Alright, fuck it, this is for people who haven’t read the books, or at least haven’t finished reading them.

I realized that with minimal tweaking, the post I wrote for my dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire blog could just as easily appear over here. Since perhaps there are people who haven’t read the whole series but would like to discuss the show over here, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Keep in mind that by “NON-SPOILERY” I mean “this review will spoil nothing that takes place after the events depicted in the pilot.” It will, of course, be SPOILERY for the pilot itself. I’d like this to remain true for the comments, please — stick only to the events of this episode.

So if all you’ve seen or read of all this is what aired last night, here you go!

—–

* Quibbles up front! And yes, they’re pretty much just quibbles.

* I think my biggest problem with the pilot episode, and given how much of that problem arises from changes the filmmakers made to the material from the book we can perhaps extrapolate that to the series in general, is Michelle Fairley’s Catelyn Stark. There’s nothing wrong with her performance, I suppose; she’s just doing what she must with the material, and there’s the rub. The combination of aging all the characters up and changing her motivation in this early part of the story — in the book, she wanted Ned to take the job as the King’s Hand, thinking his increase in power and prestige would make the family much safer than they’d be if he had the stones to turn his friend down — makes Cat’s character a lot less interesting. As a woman in her mid-thirties who was married off during a time of war and basically got right to work bearing her teen husband some heirs, and who then advocates for her husband to take an influential, potentially dangerous gig in the capital rather than risk the equally potentially dangerous dimunition of prestige and power that not taking the job would entail, and who worries after a brood of children none of whom are older than sophomores in high school, Book-Catelyn feels a lot more vital and interesting and difficult to predict, and her plight less familiar, than her middle-aged mama-bear TV-Catelyn counterpart. It’s very early yet, and things may change, but nothing Fairley has been given in the pilot or in any of the previews I’ve seen have enabled her to complicate the character or do much more than play the warm but concerned and stern protective mother and loving wife. She’s a dramatically inert character, far too easy to get a handle on versus pretty much all of the other major players, and that’s no good, because her relationship with her family is the emotional heart of this volume, and we need to find her interesting so that we find that relationship interesting as well.

* The aging-up bothered me more across the board than I thought it would, actually. In re-reading the series, I’ve found that everyone’s relative youth makes their plights so much more powerful. Book-Ned is supposed to be, what, 35? My wife’s 35, and we just had our first child, who’s still negative two weeks old; imagining the two of us with five children, two of whom are teenagers, is one of the book’s most rewarding frissons for me. So too is Book-Bran’s young age—thrown out the window at what, eight? And Book-Robb, who’d be the Lord of Winterfell if Ned takes the job, is what, 15? And so on and so forth. I miss all of that.

* And I miss the subtle message that this medieval lifestyle forces you to do a whole lot of living before you live very long, too. For a long time my mind had a hard time wrapping around the idea of the Targaryen’s as this storied dynasty given that they were only around for 300 years; I was used to Tokien’s millennial timeframes. But when girls are married off the moment they get their first period, and when the cream of your soldiery is 17 years old or so, and when people are considered very, very old at 65, 300 years is an awful long time.

* The critics were right—there was a lot of exposition in this episode. Fewer long stories and explanations of relationships than I anticipated however. For the most part it came in the form of ADR dialogue like “That’s Jaime Lannister, the Queen’s brother!” So it was more clumsy than boring.

* The Dothraki were a bit ad-hoc, no? Perhaps the intention was to avoid any stereotyping of a specific ethnic group, so they cast people from many different ones and combined them. This is what Peter Jackson did with the scary natives in King Kong, if I recall correctly. And in that sense, okay, fine, but when so much care is given to the details of the Westerosi societies, the Dothraki look a bit too much like a casting call for tan-skinned actors.

* If you’re going to call them the White Walkers exclusively, doesn’t that increase your obligation to actually make them white? Don’t get me wrong, they were creepy as heck, but it’s still a bit odd. (In the books, they were mostly called the Others, which I guess the show felt it couldn’t do due to Lost.)

* Finally on the quibble front, Ramin Djawadi’s score was about half-very good (the spooky scenes, the opening credits) and half-“you’re kidding, right?” The “heroic” music when the King’s party enters Winterfell…I was hoping a few of them would be clip-clopping along with coconut shells.

* That said, well done overall.

* Obviously the big critical question raised by nearly everyone who’d seen the pilot early is whether or not newcomers to the material could follow it. It feels weird to be able not to address this central issue, but since I’m not a newcomer, I really can’t. It seemed easy enough to follow to me; yes, there are a lot of characters, but surely serialized television has taught us it’s okay not to have everyone straight by the end of the first episode. But I’m not going to stake my take on the episode on a yay or nay proclamation on this score.

* With that removed from the equation, I can focus more on what I liked best about it: the acting. It’s as though both the filmmakers and the cast realized how hard their task was in this first episode, and went out of their way (Cat excepted) to give everyone little bits of business to separate them out from fantasy cliches. I loved the “shaving Jon, Theon, and Robb” scene with its weird forced intimacy between three very different kinds of “sons” to Eddard Stark and the jokey, casual, but fraught with tension locker-room relationship that’s evolved between the three of them. I loved Daenerys’s dead-eyed stare as she endured first her brother’s inspection and then the scalding water of her bath—these are eyes that have seen too much and prefer to look inward. I loved Viserys’s foppish trot and alarmed exclamation as Drogo rode away without a word. I loved the opening shot of the ill-fated Night’s Watch trio, waiting for the gates to open, already playing the roles they’ve selected—smug, grim, hyper-alert—to help them survive in this world. I loved Tyrion’s unique, booze-seasoned combination of arrogance and self-loathing in his conversation with Jon. I loved Jaime’s “I heard you the first time” to Cersei at the end, already knowing what she wants him to do, trying in vain to put it off, coming to grips with knowing that he’ll do it anyway. There’s enough of all that sort of thing to give me a lot of confidence about the rest of the season. When the exposition and introductions die down, the material will have more room to breathe, and if the cast and crew keep filling the space with these idiosyncratic moments, we’re in good shape.

If you have read all four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, I invite you to read my thoughts about last night’s premiere episode over at my ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. As always, the post contains some spoilers for the books if you haven’t read them, so please beware.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to write weekly “Game of Thrones thoughts” posts, but if I do, they will appear on my SPOILER-FILLED blog for people who’ve read all four volumes in A Song of Ice and Fire so far, All Leather Must Be Boiled. I’ll link to each post from here, but please, do not click through unless you’ve read all four books so far.

If I end up partcipating in a less spoilery discussion of the show somewhere, I guess I’ll link to that, too.

Brilliant idea: Random House has made the first 80 pages of A Game of Thrones available to read for free online or as a downloadable PDF. When I tell people to read the book, I say, “Give it till page 80 or so. If you don’t like it by then, hey, no harm no foul.” But in all honesty, I literally don’t know anyone whose picked it up on my recommendation, read till page 80, and didn’t like it. Seriously, not one. You have nothing to lose but, I dunno, an hour or two on the train tonight or on Sunday afternoon this weekend or whatever. Give it a shot, see what you think.

(via Westeros)

The pursuit of an Awesome Job is not something I think of as particularly worthwhile endeavor. I say this as a person who likes his job a lot. The idea that there’s a Really Awesome Job that will be totally fulfilling and provide all kinds of meaning and value to your life is not helpful. People deserve jobs where they can use their brains, feel respected as a human beings, and not hate themselves or feel like they are settling. That is a Good Job. Once you have that, you can focus on finding value in the other parts of your life. That’s the shit that matters.

—Kevin Fanning

One of the vocal styles in question comes from band member Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, who sings in starry-eyed, raise-your-voice harmonies that can resemble, at various moments: earnest children baying around a campfire; lonely goatherds calling from hill to hill; some sort of monkish or liturgical concern dedicated to solemnly singing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” in the apses of Gothic cathedrals; or possibly the way two people might try to sing in harmony on clear quiet nights if they were stranded on South Pacific islands about 200 yards away from each other. Which is to say: Lennox’s vocals are distinctive and hard to hear without dreaming up slightly fantastic settings for them to belong in.

—Nitsuh Abebe, “Panda Bear’s Tomboy is Animal Collective’s Latest Magic Trick”

Friends have been recommending Martin’s books to me for a while, but I chose not to read them (for now, at least), wanting to see if the series could stand on its own and be both comprehensible and interesting to a newcomer. And it is. I probably struggled with identifying the members of the Barksdale crew in the early episodes of “The Wire” as much as I did trying to sort out the members of the House of Stark.

—Alan Sepinwall, “HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ an epic, mature, well-crafted fantasy series”

–Richard Hawley, “The Ocean” live in Holmfirth, October 1, 2009. Unexpected and breathtaking guitar solo at the end.

I’ve been reading a lot of Game of Thrones reviews as they’ve gone up today, mostly from mainstreamy sites or their nerd (or TV-nerd) subdomains, and it’s one of those times when you realize just how idiosyncratic the critical enterprise really is. People will single out the exact same thing for discussion, then characterize it in diametrically opposed ways. The first few episodes are talky and have a lot of storylines, and this is either brilliant television with which newcomers to the material will be enraptured, or bad television with which newcomers to the material will struggle. Daenerys has a lot of sex scenes, and this is either one of the season’s strongest storylines given additional heft by a brilliant performance embodying the book’s most complex heroine, or an embarrassing throwback to the clumsy sexuality of countless dimestore fantasy novels and b-movies endured by an actress who has to try to find something for the books’ least interesting character to do. Peter Dinklage is such a stand-out that he either deserves an Emmy or throws you completely out of the show any time he opens his mouth.

Personally I get the sense that normals will follow things just fine. A friend who screened the first few episodes but hadn’t read the book loved them, as did critic Alan Sepinwall from that same vantage point, so I think the sorts of people who are civilian enough not to have read the books but who would be predisposed to checking out an HBO adult-fantasy series to begin with will be alright. As Sepinwall points out (see links below), it probably took most people a long time to tell a Landsman from a Weebay on The Wire, too. Moreover — and again, credit to Sepinwall here — HBO’s great shows have tended to need a while before they went from “ooh, interesting” to “holy shit, best ever”; Sepinwall pegs this to a point a few episodes into Season One for the shows he talks about, but I can tell you that for me, The Sopranos only became The Sopranos with “University” in Season Three, while it’s quite literally impossible to grasp how ambitious The Wire was gonna get until a few episodes into Season Two, when you realize that nope, they’re not kidding about the dockworkers.

Judge for yourselves:

Nick Baumann, The Atlantic

Dan Feinberg and Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

Ryan McGee, Boobtube Dude

Alyssa Rosenberg, The Atlantic

Maureen Ryan, TV Squad

Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

* This is the first year since the festival’s inception that I was unable to attend MoCCA. How was it? The first report I came across was from Secret Acres’ Leon Avelino, and it jibes with the overall impression I’ve gotten on Twitter and the like of a successful show, moreso perhaps than its previous two years in the Armory location.

* Nick Bertozzi debuted Rubber Necker #5 at the show! OMG I can’t wait

* Two of my favorite critics have reviewed Chester Brown’s Paying For It. Here’s Chris Mautner; here’s Tom Spurgeon. And here’s my review, if you missed it.

* Must-read of the week: The Comics Reporter’s Bart Beaty on the death of L’Association, arguably France’s best comics publisher. L’Asso is a bit like if Image Comics were founded not by a bunch of hot Marvel artists, but by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, Chester Brown, and Los Bros, and its acrimonious break-up and potential downfall is therefore that much more fascinating and train-wreck compelling.

* I quite enjoyed this 25-minute making-of documentary on Game of Thrones. I dare say it was mostly stuff even I hadn’t seen yet, and I’ve watched a whole lot of these preview video things. The Eyrie is stunning.

* I think the latest GoT trailer, titled “Poison,” is my favorite so far. It plays up the mystery angle, which I think will be important to a lot of newcomers’ understanding of what it is that they’re watching.

* This New Yorker profile of author George R.R. Martin is well worth signing up for the free four-issue digital-edition subscription to read. It has an especial focus on Martin’s anti-fandom, the people who’ve loved all or most of the books released so far but now hate Martin for taking so long to produce the remaining installments. The depth and dedication of this anti-fandom is far, far greater than I ever imagined, and reading about them is fascinating, in a “What hath Internet wrought” sort of way. (Via Westeros.)

* Hope Larson basically got her gig adapting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time into a comic by saying “I wouldn’t mind adapting A Wrinkle in Time” in an interview the book’s publisher read. Love it.

* This is pretty neat: Gollum actor Andy Serkis will be the second unit director for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

* The extremely talented cartoonist Dustin Harbin is ending his diary comic. I still owe him a review of the collection that came out through Koyama Press. In the meantime, I’ll be staring at this drawing he did.

* ComicsAlliance has posted a series of interviews with the folks who run the production of those Marvel Super Heroes: What The–?! videos for which I am a contributing writer. Here’s Alex Kropinak, here’s Jesse Falcon, and here’s Ben Morse.

* Michael Shannon is General Zod. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and Frank Miller’s The Spirit, making me sadder than ever that I haven’t seen either one yet.

* Related: Frequent ADDXSTC commenter rev’D really didn’t like Sucker Punch.

* Jason (yes, Hey, Wait… Jason) reviews Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale.

* Here’s an enormously uplifting look at the surprisingly, faith-in-humanity-inspiringly progressive treatment of race in Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie by Jeet Heer.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones takes a look at Frank Miller’s rewardingly off-model, possibly Bowie-inspired Joker in The Dark Knight Returns. It’s really tough to have the DKR Joker as your first in-comics exposure to the character, because it really is so different from how he’s portrayed pretty much anywhere else — he barely speaks, and smiles twice — yet so effective for all that. I think part of why the “evil homosexual” subtext (if anything in a Miller comic could be called subtext) of the character has never bothered me the way it otherwise might is because he’s not portrayed as a figure of giggling, creepy revulsion, but as this sort of godlike, implacable killing machine. There’s a feminized elegance to him, but it’s the elegance of Pinhead.

* Rob Clough reviews the intriguing-looking international comics anthology Gazeta.

* Tom Brevoort on Jim Shooter.

* Alt Screen lists all of New York City’s special film screenings — revivals, previews, festivals, repertory, special appearances, and so on. Very cool resource. (Via Chris Weingarten.)

* Dave Kiersh’s latest comic is partially about my current place of residence, Levittown, NY.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan will kill himself if he doesn’t finish this comic that’s “kinda about suicide” within one year. Draw, Isaac, draw!

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force webcomic drops episodes like this on you without warning every once in a while.

* Jonny Negron draws David Bowie. And draws him well.

* Another rollicking Fight or Run battle from Kevin Huizenga. I’d have run, too.

* Michael DeForge’s abandoned comics are better than most people’s not-abandoned comics.

* Finally, my God, Frank Quitely draws He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Look at the way this thing bristles. It’s all swords and spears and blades. He gets it.

* Here are the first 14 minutes of Game of Thrones season one episode one. Good God did it look gorgeous in HD. I ordered HBO for this.

* My pal Rob Bricken republished my list of reasons to read A Song of Ice and Fire on Topless Robot. Besides being flattering, this also gave the piece the potential to reach a lot more people, and at this point I’ve read enough people saying it convinced them to give the books a try to make it hard for me to keep track of them all, which is hugely gratifying. Do check out the comment thread to see the shape of Larger Nerddom’s reaction to the books, pro and con.

* Please don’t forget I have my whole own VERY SPOILERY ASoIaF blog now, ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED. I think that if I end up doing a “Game of Thrones thoughts” series of posts about the show as it airs, I’ll probably put it up there, just to avoid confusion about the level of spoilers involved.

* Zack Soto has started an all-ASoIaF fanart Tumblr that I helped him name, which is rad. Here’s his version of the Hound.

* Reviews of the advance copies of the first six episodes sent out to select critics have been coming in. Of particular interest to me and possibly to you if you’ve been following my Game of Thrones updates over the months are the ones by Winter Is Coming, Myles McNutt, and Westeros. That last one goes in-depth into what has changed, and when those changes do and don’t work, but not in apoplectic fanboyish fashion at all. Both inside and outside ASoIaF fandom and general nerddom, to say the reviews have been rapturous is not overstating things.

* George R.R. Martin finished another couple chapters in A Dance with Dragons last week. At this point he’s finished more chapters than he originally said were left to finish and he’s still not finished with the book, which is kinda funny.

* He’s also been making the big-media interview rounds. This New York Times interview with him is worth clicking over to for the title alone.

* Other interviews I’ve enjoyed include Den of Geek’s chat with Alfie Allen (Theon) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys); the Evening Standard’s interview with Clarke, Harry Lloyd (Viserys) and Richard Madden (Robb); and Den of Geek’s interview with Jason Momoa (Drogo). In all cases you get the sense of young, ambitious, attractive actors getting their first taste of being involved with an extraordinary, potentially very popular project; it’s vicariously exhilarating. (Via Winter Is Coming and Westeros.)

* Very endearing stuff here: Winter Is Coming interviews the young actresses Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, who play Arya and Sansa respectively.

* Martin holds up Lost as an example of how not to end a series; Martin fan Damon Lindelof says “ouch.” So did I.

* Finally, do NOT click this link unless you’ve read all four books, but Tower of the Hand’s recent series on Littlefinger is precisely the sort of in-depth, intelligent writing about ASoIaF I’ve been hungering for.

* 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.

* The interview with Phoebe Gloeckner about her Juárez project to which I link in this Robot 6 post is the must-read of the year. Great cartoonists like Chris Ware and Joe Sacco and Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez are cutting closer and closer to the bone lately; this great cartoonist is already sawing through. Her next project will be a multimedia ebook for tablets, it seems. Christ, I can’t wait.

* Here’s some information on how you can help fund the next projects for Hans Rickheit (who recently lost his job) and Tom Neely, two of my favorite cartoonists.

* Whoa, Achewood is going on indefinite hiatus.

* Grant Morrison and (mostly) Yanick Paquette’s Batman Incorporated will likely face further delays, but it’s almost okay now that DC has signed Chris Burnham to an exclusive contract so he can draw more of it.

* There have been so very, very, very, very, very many bits of new news on Game of Thrones I hardly know where to begin. But I can tell you that none of them were more eagerly anticipated by me than Curt Purcell’s post-read review of A Game of Thrones. In all seriousness, every time I opened Google Reader during my little baby-hiatus, his was the first feed I checked for, just to see if this post had gone up yet. Worth the wait; I’ll have more to say about it at some point, I should think.

* Meanwhile I started my own A Song of Ice and Fire blog STRICTLY FOR PEOPLE WHO’VE READ ALL FOUR BOOKS, I.E. SPOILERS AHOY.

* And HBO has just been pumping out the promotional video featurettes. Of late they’ve rolled out an entire series, each focusing on one House or one character. Check out the HBO GoT YouTube channel for most if not all of them: Stark, Baratheon, Lannister, Targaryen, Ned, Catelyn, Bran, Sansa, Arya, Robb, Jon, Jamie, Cersei, Tyrion, Danaerys, Drogo, and Robert are all out there somewhere iirc, if not more besides.

* Brian Ralph drew a brand-new epilogue for the collected edition of his first-person zombie comic Daybreak. Could be a pip, could be a pip.

* Kevin Huizenga says that Or Else #2, his best comic and I think potentially the best single issue of any comic ever pound for pound, is soon to be reprinted. (Either that and/or Supermonster #14, of which OE2 was a remake, will be.)

* Speaking of Huizenga, here are some very pretty Fight or Run images.

* Hooray: My pal Matt Maxwell is relaunching his quite good Weird Western comic Strangeways as a webcomic. He’s posting both of the completed Strangeways graphic novels first, so check ’em out.

* Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul’s lovely and underrated Flash series is ending, or I suppose I should say “ending.” This is a book that featured a gigantic mirror the Rogues found labeled “IN CASE THE FLASH COMES BACK, BREAK GLASS” or something like that.

* The Comics Grid continues to be very good, lately on the work of Daniel Clowes: cf. Tony Venezia on architecture and environment in Ghost World and Greice Schneider on the use of the visual vocabularies of different modes of comics in David Boring.

* I’m with Ben Morse: The recent match-up between Iron Man and Doctor Octopus courtesy of Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s Invincible Iron Man has been fun so far. I’m almost positive I’m cribbing this insight from Tom Spurgeon, but the unexpected hero-villain match-up is a lot harder to pull off than it used to be. I was flipping through The Essential Thor phonebook, and there’s this truly awesome battle between Thor and Magneto. Unlike today, where such a fight would consist of giant two-page spreads of Thor causing electrical storms and Magneto hitting Thor with magnetic fields big enough to level skyscrapers with no discernible effect to any given stage of combat, this was as close to a fistfight as a God of Thunder could have with a Mutant Master of Magnetism. Neither combatant really knew the extent of his opponent’s powers, so their moves were intimate and all business; the one I remember most vividly was Magneto sealing Thor in a room apart from his hammer (so he reverted to his human form as Donald Blake), then using his powers to firing metal rivets out of the wall in hopes of shooting him to death. Nowadays, nearly all the Marvel Universe characters have met each other so many times that their every meeting has the feel of a high school reunion. But back then, there really was an air of the unpredictable about such confrontations: The readers truly had no way of knowing who might come out on top. Visit Tom Brevoort’s Formspring account sometime to see how much the accumulation of “statistics” from various encounters by battle-board users has sucked the fun out of these things.

* Over at the Nu-Journal, Matt Seneca offers an intriguing but to my mind not entirely convincing take on Brecht Evens’s gorgeous Night Animals, labeling it a sex comic that kind of fails to perform. I’d say that the ending of that second story—”brusque,” as Matt puts it—is a statement of its own, not a cop-out, albeit not a sex-positive statement and therefore one apt to engender a bit of head-scratching in the subculture that is the book’s natural audience.

* Saving this for when I have time to read both the book and the review: Beth Hewitt reviews Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark for The Panelists.

* Another day, another wonderfully unpleasant comic from Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, here’s a preview of Johnny Negron’s contribution to DeForge and Ryan Sands’s porno anthology Thickness.

* And speaking of wonderfully unpleasant, I actually have a hard time reading Lisa Hanawalt’s “Extra Egg Room.” Keee-rist.

* Eleanor Davis is working on a YA comic about medieval Uzbekistan with her mom. In other news, Eleanor Davis can fucking draw. (Via Tom Spurgeon, I think.)

* Dave Kiersh presents three whole chapters of his next book, Afterschool Special.

* Hooray, weekly (I think) comics from Michael Kupperman!

* Love this Jeffrey Brown Incredible Change-Bots piece. Click for a link to the full-sized thing.

* Benjamin Marra draws the Savage Dragon. YES. Click for the full size thing.

* Please keep drawing those sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* Jason (yes, that Jason) draws Tin Machine.

* It’s great to see Frank Santoro draw ol’ Senator Wastmor again.

* Renee French runs the gamut.

* David Slade is directing the new Daredevil movie; Darren Aronofsky is not directing the new Wolverine movie.

* Hahahaha, the Red Dawn remake is digitally replacing all the China stuff it already shot with North Korea stuff to avoid screwing up its international box office? Hahahahaha! WOLVERINES! hahahahahaha

* The doofus who started a fake twitter account under the name of Powr Mastrs artist C.F. doesn’t think there was any harm done–this explains why throughout all of human history people have been so thrilled to discover that other people were going around impersonating them–while Chris Ware’s The ACME Novelty Library #20 has failed to live up to Jason Overby’s exacting standards. Hopefully you’ll get there some day, Chris! (That said, the Comets Comets redesign is gorgeous.)

* Tim Hodler asks: Who did Tarantino really crib the Superman/Clark Kent Kill Bill speech from?

* Congratulations to my old boss and friend Pat McCallum on his new gig as an editor at DC.

* Finally, thank you, everyone. It has meant so much.

Apparently a good way to while away the hours while your baby is in the NICU is to start yet another blog, so do check out ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED, my new site dedicated to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, strictly for people who’ve read all four books. SPOILER ALERT, in other words. I think the best way to describe it is a “noteblog” — I’m just jotting down a few quick thoughts about the series and the show here and there as they occur to me. If you’ve read the whole series so far, I hope you enjoy it.

He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood.

In the dream his friends rode with him, as they had in life. Proud Martyn Cassel, Jory’s father; faithful Theo Wull; Ethan Glover, who had been Brandon’s squire; Ser Mark Ryswell, soft of speech and gentle of heart; the crannogman, Howland Reed; Lord Dustin on his great red stallion. Ned had known their faces as well as he knew his own once, but the years leech at a man’s memories, even those he has vowed never to forget. In the dream they were only shadows, grey wraiths on horses made of mist.

They were seven, facing three. In the dream as it had been in life. Yet these were no ordinary three. They waited before the round tower, the red mountains of Dorne at their backs, their white cloaks blowing in the wind. And these were no shadows; their faces burned clear, even now. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, had a sad smile on his lips. The hilt of the greatsword Dawn poked up over his right shoulder. Ser Oswell Whent was on one knee, sharpening his blade with a whetstone. Across his white-enameled helm, the black bat of his House spread its wings. Between them stood fierce old Ser Gerold Hightower, the White Bull, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.

“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.

“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.

“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell.

“When King’s Landing fell, Ser Jaime slew your king with a golden sword, and I wondered where you were.”

“Far away,” Ser Gerold Said, “or Aerys would yet sit the Iron Throne, and our false brother would burn in seven hells.”

“I came down on Storm’s End to lift the seige,” Ned told them, “and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dipped their banners, and all their knights bent the knee to pledge us fealty. I was certain you would be among them.”

“Our knees do not bend easily,” said Ser Arthur Dayne.

“Ser Willem Darry is fled to Dragonstone, with your queen and Prince Viserys. I thought you might have sailed with him.”

“Ser Willem is a good man and true,” said Ser Oswell.

“But not of the Kingsguard,” Sir Gerold pointed out. “The Kingsguard does not flee.”

“Then or now,” said Ser Arthur. He donned his helm.

“We swore a vow,” explained old Ser Gerold.

Ned’s wraiths moved up beside him, with shadow swords in hand. They were seven against three.

“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light.

“No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death.

—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

* I want to thank everyone for all your kind words and warm wishes about the Missus and baby Helena. They have meant a great deal to us over the past few days. They also give me a great excuse to run this piece of Destructor/Helena fanart by Isaac Moylan.

* Two new Game of Thrones videos: One’s a new trailer that sets up the basics and show some skin, the other a featurette on House Stark.

* They did a really nice job with the official Game of Thrones poster. click to see it at its full huge size.

* Looks like GRRM managed to add hisself an extra chapter to the still-unfinished A Dance with Dragons. Slowly he turned, step by step, inch by inch…

* Curt Purcell has finished watching Lost. What did he think? The ANSWERS await you!!!! Seriously, Curt has maybe the sharpest take yet on why what didn’t work didn’t work.

* I just like reading Tom Brevoort talking about how comics are made.

* Nice little piece on the infant section of ACME Novelty Library #20 by The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual.

* This is a fine suite of nominees for the Stumptown comic con’s awards program, with what seems to my eyes like a unique and considered emphasis on illustrative chops.

* Speaking of awards, I found myself quite happy to see that Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream won About.com’s Readers’ Choice Award, just because I’m happy to see Hagio’s book win anything anyone cares to award it, but also because a “readers’ choice award” indicates that it’s clicking with more people than just dudes on the internet who don’t read a lot of shojo with which to compare it, like me.

* Bookmarking this for a likely imaginary future in which I have enough free time to read it: The Mindless Ones annotate Batman Inc. #3, an unusually dense issue in terms of annotable things, even by Grant Morrison Batman standards.

* Over at the Nu-Comics Journal, Matt Seneca reviews the revised/expanded edition of C.F.’s City-Hunter Magazine #1.

* I’ll take a new full-color Ben Katchor comic strip, sure.

* Benjamin Marra needs to keep on doing pin-ups for people’s pulp comics.

* Tom Kaczynski needs to keep sketching sessy ladies.

* I really like this Shining piece by Matt Rota.

* “Involuntary Collaborations: I buy other people’s landscape paintings at yard sales and Goodwill and put monsters in them.” (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* Jacob’s Ladder is one of those films that I saw for a class in college, liked a great deal, but then never watched again for some reason. I feel like I should.

* Prepare to flash back to your childhood like whoa: Rue Morgue takes a look at the Crestwood House series of books about classic horror movies. I’ll never ever forget those orange hardcovers.

* What, are you dense? Are you from Harvard or something? What the hell do you think I am? I’m a goddamn Yalie.

* Now that the newsy element of the new Comics Journal website has receded into the background a bit, I’m better able to appreciate the actual content. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into Bob Levin’s report on the civil war between members of Frank Frazetta’s family, or Patrick Rosenkranz’s piece on the history of autobio comics. I’m also really thrilled that Tucker Stone is writing reviews for them, too — if you only know him for his “Comics of the Weak” smackdowns, this is a whole new side to discover, and a great look. And back on the newsy tip, Tim Hodler has a morning-after piece on the relaunch and reactions thereto.

* One of the cooler things I discovered via those reactions was Graphic Ladies, a Tumblr by Erin Polgreen that collates and collects links to comics and comics criticism by women. There are only a few days’ worth of entries up at the moment, but so far it’s got excellent taste — it’s not just throwing in anything done by people with the right set of genitals, if you were worried about that sort of thing. (And if you’ve spent any time in any kind of parameter-based publishing ecosystem — the horror Internet, anyone? — you know how important it is to apply standards on top of meeting your basic coverage criteria.) A great idea with great execution so far.

* And via Graphic Ladies I discovered a rock-solid-looking group blog called The Comics Grid, featuring mostly European mostly academic critics writing short, sweet pieces on good books. (I recognize the name of contributor Ernesto Priego.) Right now I’ve got posts on The Wrong Place, The ACME Novelty Library, Footnotes in Gaza, and Maus cued up.

* I was pleased to read that the wildly overrated ex-Hobbit director Guillermo Del Toro has left yet another fantastic-fiction adaptation dear to my heart, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

* Speaking of The Hobbit, Sam Bosma’s Hobbit illustrations are gorgeous.

* Andy Khouri put together some killer cool-image galleries for Comics Alliance and Moviefone lately. The latter is all Tyler Stout movie posters, while the former includes such wonders as by-god Gilbert Hernandez drawing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

* I’m really impressed by this Monster Brains gallery of A. Paul Weber illustrations. Yeesh.

* Behold the new Game of Thrones paperback edition!

* Speaking of GoT, it’s a pleasure as always to follow Curt Purcell as he makes his way through a well-done work of genre fiction.

* Real Life Horror: It’s always worth reminding ourselves what an immoral, dangerous, genuinely bad person my Representative, Republican Peter King, really is.

* Hip hip hooray, the latest Game of Thrones trailer is now available in hi-res! I really don’t know why you’d land an exclusive trailer and then not post it properly, but what do I know. Unsurprisingly the thing is a lot more impressive when you can actually see it clearly.

* Related: I started re-reading A Game of Thrones yesterday–before the news about A Dance with Dragons hit, no less!–and I’ve now had to put the book down twice in the first few chapters because I was literally too excited by everything to come in this volume and all the subsequent ones to concentrate properly on the page at hand.

* Ron Moore, Michael Rymer, Jamie Bamber, and now James Callis — whose Gaius Baltar was one of my favorite television performances of all time — are all part of the big Battlestar Galactica reunion that Moore’s new supernatural-cop show 17th Precinct is turning into.

* Here’s a typically thoughtful Tom Brevoort Q&A at Comic Book Resources, tackling issues of pricing, title cancellations, submissions and talent recruitment, the status of the X-Men/mutant franchise, character gluts, continuity glitches and more — the difference this time around being that the questions are from one selected message-board user. It’s interesting to see how these issues are approached, and what about them is prioritized, by someone with the perspective of pure fandom.

* Now that’s a good idea for a listicle: Steve Erickson presents the Top 10 Artsploitation Films. Worth the price of admission for the Fat Girl screencap alone. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I first discovered the art of Johnny Negron via Ryan Sands a few weeks ago and had been waiting for the right image to come along to send you his way as well. This was the one.

* Real Life Horror: “Nine Years of Nudity in American Detention.”

* Be a birther, be a racist dogwhistler, be an anti-Muslim bigot, be a homophobe if you must, Mike Huckabee. But what kind of idiot fuckface can’t get behind the idea of impregnating Natalie Portman?

* Golly gee willikers, today was a big day for Game of Thrones. In addition to the news about A Dance with Dragons‘ release date (and btw, you can preorder it now on Amazon), HBO debuted a full-fledged two-minute-plus trailer for the show. Right now it’s only available in a streaming, unembeddable, non-HD crappy version exclusively on EW.com, but hopefully we’ll get a better version soon that I can share.

* It looks as though the two Hobbit movies will be subtitled The Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again. (I’m just assuming they’ll use the definite article for the former.) I’d figured “There and Back Again” would be involved but wasn’t sure about the other one.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part one: Ron Regé Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #16: The Chronically Hallucinating Insomniac is being republished by him after a sold-out 100-copy limited edition from French publisher Kaugummi as an even more limited 15-copy edition for $25, with a free drawing from GR2’s latest Post-It note art show thrown in for good measure. Wish I could afford it these days.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part two: Tom Neely has completed his new graphic novel The Wolf.

* “Martha I’d Like to Fuck.” (I actually think I may have gotten there first.)

* Johnny Ryan draws Junji Ito’s Gyo, courtesy of Ryan Sands.

* Real Life Horror: Today was one of those days where the atavistic, sociopathic, autarchic, bigoted shittiness of our great nation really fucking got to me. Those are links to fully five separate instances of nightmarish heartlessness and idiocy, and I haven’t even gotten to union-busting or Mike Huckabee yet. The Others take it all.

I picked the right day to start re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire.

(via George R.R. Martin)

* Neilalien, the first comicsblogger, has retired after an astonishing eleven years of blogging. I talk a little bit about what this means, and what it means to me personally, over at Robot 6.

* Quentin Tarantino has apparently finished putting together the long-promised Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which will debut theatrically on March 27th with seven new minutes of O-Ren Ishii anime.

* Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, Videodrome/Thriller/The Ring make-up effects demigod Rick Baker, and Velvet Goldmine/Reign of Fire star Christian Bale all won Oscars at the Academy Awards last night. That’s three for the good guys.

* Jinkies, get a load of the new Game of Thrones trailer. This looks pretty much exactly how I’d want it to look. I do feel, however, that I should say I found myself a bit concerned today that it could devolve into a bit of a harridan-off between Catelyn and Cersei. Hopefully it won’t, but after The Walking Dead I think people will certainly be paying attention to this sort of thing, and rightfully so. (Via Westeros.)

* Variety notes that the pending TV show is already boosting book sales in a big way. This link was also via Westeros, which has more.

* Speaking of Westeros, HBO’s official Game of Thrones site interviews Westeros co-founder Elio Garcia. What a delightful story of the impact A Song of Ice and Fire fandom has had on his life.

* Very very pretty A Song of Ice and Fire fanart by Kali Ciesemier: Sansa Stark, Jon Snow, and Brienne of Tarth. (Via Westeros yet again.)

* Finally, they’re a bit pricey, but there are now official Game of Thrones t-shirts featuring the emblems and words of various major Houses. Have we reached Peak Nerd? (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Zack Soto is relaunching his much-missed alt-superhero/fantasy comic The Secret Voice as a weekly webcomic! Very exciting news.

* FX has greenlit a pilot for an adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s very good cops-and-capes series Powers. Lots and lots of potential there.

* It’s looking more and more like the upcoming Marvel event Fear Itself will indeed be about giant dudes getting Asgardian warhammers and wrecking shop with them. I fully support this, even given the Tron costume piping.

* Curt Purcell is still working his way through Lost: Here he is on Season Three and Season Four. I have a lot i want to say about all this but I’ll probably wait till he’s finished the series.

* Are these new Cenobite Halloween costumes, designed by Clive Barker himself, the greatest Halloween costumes of all time?

* The Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson won’t be working on The Hobbit due to prior commitments. That’s really a shame, and evidence, perhaps, of the potential tolls on talent and experience the films’ endless delays have taken.

* A John Hankiewicz comic I totally missed? Folks, I count on you to prevent things like this from happening.

* Black Swan/Red Hulk.

* Hey, I made Kanye + Comics!

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force: the book — due in 2012.

* Solid crop of Eisner Award Hall of Fame selections this year. Good on the judges for increasing the number of inductees to ensure key figures get the recognition they deserve.

* Tell ’em, John Porcellino.

* Nick Bertozzi talks process, with ample illustrations. Really looking forward to reading his new Lewis & Clark book.

* The Comics Journal #301 looks pretty good.

* Benjamin Marra is a constant delight.

* Wow, Paul Pope can draw the crap out of tigers. Now I want to see him do a Captain Marvel story just for his Mister Tawky Tawny.

* I can get behind a version of math-rock behemoth Battles with Gary Numan (among others) on vocals instead of the squeaky-voiced muppet guy. I mean, Gary Numan plus Helmet drummer John Stanier on a song called “My Machines”? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Matthew Perpetua explains why Led Zeppelin were a better band than the Rolling Stones.

* This Game of Thrones promo kit is some serious swag. Apparently every person they sent it to got a different set of stuff.