* 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.

* I started a tumblr dedicated to (SPOILERY) thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, in case you missed it.

* I reviewed Thomas Ott’s best-of collection R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004 for The Comics Journal. I didn’t care for it.

* Over at Robot 6, I wrote about site stats for Wizard’s digital magazine.

* You’ve only got a couple more days to take advantage of an awesome sale on Lane Milburn comics. Go!

* Tom Tomorrow is Daily Kos’s new Comics Editor. Lots of intriguing possibilities there.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Chris Mautner wrote a terrific introduction to the work of Frank Miller, listing the books to read first, the ones to read next, and the ones to avoid. I don’t agree with him on all of it, but it’s a cogent and at times passionately argued piece.

* Groovy Age of Horror indeed: Curt Purcell reviews Gossip Girl! Sometimes I think I have too much influence. Anyway, Curt brings his usual eye for unusual, revealing detail and his attention to structure and expectation to the proceedings.

* Curt’s also up to A Clash of Kings in A Song of Ice and Fire.

* Michael DeForge has been posting remarkable material on the daily lately. Here’s a few pages from a graphic novel he actually destroyed rather than finish and publish.

* Geoff Johns is writing an Aquaman series. Hooray!

* I’m saving this for when I have more time and energy, but Sean Belcher reviews Dragon Age II at length. I really have no idea what Dragon Age is, other than a thing a lot of people get excited about when it comes out, but I link to this anyway because the mere existence of this sort of writing seems to put paid to the notion that video games can’t be art. (Cf. this idiocy.)

* Buy more stuff from Tom Neely!

* Reach for it! J.H. Williams III channels funk for a Static Shock cover. Wouldn’t it be rad if more superhero artists did things you hadn’t seen before with color?

* Wow, this is a great Seth Fisher piece. Thanks, Corey Blake.

* Fresh from his triumphant run of drawing sexy women, Tom Kaczynski is now drawing ’80s action figures. It’s like he’s reading my mind.

* Robert Goodin covers Johnny Ryan. Indeed.

* Anders Nilsen reveals the cover for the collected Big Questions…

* …and Anders Nilsen draws some covers for Richard Brautigan books.

* Really digging these promotional images for Strangeways‘ new online iteration.

* Well played, Iron Man 2.0.

* This Axe Cop kicker made me laugh and laugh.

* Uno Moralez, man. Uno Moralez. (Wait for it.)

* Sucker Punch as camp is one of the few reads of that film that could persuade me to see it. Nothing against Zack Snyder — until now he’s made three films, all of which I enjoyed, two of which I enjoyed immensely — but it occurred to me that lo and behold, I really don’t have any interest in schoolgirls fighting robot samurai. The fanservice failed to service me, in essence.

* Hey, congratulations to my old boss and friend Brian Cunningham on taking over the editorial reins for the Green Lantern line, DC’s biggest franchise.

* LOL: The Xorn retcon happened Grant Morrison didn’t write Magneto well enough. Well, they certainly showed him!

* It’s quite telling, but also strangely depressing given that he’s the person who introduced me to the phrase “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” that Andrew Sullivan believes he must formulate and articulate a position on literally every issue of import. That’s simply crazy. You’re not an expert on everything; you’ll be outright stupid on some things. So I learned to my eternal regret.

* Real Life Horror: This chart is hilariously awful, just on a “something is obviously wrong with this picture” level.

* Real Life Horror 2: War oughta be fun! People really think this way about the enterprise of killing large numbers of people to achieve a political goal, and feel no shame about saying so. Fuck those people.

* On the other hand, I do enjoy the Captain America trailer. Rob Bricken is right: The emphasis it places on Steve Rogers having been a bullied weakling until very recently reveals an element of the character too often forgotten. (I find Ultimate Captain America all but unreadable any time I come across him now for that very reason.)

* Another Game of Thrones trailer? Don’t mind as I do.

* Finally, George R.R. Martin has finished two more chapters in A Dance with Dragons. He says the end is truly nigh.

R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004
Thomas Ott, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, March 2011
192 pages, hardcover
$28.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

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

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

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

* Whoa, Achewood is going on indefinite hiatus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Please keep drawing those sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

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

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

* Renee French runs the gamut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Tom Kaczynski needs to keep sketching sessy ladies.

* I really like this Shining piece by Matt Rota.

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

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

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

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

* Today I kicked off “Say Hello,” my regular interview column for The Comics Journal focusing on up-and-coming cartoonists. The inaugural interview is with Blaise Larmee. I think this is the most I’ve ever directly challenged the things an interview subject of mine were saying, but that’s not a reflection on Blaise (who I like) or his work (which I also like), more a reflection on me trying to connect the comics with the persona behind/surrounding them. I hope you like it.

* I’ve been pulling some overtime at Robot 6 this week, and over the past 24 hours two of my favorite things I’ve ever done for the site have gone up. The first is my interview with Yuichi Yokoyama and preview of his amazing new book Garden. Few cartoonists are doing work as exciting as this.

* The second is my list of seven great moments from Guy Davis’ B.P.R.D. run. What a pleasure it was to go back through all my collections to pull these out. I mean it when I say that some of these stand with anything I’ve ever read in any comic ever. Big, big thanks to Jim Gibbons and Scott Allie at Dark Horse for helping to make this happen (and a shout-out to Andy Serwin for commissioning the Davis/BPRD illustration from Wizard I used to kick off the piece.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Behold the new Game of Thrones paperback edition!

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

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

* The Comics Journal has relaunched its website under the auspices of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler. They run down its major features and contributors in this welcome letter. They say bid adieu to their old hangout, Comics Comics, in this farewell note. They speak about the changeover and their plans at length in this Tom Spurgeon interview. Spurgeon bids adieu to the old TCJ.com’s genuinely evil message board in this Comics Reporter post.

* I write at some length about the Journal’s past, present, and future in this Robot 6 post. I make my first contribution to the new site in this review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise. And I will be a regular contributor via my soon-to-launch interview column, Say Hello.

* Phew! I’m very excited about all of this. PS: I recommend tapping into the Journal’s soon-to-be-online-in-their-entirety archives with this Gary Groth interview with the great Phoebe Gloeckner, one of my all-time artistic heroes and one of the all-time great cartoonists.

* Artist Guy Davis is leaving B.P.R.D., one of the very very very best superhero(ish) comics of the past ten years thanks in large part to his contributions. Click the link for my take on Davis’s work on the title. What he and main writer John Arcudi and co-plotter/overseer Mike Mignola did on that book is a genuine achievement. And this is one of my all-time favorite comics pages.

* The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition is coming out in a Blu-Ray box set at last. It contains all three extended-edition films, all the bonus materials from the Extended Edition DVDs, and those weird behind-the-scenes docs from the Limited Edition releases. I don’t think it includes the theatrical editions, but that’s fine. I already preordered it.

* Jay Babcock is discontinuing Arthur magazine’s online incarnation. Even after the print version was shuttered, it continued to be an underrated source of good comics. Best of luck to Mr. Babcock.

* Carol Tyler on her series of memoirs You’ll Never Know and “the legacy of war.”

* Tom Cruise really is starring in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. I still think that this works remarkably well.

* Writer Nick Spencer is now Marvel exclusive, though his creator-owned Morning Glories will continue at Image and, remarkably, his T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents revival will continue at DC. That’s a big get for Marvel.

* The very good cartoonist Tom Kaczynski has launched a blog for his publishing imprint Uncivilized Books. Also, his comic in Mome Vol. 21 looks sick, and he drew a sexy woman.

* This is a beautiful spread from Amazing Spider-Man #655 by artist Marcos Martin (and writer Dan Slott). It also basically crushes any given similar image or sequence of images in Inception, by the by. (Via Agent M.)

* Topless Robot’s Chris Cummins lists the 20 Greatest Liquid Television Segments. Man, what a marvel that show was. I so vividly remember feeling like I was watching something genuinely strange and genuinely adult. I still remember the “Cut-Up Camera” and “Dog Boy” theme music, and those silent Aeon Flux shorts crush the property’s later iterations.

* For some reason I really like this very simple poster for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. (Via Agent M.)

* Michael DeForge remains very talented.

* Kevin Huizenga revisits the ongoing debate over the existence of Hell, the topic of one of his (or anybody’s) best comics, “Jeepers Jacobs.”

* Real Life Horror: Every day, the Obama Administration’s military agents force non-violent, non-suicide-risk Army whistleblower Bradley Manning to sleep and stand for inspection fully naked during his solitary confinement on charges for which he has yet to be convicted and for which he is eligible for the death penalty.

* Finally, sink your teeth into this meaty Tom Spurgeon interview with Renée French. It’s fascinating to see an artist of French’s caliber talk so frankly, and yet without hyperbole or self-pity, about her artistic struggles. Also, I really love the declaration “Fuck narrative.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Black Swan/Red Hulk.

* Hey, I made Kanye + Comics!

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

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

* Tell ’em, John Porcellino.

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

* The Comics Journal #301 looks pretty good.

* Benjamin Marra is a constant delight.

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

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

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

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

* 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.)

“His Face All Red”
Emily Carroll, writer/artist
self-published on the web, October 2010
Read it at EmCarroll.com

I’ve said a lot of complimentary things about this comic in the months since it was first posted, but it occurred to me I never actually sat down and reviewed it. So the other night I loaded it up for re-reading with the express purpose of writing a review in mind. And despite having looked at it however many times since it went up on Halloween, I still found myself dreading, literally dreading, the final image. Familiarity bred fear. From the striking title to the matter-of-fact opening line to the final page turn, Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red” is an engrossing, quietly terrifying horror comic. You could be forgiven for thinking it might not be, by the way. Carroll’s slick-sexy-cute illustration style is very popular on the Internet, the kind of stuff that gets endlessly reblogged and Tumblrd and LJd; it’s easy to picture her earning plaudits for doing realistically cute redesigns of Supergirl’s costume, or a killer suite of Scott Pilgrim or Harry Potter portraits, or a drawing of Mal Reynolds and The Tenth Doctor reenacting Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square,” or whatever. So yeah, I could stand to see it de-prettified in the future. But here she applies that readily appealing craft in ways above and beyond what she could have easily gotten away with doing. Her use of the web to control pacing is really masterful: She uses the long vertical scroll to create an almost hypnotic feeling of inevitable descent as we watch our narrator explain why and how he killed his brother, and try to figure out why and how someone who looks and acts just like him appeared the next day, acting like nothing had happened; she then breaks this flow in jarring fashion with a pair of pages that contain but a single indelible image, one after the other. All this against a pitch-black background, further enhancing the immersiveness of the story. And that final turn of the page! Really pitch-perfect cartooning and pitch-perfect horror pacing, showing us just enough to let us know that something truly terrible is before us. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I found that in the weeks since I last saw it, my mind had added details to the image — they weren’t really present there, but the tone of utter shattering of reality’s norms conjured them nonetheless. Enormously effective and affecting work, as close to delivering a jump-scare as any comic I’ve read. Shudder.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* I’ve barely talked about the Egyptian Revolution in public at all; I try to explain why in this piece on Domatille Collardey and Sarah Glidden’s webcomic “Egypt from 5,000 Miles Away”;

* Valentine’s Day comics #1: In the tradition of Henry & Glenn Forever comes Johnny Ryan’s Mark Mothersbaugh/Gary Numan slashfic strip “Mark + Gary Forever”;

* Valentine’s Day comics #2: a great made-up myth by webcomic wunderkind Emily Carroll;

* and hey, did you know a bunch of Ben Katchor’s Metropolis magazine strips are online?

* There’s a pair of new, off-the-beaten-path interviews with the two prime movers behind the very best serialized superhero comics of the past half-decade. First up, Alex Carr of Amazon.com’s Omnivoracious blog interviews Grant Morrison. One thing I like about this interview, and it’s a minor thing but still kind of neat to my mind, is that since it’s for Amazon, it refers to Morrison’s comics exclusively in terms of their collected editions. Anyway, this is part one of a longer interview, and focuses mainly on Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne, The Return of Bruce Wayne, Joe the Barbarian, 18 Days, and Morrison’s desire to one day tackle the Flash and Wonder Woman. There’s a bit that explains an object that shows up in the Stone Age with time-displaced Bruce Wayne that I for one found extremely helpful. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Next up, BLDGBLOG interviews B.P.R.D. and Hellboy impresario Mike Mignola, with an unusual and fascinating focus on Mignola’s use of architecture and environment. It’s quite neat to hear that Mignola prefers Lovecraft’s settings to his bestiary. And this passage was wonderful:

Well, once upon a time, when I started all this stuff, the one thing I didn’t want to draw at all was buildings. Because, growing up in California, buildings to me were an exercise in using a ruler and perspective, and shit like that. I just had no interest in drawing that kind of stuff.

It was only after having lived in New York for a while, around really old buildings—where you see that, actually, this building’s kind of sagging and that building’s kind of leaning against the other building next door and this chimney looks like, if those three wires weren’t there, it would all fall over, and that fire escape is at some odd angle—that’s when I really started to love architecture.

(Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* I’m not sold on Austin English’s comics, but I greatly enjoyed his Inkstuds guest post on the artists and cartoonists who influenced him, since it reminded me of the existence of the D’Aulaires, whom I’d completely and shamefully forgotten.

* The cartoonist L. Nichols writes on Joe Sacco’s word balloon and caption box placement, with copious marked-up examples. I’ve talked about all the heavy lifting they do, too. Very much worth your time — and it’s maybe worth reading it and then revisiting that Emily Carroll strip above, too, to see how such techniques work on the web as well as the printed page.

* What does this lovely Justin Green illustration for The New Yorker have to do with Colin Ferguson, the man who shot 25 people on the Long Island Rail Road before it pulled into a station located about five minutes from where I grew up? Let Green explain it to you.

* Jesus Christ, Michael DeForge.

* My friend Matt Rota sure can draw.

* I’m pretty tired of designy Internet-supported minimalist movie posters, but Sam Smith’s take on David Lynch’s Mullholland Dr. maps so neatly onto my personal iconography for the film and Lynch’s work and supernatural horror in general that how could I resist? (Via Shaggy.)

* Allow me to be the 3,892nd person to excitedly inform you that Radiohead are releasing their new album The King of Limbs on Saturday. I really, really enjoyed In Rainbows, thinking it was their best thing since Kid A and digging it hard enough to go back and reevaluate Hail to the Thief (the quicker stuff is really strong, the slow songs aren’t except for “The Gloaming”; still not a big Amnesiac person), so I’m looking forward to this.

* This Rich Juzwiak review of Lady Gaga’s new song “Born This Way” is what finally sold me on it. (Finally being a matter of, like, two days, but whatever.) At first listen I wasn’t crazy about it, because it seems really simple and obvious. I mean, i understand everything she’s doing here — she’s making a gay club anthem for the ages; she’s trying to have the final word on the current UNF UNF UNF UNF four-on-the-floor pop-house revival; she’s trumping earlier, vaguer, far less actually gay “yay empowerment, yay gays” songs by Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Pink; she’s being way more uplifiting and positive, and less sleazy and focused on sex and fame, than all her other hits. So it’s definitely smart on all those counts, and successful on all those counts. It’s just way less interesting to me than the songs from The Fame Monster, especially “Bad Romance,” which was a knockout I’d never heard anything like before, like Britney covering Marilyn Manson. “Born This Way,” by contrast, is just kind of a peppy dance song. And as far as the ubiquitous comparisons to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” goes, “Born This Way” doesn’t really sound like it in any way that matters — except that the melody for “Born This Way”‘s chorus is totally cribbed from the “so if you want it right now, better make him show you how” part from “Express Yourself”. So you get to the big anthemic chorus part for the big anthemic song, and it’s a snatch of someone else’s melody, and therefore it just didn’t click for me the way it was supposed to. And I say this as someone who’s totally fine with the ABBA/Ace of Base riff she did with “Alejandro,” or the “All the Young Dudes” thing she did with “Speechless,” and so on and so forth. The weird thing is that those two songs actually sound more like their inspirations overall than this one sounds like Madonna, but there’s no specific passage in either of them that sounds as much like a specific passage in their inspirations as the chorus for “Born This Way” sounds like that one bit of “Express Yourself.” But where Juzwiak saves the day is by likening the song not primarily to “Express Yourself,” but to Patrick Hernandez’s unbelievably wonderful disco anthem “Born to Be Alive.” “Born to Be Alive” is one of my all-time favorite songs by anyone ever, a massive onslaught of delightful sounds (“Yes we were BAWRN! BAWRN! BAWRN!”), kind of ridiculous lyrics (a lot of it doesn’t really rhyme or even make sense grammatically), and cockeyed optimism. And that’s pretty much what “Born This Way” is. Hearing it with those ears gives me a workaround for the “Hey this sounds like ‘Express Yourself'” bug when it comes up.

* And in case you just saw the big Destructor image and clicked right through it in my early post, here’s part one of my big interview about Destructor with The Cool Kids Table’s Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley.

* Al Columbia tells Inkstuds he destroyed the art for his and Alan Moore’s Big Numbers #4 to make an album cover for his roommates in the band Sebadoh. I really don’t know what else to say about that, except that the actual story has ended up being even better than the rumors suggested.

* Again, please do listen to Al Columbia’s entire interview with Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell; an absolutely fascinating way for comics lovers and Columbiaologists to spend two hours. He comes across as an enormously affable guy, admirably cognizant of and secure in his talents and his limitations, and prone to dropping the occasional deeply troubling revelation into the conversation at a moment’s notice.

* pood #3 hits stores April 20th; you can order it through Previews now.

* Retailer and commentator Brian Hibbs has posted his annual look at the BookScan graphic novel/comics sales figures for the bookstore market. It makes for fascinating, if occasionally grim, reading. I think you’ll be surprised by just how well-represented the major corporate prose publishers are on the lists; it can be hard to tell, because their comics releases tend to be spread between various imprints. Unfortunately for fight fans, Brian didn’t include his customary comparisons of the bookstore market to the Direct Market of comic specialty shops, and thus failed to provoke the customary Brian Hibbs/Tom Spurgeon reenactment of the Roddy Piper/Keith David fight from They Live over the conclusions drawn in those comparisons.

* I don’t usually comment on the weekly serial comics releases, but I want to state for the record someplace less ephemeral than twitter that this week’s The Walking Dead #81 from Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard has to be one of the best issues of the series. There’s a line in it that made me say “Oof” and sort of shake my head, and that’s quite aside from whatever zombie-related developments may or may not take place.

* This reminds me that I should have said something similar about The Invincible Iron Man #500 — I mean, I said on Twitter that it was the best issue of the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca run, but I want to say it here too. I enjoyed the flashforwards, I thought the recursive structure was well thought-out and well-executed and also fun to read and unravel rather than just being showoffy or self-satisfied, the action was slam-bang, and Fraction wrote a Spider-Man cameo that actually made me laugh out loud at one point. Plus it boasted fine art from a variety of contributors, including Larroca, Nathan Fox, Kano, and Carmine di Giandomenico. Thumbs up.

* CBR has a pretty extraordinary Joyce Farmer in-store appearance report. Man, it sounds like she tore her guts out to make that book.

* Matt Seneca interviews CF for the Hooded Utilitarian. One of the highlights is CF’s impassioned denial that he’s encoding occult symbolism of any sort into Powr Mastrs. And he really comes out swinging in favor of story-based comics:

I’m aware that there are young people right now trying to make moves in comics and deny the story, but comics are a storytelling medium, more or less.  They can be poetic in the hands of one who “knows” (John Porcellino), but comics are designed to tell stories of some kind.  So in a way you’re asking “why comics?”.

Stories are actually our history, our knowledge, our wisdom.  We can’t live without them!  Stories are unique in their ability to speak on many levels at once in a very intimate way.  I’m drawn to that infinity of possibility.  I want to talk about “everything” with my work, but in an elegant and economical way.  Comics are perfect for this.  So we have funny jokes, economics, significant and insignificant events, cruelty, violence, eroticism, death, and tranquility within one work.  It’s a visual world, with exclusive abilities, living in time…. and still so simple.  That to me is very beautiful. This is what comics are for… if I want to do other things, I make a painting, a sculpture, or music.  There’s no excuse for abusing comics.  Of course we can play with the idea of “story”, and I think that’s a great, worthy thing to do, but I want the characters and ideas to always remain legible within that experiment.

* Today’s look at the work of Uno Moralez seemed to go over pretty well; here’s his Tumblr. (Via Same Hat!)

* This looks promising: The writers and cartoonists L. Nichols, Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, and Kevin Czapiewski have started a group blog called Comix Cube, where they’re mostly talking about influence and process and such, and in refreshingly personal terms. Highlights so far? Czap’s review of Blaise Larmee’s 2001, and his post touching on (among other things) one of the greatest comics of all time, Kevin Huizenga’s “A Sunset.” To me that’s the “Here” of the ’00s. Like Czap, I too was floored by that strip — it absolutely recalibrated my understanding of what comics were capable of. I think it’s maybe the underdiscussed comic of the past ten years.

* I’m tabling this till I can actually read the book, and god knows when that will be, but at first scan, Charles Hatfield’s review of James Stokoe’s Orc Stain, comparing it at length to other acts of fantasy-narrative worldbuilding and to D&D, looks like it’s working some very fertile ground.

* Dan Nadel explains Fort Thunder. Readers looking for a canonical list of Fort residents will come away confused, though, so make sure to consult The Official Handbook of the Fort Thunder Universe if you have any questions.

* Graeme McMillan loved Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark. Can’t wait to check this one out; Bertozzi’s historical comics have historically been beasts.

* Spider-Man’s joining the Fantastic Four (again). Sure, I’ll eat it. Spidey’s got a history with those characters, he’ll give the book some comic relief, the Hickman/Epting FF run has been really entertaining so far, and I like costume color changes on principle. Why not?

* Here’s an amusingly complete recap of the past fifty or so episodes of Jesse Moynihan’s cosmic-realist webcomic Forming. It’s a bit like reading a Wikipedia entry on The Young & the Restless, only instead of Victor Newman, there’s Ghob King of the Gnomes.

* This is just fine, fine writing on “Welcome to the Jungle” and Guns n’ Roses by Mike Barthel.

* I’m less nuts about Grayson Currin’s rave review of James Blake’s self-titled full-length album for Pitchfork, because given that the record’s big departure from Blake’s previous, shorter releases is the introduction of singing, it seems like the lyrics should have been discussed more, which is to say at all. This goes double because the lyrics are so minimalist, and therefore so direct. But I could just be saying that because the singing and the lyrics are what sold me on Blake at last, after a bunch of instrumental EPs that I thought were kind of undistinguished versions of things I’d heard before as far back as Burial and as recently as the last Four Tet record. By contrast, James Blake feels like the emergence of a bonafide pop songwriting tradition with mid-to-late-’90s Aphex Twin at its roots, which couldn’t be more up my alley. (That said, when I hear the phrase “Joni Mitchell cover,” I reach for my gun.)