Pauline Kael. On the more personal end of things, I enjoyed Roy Edroso’s tribute.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Ed Brubaker. This is one of the best superhero-creator interviews I’ve read in a very, very long time, both in terms of breaking news — Brubaker is leaving Captain America after nearly eight years writing it, during which time it was never less than a great time and frequently just great — and opinion — Spurge and Brubaker directly address creators’-rights flashpoints like Jack Kirby and Before Watchmen. Good on Tom for asking those questions, but better on Brubaker for answering them — you’d better believe that’s why they don’t get asked more often; there’s often just no point.

*

I haven’t even looked at these comics since the day I bought my last of them, and if you had asked me at the time I would have thought I’d have read them a half-dozen additional times by now. A lot of comics are like that, instant friends of the dormitory hallway variety and then suddenly you’re both decades older and you haven’t spoken in years and years.

—Spurge on Alan Moore & company’s Marvelman/Miracleman.

* George R.R. Martin updates us on various projects, including three that pertain to A Song of Ice and Fire.

* I’ve seen way too many people talk about Geoff Johns inserting a He-Man character he made up when he was eight years old into a He-Man comic he’s writing today like that’s a bad thing. Ahem.

* Submitted for your approval: Freak Scene, a new-underground art show opening at L.A.’s Synchronicity Space on July 6th featuring Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Johnny Ryan, Zach Hazard Vaupen, Jim Rugg, Bald Eagles, and many other leading lights of nasty alternative comics.

* Yeesh, this comic by Eleanor Davis is a doozy.

* I’d never seen Simon Hanselmann’s Megg and Mogg before, but my goodness. The character designs and humor are, heh, a bit indebted to Ben Jones, but the linework (that hair!) and sumptuous, understated coloring are things unto themselves. Terrific large-scale presentation on Hanselmann’s tumblr, too. (Via Frank Santoro.)

* Kate Beaton’s chops are ridiculous, which when coupled with the rigorous idiosyncracy of her sense of humor — her sense of where jokes are to be found — is what helps elevate her above her now-legion imitators.

* I’m sure I say this nearly every week, but this is my favorite sexy Jonny Negron drawing in a long time.

* You’d think it’d be tough for Sam Humphries and Pete Toms’s new comic for Study Group, “Virginia,” to live up to the promise of this cover image, but they pull it off. It’s worth noting that Humphries is doing this at the same time he’s self-publishing more traditionally “indy” comics and doing work for hire for Marvel. It’s gratifying to see someone who could choose to do something else still do bonafide alternative comics.

* Your Uno Moralez gif/image gallery of the week.

* Why was I not told about Rose O’Neill’s kewpie comics before?

* Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle #8, in stores in July!

* If you’ve got a hundred bones you can buy yourself a first printing of Kramers Ergot 4, the most important art comic of the ’00s. (Via Frank Santoro.)

* Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which is to L. Ron Hubbard what Velvet Goldmine is to David Bowie, has thus far had two of the most compellingly off trailers since, well, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. I continue to maintain that if Anderson ever makes an outright horror movie he’ll have a bead on scariest of all time. Based on these trailers, it’s getting tough to think of a better current director/composer pair than Anderson and Jonny Greenwood, too.

* The young Patti Smith was many things, and one of them was “extremely attractive,” which I find interesting both for obvious reasons and because that doesn’t seem to be part of her rock-star legend at all.

* Ann Magnuson is crowdfunding a Jobriath musical; Henry Rollins is narrating a Jobriath documentary. I didn’t see this coming.

* It has probably been thirteen years since I last heard the phrase “boot and rally.”

* I wrote about one of my favorite funk songs/guitar solos, “Very Yes” by Bootsy’s Rubber Band (featuring, obviously, Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish) for Cool Practice.

* Finally, feast your eyes on this gallery of double-page spreads by Jack Kirby — proof that the King of Comics was one of the greatest artists, of any kind, of the 20th century. (Via Joe Keatinge.)

I created a new-reader-friendly combined reading order for A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, the fourth and fifth books in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The two books cover the same time period but due to various considerations they had to be published separately and thus split up all the characters, half in one volume and half in the other, a decision some readers find frustrating; this is my attempt to fuse it back together in a way that newcomers to the two books can enjoy for their first time through if they want. (The list and the post that explains it are both basically the non-spoilery variants on the original reading order I came up with for veterans of the books a week or two back.) Have fun!

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, is up, and this one has a very special guest: Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress. We’re discussing women, sexual assault, and sexuality in the books. Lots to sink your teeth into, so give it a listen!

The latest Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast episode went up a few minutes ago, and it’s all about Game of Thrones Season Two. My co-host Stefan Sasse and I tackle many of the big issues of adaptation from book to screen, and I’m pretty pleased with what we come up with. Hope you dig it!

I think I figured out a good way to merge the two most recent books in A Song of Ice and Fire, which split a single time period’s worth of stories between two groups of characters in two separate volumes. I get pretty deep in the weeds of ASoIaF talk so I kept it on my dedicated site for that sort of thing, but it’s worth your time if you’ve read the series. Check it out.

I ranked the Top 12 power players in Game of Thrones by how close they are to ruling Westeros for Rolling Stone. Unbelievable to me that I get paid to do things this nerdy, even now.

I ranked 15 of Season Two’s new characters from worst to first for Rolling Stone. Fun fact: The top two swapped positions from my original draft based on last night’s episode.

Instead of cutting characters or storylines from the books to save room on the show, Game of Thrones cut a theme: that you are a single thread in a sprawling tapestry of history and prophecy sprawling backward and forward and sideways through time; that you have no control over the shape or design or pattern of this tapestry; that the occasional glimpses you get of the larger tapestry can be exhilarating and terrifying and awe-inspiring; that attempting to unravel the awesome mystery of what it all looks like and how it all connects is a driving force in people’s lives.

Most of the major storylines and characters remain intact; other themes, particularly the exploration of how violence destroys human dignity and connectedness, remain intact. So there’s still much of what you love from the books in the show. But the theme above is not what the creators are interested in exploring. You have to decide how to handle that on your own.

For my recap/review of Episode 20, please visit Rolling Stone.

No, for serious: Please do click the link and read it, because that’s my real review. The stuff that follows is…I don’t know what it is. A review of my own viewing experience?

Alright. BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD. Do not read unless you’ve read at least the first three volumes.

All season long I’ve tried to chart a middle ground — not just in writing the reviews for RS, but also simply as an audience member — between considering the differences between the books and the show and not letting that be my be-all-end-all. There’s a good professional reason for that: Most of the audience hasn’t read the books, and I want something I write for a big mainstream publication like Rolling Stone to be useful to as many of those people as possible. And there’s a good critical reason for it, too, I daresay: It’s just not a productive use of one’s critical faculties to perpetually weigh an adaptation against the source, across the boundaries of different media/art forms and geared toward a different audience and with different creators behind the wheel.

Unless you’re someone for whom fealty to the book is quite openly the one metric that matters to you — and I can respect that — the fact that Littlefinger behaves differently on the show than he does in the book, say, is a value-neutral proposition. Is his new behavior well written, well acted, well shot? In the end that’s all that matters. Frankly, I don’t center my criticism on “but THIS changed, and THAT changed, and and and” as a writer, because I know how little use I’ve gotten out of that sort of criticism over the course of the season as a reader.

Now, once upon a time I tried to evaluate the series based on what non-readers would think, or even what they’d simply be able to understand and comprehend; I don’t think I lasted any longer than the series premiere before realizing what a mug’s game that was. I’m not a mind-reader and I can’t speak for those people, and it’s a waste of time to try. What I described in the paragraph above is different than that, mind you: I’m not trying to guess what non-readers think, I’m trying to base my opinions solely on the text at hand without constantly turning to an outside source for justification.

That being said, nothing can change the fact that, well, I have read the books, and I do notice the differences. And it’s clear at this point that some, but not all, of what I truly love about the books isn’t a priority for Benioff & Weiss. I don’t know why the truncation and bowdlerization of the House of the Undying came as such a shock to me given that the two most directly comparable scenes from the first book, Bran’s vision of the land of always winter and Ned’s dream of the Tower of Joy, were both dropped entirely, but it did. And that’s hard to deal with, man! If I were to make a list of the most important scenes in the series so far, in terms of communicating what the series is “about,” the original House of the Undying sequence would be in the top four, behind only Jaime throwing Bran out the window, Ned’s execution, and the Red Wedding. For all intents and purposes it’s not in the show at all, not in a form that counts — a form freighted with all that prophetic information and linking Dany to a grand tapestry of past, present, and future events. And that’s a loss to me. To a lesser extent, so is turning Brienne into a fury-fueled killing machine, or making it look like Jon killed Qhorin in a rage.

I don’t feel “betrayed” like Linda does, though, because I don’t understand how art can betray anyone. All of us have it within our power to make art completely harmless in terms of its direct impact on our lives, simply by not watching or reading or listening to the stuff we don’t like. Moreover there’s still plenty of stuff going on here that I DO like, centered mostly on marvelous, powerful performances, and a tendency to nail the big images, and the same healthy, bitter anti-violence message I respond to in the books.

Ultimately what I need to do, I suppose, is stop weighing the two against each other entirely — to look at the books as an outline, if at all, and take Game of Thrones as it comes, on its own terms. That’s a tall order, not because I’m married to the text, but simply because when you’ve read the source material you can’t help but remember it. Unlike The Sopranos, Twin Peaks, Deadwood, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, and even Boardwalk Empire, the element of surprise that separates those shows from the pack — when I sat down to watch an episode of any of them, I literally had no idea what I might end up seeing, and that’s different from 95% of television — simply cannot exist for me with Game of Thrones. In the end, that’s the big obstacle for me, not for the show, not if I’m giving it a proper chance to be its own thing.

* Let’s start with a couple of quick updates to the piece I wrote yesterday about Tim Marchman’s essay on superhero comics for the Wall Street Journal. First, I thought it was important to add that I read and like quite a few Big Two superhero comics being published today, and I enjoy the field overall more than Marchman does, so that would be another quibble of mine with the piece. My attitude for the last few years has been that since I have an easy enough time finding superhero comics I enjoy, I don’t bang my head against the overall health of the genre. (Indeed it’s been a long time since I felt worrying about the Health of Comics was a productive or worthwhile goal for me as a writer.)

* Second, the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna wrote in to point out that he has indeed been covering the ethical ramifications of the Avengers movie and Marvel’s treatment of Jack Kirby for WaPo’s Comic Riffs blog: here he proposes Marvel just up and giving the Kirby heirs a million dollars, and here he interviews writer-artist Roger Langridge about his decision to cease working for Marvel and DC over creator-rights issues. I guess there’s a difference between the book review section (where Marchman’s piece appeared) and a dedicated blog for comics and cartooning, but I said that the national media hadn’t touched these issues at all, and here you have one of the most national-est and mainstream of national mainstream news publications talking about it. My only defense is that I simply missed the articles. Thanks to Cavna for bringing them to my attention, and for bringing these issues to the attention of his readers.

* Normally I’d save items like this for All Leather Must Be Boiled, but Entertainment Weekly’s big scoop on all the new characters in Game of Thrones Season Three (I’ve linked to Westeros’s coverage because they add a couple scoops of their own) is good enough news to share it over here, too. Basically, that character you love and were worried wasn’t going to be in the show, whoever that happened to be? He or she is in the show.

* Another one bites the dust: Like it did with me, fatherhood has forced my old Robot 6 editor JK Parkin to retire from the blog. John’s a smart writer and a tireless editor, who was responsible for making perhaps the great “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” comics blog — Robot 6 covers the entirety of comics from the home base of a superhero-centric site, and John’s the one who navigates the conflicts and congruencies — as good as it’s long been. Good luck, Papa John, and good luck to the equally awesome Kevin Melrose, who’s officially taking over.

* Speaking of Robot 6, Chris Mautner provides an introductory course on Charles Burns.

* Whoa: Benjamin Marra unveiled a whole new primitive style this past week. Feast your eyes on “Inner-City Wizard” and “College Buds.” But don’t worry: “High School Hooker Vigilante” still has that old-school Marra magic.

* Catching heavy Renee French vibes, of all things, from Tyler Crook’s portrait of the Childlike Empress from The NeverEnding Story.

* Mind you, the original Renee French is always available for your perusal as well.

* You anti-London Olympics people out there, and I know there are a bunch of you, ought to appreciate this savage, vulgar thing from Pete Barn Paulsz. (I wish I could remember how I found this.)

* Jonny Negron, man. Jonny Negron.

* Music writer Jamieson Cox interviews music writer Brandon Soderberg for his tumblr-centric music-writing podcast. Two great writers who taste great together.

* Aw man, that Jack Kirby “Spiderman” image that went around last week was a fake. (Via an apologetic SHIT COMICS.)

* Fun fact I learned from Glenn Greenwald #1: Did you know the Obama administration defines any military-age male in a strike zone as a combatant? Keep this in mind next time you hear about how many militants our fleet of flying killer robots blew up.

* Fun fact I learned from Glenn Greenwald #2: Did you know that the way we caught Osama Bin Laden was by hiring a Pakistani doctor to pretend to vaccinate children for Hepatitis B when in actuality he was collecting DNA samples? Keep this in mind the next time you hear about how those evil Pakistanis put that guy in jail for 33 years for the crime of “helping us find Bin Laden.” And try to imagine the damage this will do to vaccination rates in Pakistan — “Oh, you want to vaccinate my kid? Sure, sign me up for the program that could well be a CIA front to find someone, shoot him to death in view of his family, and dump his body in the ocean.”

* I already knew this was going on so it’s not a fun fact I learned, but as Glenn Greenwald points out, the Obama administration’s interpretation of “due process” is as ludicrous and laughable as it is totally horrifying.

* On a palate-cleansing final note: this fake menu handed out at the Brooklyn food festival Googamooga is the funniest bit of writing I’ve seen in a very, very long time. Panty slaw has entered the lexicon of the Collins household in a big way.

In the latest episode of my Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I discuss this weekend’s tremendous “Blackwater” episode before launching into a lengthy examination of violence against children in the books. Not exactly light lunchbreak listening, I suppose, but food for thought.

For my recap/review of Episode 19, please visit Rolling Stone.

You have no idea how hard it was not to just title this one “Smoke on the Water” and call it a day.

For my recap/review of Episode 18, please visit Rolling Stone.

I’m especially pleased with the opening line for this one.

* Here’s everything George R.R. Martin is working on at the moment. Sounds like the fourth Tale of Dunk and Egg is finished.

* How far did you get in Jennifer Kahn’s New York Times Magazine piece on psychopathic children before you recoiled in horror? I hit the panic button at the cat thing, predictably. But in all seriousness, this is a very strong and very troubling article about something that I’ve wondered and worried about since I first started reading about serial killers years ago. Violent sociopathy is a real challenge to a liberal democratic society’s ideas of justice and liberty, and pop-psych serial-killer books tend to hammer that home hard. Kahn’s article adds some welcome, though no less challenging, ideas to the discussion, pointing out that a graduation to adult violent sociopathy is not guaranteed, and thus something likely can be done to save these kids and their future victims, just as people who’ve inherited heart disease can be prevented from dying from it. The problem is no one’s really sure what that something is. Lots more to ponder in this thing: Could you love a cruel child? Why is it so disturbing that the kid at the heart of the article doesn’t just lash out, that instead, he…waits?

* Roger Langridge quits working for Marvel and DC over creators’-rights concerns. I guess this is how it’ll work: people at the margins leaving, and publicly declaring why.

* The Mindless Ones come forth to tackle Mad Men‘s “Lady Lazarus.” A friend planted a far less optimistic appraisal of Peggy in my mind a while back than the one espoused by the Mindlesses, and I’m finding it tough to shake.

* Andrei Molotiu has had it up to here with your so-called “stories.” I like Andrei and I like many of the abstract comics he’s championed, but this post reminds me of that Sopranos episode where the local rock band guy complains about how the Beatles have boxed in his own genius.

* Oooh, a new I Just Figured It All Out from Tom Neely.

* Oooh, a new A Wrinkle in Time promo image from Hope Larson.

* Oooh, a new gif/image gallery from Uno Moralez.

* This is a gorgeous Karl Wills page. Funny, great physicality, love the blood spatter, love the big white thighs, love the erasure of the faces as the fight begins.

* Rob Bricken’s piece on the CW’s forthcoming Green Arrow show Arrow made me laugh. “People might accidentally recognize the name ‘Green Arrow’ — we all know how unpopular superheroes are nowadays!”

* Can you imagine listening to M83’s “Kim and Jessie” as a real-live emotional teenager?

* “You think you’re better than me?” is humankind’s worst emotion.

* Finally, there’s a panel in this Puke Force strip by Brian Chippendale that sums up America’s drone wars so perfectly and devastatingly I don’t even know what else to say. You’ll know the one when you click the link for the full comic.