* First, a quick programming note. I’d prefer not to go into the details of the IRL situation that has kept me away from the blog for the past several days — you can find them on my Twitter account if you’re so inclined — but I would like to thank everyone for their patience, and everyone who’s reached out to me and my family in whatever way for their kindness and support. I have a few minutes here on the train to play catch-up, so that’s what I’m gonna do, but I would expect blogging to remain sporadic, as I must prioritize external commitments during the bulk of what free time remains to me, which is likely to be insufficient to fully fulfill them anyway. Sorry!

* Game of Thrones continues to look very very good. This video is about the first season’s major settings.

* Speaking of, congratulations to George R.R. Martin and his girlfriend of 30-plus years, Parris, for tying the knot.

* Still speaking of, Curt Purcell notes that the book is temporarily out of print as a TV tie-in version is put into production.

* Still still speaking of, here’s an interesting first-hand report on a screening of the show’s first two episodes for European network reps. He says the show doesn’t necessarily really show its stuff in the first couple eps, which is actually a standard HBO thing, in my experience. He also really likes Maisie Williams, the child actress who plays Arya Stark; I’ve heard that a lot.

* I’ve barely read or watched anything by the late Dwayne McDuffie, but from what I can gather he had a model career for a “mainstream” comic-book and animation professional: He created many brand-new things, he made fine use of many old things, and he not only worked ethically, but ethics, in the form of more and better representation of non-white people in superhero comics, were central to his work. It’s rotten that he died so young.

* Great artists drawing monsters part one: Guy Davis draws Pennywise the Dancing Clown. (Via Alex Segura.)

* Great artists drawing monsters part two: Daniel Clowes draws Glenn Beck. (Via DanielClowes.com.)

* I always dig Dennis Culver’s portrait line-ups, like this one of Batman, Inc.

* Oooh, this is good. Curt Purcell, one of my favorite genre-fiction writers of all, is watching and reviewing Lost. Here he is on most of Season One, half of Season Two, the beginning of Season Three, and more Season Three. Curt brings very, very few preconceptions and hang-ups to his reviews, just a sense of what he wants out of art and an ability to explain why a given work does and doesn’t deliver it, which makes him perfect for the critical minefield that is this show.

* CBR has posted a pair of interviews focusing on two of the best superhero comics of the past decade: Grant Morrison talks about All-Star Superman (the best one), while Ed Brubaker and Tom Brevoort talk about Brubaker’s Captain America run (a top tenner, I think; I need to crunch some numbers).

* Congratulations to the latest round of Xeric Grant winners. The Xeric is one of those things that you’d say “man, wouldn’t it be great if…” if it didn’t actually exist, so thank you, Peter Laird, for the fact that it does.

* I don’t want to give it away, but Jeffrey Meyer’s Covered version of the cover for Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius is really clever if you are a comics nerd, and in the spirit of the original too, I think.

* Diplopia, a series of collaborative, interlocking paintings by Eleanor Davis (one of the great contemporary alt-fantasy cartoonists, when she does alt-fantasy) and Katherine Guillen, is really quite something. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* I guess I had no idea that Alan Sepinwall invented the prevailing mode of TV criticism today — the weekly review/recap, seasoned with fannish advocacy (and/or outrage). I’ve alternately enjoyed Sepinwall’s work a great deal and gotten pretty fed up with it from time to time, and I think both phenomena can be attributed to that fannish quality. His passion and devotion makes him a fine close-reader and strength-susser-outer, but it can also lead him to form ideas about what a show is doing or should do that the actual show can’t ever hope to dislodge. (Via Matthew Zoller Seitz; Sepinwall himself responds to the Slate piece in question here.)

* Weird — to me the apparently controversial idea that Black Swan is a horror movie is utterly uncontroversial. It’s more like the fact that Black Swan is a horror movie. (Just not a very good one!)

* That’s funny: Just today I was listening to Wild Beasts and wondering when their next album would come out, and lo and behold, new Wild Beasts album called Smother due May 10th. God I loved their last record.

* Real Life Horror: In light of recent events, this 2006 New Yorker profile of Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya by Andrew Solomon is morbidly fascinating. The regime he describes reminds me of Ian Kershaw’s argument that the Nazi regime was not one of merciless and uniform top-down control, but an all-encompassing morass of bureaucracies and para/militaries untied in “working toward the Führer” — i.e. moving independently to fulfill the goals expressed and embraced by Adolf Hitler, sometimes issued in direct orders and crystal-clear public statements, often not. Since Hitler’s main goals were few in number and easy to grasp — eliminate the Left; conquer the Soviet Union, extirpate its population, and give its land and resources to Germans; blame the World Wars on Jewry and collectively punish them with death for this imagined crime — it was easy enough for these sometimes complimentary, often conflicting, often wholly redundant agencies to stay moving in the same direction, even after several years of ignominious defeat, merciless attacks on their own soil, and near-total public silence from Hitler. Since Qaddafi’s goals, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, self-contradictory, and downright bizarre enough to make Hitler’s absurd and grandiose schemes look like your local library board of trustees’ eminently sensible plan to refurbish the restroom, his regime appears to have completely disintegrated the first time a large group successfully opted to no longer “work toward the Leader.” And since he cannot imagine a Libya without Qaddafi, he will now do his best to ensure that if Qaddafi must go, there won’t be much of a Libya left. Awful, just awful. (Via Christopher Hayes.)

* By the sound of it, George R.R. Martin needs to wrap up three chapters in order to complete A Song of Ice and Fire Book Five, A Dance with Dragons. But I feel as though this has been the case since the New York Comic Con this past autumn.

* The promising group comics blog The Panelists has moved from The Comics Journal‘s website to their own site. Change your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly.

* The legendary Bay Area comics shop Comics Relief is closing after a precipitous decline resulting from the death of its guiding light, Rory Root, and subsequent management by Root’s family; a new store run by various Root employees and associates will open in the same location (I think) under a new name. I only know Comics Relief and Root from their welcome presence in that retail-anchor area of the San Diego Comic-Con show floor, with Bud Plant and Mile High; I bought many comics there in the first few years of my grown-up comics readership, and think of the store fondly. Best of luck to all involved.

* Not only do I really like the idea of “Graphic Details,” a touring art show featuring the work of Jewish women autobio cartoonists, but I also really like the Miss Lasko-Gross poster image for it.

* Here’s a fun, geeky Tim O’Neil post on the cosmologies of the DC and Marvel Universes and the way they lurk in the back of your mind when you’re reading about any given street-level DC or Marvel character.

* Late to the party link #1: Frank Santoro uses the occasion of hanging out with cartoonists John Pham and Jon Vermilyea to wax digressive on how we follow cartoonists’ careers, which works fall through the cracks, and the way animation work serves the putting-food-on-the-table purpose that assembly-line tasks like inking or coloring once did for alternative and underground cartoonists. Françoise Mouly was a Marvel Comics colorist, don’t let’s forget.

* Late to the party link #2: Gabrielle Bell talks to Bitch about feminism in comics in general and her work in particular. (Via Drawn & Quarterly.)

* Hot cha, look at the cover for the Strange Tales II hardcover! Art by Kate Beaton, design by Paul Hornschemeier, very silly jacket copy by yours truly.

* Very useful: HBO’s official pronunciation guide for Game of Thrones. The “CAT-lin” thing blows my mind, but I’ve heard George R.R. Martin pronounce it that way, so it’s canon. Westeros notes that one difference between GRRM’s preferred pronunciations and the show’s is that they’ll be pronouncing the honorific “Ser” as “SAIR” rather than “SIR.” This makes sense to me, actually: In the books, the changed spelling was sufficient exotification, but viewers can’t hear a spelling change.

* Oh man, JEEZ, this Kate Beaton panel. JEEZ.

* Another fine, candid CBR interview with Marvel’s Tom Brevoort. This time he reveals that Nick Spencer is taking over Secret Avengers because Ed Brubaker wasn’t having a good time writing it, just for example. And whoa, those are some nice colors on that Thor #620 preview! Is that Pasqual Ferry doing his own colors? I forget. Anyway, you may disagree with some of what Brevoort says, but wouldn’t it be marvelous if all the major figures in the North American comics industry were this vocally opinionated and forthright?

* Real Life Horror, Actual Class Warfare Edition: Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is threatening to deploy the National Guard to help him take away the collective bargaining rights of state employees. (Via Atrios.)

* Bilbo and the dwarves!

* The San Diego Comic-Con 2011 completely sold out in one day. Zoinks. Tom Spurgeon has further thoughts, centering on the fact that the show still puts up a world-class slate of comics programming and exhibitors and that the programming end, at least, is better attended now than ever — but that none of that may matter if the way that tickets to the show are sold redound to the movie-trailer crowd’s near exclusive benefit. It’s not clear that that’s the case, however. One thing that seems abundantly clear is that the days of SDCC being something a casual or curious person could plop themselves into the day of, or even the month of, are loooooooong gone, never to return; everyone’s expectations should be recalibrated from there.

* Saving this for when I have the chance to really listen: Inkstuds interviews Al Columbia for two hours. Worth it for the below header image alone:

* Tokyopop is looking into publishing a collection of Brandon Graham’s King City at the extra-large trim size of its Image Comics serial-comic incarnation. I look forward to reading it! Via Frank Santoro, who has more.

* Now this is freaking heartwarming, doubly so if you’ve read the books: The girl who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones has adopted the dog who plays Sansa’s direwolf Lady. That’s the happy pair with the young actors who play Bran and Arya. <3 <3 <3

* Speaking of A Song of Ice and Fire, I agree with the assessment of regular commenter Hob, who emailed me a link to this astonishing map of Westeros by Other-in-Law with the message “Possibly the best fan art I’ve ever seen.” Click the image to see the whole thing, and more maps from ASoIaF besides.

* The Hobbit starts shooting on Monday, March 21, 2011.

* The Australian magazine The Lifted Brow looks interesting — the current issue boasts contributions from comickers Eddie Campbell, Lisa Hanawalt, Noel Freibert, Ron Regé Jr., and Lane Milburn. (Via Mr. Freibert.)

* Interesting list of the Seven Deadly Sins that crappy horror movies commit from Tawnya Bhattacharya. I don’t agree with them all — what inner demon of Sally’s did Leatherface represent in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Her childhood fascination with the zebras on the wallpaper in her grandparents’ house? — but so many horror movies are colossal wastes of time that it behooves us to try to understand why. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Rob Humanick reminds us that Shutter Island > Inception.

* Headline of the Day: One in 50 Troops in Afghanistan Is a Robot

* He’s certainly an expert on leadership vacuums, I’ll say that much.

* Is it just me or does R. Fiore’s review of Acme Novelty Library #20 get just about everything wrong, from matters of basic reading comprehension (the veracity of Lint’s son’s memoir) and aesthetic judgment (the quality of the memoir’s art) to the overall assessment (Ware needs to buckle down and tell a by-god STORY already!).

* Finally, do not tl;dr Lawrence Wright’s enormously long, enormously compelling New Yorker article on the Church of Scientology, as seen through the eyes of its most socially prominent defector, Crash/Casino Royale/Million Dollar Baby writer and director Paul Haggis. I tend not to go for South Park-style Scientology skewering, because it seems clear that the only thing keeping the tenets and traditions of all the world’s religions from sounding just as ridiculous as Scientology (or Mormonism) when laid out in just-the-facts terms is centuries of faith and familiarity. Start a faith thousands of years ago in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent rather than decades ago in the United States of America and they magically become a lot harder to mock as bad science fiction, Moroni and Xenu be damned. However, the CoS’s alleged financial shakedown and apparent physical intimidation of its members, as well as the extraordinary lengths to which it goes to ensure they don’t leave, rise above and beyond the illogic all religions definitionally share and enter the realm of Roman Catholic Chuch-style criminal conspiracy. Moreover, no one who’s spent as much time in the occult/conspiracy underbelly as I have can fail to find the story of L. Ron Hubbard’s shake-and-bake religion, Jack Parson’s black-magick orgy house and all, deeply and darkly hilarious; and the article is coldly ruthless in the way it exposes Hubbard’s self-aggrandizing legend as hokum. Equally damning is its quiet but emphatic and repeated contrast of the Church’s official line about this or that claim by its detractors, however mild or innocuous, with the claim itself: Not only are the particulars of any given apostate or non-member’s recollection of an event denied, but the event in question is said to have never taken place, and indeed the participants are alleged to have never even met. Finally, the way it just tosses out the occasional wholly chilling detail makes for bracing reading. Fun fact: Church leader David Miscavige has apparently had his own wife disappeared for insubordination; no one outside the Church has known where she is for years, and the Church isn’t talking. (Via Anne Laurie.)

* PictureBox reveals the details about their next release from Yuichi Yokoyama, Garden. Really looking forward to this one.

* Bill Kartalopoulos’s “Cartoon Polymaths” show sounds pretty cool. I mean, Winsor McCay and Paper Rad in one art exhibit, y’know? It opens tomorrow at Parsons in NYC.

* They’re making A Song of Ice and Fire comics. Shrug. It looks like they’ll be done in the typical front-of-Previews mode, which I don’t think will do the material any favors.

* Jeet Heer defends Art Spiegelman. I think it’s a testament to how deeply influential were not just Maus but also the original version of Breakdowns (not to mention his co-editorship of RAW) that what were once hugely groundbreaking works are now deeply ingrained as almost habits of thought in all of art/alt/lit comicdom and are thus undervalued. Heer also points out Spiegelman’s value as a comics’ foremost public intellectual.

* Michael DeForge reminds us (or at least me) that The Believer has had an Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section for many issues now. Anyone read the mag? How is it? I mean, the February 2011 issue has Jonathan Bennett, Charles Burns, Lilli Carré, Michael DeForge, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Leif Goldberg, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Haven and more, so it seems like it should be pretty great, yet I feel it’s sort of disappearing into the void, at least among comics-critic-dom.

* Speaking of things I’m not reading because I’m a miserly ignoramus, Frank Santoro takes the opportunity of what I think is the conclusion of the Shaky Kane series The Bulletproof Coffin to wax tangential on different modes of serialization in contemporary comics. One of those tangents involves the fate of collections of work that was getting some attention in serialized form, like Coffin and King City. My reading of serialized comics basically hinges on what I can access for free, and my request for review copies for Bulletproof Coffin, King City, Orc Stain, and Morning Glories was turned down en masse by Image, so I can tell you, Frank, I’ll probably be very likely to check out collections of those if I can get my hands on ’em.

* Here’s a nice primer on Mokele-Mbembe, the relict sauropod dinosaur that supposedly roams the Congo basin and is one of my favorite cryptozoological creatures in the world.

* Emily Carroll’s fondness for drawing sessy ladies gets my full support.

* My pal Isaac Moylan is pretty talented.

* Based on a true story!

* Is the latest episode of Axe Cop intentional commentary on the role of women in superhero comics, or is that just a pleasant coincidence?

* I really want to redirect you to Matthias Wivel’s interview with Chris Ware, now that I’ve finished reading it at last. Must-read material. Question now that I’ve read it: Where would Ware be without Richard McGuire’s “Here”?

* No one in superhero comics gives better interview in terms of how the sausage gets made than Marvel’s Tom Brevoort.

* Whoa: DC is launching fully sixteen miniseries for its Flashpoint event. And when you look at last year’s sales charts, can you blame them? “Whither the midlist” is always the big question, but these things are going to eat up like half of the upper charts all on their own.

* This Axe Cop fan film looks beautiful and has an incredible theme song.

* Ooh, a lovely A Song of Ice and Fire art gallery by Gianluca Maconi.

* My collaborator Matt Wiegle is posting illustrations for Lord of the Flies at the Partyka site.

* Becky Cloonan posts a page from an unpublished “Abercomic” I commissioned from her for an abortive relaunch of Abercrombie & Fitch’s A&F Quarterly a few years back. Sexy, no?

* Via Matt Seneca, this comic Superwest by Massimo Mattioli sure looks interesting.

* I’m happy/sad to hear that Jeffrey Brown has an Incredible Change-Bots strip in the final issue of Wizard. Click the link for further Change-Bots goodies.

* Speaking of Wizard, my friend and former coworker Mel Caylo of Archaia talks to Sam Humphries and the gang at Meltdown Comics’ Meltcast podcast about the demise of Wizard and ToyFare. If there’s one thing we Wizard alums can do well, it’s talk about life at Wizard; Mel should give you some insight into what it was really like there.

* The Wizard/ToyFare fallout continues:

* Heidi MacDonald has another fine round-up of reactions and analysis, including a deeply unappealing self-evaluation of the company’s strengths from a company document. The bit about “we don’t have any of our own employees; we contract them through Wizard Entertainment” is Scott Rosenberg-level unpleasant.

* iFanboy’s Jason Wood walks us through the way that Wizard owner — actually, I’m not sure that covers it; at this point it seems safe to say that Gareb (and perhaps brother Stephen) and Wizard are effectively synonymous, like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails — Gareb Shamus assembled the shell company through which Wizard now manifests itself. Hmm, I wonder if Shamus’s previous enterprises have something on the ledgers that necessitates picking up stakes.

* On a more pleasant note, toy writer Poe Ghostal laments the demise of ToyFare, which in my experience is the one Wizard product no one ever complained about. And for good reason — it was very very good! I’m glad it will continue to exist in digital form.

* I’m about to write more about the “death” issue of Fantastic Four than I expected to. No spoilers, though, so don’t worry!

* As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been reading Jonathan Hickman’s run on FF, variously illustrated by Dale Eaglesham and Steve Empting, for some time now, for the simple reason that it’s good. Pairing Hickman with the Fantastic Four — not just Marvel’s oldest and most storied franchise, but the one constructed around distinct characters, and indeed around character dynamics, more than any other — is a great way to mitigate his tendency to make the “mad idea” king, as seen in his increasingly less impressive S.H.I.E.L.D. reimagining, a book that feels like some kind of experiment in eliminating character from the storytelling equation entirely. The art is meaty and solid, the pseudo-science is fun rather than merely dizzying, there’s lots of cool creatures and villains to fight or outwit, and of course there’s the recognizable and entertaining Thing, Human Torch, Mister Fantastic, and Invisible Woman (and Namor and Franklin and Valeria and Doctor Doom and Galactus) at the center of it all. So I was gonna read the death issue, #587, regardless. The hype didn’t bother me because, and I say this as someone who makes part of his living following comic book industry hype, there’s no such thing as inescapable comic book industry hype. If you choose to escape it, you can, even while you read the underlying books.

* So! I read the comic and it was a good comic just like the rest of Hickman’s FF comics have been. But I was quite surprised upon turning the final page that the hype machine had cranked up as high and hard as it had, given what I actually saw on the actual pages in question. Even given the transitory nature of superhero-comic deaths, this one — based on what we see and what we don’t see, based on what we know about how the franchise works in general and how Hickman’s take on it in particular, based on the fact that the series is about to start over with a new title and new numbering but its landmark, irresistible-to-marketing #600th issue is right around the corner — felt like a well-executed plot point in service of a larger, longer story much, much more than it felt like a “get me the Daily News on the horn, the people need to know!” pop-culture event.

* And interestingly, the book’s editor, Tom Brevoort, really isn’t pretending otherwise:

[Reader Question:] I think we’ve finally hit a point as a fanbase where a majority of the epople who actually read the books aren’t going “THIS DEATH WON’T LAST” and are instead going “How will the is change the status quo and lead to interesting stories for a while?”

[Brevoort:] Well, let’s hope so.

People aren’t even pretending that deaths will stick anymore; the choice isn’t between deaths that last and stunts that don’t, but between plot points that people care about and stunts they don’t, about stories assembled with care and skill versus meaningless cannon-fodder churn imposed from on high. Or as Hickman puts it:

The question is: Are we trying to have an honest, resonating beat within the telling of a story, or are we trying to shock the reader and score cheap points?

I think it’s a bad idea to completely devalue death in a genre built on the creation and solving of problems through violence, but if that ship has sailed, again, I think you could do a lot worse than treating death as Hickman has and as Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison did before him: as a door you can open to explore parts of your characters and concepts you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

* But leave it to Tom Spurgeon to move past that silver lining and find a dark lining around it:

the takeaway may be that Marvel has helped create a market that limits the reward that used to be due better-than-usual work, and that drastic ways to goose interest and sales in such titles may be the only tools left to them if they want to move more copies.

Good work relies on gimmickry to get over, is the gist of it.

* Anyway, death was already a commonplace for the Fantastic Four: Bully and Douglas Wolk show us just how common.

* Moving on, Tom Brevoort hated, hated, hated this comic. Place your bets, folks!

* Justin Green has a blog! The Pulse!-reading teenager in me is freaking thrilled.

* Jeffrey Brown talks Incredible Change-Bots Two.

* Yet another name change for the Greg Pak/Fred Van Lente Hercules comic. I wonder how long they can Atlas this thing before it runs out of steam. A long time, I hope!

* I normally don’t go in for geeky “who should play so-and-so” casting speculation, but I’ll make an exception for A Song of Ice and Fire’s Brienne of Tarth. That’s a real challenge.

* Jeet Heer leads this piece on Dino Buzzati’s 1969 proto-graphic novel Poem Strip by saying its 2009 translation and republication hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Insofar as I’d never heard of it until reading Jeet’s piece, I’d have to agree. The cover is gorgeous and the two interior panels Jeet reproduces look like John Hankiewicz 45 years before the fact.

* You can watch this Bollywood Tamil killer-robot action sequence from Shankar’s Robot ironically if you want, but I’d kill to see action this intelligently choreographed and impressively staged (for what I’m sure was a relative pittance) in any of the (non-Neil Marshall or Neveldine/Taylor) genre entertainments I regularly consume. Bonus: The Robot looks like Joe Pesci from toward the end of Casino. (Via Michael Kupperman, awesomely enough.)

Regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware (to say the least!) that I am a big fan of George R.R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels called A Song of Ice and Fire, and that I’m eagerly anticipating the HBO series adapting them, called Game of Thrones. But a few days ago I realized that you might not know why. Credit for this goes to my blogging chum Curt Purcell, who used the occasion of my umpty-millionth post on the topic to ask:

Without giving too much away, can you maybe hit a few bullet-points about what sets SONG OF ICE AND FIRE apart from other similar fantasy series? It sounds so run-of-the-mill, even when people gush about it. What am I missing that would make me want to read it?

As I said in the comment I left to answer his questions, I’m such an enthusiast for this material that I don’t know if I’ll be any good at expressing or explaining why. (I’m also emotionally and physically exhausted due to all sorts of off-blog goings-on this past week and am not at my most cogent.) But I’ll take a shot at running down some of the series’ distinguishing characteristics. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the hard sell.

First off, what exactly are we talking about here? Well, as I said, A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy novels by writer George R.R. Martin, whom some comic fans and nerds may know from his involvement with the Wild Cards series of revisionist-superhero prose novels, or for his time on the writing staff for the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton Beauty and the Beast TV show. So far, four volumes of a (sort-of^) planned seven have been released: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows. The HBO series, spearheaded by David Benioff and Dan Weiss, takes its title (sans indefinite article) from the first volume and will debut on April 17; the plan is to adapt one book per season, although the books get so long that some may need to be spread over the course of two seasons.

What’s the setting? Without spoiling anything important, here goes: The books take place mostly in a land called Westeros, your basic roughly medieval-European epic fantasy setting, albeit one with far, far fewer overt trappings of fantasy than, say The Lord of the Rings — humans are the only game in town in terms of races, and we’re several generations removed from the last time magic/sorcery or mythical creatures like dragons were a going concern. The main fantastical feature when the story begins is how the flow of seasons work: Summer and winter can each last for years, decades even, before shifting unpredictably.

Westeros, which ranges from an arctic climate up north to a Mediterranean one down south and has similar cultural lines of demarcation, was once divided up into Seven Kingdoms, each ruled by great families, or Houses. But for centuries now, the whole continent has been united under one ruling King. However, about 15 years or so before the story begins, a group of powerful Houses banded together to overthrow the current king, who had gone insane, thus ending the kingdom’s first and up until that point only dynasty.

What’s the story about? Again, without spoiling anything important: It’s 15 years after Mad King Aerys of House Targaryen was overthrown by an alliance of nobles who were either burned by his cruelty or hungry for power of their own, or some combination thereof. The leader of the alliance, Robert Baratheon, has been king ever since, supported by his wife’s hugely influential, hugely assholish family, House Lannister. But when his mentor and right-hand man dies (or is murdered — no one’s really sure), Robert, who seems well-intentioned but by now is kind of a drunk and glutton and horndog and not a very good king, heads north to seek the help of his best friend, Eddard Stark, who has command of the kingdom’s distinctly unglamorous northernmost area. A Game of Thrones primarily chronicles the conflicts between House Stark and House Lannister as Ned, as he’s known to his friends, tries to help out King Robert and get to the bottom of the mystery of their mutual mentor’s death, and some other shady goings-on as well.

But meanwhile, two threats are brewing beyond the kingdom’s borders and outside the struggle for power and influence surrounding the rival Houses. The first lies in the uncivilized wastelands to the North, beyond a massive Great Wall of China-type structure called The Wall, a 700-foot-tall barrier made totally of ice that stretches from sea to sea. Thousands of years ago some kind of supernatural menace came out of the North to threaten the Seven Kingdoms, and the Wall was constructed after mankind’s victory to keep the threat from coming back. By now it’s been so long that the organization tasked with maintaining the wall is a neglected, ragtag band, ill-prepared for…whatever it is that seems to be going on out there, somewhere.

The other lies overseas, where the only two survivors of the overthrow of House Targaryen, a boy named Viserys and a girl named Danaerys, have hit their teenage years and are trying to mount a comeback. Even though Aerys was a major creep, and Viserys is no great shakes either, if the two of them get the right backers and the right soldiers, they could present a major threat to the new rulers of their old kingdom, who know they’re out there but have no idea how to find them.

Why should I care about any of this? This is really the heart of Curt’s question, and probably yours, if you have a question about the series yourself. Chances are you either are perfectly conversant and comfortable with the standard tropes of fantasy and thus this series’ specific iterations thereof aren’t enough to hook you, or you’re the sort of person who automatically tunes out anytime someone in a tunic whips out a sword and says “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, heir to the throne of Gondor” or somesuch and thus you’re skeptical that the books would be for you even if they’re the best gosh-darn stories about a made-up kingdom of knights and dragons and shit ever invented. With all of you in mind, I put together a list of what sets the books apart, both for me and, from what I’ve gathered based on talking to and reading about other fans, for a lot of people. This is the stuff that matters.

1) I mentioned this already, but it bears repeating: The fantasy elements are surprisingly minimal, particularly at first. Simply put, if you’re the kind of person who can’t stand elves and orcs and dwarves and wise old wizards, they won’t be around to turn you off out of hand. Now, this wasn’t really a selling point for me, since I’m a person who has the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left arm and obviously has no preexisting, in-principle problem with elves and orcs and dwarves and things of that nature. But I think you’d be surprised at how little high/epic fantasy I’ve actually read outside of The Lord of the Rings. The vast majority of my fantasy reading was done when I was a YA reader, and was centered either on satires (Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, Robert Asprin’s Myth series) or sort of off-model, less Tolkienian series (this is the stuff I remember more fondly — Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy, and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, the most Tolkienian of the group but still pretty far removed from the Elves/Dwarves/Orcs model that dominates much of the genre)). In my mind, I’d come to associate stuff that more directly bore the fingerprints of Professor T or his Gygaxian reinterpreters with either unoriginality, tedium, or cheese. So a series that focused more on character and worldbuilding in the cultural and historical senses of that word than on invented races or bestiaries or magical systems was perfect for me when deciding to give fantasy another try at age thirtysomething.

2) A closely related point: In the absence of magical stuff, the story’s driven by realistic human conflicts. Martin has said that the series’ central struggle for power — the titular game of thrones played by various important people we meet — was inspired by England’s real-world War of the Roses, with its complex web of family loyalties and regional rivalries and so on. In terms of narrative fiction, I think the the closest comparison is The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. A Game of Thrones combines the first film’s story of rival families violently jockeying for supremacy amid all sorts of complex conspiracies and alliances with the second film’s story of the very serious, very smart leader of one of those families trying to uncover the origin of a plot against him and his. The point is that we’re very far from rote Joseph Campbell hero’s-journey fantasy storytelling, with some dude learning it’s his destiny to defeat the Dark Lord. If you’re sick of that sort of thing, you’ll find a lot more to hook you here. This goes double if you’re the sort of person who’s ever enjoyed fictional or non-fictional war epics or gangster stories. “The Sopranos with swords” really is a pretty dead-on way to describe what’s going on here.

3) Another reason “The Sopranos with swords” works, and probably one of the big reasons HBO bit: There’s graphic language, violence, and sex. Again, I’m not particularly well-read in the genre, but this is something I’ve really never seen before, not outside weirdo projects like CF’s Powr Mastrs — and this isn’t some cult-favorite alternative comic series, it’s the most popular and influential contemporary fantasy series other than Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. If you’re the sort of person who’s complained that Tolkien’s world is too sexless and bloodless to really care about, believe me, you won’t be voicing similar complaints here. I’ll elaborate on this a bit below, but I also would argue strongly against the notion that any of this is shock for shock’s sake, or rote revisionism. It’s simply Martin writing fantasy the way other writers would write about any other world full of human beings who kill each other and have sex and get pissed off. It’s refreshing. “Deadwood with swords” works here.

4) One last related point: The story isn’t just set in a (relatively) realistic world, driven by realistic human conflicts, and featuring realistic human behavior — it’s powered by relatable human relationships, emotions, drives, desires, and even mistakes. I’ve written about this at length before in somewhat spoilery fashion, but to recap it here, so much of what happens in these books hinges on the personal relationships between the characters, and the way old grudges or old friendships cloud judgment and lead to poor decisions. Perfectly well-intentioned, innately noble characters can’t stand other perfectly well-intentioned, innately noble characters for various reasons that are all too familiar — long-ago affairs, half-forgotten insults, petty jealousies. Characters will know full well that their family is a collection of really awful people, but they’ll still do their level best to help out because hey, it’s family, and it’s psychologically and emotionally tough as hell to leave your family behind. In other words, like all of the best HBO shows did with their respective genres — The Sopranos with the mafia, Deadwood with Westerns, The Wire with cop shows — A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t just surface revisionism, it’s bringing the full weight of richness of literary fiction to genre entertainment.

5) Moving on, here’s a point about the basic logistics of reading these books: The structure of the narrative is highly addictive. Each chapter focuses on a particular character, whose name serves as that chapter’s title, and the characters rotate throughout the book(s). This has the effect of embroiling you in a particular character’s situation or storyline, then immediately popping you over into another’s, so that you find yourself racing through the chapters to get to the next one starring the person you’re interested in — and then getting interested in the ones you’re reading in the interim, and repeating the process over and over. It’s rather brilliant.

6) The raw plot is enormously engrossing. There’s a dynastic struggle that encompasses a murder mystery, a conspiracy, shifting and secret alliances, political machinations — and then brewing underneath it all, two major external threats. You find yourself wanting almost desperately to get to the bottom of it all, and Martin is a strong enough writer to keep adding elements without drowning out the ones that hooked you in the first place. A good comparison here might be Lost, where each time you hit the ground level of the until-then central strain of antagonism, the creators yanked the rug out and revealed another beneath it. The shape and scope of the story is perpetually enriching and expanding.

7) I think Martin’s a pretty strong prose craftsman. There are a few groaners in there, especially in the first book (I think there are two warm fires in the hearth that couldn’t chase away the coldness in Character X and Y’s hearts, for example), but let’s just say that my dayjob sees a lot of SF/F pass across my desk and some of it is embarrassingly badly written. Martin knows his way around the typewriter.

8.) Big surprises, as shocking and powerful as any I’ve read or seen in any work of narrative fiction ever. Stuff that’s on the level of all-time gut-punches like “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” or “You are the dead” (or for you altcomix readers, the big moments in ACME Novelty Library #20 or Love & Rockets: New Stories #3). You want to stay as spoiler-free as possible about these books, that’s all I’ll say. Like, if you start reading them, don’t even read the back-cover or inside-flap blurbs. (Seriously, DON’T.) This is not to say that if you know the surprises, you won’t enjoy the books — I knew one of ’em and still loved it, just like I knew all of the major deaths in The Sopranos through Season Four and still loved it — but man oh man. There’s one part that had me so stunned and upset I literally lost sleep over it, and sat there rereading the chapter, sure I must have missed something or somehow gotten what I’d read wrong. I didn’t. It was awesome.

9) This is hard to articulate without spoiling the grand arcs of the narrative, but suffice it to say that having read all four currently existing volumes, Martin is playing an impressively long game. I don’t want to say too much more, but when you’ve read enough to start getting a sense of where it may head in the final three volumes, it’s kind of stunning in scope. Seeds planted in the first volume are carefully cultivated and tended to for multiple books and multiple years and multiple thousands of pages and still haven’t blossomed yet. Best of all, I think this all ties to one of the central themes of the series, but again, I don’t want to spoil anything.

10) This one’s important: There’s basically nothing glorious or badass whatsoever about violence as portrayed in these books. Most great fantasies don’t skimp on the emotional consequences of being enmeshed in these great struggles — the scouring of the Shire and Frodo’s departure are obviously the beating heart of The Lord of the Rings just for starters — but I don’t think I’ve ever read a heroic fiction that so relentlessly drives home how war and violence immiserate and degrade everyone who participates in them. There’s a haunting flashback in the first volume that in other hands would have been a depiction of some great and glorious last stand, but Martin imbues it so thoroughly with a sense of great sadness and loss and waste and terror. It’s beautiful and really humanistic. Now, I know Tom Spurgeon, who’s no dummy, disagrees with me on how the violence in the book comes across — he thinks it’s Mark Millar’s Ultimate Lord of the Rings, not because he feels Martin is glib or crass or glorifying the violence, mind you, but simply because he feels the use of violence is primarily calculated to get the material over with maximum genre-tweaking impact — but as he’ll also tell you, he’s in a very small minority on this. Martin, as it turns out, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War; I know that doesn’t necessarily reveal a fundamental truth about him beyond “he really didn’t want to go to Vietnam,” but in reading these books, I think his draft board made the right call.

11) That said, when there is action and violence, it’s really strong and really heart-pounding. And when there is fantasy, it’s exciting and strange and awesome, in the original sense of the word. The reason why is the same in both cases: We know that in this world, both swordplay and the supernatural have irrevocable, terrible, life-changing, world-altering consequences.

In short (haha, yeah right), I’m about to say something that I pretty much never say, even about works I deeply love and even to readers whose tastes I feel I understand deeply: I recommend these books without hesitation or qualification. And I’ve done so to readers ranging from my Destructor compadre Matt Wiegle to the fiftysomething mother of two grown children who works in the cubicle next to me, all of whom are basically over the moon for them. If you look into ASoIaF fandom at all, you’ll find this story repeated over and over: Fantasy skeptic gets enthusiastic recommendation from trusted friend, says “What the hell, I’ll give it fifty pages,” and within hours is passing on enthusiastic recommendations of their own. Consider this mine.

^ Why the “sort of”? The series was originally envisioned as a trilogy, but it grew to four volumes and then to six as Martin wrote the initial volumes. When he hit the writing process for the fourth book, he realized the amount of material he wanted to cover would require the book to be split in half even just as a logistical matter, so the series is now slated seven books long. This decision, plus his decision to scrap a planned “five-year jump” for the story between volumes three and four and his subsequent need to re-write and re-conceive a lot of existing work, led to a lengthy delay between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows and a positively infamous delay between Crows and the planned fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons. Martin seemed to have planned to announce a publication date for Dragons during the TCA press tour last week, but an illness around Christmastime sideswiped him; still, I expect an announcement on the book before or when the HBO series debuts in April. (back)

* Myyyyyyy goodness, this new teaser for Game of Thrones is wonderful. The throne! (Via Westeros.)

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming rounds up reactions to the TCA sneak-peek footage. Speaking of which, Elio and Linda at Westeros offer a lengthy and thoughtful reaction of their own.

* Over at Robot 6 I posted a six-page preview of Night Animals, a graphic novel from The Wrong Place author Brecht Evens due out in March from Top Shelf. Looks lovely.

* Speaking of looking lovely, here’s a fun little comic about not liking Nirvana by Sally Bloodbath.

* There’s a super-limited-edition new Yeast Hoist issue (#16) from Ron Regé Jr.

* Wow, buy all four issues of Josh Simmons’s Top Shelf series Happy for the low low price of ten bucks!

* John Porcellino talks process with Frank Santoro.

* I’m posting this more out of obligation than genuine interest, because it’s difficult for me to imagine circumstances under which I’d be like “Oooh boy, a new Ridley Scott movie,” but Alien and Damon Lindelof are things that I’ve cared about, so here you go: Scott’s collabo with Lindelof is no longer an Alien prequel but a new thing called Prometheus. So there you have it. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, I’m just going to post two images from the brilliant Tumblr Kanye + Comics, which takes images from comics and splices them with Kanye West lyrics, but I assure you I could do this all day. Man, that first one should be the Superheroes Lose mascot. (Via someone on Twitter yesterday, I think.)

* Heidi MacDonald takes the 2011 comics sales chart wonkery ball and runs it into the end zone. The picture that emerges is of an industry revolving around the equivalent of a really killer Entertainment Weekly panel at San Diego, basically: Bendis, Johns, Morrison, Kirkman, O’Malley, and to an extent Millar. Heidi also puts everything together in a way that makes me a lot more open to the notion that creator-owned comics, or certainly at the very least creator-driven comics, are the star attraction of the market right now.

* Kate Beaton signs to Drawn & Quarterly for a Hark, a Vagrant! collection in Fall 2011. Kudos all around.

* Corey Blake wins Headline of the Day: “Archie leads the digital comics revolution”.

* Frank Santoro and Dan Nadel have the details on that Santoro exhibition that was teased a few days ago. It’s Santoro vs. Greco-Roman mythology, and thus sounds awesome.

* I’m not as big a Shane Black person as many commenters around here seem to be, mostly because I tend not to care for slam-bang action comedies, but I could certainly handle the writer of The Monster Squad being tapped to write and direct a live-action American Death Note adaptation.

* And I’m not quite interested enough in either project to post them here, but there are pictures of the new Spider-Man and Captain America movie costumes out there, and they both look pretty good. I would also like to take this opportunity to note that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies weren’t very good.

* Curt Purcell has posted another piece on Battlestar Galactica, focusing on Starbuck. He objects to the character’s resolution (a good deal more reasonably than many such objections, I should note); I disagree in the comments.

* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles Real Genius, which I think me and most of my friends took as more of an instruction manual than an actual movie. Chris Knight, Discordian Saint.

* I’m not sure if the drawings in this Josh Cotter post titled “Ben Clark: Inks” are by Cotter or not, but they’re lovely.

* I think the Westeros crew’s review of the Game of Thrones sizzle reel shown to the press over the past week is the best-in-class effort. It drives home a few points I’ve seen in other reports quite clearly: HBO is using the plot to grab people rather than resting on “It’s a fantasy TV show” (compare and contrast with AMC’s strategy for The Walking Dead), Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke are apparently really impressive in the key roles of Catelyn Stark and Danaerys Targaryen respectively, and the Wall looks incredible. (Cf. Myles McNutt’s fine review, and James Poniewozik’s as well; both via this Westeros post.) Their quibbles seem reasonable to me as well: Jaime Lannister isn’t quite as impressively roguish as they’d expected, for example. (They refrain from naming the character with whom they have the most concerns.) If you’re as starved as I am for good GRRM/GoT/ASoIaF talk, these are all places you should be visiting.

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming serves up an in-depth report on the press roundtable with showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff. It seems primarily concerned with bouncing the show off things to which it will be compared: the books themselves, The Lord of the Rings, other big HBO shows, non-fantasy fans’ preconceptions of the genre, and so on.

* Finally (via McNutt), if you’re interested in Game of Thrones but haven’t read the books, Alan Sepinwall is the TV critic for you: He plans on going into the show without reading them and without consuming any press materials that give away plot points. Sepinwall can be a very insightful critic when he’s working with strong material to which he brings few preconceptions, so this could be good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* UPDATE: The series debuts April 17th.

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

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

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

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

* Real Life Horror 2: Freedom.

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

* Well, shit and double shit: George R.R. Martin was hospitalized on Christmas Eve with the urinary tract infection from hell. Fortunately, he’s okay; unfortunately, the “big announcements” he’d planned for HBO’s TCA reception (why whatever could they have been!!!) are kaput. Get well soon, George.

* You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! Poor Steve Lyons does what he can with a thankless task.

* There’s a passage in my friend Ryan “Agent M” Penagos’s exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and reigning Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada that I find very revealing about the man’s approach to his job: He sees his tenure and the projects he helped develop as the Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns he didn’t have it in him to produce as a cartoonist.

* Springboarding off Fantagraphics’ Complete Carl Barks announcement, Graeme McMillan asks what it means that Disney is publishing comics starring its characters through publishers other than Marvel. The long and the short of it is that Disney sees Marvel as being not in the comics business, but in the Marvel business. That’s consistent with their approach to many of their other brands: It’s not like they made Jim Henson start building all the puppets for their theme parks or had Pixar do Tangled for them. But it also tells you something about what Marvel’s approach to comics will likely be for the foreseeable future.

* Elsewhere, Graeme and Jeff Lester ponder at length why Axel Alonso got the Editor-in-Chief gig at Marvel over Tom Brevoort, who’s both more visible to the public and more integral to the company now-flagship Avengers franchise and nearly all of its big line-defining crossover events. But I don’t think it’s a mystery at all, frankly: Brevoort has said multiple times that he had no desire to take that job. I also don’t think it’s any mystery what Quesada will be doing, as it’s what he’s already been doing for quite a while.

* DC goes day-and-date digital with its Batman Beyond ongoing series. I note these things because they seem noteworthy, not because I have any idea what they really mean. I also note that I hear a lot of these series have had problems actually coming out day-and-date even when announced as such, particularly at Marvel.

* Gosh, Yanick Paquette has come into his own as the artist for Batman Incorporated.

* Cliff Chiang does Jaime Hernandez doing the Archies, basically.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan does Jeffrey Brown doing MMA.

* I haven’t seen Gareth Edwards’s much-lauded first-person giant-monster romance Monsters, but what little I’ve heard about it makes him sound like a pretty good choice to direct the next American Godzilla remake. Then again, wasn’t that basically what Cloverfield was? I mean that as a compliment by the way.

* Good news: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an FCC fine against boobs and butts on NYPD Blue.

* Real Life Horror headline of the day: “Severed head full of bullet holes found dangling from bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, official say.”

* Real Life Horror photo of the day: I’m not posting it here because even though it’s not graphic, its immediate implications are disturbing enough that doing so might be hurtful to some readers. But basically, a family photo snapped by Filipino city councilman moments before he was shot to death reveal his assassin with gun drawn and pointed directly at him right behind his unsuspecting family, and you can see it at the link. (Via Heidi MacDonald via Ivan Brandon.)

* My Representative, IRA supporter and anti-Muslim bigot Peter King, is the new head of the Homeland Security Committee; he says the New York Times should be indicted under the Espionage Act. He is a terrible person, and a dangerous one.

* Lighter-note time! Hahahaha, Tom Ewing reviews “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme for Popular, the blog on which he reviews every UK #1 single ever. A number-one hit that misattributed leadership of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Raphael!

* Three music videos of note today:

* My gosh, what a song “Film Music” by Family Fodder is! (Via Douglas Wolk, through whom I first heard it a while back.)

* Here’s the hugely enjoyable video for master pasticheur Destroyer’s late-period Roxy Music homage “Kaputt.” (Via Ryan Catbird.)

Destroyer – Kaputt from Merge Records on Vimeo.

* Finally, this one’s unembeddable so you’ll just have to click through: Wubba wubba wubba, goodbye, God bless, not only in the USA but in the UK too, it’s Hercules & Love Affair’s “My House.” Perhaps only my wife, who hears me sing “Everybody Everybody” on the daily, has any idea just how ready I am for Club MTV/House of Style nostalgia. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Dang: Dirk Deppey has been let go. Take it from someone who was there: Dirk midwifed the comics blogosphere as we know it. Vaya con Dios, Journalista — most of us wouldn’t be here if not for you.

* Two great Quotes of the Day today on Robot 6: Ta-Nehisi Coates on comics as the literature of outcasts (fun, potentially corroborative fact: all of my gay friends are also big nerds);

* and Joe Casey finds today’s superhero comics boring. Oddly, so do I, for the most part, and judging from multiple conversations I’ve had recently, so do a lot of people I know. There are some counterexamples, certainly, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to talk about them if I can collect some thoughts. (Here’s one that’ll be going in: the conclusion to Brian Hibbs’s year-ender essay on the troubles faced by the Direct Market.)

* The Joe Casey quote comes from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interview with him, which kicks off Spurge’s Holiday Interview series for the year. Curling up next to my in-laws’ dogs in Colorado while reading these things on my laptop genuinely is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. I look forward to the rest of ’em. As for this one, Casey’s Ben 10 insulation from repercussions for calling a spade a spade has made him one of the most consistently entertaining interviews in comics on a “here’s where the bodies are buried” level.

* Speaking of Spurge, in this piece on his favorite WildStorm comics he makes the case for that incest storyline from Alan Moore and Zander Cannon’s Smax, the idea being that it’s a jarring enough custom that it makes us feel the kind of response that the characters themselves would feel, instead of setting up afterschool-special-type mustache-twirling antagonists who are racist or homophobic or some other thing we in the audience can gloss right over as “bad guys!” The idea is that it’s sort of the narrative equivalent of the way Shaun Tan used the fantasy elements of The Arrival to better simulate for readers the disorientation of the immigrant experience. It’s smart; given that Moore has shown himself to be prone to afterschool-special literalism in this area — including in Smax‘s fellow Top 10 spinoff The 49ers — I’m not sure I buy it.

* Marvel has made a big deal out of how Fantastic Four will be ending after the current “Three” storyline, which ostensibly will kill one of the Four; today they announced that the Fantastic Four creative team will be launching a new series called FF in March. I don’t understand these kinds of maneuvers. Do they even really goose sales anymore beyond the #1 issue? I mean, these things can work fine if you’re Grant Morrison, but Hickman and Epting are having a swell run on Fantastic Four, and to me the gimmickry just distracts from it.

* Kevin Huizenga has posted three new Fight or Run strips! Someone with more influence over Kevin Huizenga than I have should beg him to make this a weekly webcomic.

* The great Norwegian cartoonist Jason, of all people, pretty much nails Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, or at least what I think of it, right down to some very specific points of comparison with how it probably ought to have been filmed, and to calling out the silliness already present in the original. That said, it seems pretty clear that I like both the comic and the movie a lot more than Jason does.

* Vice’s Nick Gazin says some smart things and some stupid things in his latest comics review round-up, which is par for the course, but it’s entertaining either way, which is also par for the course. (Seriously, PictureBox haters are the new Fantagraphics haters.)

* Ooh ooh, Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Movie Uncut by J.A. Kerswell — a Portable Grindhouse/Destroy All Movies!-style book about slasher flicks!

* Benjamin Marra’s ROM: Spaceknight art is now available as a one-of-a-kind print to raise money for Bill Mantlo’s medical bills. Bid on the thing — as of this writing it’s available for freaking $9.99! (Via Zack Soto.)

* Emily Carroll is a real talent.

* Dave Kiersh is a real talent.

* I can’t wait to talk about Battlestar Galactica with Curt Purcell.

* And here’s another Quote of the Day, this time music-related: Scroll to the bottom of this page from Pitchfork’s Artist Guest List Best of 2010 feature to read OMD’s Andy McCluskey thoughtfully and passionately explain the brilliance of Robyn.

* I think this Alyssa Rosenberg piece on Game of Thrones for the Atlantic (WARNING: more spoilery than I’m comfortable with) fairly misses the boat. Rosenberg argues that the show will require more “sustained leaps” of belief than not just series like The Sopranos and The Wire, which require us to suspend our potential disbelief that murderers struggle to behave decently and contribute usefully in other ways, but also shows like True Blood or The Walking Dead, which depict fantastical things happening “firmly within the existing world” and “in a world discernibly our own” respectively. But the appeal of the Song of Ice and Fire books, and presumably the series, absolutely is that the characters’ motives and their societies’ constructions are recognizable from where we stand, the occasional dragon or bit of sorcery notwithstanding. The fact that it doesn’t take place on “Earth,” not even the alternate near-future Earths of Sookie Stackhouse and Rick Grimes, makes no difference in terms of the show’s approach. (Its reception might be a different matter, but only because swords and armor and accents make a lot of people think “old-timey” and tune out, and that’s not what she’s talking about; she’s saying things like that the show’s in a class by itself because it’ll have “to convince viewers not only that dragons are real, but that they are a literal bulwark against a real and frosty evil,” which in reality is just a difference in degree from “vampires exist and want marriage rights,” not in kind.) “The Sopranos with swords” is dead-on, if the show is done right.

* Finally, no idea how I missed this, but on December 16th George R.R. Martin wrote that he “might have an exciting announcement…maybe two” on January 9th at the Game of Thrones TCA thingamajig in Los Angeles. I suppose it’s easy enough to guess what the first exciting announcement is, but what about the second? I’ll bite: I’ve often wondered if he was actually writing the next two Song of Ice and Fire books at once…

* Craig Thompson says “Habibi production is stuck in limbo.” In a good way, I hope?

* Mike Mignola tells CBR some more about his forthcoming Hellboy plans, including collabos with Kevin Nowlan, Richard Corben, and his own bad self. I especially enjoy the news that he may start treating Hellboy like an altcomic in terms of numbering; rather than label things “issue #2 of 6” or whatever, he’ll just start from #1, and they’ll come out when they come out, and the stories will finish when they finish. Hell yeah.

* Murderers’ Row: Sammy Harkham, Gabrielle Bell, Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga.

photo by Dan Nadel

* Tucker Stone has his “WE are the walking dead!” moment. This is a great column on some of the year’s worst comics, worth both reading and just scanning through the horrifyingly awful panels Tucker picked out to illustrate. And seriously, stop buying terrible comics. (I do straight-up enjoy those last two images, though.) Moreover, right near the top of the piece Tucker rattles off a rock-solid best of 2010 list that covers superhero comics, alternative comics, and “fusion comics” alike. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Hey, Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith has his own blog! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* This episode of a geek podcast named Bear Swarm! leaves no doubt that it is an episode of a geek podcast with a name like Bear Swarm!, if you know what I mean, but it also features a lengthy, geekish interview with George R.R. Martin about the Song of Ice and Fire novels, so I do recommend listening to that part.

* Eve Tushnet on Eyes Wide Shut and the pleasure of finding pleasure in occasionally less-than-pleasurable art:

I don’t think I’ve been nearly attentive enough about restraining this tendency in myself: the tendency to summarize, to grade. To say, “This movie was fantastic in ways x, y, and z, but ultimately failed/succeeded because q.”

It’s that “ultimately” which I need to work harder to avoid. Art is not an exam! You don’t pass or fail.

* Mark Bagley is returning to Ultimate Spider-Man, one of my favorite superhero titles for years and years on end now. I think it’s safe to say that his work for DC showed that Ultimate Spider-Man is where he belongs, although let’s be honest, David LaFuente creams anyone else who ever drew that book.

* In further news related to the good Brian Bendis comics, They’re making a TV show out of Alias. I’m not confident it’ll be any good, based simply on the track record of adaptations of any and all genre comics. It occurred to me yesterday that I could list all such adaptations I consider to be genuinely creatively successful on one hand and still have fingers to spare.

* Pure Sean crack: Ta-Nehisi Coates slags superhero movies for their smallness, praises The Lord of the Rings for its bigness. I’m telling you, I remember so vividly the 20-minute sneak-preview I was able to attend after the Cannes Film Festival, when they were screening the Mines of Moria sequence for critics. I went with a skeptical friend, and we left astonished. The instant Legolas fired that arrow and we traveled with it as it traversed that vast chasm and hit that orc, who then plummeted into the abyss, I realized: They’ve gotten the scale right, for the very first time in the history of fantasy cinema.

* Speaking of Coates, I understand why American fiction writers used to be so smitten with the idea of ex-Confederate soldiers righting the wrongs inflicted on them and theirs by Union thugs. I don’t understand why they’d still be smitten with it today. Or maybe I do, sad to say.

* Finally, a little Real Life Horror (and let’s face it, for the next two years that could be the name of any given Congressional Beat column) for your weekend: My congressman, the odious, racist (and not incidentally IRA-supporting) Peter King, will be heading up a McCarthyite committee to “investigate” American Muslims come the next Congress. Fuck this asshole, fuck anyone who thinks this is a good idea, fuck this failed-state country of ours, hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the Tylenol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Here are some ways to kill time until Bruce Baugh blogs about Cataclysm.

* Radagast, Balin, and Beorn have been cast and Cate Blanchett has been re-signed as Galadriel in The Hobbit. Yes, ex-Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy is Radagast.

* Holy moley: Problem Solverz, the upcoming Adult Swim cartoon from Ben Jones, is almost literally unbelievably gorgeous. Do yourself a favor and watch this fullscreen at 720p. The colors are astonishing. It’s also really funny! Well done. (Via Sammy Harkham.)

* Here’s a very informative interview from the Innsmouth Free Press with artist and blogger Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains fame. It includes the breaking news that Alfrey and Mat Brinkman are making a board game together.

* Today on Robot 6: Early and rare Bill Watterson art.

* Check out these effusive BCGF reports from AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer and pood‘s Adam McGovern.

* Speaking of AdHouse, AdDistro has added Revival House Press, publishers of the entertaining Trigger and Shitbeams on the Loose.

* AMC will be re-running Breaking Bad in its entirety, two episodes every Wednesday night starting tomorrow through March 2011. Sold.

* I don’t think all that much of the films of Christopher Nolan, and this post by Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken struck me as a pretty efficient film-by-film explanation of why.

* Today the New York Times’ RSS feed for Paul Krugman’s blog uploaded a post with the headline “Ice And Fire Update” and the synposis “The saga is getting better.” Man oh man was I disappointed when I clicked through to see it was a post about Iceland’s economy and not, you know, Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman blogging his thoughts on the chapters he recently read from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

* Real Life Horror: This Telegraph piece on potential UFO/extraterrestrial-related documents in the WikiLeaks diplomatic document dump is a Real Life Horror candidate for two reasons. One, hey, awesome, confidential government cables about aliens! Two, the litany of astonishingly bloodthirsty statements by various American conservative politicians and pundits calling for the state murder of Julian Assange and anyone who helps him. It’s almost as if the movement had been waiting with bated breath for a political enemy whose death they it could call for without reproach.

* America is Number One!

* Good eye, Ben.

* The inclusion of Bryan Ferry’s Olympia on Pitchfork’s Worst Album Covers of 2010 list is just bizarre. Like they’re asking, “Can you believe Bryan Ferry put a recumbent model on his latest album cover?!?” Um…yes?

* This weekend I attended the second annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. It was the best comic con I’ve ever been to; on a pure comics level it was simply staggering, and of course that’s the level that matters. I wrote a full con report for Robot 6, so please do check it out.

* Last night HBO aired an 11-plus minute making-of/preview of Game of Thrones. I’ve embedded it twice below: The first video is the full 11:46 preview that ran on TV, while the second is a shorter version from HBO’s official YouTube account that runs about 10 minutes. Watch the longer one, provided it’s still up. What can I say? Everything looks rock-solid, and again, they seem to be emphasizing the stuff you’d want them to emphasize; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who plays Jaime, nails the mega-plot of the whole series right to the wall, for instance. Also? The Hound. (Via Winter Is Coming.)

*Here’s a lengthy and to my mind insightful essay by Myles McNutt on Game of Thrones and the HBO brand. (Via Westeros.) Sample bit:

In earlier conversations on Twitter where I tried to find just where Game of Thrones fits within the HBO Brand, there were some logical parallels: the scale of the series is perhaps matched only by Rome (which was both a BBC co-production and an actual historical series), and the kind of fan interaction necessary for its success most closely mirrors True Blood. And yet, the show doesn’t fit easily into either of those categories, in that the show lacks the romantic and camp elements of a show like True Blood but has a greater expectation for authenticity (oddly enough) than Rome – it seems strange to suggest that viewers are scrutinizing a fantasy more closely than an historical drama, but such is the nature of a literary adaptation of a beloved series with an intelligent fan base whose expectations of this story go beyond what Sookie Stackhouse readers might have expected from the adaptation of their beloved novels or what history nuts might have anticipated from Rome (which was also sold as a fictionalized account of the historical event in question).

I’ve thought about the “accuracy” angle a lot versus True Blood, which I’m told plays fast and loose with the details, and even some major elements and characters, of Charlaine Harris’s novels while remaining broadly faithful to the overall plot, and versus The Vampire Diaries, which I’m told has almost nothing to do with the novels anymore. (Clearly the same is true of Gossip Girl.) I’m tempted to say that female-based fandom is more forgiving of deviations from orthodoxy, but then I remember that a) The Walking Dead seems to be doing just fine by most of the fans of its source material despite increasingly massive deviations from the original (and despite not being all that good, but that’s not really relevant here), and b) The Lord of the Rings, which mentally I’ve constructed as the gold standard in fandoms that demand absolute fidelity, actually made quite a few changes itself. Tom Spurgeon has argued that fans don’t want fidelity, they want flattery — flattery of what they the fans believe to be the most important aspect of the work at hand. I tend to agree with him. But in a case like Game of Thrones, where so much of the story is driven by byzantine plotting by the characters, I think fans will get a bit restless of there’s too much mucking about with it.

* Game of Thrones t-shirts!

* Jim Woodring Frank t-shirts!

* Hyphen magazine profiles my pal Shawn Cheng of Partyka. (Via The Daily Cross Hatch.) Worth reading for the pronunciation guide to “Partyka” alone!

* Ben Morse on Juliet, the best villain in Gossip Girl history. Money quote, in more ways than one: “In the weird dynamic of this show where the spoiled brats are the heroes, it just makes twisted sense that the girl who has to do her own dishes is the villain.”

* Thank goodness someone’s finally going to put the spotlight on the Marvel Comics work of Brian Bendis. Aw, I kid. I actually think a PR initiative based on talking up the writers who help decide the direction of the Marvel Universe in an almost editorial capacity is a good idea, insofar as that’s a pretty unique set-up in terms of the history of superhero comics and worth talking about as such.

* Please subscribe to the RSS feed for Jesse Moynihan’s webcomic Forming; I don’t see how you’ll be disappointed in terms of the sheer visuals.

* I’m sure I must have seen this illustration of Lady Liberty and Lady Justice making out somewhere before, but only in seeing it now do I realize how cool it would be if there were a giant Statue of Justice on the West Coast somewhere, with the two of them bookending America like the Argonath.

* With Boardwalk Empire‘s season finale approaching, HBO is unleashing the kraken with regards to publicity for its next big thing, Game of Thrones. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the network released hi-res versions of all the photos from last week’s Entertainment Weekly spread on the show…

* a preview of a 15-minute making-of featurette they’ll be unveiling prior to the Boardwalk Empire finale next Sunday…

* and a new minute-long teaser.

And frankly? It all looks wonderful. In particular, starting that trailer with that particular scene appears to indicate that they know what the books are about, not just what they’re about, if you follow me. As always, they’re just trailers and promo stills and therefore completely unreliable, but. But but but! (Links via Winter Is Coming and Westeros, as usual.)

* Meanwhile, I plan on finding it really weird to watch mainstream pop-culture sites cover the show–even though I myself only discovered the series this year and am far from a GoT OG.

* The enormously engrossing, uncomfortably disconcerting online first-person horror film/ARG Marble Hornets has returned after a seven-month absence for its second season. When I say “uncomfortably disconcerting” I’m really not kidding. Even though I’ve just about exhausted all the information, commentary, and parody available on the project, I still find myself freaking out a little bit when I have to go out in the dark to take out the trash. They’ve hit on a really powerful set of images and techniques. If you’ve got about a movie’s length of time to kill, start here; the latest “entry” is embedded below.

* Two of my favorite webcomics had real doozies for their most recent installments: Jesse Moynihan’s Forming and Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force. Bookmark them!

* It’s official: The Hobbit movies will be filmed in 3D. Peter Jackson seems like a filmmaker who was made to make 3D movies. Certainly more so than James Cameron!

* Wow, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had a rough opening night. Like, rough enough that I wonder if someone–the creators, the performers, the audience, the newspapers, Bono, someone–was just joking. Bitter experience and Avatar have taught me that I have no clue whether or not something will be a for-the-ages flop/demonstration of classical hubris; that said, the story of this show has been completely mesmerizing, and not for the reasons one imagines Julie Taymor, Bono, the Edge, and Sony or Marvel or whoever want it to be. On a qualitative level, my appreciation for Taymor’s glam weirdness is offset by my disgust with the leaden pretension of the U2 music I’ve heard from the show, so I don’t know how to feel about it in that regard either.

* Chris Mautner’s Comics College column tackles Hergé. Since all of his Tintin work is in the same format and working basically the same genre and tone, he’s one of the great “where to begin?” artists in comics. Well, here’s where to begin!

* Sean P. Belcher was a good deal more sympathetic to last night’s episode of The Walking Dead than I was. Basically we agree about its strengths, but differ in the weight we place on its weaknesses.

* Spurge is right: This Deborah Vankin profile of Joyce Farmer’s new memoir Special Exits makes the book look and sound great. I won’t spoil the really revealing quotes from and about R. Crumb, either.

* Trouble with Comics had a bit of an RSS spasm over the weekend, but it brought Christopher Allen’s thoughtful critique of Jack Kirby’s OMAC to my attention, so I’m glad it happened.

* Hawt stuff from Brandon Graham. (Via Agent M.)

* Very much looking forward to Ryan Cecil Smith’s Two Eyes of the Beautiful II, on sale at the BCGF this weekend.

* I’m digging what I’m seeing from Alex Wiley’s Hugger-Mugger Comicx. I like the cute-brut linework and citrusy colors.

* Wow, 102 pages of unpublished comics from James Stokoe!

* Real Life Horror: Every time I think about it, I am freshly amazed that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large nine years after the 9/11 attacks they orchestrated. (And that we’ll probably never be able to try and convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because the Bush Administration tortured him, but that’s a different matter.) The AP has a fascinating, if somewhat depressing, report on the lucky breaks that have kept al-Zawahiri out of American clutches and/or crosshairs. Here’s hoping that once all the money we save by freezing federal employees’ salaries singlehandedly ends the recession and persuades Republicans to put aside their differences and become good-faith allies of the President, there’ll be enough left over help catch this murderous fuck.

* This is one of those days when I want to link to everything that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. Money quotes:

I’d love to see someone make the argument that private sector managerial experience entitles you to run the NYPD.

—on incoming NYC schools chancellor Cathleen Black

What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat.[…]Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically “prove” the problem of violent white supremacists.

—on the FBI sting of would-be Christmas tree bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud.

* Rest in peace, Irvin Kershner and Leslie Nielsen. The Empire Strikes Back and The Naked Gun are two of the movies I’ve absorbed completely enough to have a hard time imagining how I would think and speak about certain things without an array of quotes from them at my disposal.

* Finally, as I mentioned earlier, DestructorComics.com is up and running. Matt Wiegle and I will be updating it on Mondays and Thursdays. I can’t wait to share these stories with you!

* Clive Barker is looking for a publisher. That amazes me.

* New Game of Thrones promo this weekend, big 15-minute “Inside Game of Thrones” thing next weekend.

* Bruce Baugh on The Shattering, the world-changing component of World of Warcraft’s big Cataclysm expansion/event — part one, part two, part three. I’m a sucker for Bruce’s writing on gaming, but I think this is of interest to fans of superhero comics as well because of how directly it speaks to the pleasure of a huge event-driven overhaul of a shared fictional universe, an overhaul that takes care of some housecleaning in addition to opening up story possibilities. Do click on part two at the very least; it’s the photo-driven one, and even I can see how different and much more vivid everything looks now.

* Curt Purcell responds to Tom Spurgeon’s call for good superhero fights. I nominate Superman vs. Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Nixon vs. the grandma robot in Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled–honestly, Frank Miller is fight-scene magic and I could go on–the Immortal Weapons tournament fights in Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja’s Immortal Iron Fist, Daredevil and Elektra vs. Bullseye in Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil, pretty much any storyarc-ending fight in Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley’s Invincible (eg. Conquest)…lotsa stuff.

* Grant Morrison talks to CBR’s Jeffrey Renaud about Batman Incorporated. It sounds like he’s really made a tonal break with the rest of his run.

* Sheesh, look at these original Brian Ralph Daybreak pages.

* Tom Breihan reviews the living shit out of the remastered reissue of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. There’s not a ton of writing on Nine Inch Nails that I…trust, I guess? But this is among it.

* It’s funny: The bit that sold Ben Morse on Paul Cornell’s Action Comics run was the bit that threw me a little. It felt written for the internet.

* Concrete‘s Paul Chadwick storyboarded Strange Brew??? Did I know this?

* Jason Adams catches that the release date for the Thing remake has been rescheduled for October 2011, which seems to indicate some confidence in its horror-audience money-making abilities on the part of the studio.

* I can’t imagine it makes sense to say “rest in peace, Peter Christopherson,” but I’m saying it anyway. Dave Simpson’s Guardian obit is lovely, as is artist John Coulhart’s verbal and visual tribute (via Dan Nadel).

* You should read Matt Zoller Seitz’s essay on his late wife Jennifer.