And it’s up on George R.R. Martin’s website. And it’s pretty juicy.

The second episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up! This time out Stefan Sasse and I discuss morality, leadership, and reform in the context of such august personages as Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Roose Bolton, and Tywin Lannister. Enjoy it with your leftovers.

Meanwhile, I contributed a couple of entries to the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2011 countdown: Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise at #80 and Tom Neely’s The Wolf at #78. Enjoy them with your gift cards.

I’ve started an A Song of Ice and Fire podcast! It’s called the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, because who could resist that acronym, and its first three episodes, to be rolled out over the course of the holidays, were the brainchild of Stefan Sasse, the hugely insightful writer behind some of my favorite ASoIaF essays. Stefan noticed that he and I share a focus on issues of morality when discussing the books’ warriors and leaders, so he suggested we just get on Skype and start talking about it. I’m glad he did; this was a ton of fun.

Part one is up now at my ASoIaF/Game of Thrones blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. Part two will go up next Monday, and part three the Monday after that.

Enjoy!

* There’s a new teaser trailer for Game of Thrones Season Two. It centers on one of the new characters being introduced this season, which puts me in mind of several other shows that have introduced major new antagonists after their debuts and how they’ve positioned them relative to the preexisting players.

* Related: I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this, but my A Song of Ice and Fire tumblr All Leather Must Be Boiled has a whole lot of ASoIaF/GoT art/fanart on it. Today I posted this grim painting of the Riverlands by Rene Aigner, which says a whole lot about the series.

* More BCGF: L. Nichols flips the eff out over the show;

* and PictureBox stocks up on many of its highlights and hidden gems for its online store.

* More Jerusalem preview pages from Guy Delisle. This is shaping up to be a really lovely book.

* I don’t think there’s an easy way to link you to all of it, but sniff around Benjamin Marra’s Traditional Comics tumblr for a lot of art from his series of American Psycho tribute booklets.

* The Comics Journal presents a look at four prominent alternative-comics retailers by Patrick Rosenkranz. The amount of thought and creativity they put into promoting the comics they sell and attracting the audience that buys them is both inspiring and a little depressing, in terms of how much time and energy you need to invest if you wanna make a go of this sort of thing.

* Entertaining speculation about the evolutionary origins of monsters in the human mind, the idea being that early man’s brain combined features of all the animals it was worried about getting attacked by into creatures like dragons and such, as a kind of shorthand for “LOOK OUT, DANGEROUS ANIMAL!” (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Every year as the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival approaches, I start to see my wallet as an object of intermingled pity, dread, and revulsion, like the Eraserhead baby. I’m racking my brain to see if this is an exaggeration, but nope, I don’t think it is: There’s something interesting at literally every table. Can you say that about any other show? Anyway, I’ll obviously be there, so please say hello to me if you see me. I look like this:

The lack of lens glare over my left eye can be attributed to me breaking my glasses last night on the platform of the Jamaica Long Island Rail Road station while overenthusiastically acting out a scene I enjoyed from season one of Breaking Bad.

* Continuing from last Carnival, here are several guides to noteworthy books you’ll be able to buy there. If you read only one, make it Chris Mautner from Robot 6’s comprehensive round-up post. But beyond that, there’s info galore from…

* Zack Soto, who’s repping the new publishing collective Press Gang, his own Study Group Magazine, and about a million lovely prints;

* non-attendee Dustin Harbin, who notes among other things the opportunity to pick up this year’s alt-festival circuit sleeper hit, Ethan Rilly’s Pope Hats #2 from AdHouse;

* Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino at Secret Acres, who in addition to bringing nearly every single person they publish will have a new issue of John Brodowski’s excellent alt-genre series Curio Cabinet on hand;

* Ryan Sands, who’s bringing tons of work from the greater Same Hat!/Electric Ant/Thickness/Chameleon hivemind;

* Closed Caption Comics, who are literally just filling little cardboard boxes with comics they recently made and calling that issue #9.5 of their flagship anthology;

* Benjamin Marra, who’s bringing the whole panoply of Traditional Comics releases, including the brand new Night Business #4;

* Tom Kaczynski, who lists the goods to be gotten from his Uncivilized Books imprint;

* and Unciv artist Gabrielle Bell, who posts the latest in her ridiculously strong year of autobio strips.

* Few things on the comics internet excite me more than a new Tom Spurgeon review of a book I’ve read; each one reminds me that nobody does it better. Here he is on Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Three. And though I haven’t read the comic yet, here he is on Joe Sacco’s new minicomic from Fantagraphics, The Road to Wigan Pier, a review of George Orwell’s book of the same name.

* Here’s another massive TCJ.com interview I’m saving for when I can really savor it: Dan Nadel speaks with the singular talent Marc Bell.

* Meanwhile, Robin McConnell interviews Geof Darrow, who was practically Cartoonist of the Year this year despite not publishing anything simply by virtue of his influence. Over on Robot 6 I noted Darrow’s recent rejected Superman cover, which he talks about (and posts!) in the interview.

* Game of Thrones hits DVD and Blu-Ray on March 6.

* Dark Horse is the latest publisher to go same-day digital, as of a mere two weeks from now. Après DC la déluge.

* Adrian Tomine just says no to making graphic novels instead of short stories. I’m pretty okay with this.

* Will Jonny Negron’s winning streak never end?

* There’s not a great deal to dislike about Power Comics, a new tumblr dedicated, essentially, to the ’80s black-and-white-boom books Benjamin Marra is pastiching in Night Business. (Hat tip: Agent M.)

* Aeron Alfrey reminds us that it’s never a bad time to revisit Charlie White’s Understanding Joshua.

* First U2, now Bryan Ferry: Trent Reznor’s year in cover versions has been a fun one.

* Any time my friend and collaborator Matt Rota posts new art, it’s worth checking out.

* Like most people on the Internet, I enjoy artist Brandon Bird’s unique entertainment-industry surrealism, both in his own paintings and the shows he curates. His latest is dedicated to the humans of Jurassic Park. I find myself hoping that someone chose to immortalize this one low-angle shot I remember quite vividly of Laura Dern’s khaki-clad hind end as she prepares to sprint across an open field to safety — I’m pretty sure it put me through puberty. (That or an En Vogue video, most likely.) Anyway, that’s Lisa Hanawalt doing Jeff Goldblum below. (Via Agent M again.)

* And hey, that reminds me that longtime ADDXSTC fave Robert Burden (not Flaming Carrot Robert Burden, labor-intensive portraits of action figures Robert Burden) recently painted the Thundercats.

* Finally, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: Matthew Perpetua has posted the Fluxblog 2011 Survey Mix! 10 discs, 183 songs, 13 hours of music, yours for the downloading!

I wrote a long piece on learning to see the victims of war for my A Song of Ice and Fire blog. (Beware of spoilers.)

* Recently on Robot 6:

* The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has announced its programming slate. Phoebe Gloeckner’s spotlight panel and a Tom Spurgeon/CF/Brian Ralph three-for-all are the highlights for me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Tom talk about CF at length, now that I think about it…

* Related: AdHouse is gonna have a hell of a show, by the sound of it.

* And here’s a BCGF debut: Zack Soto and Milo George are (re)launching Study Group Magazine, with a killer initial line-up of comics and journalism that includes work by ADDXSTC faves Chris Cilla, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, as well as interviews with Eleanor Davis and Craig Thompson.

* Does Koyama Press have the coolest publisher backstory ever?

* Inspired by a quote from Chris Mautner’s excellent interview with Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus in which Spiegelman explains the pain of having such horrifying and personal subject matter at the heart of his career for so long, I defend Art Spiegelman against his “what have you done for me lately?” detractors.

* And inspired by Nadim Damluji’s excellent interview with Craig Thompson about Orientalism in Habibi (although I must warn you not to enter the ensuing comment thread unless forced at gunpoint, and even then you might want to consider taking your chances at disarming the guy), I defend Craig Thompson against criticism to the effect that he doesn’t really know what’s going on in his own work.

* I’m really enjoying Ben Katchor’s increasingly explicit anticorporatism.

* Top Shelf is going digital in a big way, with a couple of comics apps. And damn, the price is right on the books they’re launching with. Clumsy for two bucks?

* At last! Image is releasing a collected edition of Brandon Graham’s much-lauded King City in February.

* John Porcellino has a new King-Cat coming coming out on Wednesday!

* So this is the cover for Jonny Negron’s Chameleon #2. That make sense.

* The Matthias Wivel-edited Nordic comics anthology Kolor Klimax sure looks good.

* Here’s a long and excellent piece by Zom on the horror of Uno Moralez. It’s a rare feat to analyze what makes something mysterious and horrifying with this kind of accuracy but with no intention of deflating the mystery and horror.

* Fear Itself ate itself, basically. This certainly isn’t the first time a major event comic involved elements of planned rapid obsolescence — it was the knowledge that they’d be wiping out Spider-Man’s marriage and with it whatever other aspects of his history they wanted to fudge that enabled Marvel to unmask Peter Parker for a mainstream-media bounce during Civil War — but it’s really quite unusual for three epilogue one-shots branded with the event’s name to undo the three biggest status-quo changes of the event, within three weeks of that event’s official conclusion. Still more unusual is that in all three cases Marvel’s clearly better off having undone them.

* Tucker Stone’s interview with Mark Waid about Daredevil is really entertaining on both sides of the tape recorder.

* Wow, they are dropping a lot of characters from A Clash of Kings in Game of Thrones Season Two. In some cases I understand both why they’re doing it and how it’ll work. In a few cases I’m kind of unsure how you do certain things you need to do at all without them. But when you think about it, the challenge faced by GoT the show is unprecedented. It’s one thing for The Sopranos to take bit parts and grow them into main characters at some point down the line — you’ve simply taken a presumably grateful character actor and given him the material of a lifetime. It’s still another to know up front that you’re casting a role who’ll get maybe five minutes of screentime this season but will turn into an opening-credits role in three, four years. What do you do, tell the Shakespearean actor you cast this past summer to clear his calendar for 2014? The answer will likely be not to cast such characters until the big stuff is happening, which of course will mean doing things differently than they were done in the books.

* Can you imagine having a sex ed class in which physical and emotional pleasure were valued and discussed? The clitoris, orgasms, the importance of making your partner feel comfortable emotionally, and being made to feel comfortable emotionally yourself? I can’t remember when that particular lightbulb was switched on in my head, but once the idea of such a sex ed curriculum was introduced to me, it became something that made me just shake my head in disgust that that’s not how things are. That’s absolutely how things should be. And in this New York Times piece about such a class in a school in a Friends’ school in Philadelphia shows you how it works.

* Speaking of the Times, unfortunately: Everyone I know thought Occupy Wall Street intended to shut down the New York City subway system yesterday, because they heard it on the news. I heard it on the news and so it’s what I believed. My in-laws, who are visiting us from Colorado, canceled their usual day in the city yesterday because they heard service would be disrupted on the news and so it’s what they believed. After the shutdown never materialized, today my co-workers said that OWS had simply failed to pull it off, because they’d heard of the plans on the news and so that’s what they believed. It turns out it was total bullshit, invented by Fox and the New York Times. But I heard it on several other outlets besides those, up to two or three days in advance, complete with responses to the supposed planned shutdown by NYC authorities. And it was all horseshit. As I’ve been saying on Twitter, it’s really rather amazing to watch all the organs of a body politic afflicted with terminal-stage capitalism work to expel OWS from the system. And this memetic inoculation against it — “protest Wall Street if you want, but once you start making it impossible for regular working people to get where they need to go…” — will likely never go away.

* Another case in point: The truly routine violation of protesters’ rights by the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD. The impunity with which they assault people, illegally arrest and detain them, illegally spy on them for their political beliefs, and so on is breathtaking. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates (via whom the aforelinked article) always says, we’ve got the police force we want, basically. If we didn’t want it, there are many ways in which we could make sure we didn’t have it.

* To end on a happier note, here are a few music links I enjoyed:

* Mark Richardson on freaking the fuck out over My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Man, we’ve all been there. I think my favorite part of listening to the album is when you get to that end section of “What You Want,” right before the final song “Soon” kicks in, and it’s so lovely you almost can’t bear it.

* Jaimeson Cox has been writing about Drake’s new album Take Care all week, and it’s been great. Actually, that album has coaxed great writing out of a lot of music writers. Off the top of my head: Brandon Soderberg, Zach Baron (the bit about the title track’s a must read), Ryan Dombal, Hua Hsu (terrific point about how disconcerting delivering similar sentiments via both singing and rapping can be). It’s early yet, but I think this may be my second-favorite album of the year after Kaputt by Destroyer? There’s just so much to talk about in the music especially, which is why I may inflict a post about hip-hop on you all in the near future. You’ve been warned.

* Well, this is certainly nice: My comic in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 is getting good reviews from the folks who enjoy Spider-Man comics. Here’s Ray Tate at Comics Bulletin, and here’s David Walton at The Reilly Factor. Kitty’s Pryde liked my page layouts but didn’t like my jokes, which, hey, fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing if I pass muster with the big Spider-fan sites.

* Oh hey, look, it’s four of the best people in the history of comics. From left: Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Groth, Phoebe Gloeckner. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog, I wrote about the role of social justice in the series, using the conclusion of the Harry Potter series as a counterexample. I elaborated on the point for the benefit of a naysayer, too. I realized yesterday just how important this is to me.

* Recently on Robot 6:

*Good god: Gary Groth interviews Robert Crumb at glorious length. I ran down some of the high points for Robot 6.

* Ng Suat Tong annotated all the flashback panels from Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” I added my two cents at R6 as well.

* Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” has wrapped up. Some lingeringly creepy images in here, as you’d expect.

* And here’s a quick little highlight reel for the Journal’s Habibi roundtable.

* Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books, Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics, and François Vigneult’s Family Style have formed a publishing collective called Press Gang. That’s promising.

* Jesus: The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo put a caricature of Muhammad on the issue that came out yesterday. Later that day, someone blew up their offices.

* The Minneapolis small press show MIX may be having its last hurrah this weekend.

* David Bordwell’s latest absolute killer of a film essay is on visual density, specifically the way leaving objects that previously played a role in the narrative within the frame charges that frame with memories. The relevance to comics is obvious. And in terms of Bordwell’s recurring themes, he argues that this technique has largely been lost with the primacy of the walk-and-talk/stand-and-deliver binary for shooting dialogue.

* Matt Seneca on recent releases from the great Yuichi Yokoyama. While as usual I disagree with many of his emotional and thematic conclusions — I don’t get pessimism from Garden at all; it seems beyond that to me — I enjoy a lot of his specific observations, like the kindly feeling of the book’s slideshow-style finale. Plus, the piece includes a bunch of gorgeous art from Yokoyama’s thus far untranslated Baby Boom.

* Joe McCulloch on pre-Code horror comics for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Local boy makes good!

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the increasingly obvious problem with the NYPD.

* Dan White’s latest Cindy & Biscuit story is an all-Biscuit affair. Such vibrant cartooning!

* Michael DeForge previews his next comic, Kid Mafia. I’m detecting a lot of Tim Hensley/Wally Gropius in this one.

* Oh hey, Jonny Negron decided to mint money by offering prints for sale of his Drive pin-up.

* Andrew White appears to be prepping to post a comic every day this month.

* Keep drawing the sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* More hot stuff from Ryan Cecil Smith. You know, it’s times like these when I wonder if I should put some kind of NSFW tag at the top of the blog, or if it goes without saying.

* So as you might have heard, I wrote a Spider-Man comic and annotated A Game of Thrones.

* On the latter score, Elio Garcia of Westeros.org has posted his own announcement of the project. Elio calculates that he and I and Anne Groell wrote over 1,000 notes on the book between us, which both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me at all given how into it we all got. I’m telling you, it’s a really rich vein to tap. Elio also notes that Subtext is working on a web version, so you non-iPad users out there, take heart.

* And this was a daymaker: An effusive write-up from big-deal SFF site Tor.com, and one that quotes extensively from me at that. I mean, get a load of this praise:

“this definite guide is interactive, comprehensive, ever-expanding, and most of all, made with the fans in mind….The annotations aren’t idle theories, rather, these are insights from those who know this world better than anyone else in the world, save George R. R. Martin himself.

Who am I to argue?

* My chum Rob Bricken of Topless Robot notes how useful the annotations will be for those readers who can’t tell the players without a scorecard. He also touts our bonafides as experts, which apparently I will never get used to.

* And a special tip of the hat to the Chief, Dan Nadel, who very kindly congratulated me for the project on the blog of the estimable Comics Journal itself.

* As for Spidey, I’d like to thank three of my favorite comicsbloggers, JK Parkin, Tom Spurgeon, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, for pointing their readers in my comic’s direction. Same for everyone on Twitter and Facebook who’s done so. Thank you all!

* And as noted, I spoke with my co-writer J.M. DeMatteis about all things Spider-Man for CBR.

* Meanwhile, I’m still making my way through Mad Men. Latest post on the end of Season Three here, archive of every MM post so far here.

* As I mentioned earlier, I reviewed Benjamin Marra’s Gangsta Rap Posse #2 for TCJ.com.

* Over at Robot 6, Eddie Campbell, Leela Corman, and I defend Craig Thompson’s Habibi against accusations of Orientalism.

* And Ron Régé Jr. says “Fuck Other Forms of Art.”

I’m over the moon to be able to finally announce this: I annotated A Game of Thrones.

I didn’t do it alone, either. Working alongside me were Anne Groell, editor of the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series; and Elio Garcia, George R.R. Martin’s go-to researcher, the co-founder (with Linda Antonsson) of ASoIaF megasite Westeros.org, and the co-author (with GRRM and Antonsson) of the forthcoming World of Ice and Fire guide.

I know, right?

We did this in a very cool fashion for a very cool new iPad app called Subtext, which launches today. It’s kind of like having a social network built into the book itself.

The way it works is that you download Subtext for free from the iPad App Store. Then you use it to read any Google Books ebook. As you do so, you can embed notes in the margins at any point throughout the book, sharing your thoughts or asking questions about what you’ve read. You can also read and reply to any notes on the book left by your friends, or in cases like A Game of Thrones, notes left by the author or by experts like, well, me. This video will give you the basic idea.

So in other words, it’s not just that you can read an annotated version of A Game of Thrones — you can annotate it yourself, and interact with anyone else who’s done so, including Anne, Elio, and myself. And a whole bunch of other books featured in the launch have expert or author annotations as well. (George was a bit too busy to contribute himself, which is why we three were tapped. Somehow I don’t think you’ll mind that he didn’t find time in the schedule.)

If you’ve enjoyed my writing about A Song of Ice and Fire here or at All Leather Must Be Boiled or anywhere else, I think you’ll enjoy the notes I’ve left for you to find.

But speaking personally, my contributions kinda pale in insignificance compared to Elio and Anne’s. When I was first approached about the project, I said yes in large part just for the opportunity to work alongside such august personages in the ASoIaF community. I was not disappointed. Anne’s you-are-there anecdotes about discovering the book, working with Martin, and what she knows (and doesn’t know) about what has yet to be written are worth the price of admission alone. (And I’ll tell you what, there’s little that does your superfan ego better than being told by the book’s editor that this or that insight you had about the book was dead on.)

Elio’s astonishingly comprehensive annotations are also more than a return on your investment. He’s provided the first appearance of nearly every character, House, region, and in-world jargon with a capsule biography/definition and a link to further information on his and Linda’s indispensable ASoIaF website, Westeros.org. And as GRRM’s researcher and soon-to-be coauthor, the guy who knows Westeros better than Martin himself, he too offers unique insights into process, theme, and technique.

In both cases, just reading their notes as they went up while I was working on the project was an enormous pleasure. God only knows how much of that AT&T data plan I ate up by anxiously refreshing the Recent Notes page to see if Anne or Elio had dropped any more knowledge bombs on me. And my desire to earn my keep alongside them led, I think, to some of my best ever writing on the book.

I really hope you iPad owners will check it out. Download the app here, then download the book here, then go to town. Our annotations should pop up automatically — keep your eye out for my sigil.

See you in the pages!

PS: Thank you to Elio Garcia for recommending me for the project, thank you to Elio and Anne Groell alike for treating some dude with tumblr like both a peer and a pro, and thank you to Claire Teter from Subtext for guidance and support throughout the process.

* Some lovely preview pages from Frank Miller’s Holy Terror are going around. (Via Marc-Oliver Frisch.)

* Chris Ware has a new iPad-only comic out. More about this anon.

* Here’s a nice piece by Zom of the Mindless Ones on the end of Twin Peaks.

* George R.R. Martin on early Marvel superhero comics — what made them different, how they influenced him.

* The comment threads for my recent Habibi and Mad Men posts are proving unusually fecund. Check ’em out and talk about Orientalism, competence fantasies, male beauty, and more!

* And hey, how about that Hellen Jo?

* My latest Say Hello! column is up at The Comics Journal. This time I interviewed Jumbly Junkery‘s L. Nichols.

* I’ve collected some powerful tributes to Dylan Williams over at Robot 6.

* I’m pretty bummed that I missed out on getting David Bowie sketches from Craig Thompson and Chester Brown at SPX this past weekend, so you can bet your ass I’m camping out days in advance to get ’em from next year’s guests of honor, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. The show’s expanding its floorspace next year, which is a good thing — with those two there, they’ll need it.

* Chris Mautner reports on his haul of comics from the show. I too was pleased to see a new Kevin Huizenga minicomic. Speaking frankly, I didn’t feel a lot of energy from that segment of the comics at the show. Most of the stuff I was excited to read, from Big Questions and Habibi to Forming and Pure Pajamas, came from the established publishers. Meanwhile, reliable makers of really good minis like the Closed Caption Comics and Partyka collectives were MIA, and I didn’t really make any discoveries that made up for their absence. It was the one flaw of an otherwise very successful show, I thought.

* Kevin Czapiewski’s con report was an uplifting read. SPX has a well-deserved reputation for being a fun show to hang out with your fellow comics people, but Kevin argues persuasively that this provides not just a pleasant weekend, but a form of creative/spiritual sustenance.

* The Descent director Neil Marshall is directing the pivotal “Blackwater” episode of Game of Thrones Season Two, from a teleplay by George R.R. Martin himself. That’s pretty damn exciting.

* Why did Gabrielle Bell take down her daily diary comics from July?

* Ron Regé Jr. is raising money to help support himself as he completes his next book, Fantagraphics’ The Cartoon Utopia. That’s a gorgeous…cover? Promo image? Gorgeous regardless.

* Lisa Hanawalt has a strange imagination.

* BREAKING: I love Jonny Negron.

My A Song of Ice and Fire blog All Leather Must Be Boiled now has its own domain: boiledleather.com. Please adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

* I wrote a well-received post on feminism and A Song of Ice and Fire over on my ASoIaF tumblr, in response to this pretty bad piece by Sady Doyle and this very good one by Alyssa Rosenberg. Spoilers abound at all three, so be careful. Related, and less spoilery: my big problem with the way the non-Western cultures in A Song of Ice and Fire are portrayed.

* Jeez, the hits just keep on coming in the comics world: The Center for Cartoon Studies’ library was flooded during Hurricane Irene. The books are basically okay, but the building’s screwed.

* On the Sparkplug/Dylan Williams front, Chris Mautner recommends six Sparkplug books you should consider purchasing to a) help out, and b) read great comics.

* And in happier news, this is a terrific idea: The Library of Congress is creating the Small Press Expo Collection, which will permanently archive all of the Ignatz Award nominees and select self-published books and minicomics.

* And if you enjoy alternative comics in the slightest, Rob Clough’s Top 50 Comics of 2010 is well worth your time. You’ll find a lot of the usual suspects on here, and he and I have a lot of overlap, but he orders things in an idiosyncratic way that will make you think about what you liked best and why.

* George Lucas added a bunch more nonsense–and I mean that, it’s nonsense, it’s stuff that it doesn’t really make sense to add–to the Blu-Ray editions of the original Star Wars trilogy. I’m in broad agreement with what Rob Bricken says about this at the link. It’s perfectly fine for George Lucas to do whatever he likes with his movies. He doesn’t owe me anything. It would just be nice if I could own a nice hi-def copy of the movies I loved growing up as they existed when I was growing up.

* Brigid Alverson put together a highlight reel from a recent Dan DiDio/Jim Lee interview about the rebooted DC Universe and its concurrent digital-comics initiative.

* Jeez, Sam Humphries sure knows what he’s doing.

* Zak Smith/Sabbath on what Rem Koolhaas can tell us about Dungeons & Dragons. (Now that’s a tough sentence to top.)

* William Monahan, the guy who adapted The Departed is doing a draft of Frank Miller’s Sin City 2 script. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Here’s the cover and creator line-up for Thickness #2, the latest issue of Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands’s alt/art smut comics anthology series.

* Both Rolling Stone’s Matthew Perpetua and Pitchfork’s Tom Breihan interviewed the Rapture’s Luke Jenner about his band’s comeback album, and he comes across like a mensch in both. He’s quite candid about why former co-frontman Mattie Safer left the band following his own return to it after he himself quit a few years back, but Safer emerges as a sympathetic figure too. He thought he was now the undisputed leader of the band, and then that was taken away from him. You can easily see how that would weigh on a guy.

* Jonny Negron is a talented person.

* This is what Ben Katchor used to draw like!

* Now and forever the King. (Additional thoughts.)

(A quick programming note: Though a hurricane-related internet outage appears to have resolved itself as mysteriously as it started (on Monday morning, well after the winds from a hurricane during which we never lost power or cable had died down), I’m still having some unrelated computer problems, as well as spending a lot of time writing for other outlets. So if you don’t see me here as often, that’s why.)

Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

On Watch the Throne, the new collaborative album by Jay-Z and Kanye West, the title phrase or a variation on it is uttered nine times over the course of sixteen songs. Meanwhile, a recurring orchestral sample — its nervous energy evoking the spooky bits of Magical Mystery Tour, sinister ’60s children’s movies, and the shifty-eyed rhythm of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” — shows up in looped form as an unofficial theme at the end or beginning of four separate tracks, including the opener “No Church in the Wild” above.

Did this remind anyone else of George R.R. Martin’s character mantras/catchphrases from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones? “If I look back I am lost.” “Where whores go.” “It rhymes with…” “She’s been fucking [names redacted] for all I know…” “Kill the boy.” “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” “Valar Morghulis.” “Weese, Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling…” In each of these cases, these are phrases that wounded, worried minds keep circling back and back and back to, obsessively. They’re phrases they cling to and phrases that haunt them.

Can you think of a better way to describe what the the repetition of the words “watch the throne” might mean to two men whose unquestioned position at the top of their field means, as Jay-Z puts it, that the only place they can find an opponent is in the mirror?

I’ve been writing a post comparing Watch the Throne to ASoIaF/GoT since my first listen, but when you play the game of Game of Thrones comparisons, you publish or you perish. Oh well! I actually don’t mind that other people have gotten there first, because it means that the initial, incorrect critical narrative about the album — two rich people rapping about how rich they are, which is bad because of the debt deal and the London riots or something — is falling by the wayside. It’s as if the pressure to turn reviews of an important album around in 24 hours (due to the record’s unexpected, exclusive, leak-thwarting midnight release on iTunes) led critics to forget that anything ever happened at any other time. If it’s not okay to rap about fame and wealth to a struggling audience, then flush the last two decades of hip-hop, including multiple chart-topping critically acclaimed albums by Jay-Z and Kanye West, down the toilet.

But not only is the thesis ridiculous, it’s not even accurate. Obviously Kanye and Jay rap a lot about their money and the stuff they’ve bought with it on this album, and obviously the names they’re dropping are high-end and/or highfalutin’ enough to stand out to critics under deadline pressure. (I bet the Museum of Modern Art didn’t expect to have almost as much of a role on this record as Frank Ocean does.) But you’d almost have to purposefully ignore the rest of the lyrics, and most importantly the sound of the thing, to think that’s all there is to it, to characterize this album as a less forceful-sounding Rick Ross record. For all the talk about life at the top, they seem about as comfortable there as Robert Baratheon, Eddard Stark, and the stained knight Jaime Lannister. The music is foreboding and paranoid, minor-key prog samples, witch house synths, and soul legends chopped and pitch-shifted into demon shouts and banshee wails. The lyrics describe difficulties — from Jay-Z copping to depression, to Kanye’s R. Crumb-like dissections of his sexuality and misogyny, to overcoming the obstacles of a racist society to “make it in America” only to discover that the higher they go, the fewer people like them they find — that go a lot deeper than the usual litany of complaints about haters and biters. Both aspects of the record are embodied by those repetitions — that cycling, recurring, uncomfortable theme music; “watch the throne, watch the throne, watch the throne,” over and over again. If they were comfortable on the damn thing, they wouldn’t constantly be telling themselves and everyone else not to take their eyes off it for a second.

Jay-Z Kanye West “Why I Love You”

* I’m impressed by DC’s response to the recent debate over the number of women creators it employs. Anyone who says “Well they had to say something, it was bad PR” has obviously not been following the comics industry very long. When you ask someone publicly to do something, and they say “You’re right, we’ll try to do better on that,” that’s a really good thing, especially on an issue like this. Good for DC.

* Grant Morrison in conversation with Neil Gaiman. A fun quote from Gaiman about Morrison: “Whenever I see you now, you are this glorious bird of paradise, but I remember, just as for you I will always be a nervous, hungry young journalist, I remember you as a kid in a black raincoat, incredibly shy. The thing that would get you animated was the point where you’d start talking about a story, and you would come to life.”

* There’s a Marvel/Gary Friedrich lawsuit going on over Ghost Rider right now as well.

* It’s always fun and informative to hear Tom Brevoort talk about how the sausage gets made.

* HBO execs talked about Game of Thrones in a reasonably interesting fashion recently: They’re standing very firm on the 10-episodes-per-season issue, which is unfortunate, but other than that they seem very supportive of a long run and not apt to try to cram too much material (i.e. the entirety of the fatter volumes) into a single season as opposed to spreading it out.

* RoboCop vs. Transformers vs. Hanawalt vs. Harbin.

* Uno Moralez is really one of the best.

* Funny stuff and sexy stuff from Michael DeForge.

* The Sylvester Stallone Character Name Generator made me laugh very hard. (Via Mike Barthel.)

* Here are some highlights from Thursday and early Friday at the San Diego Comic-Con…

* I recommend following Robot 6’s CCI2011 tag for your San Diego news needs. Tom Spurgeon is also keeping a running log of the major comics publishing announcements, with occasional commentary, at his recently revived Comics Reporter site — that’ll be worth checking daily as well.

* Pyongyang/Shenzhen/Burma Chronicles author Guy Delisle’s next travelogue will be Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, which will take place during the “Operation Cast Lead” Gaza War. That’s something to look forward to, though as I said at Robot 6, it won’t be without controversy. (I’ve already gotten one condemnatory Google Alert hit for that post.)

* Marvel will be releasing day-and-date digital versions of its major Spider-Man and X-Men comics. If you go in for the Marvel Movie Conspiracy Theory, you’ll note that these are the two major franchises that Marvel Studios doesn’t own the rights to, rather than the Avengers and their associated characters. Marvel says they’ll start rolling out same-day digital copies of their other titles at logical jumping-on points, like first issues or the start of major new storylines.

* Sticking with the digital beat, Top Shelf is releasing digital versions of over 70 of its graphic novels.

* Frank Miller’s Holy Terror looks quite entertaining. I hadn’t realized it was in black and white, although I guess with Lynn Varley out of the picture it stands to reason.

* Chris Mautner interviews Brian Ralph about his first-person zombie survival story Daybreak. Fun fact: I have a short piece on this book in the August issue of Maxim!

* In the Friday iteration of DC’s daily panel on its “New 52” linewide relaunch, DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio said planning for the relaunch began in October 2010, when 23 writers met to talk about the line’s direction. That’s the first firm date I’ve heard — it’s months before most of the speculation I’ve seen has pegged the initiation of the project — and the first time I’ve heard that that many writers were involved.

* In other news…

* I took a quick look at Grant Morrison’s recent comments on Siegel & Shuster’s claim to Superman on Robot 6.

* Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley on George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, and nerd culture’s cult of disappointment.

* Speaking of which, Sam Bosma has been doing some extraordinary portraits of ASoIaF characters lately. Spoiler warning: Unless you’ve read the first four books, there are plenty of characters in there you probably haven’t met, so look out.

* Those two links remind me: Things have really been hopping over at my Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog All Leather Must Be Boiled since I finished reading A Dance with Dragons. I’ve been posting a lot of commentary and links to interesting art and reviews, and Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, the good folks at the big-deal ASoIaF fan site Westeros.org, have been sending a lot of traffic my way, so there’s some good comment-thread action as well. Do check it out if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in. My review of/braindump on A Dance with Dragons is a good place to start.

* Peter Jackson has released an official composite image of all 13 Dwarves from The Hobbit. Pretty, pretty good.

* Jason Adams runs down the major horror movies slated for release during the back half of 2011, none of which I will get to see, sob sob sob.

* In defense of chillwave, by Nitsuh Abebe.

* 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.

I’ve posted an ADwD braindump — likely the first of many — on my A Song of Ice and Fire blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. Needless to say, SPOILER ALERT.

A brief programming note: Blogging will be very light until I finish reading A Dance with Dragons. I will not be using Twitter at all during this time, and will likely stay away from Tumblr and the bulk of the Internet as well. Thank you for your patience, and I’ll see you on the other side.