Is anyone planning to watch the Season Two premiere of The Walking Dead? I’m not, on “life’s too short” grounds. That first season was pretty bad, and there are many, many better and/or more enjoyable shows I can be watching. I’m just curious what y’all have decided. Let me know in the comments if you like.

Daybreak
Brian Ralph, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, 2011
160 pages, hardcover
$21.95
Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

* Must read #1: This piece on Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later by Glenn Heath Jr. for Not Coming to a Theater Near You is the best review of that movie I’ve ever read. It just gets everything about it right.

* Must read #2: Rob Clough on virtually all the comics of Michael DeForge. A thorough examination of the best young cartoonist.

* You can now purchase <i>Thickness #2, the erotic comics anthology edited by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, and Chameleon #1, the god-knows-what anthology spearheaded by Jesse Balmer and Jonny Negron, at their respective websites, and I don’t see why you wouldn’t.

* Over at Robot 6 I used this Brandon Graham Habibi tribute as a springboard for all sorts of related links: More Habibi pro fanart at Floating World, Nadim Damluji’s essay on Habibi and Orientalism, the Inkstuds video interview with Brandon Graham, and more. Click on over and check ’em all out.

* Comics distributor Haven has shut down. As George R.R. Martin might put it, the Direct Market for comic books in North America is now a monopoly, or near enough as makes no matter.

* Dash Shaw loves Blind Date.

* Laura Dern is trying hard to persuade David Lynch to direct another movie. Related: Man did I have a crush on her circa Jurassic Park.

* Jeez, this webcomic slechtemeisjes that Kevin Czap uncovered is stunning. He says the resemblance to Henry Darger is coincidental, which is also stunning.

* Randall Munroe channels Uno Moralez.

* Jesus, Renee French.

* Jim Woodring has been killing it lately.

* Good new comics news #1: Benjamin Marra has released Gangsta Rap Posse #2! It looks like this:

* Good new comics news #2: Emily Carroll has started a new webcomic called “Margot’s Room.” The way it works is that you click the objects listed in the text at the top of the landing page to read it.

* Good not really new comics news: Frank Santoro’s interview with Forming author Jesse Moynihan for the Comics Journal contains, in its entirety, the Lost-inspired comic “Spiritual Dad” that Moynihan and Dash Shaw did for The Believer a while back. Just scroll down.

* Did you know Brian Chippendale has a prose science-fiction short story blog?

* Here’s a sentence I’m excited to write: Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Community creator Dan Harmon.

* David Allison (aka Illogical Volume) connects Darkseid to the inescapable gravitational maw of contemporary capitalism as part of The Mindless Ones’ month-long series of essays on bad guys. What I like about this essay is that it makes Darkseid a lot more dangerous an idea than if we regard him as simply a celestial fascist, one of “those guys,” the obviously evil goosesteppers no self-examination is required to oppose. As much as I enjoy Final Crisis, no one was ever likely to come down on the “oppression” side of “freedom vs. oppression.” The original Jack Kirby conception of Darkseid and Anti-Life as war itself, whereby any violent opposition to Darkseid is itself Anti-Life, is a much stickier proposition, as is Illogical Volume’s suggestion of a humanity-devaluing socioeconomic program so pervasive that opposition is all but literally unimaginable. That’s the hallmark of a good dystopia, after all: No chains required.

* The CBLDF puts the Comics Code’s head on a stick and mounts it on the city wall.

* Craig Thompson, Habibi, Arabian Nights, Orientalism.

* The end of the first paragraph in Graeme McMillan’s brutal drubbing of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror may be the most devastating line I’ve ever read in a comics review.

* Another wonderfully weird image/gif gallery from Uno Moralez.

* This is a sculpture of a creature from Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark illustrations, by Kezeff. It is marvelous.

* Real Life Horror: The President can have Americans killed without charge, trial, or conviction at any point around the globe now, apparently, so that’s pretty fucking exciting.

* Finally, start your October off right with TERROR STAIN, the latest in Chris Ward’s annual series of Halloween mixes.

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

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

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

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

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

* And hey, how about that Hellen Jo?

* Publisher Dylan Williams of Sparkplug Comic Books is battling cancer without medical insurance. Please help him out in the best possible way: Buy some Sparkplug comics. I posted some recommendations at Robot 6, along with some thoughts about just how unique and valuable a publisher Sparkplug really is. Meanwhile, Floating World is holding a two-day benefit sale, if you live in Portland and/or are a Phillip K. Dick fan (explanation at the link).

* What a horrifying story: Syrian security forces abducted, beat, and broke the hands of political cartoonist Ali Ferzat before dumping him on the side of the road. The mafia-like cruelty and chutzpah of Bashar al-Assad and his underlings on display in this attack really takes the breath away. I wonder if this is a case the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund can help out with in some way.

* Bummer: The great film scholar Kristin Thompson won’t be writing the Hobbit-centric sequel she’d planned to The Frodo Franchise, her book about the multimedia business of turning The Lord of the Rings from a book to a movie to a cross-platform empire. She’s also shuttering her ongoing blog on the subject.

* John Porcellino on the things he learned from redrawing one page of the Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four.

* Jason Adams on Trollhunter, which seems like a hoot and a half. After the unrelenting stream of insectoid aliens, J-horror knockoffs, and corroded/decrepit slasher/torture baddies, it’s just such a pleasure to see a monster that looks different from all of the other monsters.

* It’s like Nick Gazin reached into my head and pulled out the exact words I’d have used to describe the Smurfs movie.

* Guy Perez’s cover version of Al Plastino’s Superboy #6 cover is my favorite Covered contribution in a long time.

* I hereby invite you to read “Bongcheon-Dong Ghost” by Horang, one of the scariest webcomcs I’ve come across in a while. Leave your speakers on. More about the comic at Robot 6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Tremendous interview with Anders Nilsen about Big Questions by Alex Dueben on CBR. “It’s my newest book, but it’s also my oldest.” Wow, can you imagine? Big Questions was the first comic Nilsen ever did, and it’s about to be released in its finished 600-page form.

* Some of the Harry Potter movie people are working on a deal to make a mult-movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. That could certainly be very good, though in all likelihood it’ll be overwrought and mediocre with interesting moments like most big Hollywood versions of good ideas these days.

* The House Next Door’s Sumanth Prabhaker on Grant Morrison’s historicist reading of superhero comics, including his own, in Supergods.

* Filing this away for when I’ve read the book: Hayley Campbell reviews Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette for The Comics Journal.

* Apparently Julie Doucet’s cat carrier has sat at the bottom of the back stairs of the Fantagraphics office since 1993. This fits very well with my preexisting mental picture of the Fantagraphics office.

* Well this is certainly a great ad for The Beguiling that Michael DeForge drew. How many characters do you recognize? I got all but three or four, I think.

* Uno Moralez is creepy and sexy.

* Jonny Negron goddamn

* Yow–this new group sketchblog Ashcan All-Stars is doing Sin City and doing it well. In order: James Stokoe, Moritat, Sheldon Vella.

* No, seriously, it’s uncool how much I’m enjoying The Walking Dead‘s woes. They’ve all got mothers, you know?

* If there’s one thing HBO knows how to do, it’s make trailers that make their shows look like the baddest things ever. Boardwalk Empire is pretty great regardless, though.

* Click here to find a list of my ten favorite comics, more or less.

* My friend and collaborator Matt Rota has an art show opening up on Saturday, August 13 at L.A.’s Copro Gallery. The art in it looks like this:

* Jeez it is a pleasure to witness Joe McCulloch’s return to writing about alternative comics, specifically one of my top three favorite cartoonists and one of the very best comics short stories of all time: Phoebe Gloeckner and “Minnie’s 3rd Love.”

* Meredith Gran on the importance of supporting women cartoonists buy paying them to draw comics.

* Ben Morse on the best of Ultimate Spider-Man, which has been a very good comic for more than a decade.

* The degree of schadenfreude I’m feeling from The Walking Dead TV show’s behind-the-scenes woes is unseemly.

* Six ancient things that were probably built by aliens. Nearly a decade and a half after I first read Illuminatus! and 20-25 years after I first heard of Stonehenge and Atlantis and Easter Island and so on, this kind of thing still gives me chills.

* There’s not a whole lot in comics right now more fun than the way Dan White draws Cindy & Biscuit launching themselves through the air at monsters they’re about to dispatch

* I can certainly support the idea of Miles Fisher as a male, American, horror/parody-video-making Robyn. (See also.) Bonus points for casting Steffi from The Bold and the Beautiful in the Kelly Kapowski role and the closing homage to Hellraiser III. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

* Jack Kirby’s heirs have lost their copyright suit against Marvel, which centered on whether or not Kirby’s creations/co-creations for the company constituted work for hire. The judge ruled that they did: “If it does [constitute work for hire], then Marvel owns the copyright in the Kirby Works, whether that is ‘fair’ or not.” One of the few nice things you can say about “nerd court” is that in nerd court you can concentrate on whether or not a thing is fair. Anyway, in the real world it’s not clear to me whether this is something that can now go to a higher court or whether this settles the matter.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Gilbert Hernandez will be returning to Palomar with a story in Love and Rockets: New Stories #5, out next year. That surprised me, given his recently expressed feelings about his Palomar material, but I’m as happy about this as I am about any new Beto comics.

* Jordan Crane’s new kids’ book Keep Our Secrets uses heat-sensitive color-changing ink to reveal hidden images. Jordan Crane is pretty amazing, basically.

* Listen to an audio clip of Dan DiDio addressing the number of women creators at DC right now. Check out Laura Hudson’s column on the subject, too. Remember, “We have to stop thinking of it as a quota thing and think of it as a common-sense thing.”

* Marvel is once again offering a variant cover for one of its event comics in exchange for unsold copies of DC’s event comics. Almost everything about this story and all the arguments for and against it is funny to me.

* Grant Morrison spitballs an Atom revamp in which a limit to his size-shifting abilities serves as a parameter for individual adventures. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* The Comic-Con organization’s WonderCon may be moving from San Francisco to Anaheim due to initial scheduling constraints, though as CCI’s David Glanzer tells Tom Spurgeon at the link, it’s far from a done deal because San Fran has changed its mind about the scheduling thing. I hate to see a nice city like San Francisco lose a show, but at the same time you have to imagine that operating a con in Los Angeles itself (more or less) would make a lot of sense for the organization.

* Jeet Heer reviews Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I like that he focuses on the very nearly physical pleasure of reading Katchor comics, as immersive an experience as contemporary comics offers. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* J. Caleb Mozzocco’s Robot 6 review of Chester Brown’s Paying For It describes Brown’s appearance in the book as “a grim, expressionless little bobble-headed skeleton…like Harold Grey drawing of the male half of the couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.” That’s worth the price of admission for the review right there.

* This is fun: My pal T.J. Dietsch, a total newcomer to the work of Jim Woodring, decided to try Weathercraft. It was a successful experiment. T.J., try Congress of the Animals next!

* I was quite happy to discover Jason Sandberg’s “Kurtzberg” series of paintings at Kirby-Vision, which pay homage to Jack Kirby yet have a static surrealism all their own. You can find more by scrolling through Sandberg’s site.

* Jesus, someone made animated gifs out of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki. Why you do dis to me, Dimmy? Why?

* Finally, I had no idea that there was a dispute over who created my beloved He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. That’s the subject of the documentary Toy Masters, which also chronicles the behind-the-scenes strife between the makers of the television series (J. Michael Straczysnki among them), who saw the job as no different from any artist’s or entertainer’s, and the makers of the toys upon which the show was based, who saw the show as a 30-minute commercial. Errol Morris it ain’t, stylistically speaking, but it’s fascinating if you’re into He-Man and probably still pretty funny if you aren’t. (Via Topless Robot.)

* This report on the Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez spotlight panel at Comic-Con from CBR’s Sonia Harris makes for fascinating reading. All three brothers are really astute commentators on one another’s work.

* Kevin Czapiewski talks about one of my favorite things about Jordan Crane’s comics: his pictogram sound effects.

* Don’t let Nick Gazin’s short sell in the intro fool you: His interview with Jonny Negron for Vice is fun and informative, and contains a lot of Negron art I haven’t seen to boot.

* Hey, Vasilis Lolos is finally working on a second volume of Last Call! Now whatever happened to The Pirates of Coney Island?

* The more Walking Dead Season One staffers leave, the more I’m tempted to watch Walking Dead Season Two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* In other news…

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

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

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

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

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

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

* In defense of chillwave, by Nitsuh Abebe.

* The 2011 edition of San Diego’s Comic-Con International began last night with its traditional Wednesday Preview Night. Actually, it seemed to being on Monday, as publishers began rolling out their SDCC announcements early. Here are a few of the neater ones thus far.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley’s next project, Seconds, will be released by Villard in 2013. That’s all I got. That’s all anyone’s got about it, at the moment.

* After literally years of saying that publishing original graphic novels without serializing the content first doesn’t make financial sense for them, Marvel is doing exactly that with their new Season One line of standalone graphic novels retelling the origins of some of their major characters. I think there’s two interesting things to be said here. The first is that while Marvel’s no doubt going to get a lot of grief for “ripping off” DC’s similarly named Earth One line (or “line” — we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Batman book since it was first announced), Earth One is actually more similar in terms of content to Marvel’s existing Ultimate line, in that it’s taking the characters and basic concepts and restarting them from scratch with all-new continuity. Season One, by contrast, is just an origin retelling of the sort Marvel’s done many times in floppy funnybook form. The second thing is that the talent involved isn’t superstars, but people who seem to me to be roughly on the level that the folks who launched the Ultimate line back in the day were at. That’s undoubtedly a cost-saving measure, but maybe, as with the Ultimate line, it’ll provide a chance to establish some new voices on a project tangential to the success of the mainstream Marvel Universe.

* Drawn & Quarterly is debuting their very nice-looking collection of Kate Beaton’s Hark, a Vagrant! at the show.

* In other news…

* Hooray, Tom Spurgeon is back at The Comics Reporter! Man, did I miss him. He starts things off with a bang, too: A lovely essay on Jaime Hernandez’s lovely “The Death of Speedy Ortiz.” I like his point about how young people can incorporate tragedy into their self-mythologies in a way that’s both helpful and deceitful; I certainly did.

* Spurge also offers a provocative essay arguing that yes indeed, it’s time for the Xeric Grants to go. I don’t think I agree with his analysis at all. I think breakout success in the webcomics field of the sort Tom says is now possible in a fashion akin to what the Xeric does for its winners is, for the most part, only possible within a relatively narrow range of artistic expression. (I also think Kickstarter success is only possible within a relatively narrow range of audience appeal, but Kickstarter’s not really something Tom’s talking about.). I think that if arthouse publishers like Koyama, PictureBox, Secret Acres, AdHouse, Pigeon Press et al were really sufficient to cover worthwhile young/new cartoonists, then someone ought to have told recent winners like Blaise Larmee, Lane Milburn, and Dave Kiersh (Dave Kiersh!), who all seem to me to be eminently publishable by such outfits but who turned to the Xeric anyway. And I don’t really see a problem with the Xeric moving away from its old-school conception of self-publishing as an end in itself; none of the aspects of the new-model Xeric — an honorific people take seriously in a world where Brad Meltzer’s Justice League wins Eisners, a chance for cartoonists to be handed some money and some printed comics, a foot in the door with small-press publishers — seem any less noble or delightful to me.

* By contrast, Geoff Grogan pens the most eloquent eulogy for the Xeric grant I’ve yet read, tackling not just the “what this person, place, or thing that doesn’t exist anymore meant to me” business that’s as far as most of us comics people ever go in these things, but arguing persuasively that the loss of the Xeric is the loss of an opportunity for cartoonists (or comics-makers, as Geoff might prefer) to experiment, in print. Both these elements are key. He also notes that the Xeric Foundation provided him with legal help when his excellent book Look Out!! Monsters ran into some trouble, which a ComicPress site and Kickstarter page are never going to provide anyone. Read it.

* Grant Morrison takes nerd culture to the woodshed. If you’ve ever wondered why a forward-thinking guy like Morrison has never managed to maintain a web presence, I think you now have your answer.

* Good riddance to the Ron Howard Dark Tower adaptation project, for now at least. Those books stink.

* Fuckin’ Adams.

* The cartoonist Jason reviews John Carpenter’s The Thing. Ain’t the internet grand? My favorite thing about this is how he points out that as a Norwegian, he can understand every word the crazy Norwegian is shouting before the Americans kill him, making the whole movie that much more fatalistic.

* Curt Purcell didn’t care for Death Note overall, having realized that by the end he was reading more out of the residual goodwill engendered by the concept and the first few volumes than for interest in the increasingly byzantine doings of the killers, detectives, notebooks, and shinigami involved. That’s a fair read, although I recall enjoying myself right through the end.

* Matt Zoller Seitz and his ninth-grader daughter talk Harry Potter, the books and the movies, at length. I guess now’s the part where I say that the books convey the helplessness of children at the hands of adults really really well but are otherwise kind of a mess, the ending’s a convoluted punch-pulling trainwreck that gives way to a mawkishly sentimental and unimaginative epilogue, and I’ve had zero interest in seeing any of the movies since the first one. Every Potter needs a pooper!

* Man, Duel was a good movie. I probably haven’t seen it in a dozen years.

* Michael DeForge’s “College Girl by Night,” his contribution to the second volume of the alt-smut anthology Thickness, looks like potentially pretty hot stuff.

* Cool, creepy art from Jonny Negron.

* Cool, creepy art from Renee French.

The Wolf
Tom Neely, writer/artist
I Will Destroy You, July 2011
228 pages
$25
Buy it from Tom Neely
See some preview pages and read my interview with Neely at Robot 6

One thing you’ll never get from online previews and PDFs of The Wolf, which were the only ways I’d experienced the book when I first read it and liked it enough to give it an effusive PR blurb, is its impact as a physical object. I’ve actually put off writing this review because I felt inadequate to the task of conveying what a smack in the face the thing feels like. It’s big and thick and square, with a wordless and cryptic cover that evokes albums of huge mystical mystery like In the Court of the Crimson King or Led Zeppelin IV. Inside, the one-per-page or per-spread images frequently go full-bleed, which isn’t the most uncommon thing in the comics world to be sure — but the square pages make it feel like you’re seeing a single panel blown up to brobdgnagian size. It’s a strange-making effect, taking the familiar “bigness” of a splash page or double-page spread, filtering it through a frame you’re not accustomed to, and making you feel the impact of size and scale like a new, fresh thing.

The images themselves are torn from an obviously deeply personal vocabulary of monsters, injecting the sexualized surrealism back into werewolves and zombies that have been stripped of their primal power by the conventions of genre. Spectacle, meanwhile, is here derived not just from violence or vistas but from sex: The battle between the title character and a multi-limbed red skeleton, a full moon that appears like a cigarette burn in a grey-blue night sky, and a series of abstract washes of hair-like blacks and fleshy pink-reds and seminal yellow-whites that appears in the middle of graphically depicted intercourse between the wolf and his pale, raven-haired bride all have equal knockout force behind them. You can tease an emotional narrative out of the proceedings easily enough — past callousness, cruelty, and self-destruction in the context of a relationship are overcome, atoned for, and healed through sexual connection, and a transcendent future is discovered, a natural world untouched by the taint of the bitter past. But it’s the way each individual stage of that journey is depicted with symbols, colors, and creatures that capture and embody it perfectly, their lush brushtrokes fraying and spattering and bleeding emotional intensity on every page, that gives the book its power. Every turn of the page is an encounter with raw feeling, made physical by cartooning. That’s great comics.

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

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

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

* Your other top comics story: Borders is dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan sure can draw.

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

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

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

* I’m very excited to direct you to my interview with Tom Neely about his new graphic novel The Wolf, which includes a selection of preview pages. The book is Tom’s best, and one of the best of the year.

* When was the last time you were truly amazed by an artist you’d just seen for the first time? For me it was my discovery via Monster Brains of Mat Brown. This stuff is incredible — like the Sistine Chapel painted by an Alien facehugger attached to Geof Darrow. Click through to see it at full size.

I mean, seriously.

* Whoa: Dave Kiersh has an entire blog dedicated to posting his early minicomics in their entirety. My favorites so far are 1998-99’s Quaaludes, 1999’s Young Adult, and 2003’s Amazons, none of which I’ve seen before despite being a fairly dedicated Dave K. fan. It’s amazing to think he hit his teenage-heartbreak sweet spot when he pretty much was a teenager.

* Mmmm, hot licks from Holy Terror by Frank Miller.

* George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire occupies four of the top ten New York Times paperback best sellers right now, including #1. Don’t click the list unless you want the shit spoiled out of books three and four, though.

* Is it just me, or are the Harvey Award nominees better than the Eisner Award nominees this year? Like, insofar as they actually nominated Acme Novelty Library #20 and Love & Rockets: New Stories #3?

* Gabrielle Bell will be posting a diary comic every day for the month of July. Good news for people who like to see new Bell.

* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley takes a close look at the overabundance of information in the truly horrifying torture sequence from Brian Chippendale’s Ninja. I’d forgotten how difficult that page was to take.

* I’m actually not nuts about the posts in practice — they feel a bit underbaked, a bit too dependent on the reader sharing certain assumptions about and impressions of any given song — but in theory, the music blog One Week One Band spending seven days talking about David Bowie’s 1990s work (with writer Ian McDuffie) is an exciting prospect to me, since that’s the first David Bowie I knew. Like Tori Amos, Aphex Twin, Pantera, Pink Floyd, Marilyn Manson, Gary Numan, and Joy Division, I got into David Bowie because Trent Reznor was into David Bowie. Earthling was my first Bowie record, and it’s still one of my favorites. It’s so loud!

* Better in practice is Matt Zoller Seitz’s list of The 10 Loudest Movies Ever!! It’s basically seven films that are varying degrees of wonderful and then three piles of shit.

* Uno Moralez’s random
image/gif gallery posts are really the best bang for your internet buck. Please click the link — if you haven’t seen one of these things, you can’t understand.

* This is almost anticlimactic after the earlier Mat Brown link, but Monster Brains’ Charles James Folkard gallery is lovely as well. Aeron Alfrey’s really been on a hot streak at that site lately.

* Tom Brevoort gives good interview.

Nostalgia is powerful and potent, and it’s one of the things, particularly for the longtime audience, that makes things go. If you can drop in a reference or do a twist or bounce some story point off a comic we fondly remember, we as an audience like it. It works for us. It rewards the investment in the material and the time spent, and it creates a larger sense of involvement than is typically possible in a single TV show or a movie or a novel. It’s one of the things that comics can do with their serial storytelling style that many other forms of entertainment can’t. The danger there is that if you rely on it too much, you’re telling stories only for people who have been reading for 30 years or who are willing to put in the hard work to understand whatever it is you’re talking about – the particular language you’re speaking. That’s the balancing act.

* It’s hard out here for a cartoonist: Theo Ellsworth edition.

* Best of luck to my old Wizard coworker Rick Marshall as he departs MTV’s Splash Page blog.

* Film and culture historian Robert Sklar has died, rather tragically. A part of me will always be a Film Studies student, and that part is very saddened by this.

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

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

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

RUDICK: Does it frighten you to see those things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Maybe my deep and abiding satisfaction with The Lord of the Rings has given this subsequent project an air of anticlimax. Maybe the lingering stink of Guillermo Del Toro, genre filmmaking’s most overrated non-Christopher Nolan exemplar, has dampened my enthusiasm. Maybe the advent of everything from Lost to Battlestar Galactica to A Song of Ice and Fire has diffused my ability to obsessively interest myself in another serialized work of fantastic fiction. Maybe the constant budget and legal and personnel problems and the resulting stops and starts in production have afforded me a little too much of a confidence-sapping glimpse into how the sausage gets made. Regardless, I’ve found myself bizarrely (for me, a man who has the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on his person) indifferent to Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies. But if you were Peter Jackson and you wanted to rectify that state of affairs, you could do much, much worse than releasing a production still as note-perfect as the one below and casting Evangeline Lilly as a Wood Elf, I’ll tell you that goddamn much.

* Jeet Heer scans the length and breadth of Daniel Clowes’s recent works — lots to chew on in the books, lots to chew on in the piece, though Jeet fails to tackle the critical question of whether he can identify with Wilson or not.

* Also at the Journal: Tim Kreider’s piece on Cerebus explains both why you’d want to read Dave Sim’s landmark comic and why you wouldn’t better than any I’ve read. I commented on the piece at Robot 6.

* Gary Groth on the state of the comics industry. Be sure to check the comment thread to discover that the publisher of Love and Rockets, Eightball, Peanuts, and The Acme Novelty Library has failed to live up to superhero fans’ exacting standards.

* Hans Rickheit has launched his Cochlea & Eustachia feature as a webcomic. That’s a great strip every time it appears.

* Curt Purcell on the fashion of Death Note. I’ll tell you what — I don’t remember the name of that ill-fated FBI agent from the second volume, but I sure remember her jacket.

* Sheeeeesh, this picture of a speaker stack by Paul Pope.

* I need to write this down someplace before I forget: that supercut video of the 100 Greatest Movie Threats should have included the bit from The Three Amigos where Steve Martin tells El Guapo “Let her go or I’ll fill your guts so full of lead you’ll be using your dick for a pencil” and the part from Invasion U.S.A. where Chuck Norris tells a guy “I’ll hit you with so many rights you’re gonna beg for a left.”

* The 2D material in this half-hour animated Italian-language adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is crude, yes. But the computer-rendered sequence in which the plane flies through the mountains and into the dead city beyond, starting around the 11:50 mark? Absolutely astonishing. The sense of scale is horrific, and the lighting…man, if a live-action horror film were lit this way today, we’d be celebrating in the streets. I had no idea gray could glow. (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* And from the makers of my beloved ELA, PepperMelon, comes a new short film called fIRST — four minutes of dayglo sci-fi splendor and emotional oomph.

“fIRST” – a short story by PepperMelon from PepperMelon on Vimeo.

* The rumors (which weren’t so much rumors as they were lots of people knowing exactly what was going to happen and talking about it privately but not being able to say so publicly just yet) are true: DC is scrapping, re-numbering, and relaunching its entire superhero line, launching fully 50 different #1 issues in September. What’s more, the entire line will go day-and-date digital, with digital versions of the books going on sale the same day as their print counterparts. Much more on this anon.

* The two Hobbit movies, subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again, will be released in December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013 respectively. See you there opening night.

* Ed Brubaker on superheroes, violence, and closure — one of the most interesting things I’ve read about superhero comics in a long time, from Tom Spurgeon’s very interesting interview with the writer.

* Bruce Baugh on John Carpenter’s The Thing:

Third, there’s a useful lesson in plotting in this story. You absolutely don’t have to nail down everything for it to feel like a tight, connected whole if you give the audience—or players—enough solid points for them to stand on while speculating about the rest. In the case of the Thing’s subversion of the various station members, we can tell with great confidence when some happened, and even get to see some right on screen. Others we can only wonder about. And that’s fine. Players often like to chew over the unresolved questions, if it doesn’t all just feel like an exercise in futility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this sort of thing, about questions left unanswered by various genre fictions, and how sometimes those un-answers remain a huge part of the work’s appeal years later while other times they’re the reason we rarely return to it, all in the context of how Twin Peaks seems to be a case of the former while it’s still unknown what side Lost will eventually fall on. I think it has to do with…I guess I’d call it a matter of “full absences” versus “empty absences”? You want a given absence of information to feel like it’s full of information that for whatever reason you can’t see, rather than just a gaping hole where information should be, but I’m not sure if I can nail down what the difference would be other than “I know it when I (don’t) see it.” I need to hash that out some more.

* This is exactly why I keep Corey Blake in my RSS reader: Here he’s collected links to all of my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” columns, which offer advice to newcomers on where to begin with the work of the great cartoonists.

* I wish there were an apostrophe after the author’s last name–that would make the title of Michael Kupperman’s next book even funnier.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in fine form today. First he coined the phrase “the fiscally fantastic” to describe fiction about the extravagantly carefree wealthy. My wife and I were talking about this just this past weekend, in reference to how Frasier, despite being more consistent over the course of its however-many seasons than its predecessor Cheers and the similarly ubiquitous-in-syndication sitcom Roseanne, really doesn’t hold a candle to either one. In the end, stories about Roseanne‘s nuclear family of working poor and Cheers‘ adopted family of three-time losers feel more inherently…I dunno, worth telling than the travails of the Brothers Crane as they try to balance failed romances with getting time on the squash court, drinking aged scotch and fine wines, and snagging season tickets for Seattle’s most expensive cultural attractions. I know I’ve also gotten kind of tired of movies about billionaire vigilantes and rich young beautiful urban professionals who learn something about life and laughs and love.

* Then there’s this piece on why male readers should read women writers. Basically, Rooney Ruling yourself to account for gender opens you up to the output of over half of the human population, which can only redound to your benefit compared to sticking just to the Y-chromosome set:

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

I think it’s worth murdering your inner sexist pig, but yes. One thing that the “eat your vegetables” metaphor for doing less-than-immediately-easy things undervalues is that when you eat your vegetables it’s not that the only benefit is that you’ve satisfied your mom and dad, you’re also getting vital nutrients necessary to stay alive. Plus, broccoli is delicious. You know?

* It’s been great to see Brian Hibbs, Graeme McMillan, and Jeff Lester — the Big Three of the fractured Justice League that is The Savage Critic(s) — return to regular capsule-review writing. You should go and browse through the past several weeks of entries, but for now let me direct you to Jeff’s most recent contribution, which contains this beautiful bit of writing on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy:

By [the ’50s], it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid’s world where nothing can be dismissed.

Ooftah, that last bit is good.

* Though I think Nitsuh Abebe is being too hard on Lady Gaga, who’s a better pop star than we deserve, and that he ultimately stops short of where he could have gone with his argument that provocation and “being yourself” are value-neutral concepts — that’s as may be, but surely we could look at the actual form these things have taken with, say, Odd Future and Lady Gaga and evaluate their respective value, no? — the rest of his column on the message of Born This Way is so stuffed with great ideas, expertly delivered, that I hardly know where to begin excerpting it. But here’s a start: “Aren’t ‘be yourself’ and ‘be what you want to be’ totally different instructions?” That’s an underexplored aspect of Gaga’s persona. “Born This Way” — what if you weren’t? Her embrace of artifice is so complete that it’s odd to think of how she’s simultaneously arguing for the primacy of personal authenticity.

* Some sweet, He-Man-cartoon-reffing fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit by Marc Palm.

* This looks like sketches for a new Uno Moralez comic.

* Always good to see a new Ben Katchor strip.

* The San Diego Comic Con International gets its first comics-centric counterprogramming slate in the form of Tr!ckster, a mini-con centered on indy guys like Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and Scott Morse. Now we need an artcomix show and we’re all set.

* Over at Robot 6, I talked a bit about Tom Brevoort talking a bit about how Marvel’s Avengers movies and Marvel’s Avengers comics help each other out versus the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises.

* Dan Nadel rounds up recent reviews of Yuichi Yokoyama’s excellent Garden, including efforts by ADDXSTC faves Chris Mautner and Douglas Wolk.

* Curt Purcell on religion in A Song of Ice and Fire and Battlestar Galactica. This is spoilery as hell for both series, but if you’re all caught up with them, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to read this. Very astute comparisons.

* When Josh Simmons draws things like this you know they can’t be headed anywhere good.

* Another day, another wondrous Uno Moralez image/gif dump.

* I can’t post an image without ruining the gag, but Axe Cop gets better and better.

* Aeron Alfrey has been spotlighting some real treasures at Monster Brains lately, from some ornate skeletal creatures by Pedro Izique to multiple He-Man and the Masters of the Universe galleries, about which I wrote a bit for Robot 6.

* Finally, this picture of January Jones as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class is truly a joy.