* Kevin Melrose at Robot 6 rounds up links and commentary about the Wizard/ToyFare shutdown, including the shell game being played by Gareb Shamus’s various ventures.

* Excellent investigative reporting by Newsarama’s Vaneta Rogers, who attempts to unravel who, exactly, ran the now-defunct Comics Code Authority, and just how much “authority” he or she or they actually had. It ends with a terrific cautionary tale from retailer advocate Joe Field of how ratings systems of the sort that have replaced the Comics Code often have the paradoxical effect of decreasing the amount of all-ages content available to consumers. (Via Sam Humphries.)

* Tom Spurgeon worries that Marvel’s much-hyped death of a Fantastic Four character in this week’s issue #587 is taking something intended to heal years-old structural problems with comics’ Direct Market — monopoly distributor Diamond’s decision to begin shipping comics to retailers a day before they go on sale, to give those retailers more time to properly stock their stores — and transforming it before our very eyes into just another short-term sales-goosing gimmick (an issue so important we’re letting retailers break the embargo and sell it the day they get it instead of the day after!) of the sort that caused all those structural problems in the first place. I worry about that too. Silver lining, though? For the second time in recent memory, Marvel’s mainstream-media hype for a character death will actually direct curious readers to a good comic with a sizable run of strong quality behind it. There are much worse fates I could imagine than for someone to be duped into buying into the Jonathan Hickman/Steve Epting/Dale Eaglesham Fantastic Four run, or the Ed Brubaker/Steve Epting/Mike Perkins Captain America run before it.

* Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, whose Kaputt is an early candidate for Album of the Year, gives very good interview to NPR’s Matthew Perpetua and The Onion AV Club’s Noel Murray. Bejar made a tremendous record and talks about it with real panache.

* If you know someone who passionately dislikes Ween, chances are it’s because of the track from their 1994 masterpiece Chocolate and Cheese called “The HIV Song.” Here’s a fascinating passage about the song — gallows humor at its most awesomely awful — from Hank Shteamer’s 33 1/3 book on the album.

* Real Life Horror: The by-now comically transparent punitive mistreatment and overincarceration of WikiLeaker Pfc. Bradley Manning appears to be getting some news-media traction.

* A Della’morte Dell’amore sequel? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Fuck you, there is NOT a Hawkeye story called “The High, Hard Shaft.”

* Finally, we are now accepting Destructor fanart submissions.

* I think my friend Kiel Phegley’s latest Q&A with Marvel honchos Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort makes for meaty reading. Brevoort muses at length on Marvel’s difficulty with ascertaining how new readers are discovering their comics; ponders how to effectively communicate to the bookstore audience given its lack of centrality and mostly casual interest in the product vs. the “comic shops on Wednesday/message boards the rest of the week” hardcore; explains the to-me baffling maneuvers surrounding the Thor titles this summer; and pins some of the blame for Marvel’s slackening sales on overextension of four top editorial figures. He also basically becomes Marvel’s new official mouthpiece by announcing that newly minted Editor-in-Chief Alonso, whose responses here are almost all just one sentence long, won’t regularly be participating in these Q&As anymore, putting Brevoort in the Quesada carnival-barker seat.

* Tom Neely, killing it as usual.

* Remember when there was a line of children’s toys and comics basically centered around Cthulhu? No? Then let Monster Brains’ gallery of Inhumanoids comic covers remind you. That guy who was basically giant rotting crocodile with an exposed ribcage remains amazing to me even now.

* Whoa, I fully support this King Collection line of t-shirts based on classic Stephen King jacket art from Fright Rags. Needs that incongruous bird-guy duel from The Stand, though. (Via Dread Central.)

* TPM’s guide to prominent locations in yesterday’s big Mafia bust really does read like a bunch of black-comedy Sopranos subplots.

Two alleged mobsters in Rhode Island (one who’s 83 and another who’s 63) are accused of extorting two strip clubs in Providence for “protection money” dating back to 1993.

Luigi “Louie” Manocchino (also known as “Baby Shacks,” “The Professor” and “The Old Man”) and Thomas Iafrate are accused of extorting money from the Satin Doll and Cadillac Lounge.

* I’m sort of amazed by how extremely creepy the online horror project Marble Hornets remains even though the current storyline depends so heavily on actors who aren’t strong enough to get their improvised dialogue over. Actually, creepy doesn’t cut it — I’ll go ahead and say outright scary. The two most recent episodes went up while my wife was in the hospital, and I actually put off watching them while I was in the house by myself. I caught up just now on the train, and sheesh — at one point I full-out jumped in my seat, alarming the guy next to me. Something about the visual tools they’re working with, the way they locate the horror in the very means by which we’re seeing and hearing what goes on, hits hard and deep and overcomes any shortcomings in performance and filmmaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Three music videos of note today:

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

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

Destroyer – Kaputt from Merge Records on Vimeo.

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

* Here are links to the three Carnival of Souls posts I did over the break through today: post-Christmas/blizzard, pre-New Year’s, post-New Year’s.

* Here’s a guide to all of Robot 6’s big 2nd anniversary special content, including some cool stuff involving yours truly;

* And here’s Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010, all in one place. This also includes a list of the list’s participants, which I think is helpful.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Bill Sienkiewicz is telling the story of his (mostly) unpublished collaboration with Alan Moore Big Numbers;

* Becky Cloonan is posting pages from her unpublished Tokyopop book East Coast Rising Vol. 2;

* and DC Comics makes a slew of announcements: all ongoing series are $2.99, letters pages are returning, Peter Milligan on Red Lanterns, and Sean Murphy on an American Vampire spin-off. That’s a pair of shots fired in the PR war, hopefully a step in the right direction for the Direct Market on pricing, a sign that Green Lantern is joining Batman as the two core franchises of the DCU, and a sign that American Vampire is joining Fables as the two core franchises of Vertigo.

* The Comics Journal has launched The Panelists, a new group blog featuring Derik Badman, Alex Boney, Isaac Cates, Craig Fischer, Jared Gardner, and Charles Hatfield. That’s a formidable crew.

* Dark Horse’s Facebook page hosts a very useful and thorough guide to the state of Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics.

* Which reminds me that the use of Facebook for PR was, along with now largely confirmed claims that the iPad is a digital-comics gamechanger, one of the big hobbyhorses of the late great Journalista blogger Dirk Deppey. “Seriously, what idiot ‘advertises’ their event solely on a website that requires registration to see the advertisement?” The kind of idiot who wants to advertise on the country’s most popular website, I guess.

* Chris Allen and Alan David Doane think that good superhero comics are the very least we should expect and demand. I see their point, although a good superhero comic is a good comic, after all.

* From good to bad: Graeme McMillan and the Comics Alliance crew explain what made some of 2010’s worst superhero comics so awful — very little schtick, lots of dragging very bad writing and art choices into the light of day and investigating what went wrong. Well done.

* If you’ve ever wondered what a smart critic with zero experience with any comics or video games would think of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, check out Edward Copeland’s review. He situates the movie in the (500) Days of Summer/Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist sphere, as you might expect, and preferred the rom-com stuff to the fighting and video-game stuff, as you also might expect.

* I’d need to reread the Fourth World saga to be sure — it’s been a few years — but I’m pretty sure that, contra Tim O’Neil, Jack Kirby’s Anti-Life wasn’t fascism, or more accurately it wasn’t just fascism — it was war. I cribbed that from Tom Spurgeon and I think it squares — after all, anti-fascist superhero comics from the World War II generation were a dime a dozen, but the Fourth World Saga stood out for a reason. Regarding Tim’s contention that Morrison’s Anti-Life is less powerful a concept than Kirby’s because it’s imposed rather than embraced, I think that’s probably true, but there certainly are people who want to impose Anti-Life’s real-life equivalent and it’s a valid avenue of exploration.

* Tom Spurgeon’s interview with the comics critic and journalist David Brothers helped me get at something I’ve often found frustrating about Brothers’s work. He’s a fine writer who brings welcome eye-on-the-ball focus and deserved indignation to his commentary on industry ethics, diversity issues, and business practices, but I’ve been frustrated by his tendency to focus so much on superheroes and other fantastic-action genre work and his occasional lapses into his particular character-specific version of “Wolverine would never say that!” But regarding the former, Brothers reveals that he only this year started reading Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez — and what a year to start! — and regarding the latter, he owns up to “basic fan entitlement.” In other words he’s young and (like all of us, hopefully) growing as a writer. Read the interview for his smart rejection of “hey, true art takes time!” defenses of late books and for a great bit on superhero comics’ civilian fashions (although I strongly disagree with his contention that “part of being an adult is wearing a shirt that has buttons on it every once in a while”):

The lack of attention paid to fashion in comics is baffling to me. We all pay a certain amount of attention, time, and money on what we wear, but you wouldn’t know it when you look at mainstream comics. Guys still wear Solid Colored T-Shirt and Latex Tight Jeans, with maybe a loose, formless leather jacket on top. Women wear Solid Colored Belly Shirt/Baby-T, Low Rise Jeans, and Visible Thong Straps. Belts, jackets, suspenders, and even something as simple as logos tends to be almost nonexistent, barring the relatively few artists who take the time to do it right.

The visible thong thing really is the post-millennial equivalent of ’70s and ’80s shirtless vest-wearing street toughs and ’90s mullet-based hairstyles.

* Can you imagine a world in which Lord of the Flies, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Waiting for Godot, Rear Window, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were in public domain as of this year? Yeah, neither can I. Fuck Thank you very much, Congress!

* Real Life Horror 1: I’m always up for reading about the giant octopus of that washed up on the shores of St. Augustine in 1896.

* Real Life Horror 2: Here’s a wonderfully written history of the bubonic plague by writer Mark Sumner on, of all places, Daily Kos.

* Real Life Horror 3: It’s always worth pointing out that my Representative, Peter King, supported IRA terrorism, especially given that he’s planning McCarthyite investigations of American Muslims who didn’t.

* Real Life Horror 4: The political blogger Digby has been doing yeoman’s work reporting on American law enforcement’s willy-nilly use of painful, frequently lethal tasers on non-violent non-criminals.

* Real Life Great Job: I can’t believe that one of the candidates for Republican National Committee Chairman is named Reince Priebus. Are we sure he’s not a Tim and Eric character? What do Prance Stuard, Bilb Ono, Doug Prishpreed, and Dun Dorr have to say about this?

* Cinema just got a lot less convincingly simultaneously genteel and dangerous.

* Whoa oh oh oh, ohhh.

* Oh, so that’s what’s up, Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, who apparently never stops drawing, he has a funny new strip up at Vice.

* I’m glad to hear that I played some small part in getting Curt Purcell psyched about blogging about horror again.

* Speaking of: I can’t help but be a bit disappointed with the (leaked and/or official depending on what post you’re reading) video for Kanye West’s monster, especially given such recent direct points of comparison as the clips for Scissor Sisters’ “Invisible Light” or West’s own “Runaway.” To the table occupied by the former’s dizzyingly trashy recreation of giallo and other groovy-age staples and the latter’s go-for-baroque parade of sexual, racial, and self-mythological neurosis, “Monster” brings a cornucopia of played-out “sexy dead model” visuals I saw in a fashion magazine, like, ten years ago. Moreover I think the whole sentiment behind “Monster” loses something when removed from the self-loathing draped all over My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; conflicted tracks like “Runaway” contain both sides of Kanye’s macho-asshole schtick in the way that the tough-guy songs just don’t. Finally, once you’ve read Nitsuh Abebe’s suggestion that Nicki Minaj should have been represented by a shapeshifter rather than a pair of good/evil twins, you really can’t unsee it. It’s like (as I’m fond of mentioning) when I learned that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was supposed to be filled by Pete Clemenza until it fell through over a wage dispute with Richard S. Castellano.

* Happy birthday to my favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien. I love you, Professor!

* Finally, HOLY SHIT

* Quick note: I am creating this post from 30,000 feet above the American Midwest, so apologies for the airplaine-wireless-mandated lo-res images.

* Like the comics blogosphere’s own version of the Jelly of the Month Club, Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview Series is the gift that keeps on giving. Recent entries of note include interviews with beleaguered Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar, esteemed Drawn & Quarterly associate publisher and publicist Peggy Burns (perhaps my acquaintance of longest standing in all of comics), and garrulous webcomics craftsman Dustin Harbin.

* The most informative of the bunch so far has to be Spurge’s interview with CBR News Editor (and my friend) Kiel Phegley. Kiel serves up a survey of the state of the industry that I think will really impress you with its insight and candor, not just “coming from a CBR editor” if that’s the kind of thing that’s inclined to turn you off but coming from anybody.

* I wrote up Anders Nilsen’s masterpiece Big Questions for the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010.

* Speaking of year-enders, Tucker Stone lists his 20 Best Comics of 2010. Many fine choices on there.

* Tim O’Shea interviews Axe Cop‘s Ethan Nicolle. It’s fascinating to learn that Axe Cop is written largely through actual, literal play. I also had no idea the Nicolle Brothers have a print Axe Cop miniseries on the way from Dark Horse called Bad Guy Earth.

* Marvel’s keeps moving in the direction of day-and-date digital releases, but they’re smaller movements than I expected to see by now.

* Curt Purcell has a few quick thoughts on Battlestar Galactica. He’s also looking for recommendations as to which shows to watch next. Curt, The Sopranos and Deadwood are the best shows. The Wire is very good except for the final season. You know I loved Lost.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM pleads for Bernard Rose’s Candyman. The post includes an anecdote that makes me really disappointed in Philip Glass.

* Fine writing by Zak Smith/Sabbath on the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter of The Hobbit and what it means for fantasy storytelling and RPG storytelling alike.

* Brian Chippendale’s last few Puke Force strips have been really good.

* Aeron Alfrey has posted a fine selection of video game covers over at Monster Brains.

* Whoa, what is up, Michael DeForge?

* Renee French titled this image “Shatner.”

* Real Life Horror 1: TPM’s Rachel Slajda presents the year in Islamophobia — to me the most dispiriting development in an already dreadful year.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald continues to chronicle the harsh treatment of WikiLeak source Bradley Manning by the U.S. government. That’s the “how”; I have a feeling this lengthy round-up of revelations provided by WikiLeaks in 2010 is the “why.”

* Related: The story of #mooreandme, the vociferous Twitter protest of comments made by Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann dismissing and mischaracterizing the rape allegations against WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and a link retweeted by Olbermann to an article outing the accusers.

* Real Life Horror 3: I’ve been remiss not to have linked to this already, but my home land mass of Long Island appears to have sprouted a serial killer.

* Every time I read stories like this — and that’s often — the phrase “of historic proportions” pops unbidden into my head.

(Warning: I don’t really reveal any plot points but I kinda blow the contours of some of the big scenes here, so SPOILER ALERT in that sense.)

The outpouring of acclaim for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan just goes to show you: Movie nerds love pale brunettes with eating disorders. (I oughta know!) I really don’t know how to explain the plaudits otherwise.

Sure, there are tiny fragments of a great, or at least a scary, horror movie sprinkled throughout this story of a newly minted prima ballerina who’s cracking under the pressure. The Exorcist/Shining/Jacob’s Ladder/Lost Highway blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpses of wrong things (the drawing that blinked, the first of Nina’s doubles) and jump-scare things-that-should-not-be (“sweet girl,” and (of all things) Nina turning in mid-frig to see Barbara Hershey’s mommie dearest asleep in the chair) had me shivering in my seat. And the film’s undergirded by three entertaining performances, too. Mila Kunis nails the smiling smoker’s sexuality of an artsy version of the sort of girl my wife used to call a “College Jen.” Vincent Cassell is an absolute pleasure to watch every time he’s on screen, taking the French choreographer cliché and clichéing the hell out of it, yet always keeping him on the lighter side of the dividing line between hot-blooded genius and sexual predator so you never feel all that bad for rooting for him to do something sacré bleu! whenever he shows up. And I guess Natalie Portman deserves her Oscar for her “Raging Bull, but with bulimia instead of the Pasta Tour of Italy” physicality. I mean, I don’t think I’m ever going to think of Nina Whatsername again, but it was a demanding role and she really sold the idea that her ruthlessly honed physical condition bespoke fragility rather than strength. Moreover, her body language following her transformation at the end of the film was totally different and riveting; you could easily have convinced me they CGI’d her face on someone else’s body, like the Winkelvi.

But I think I just rattled off everything the movie has to recommend it. Most of the horror, the body horror in particular, is just sort of a yawn — anyone who’s watched a single David Cronenberg film (even the Viggo Mortensen crime ones!) has seen better/worse, and even the nastiest/cringiest material here, like the peeling scene in the party restroom, struck me by how not skeeved out I was by it. And almost all of the grand-finale scares (“sweet girl” excluded) weren’t just not scary, but laugh-out-loud ridiculous: Winona Ryder in the hospital room, the drawings and paintings, the transformation in the bedroom, the fight in the dressing room. Was Aronofsky going for camp? That’s what it felt like, which is sure to do a number on the effectiveness of any movie that’s trying to show someone scared out of their wits.

I found myself chuckling at the film’s dramatic moments on a far too regular basis as well. Right from the jump, with the wooden mean-girl gossip and giggling of the ballerinas, the film established that any point it could make, it would make with a sledgehammer’s subtlety. Tomas explaining that the Swan Queen would have to have both a dark and a light side as a mirror’s edge doubles him; infantilized Nina reporting the news of her success to her mother with “He picked me, Mommy!” rather than “I got the part,” which is what pretty much every human being I’ve ever known in the performing arts would say and I assure you I’ve known some damage cases; anything involving Winona Ryder; and my favorite, Nina’s failure to connect with the Black Swan aspect of her role depicted in shockingly, hilariously straightforward fashion as the result of the female equivalent of blueballs. The film’s egregious overscoring and overcaffeinated camerawork further undercut both the scares and the soul, browbeating you when they should be letting your brain do the work.

It’s a shame, it really is, and I’m disappointed. Usually the scary movies that get a lot of critical traction turn out to be pretty damn good, from The Silence of the Lambs to Mullholland Dr. (with which this film has quite a bit in common, obviously) to even There Will Be Blood (ditto), but this just didn’t work for me as either a horror film or a drama. On the other hand, the girl from That ’70s Show goes down on Queen Padme Amidala. For Your Consideration!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Death Trap by Lane Milburn, self-published with a Xeric Grant — looks like a creature feature, feels like something far more unsettling.

Everything he does well, he does as well as he’s ever done it here: Immersive environments, crosshatched and “lit” to look like they were constructed from solid smoke. Weird, ugly monster designs that connote some sort of infectious sickness of reality as much as they do simply somethin’ scary….And perhaps the most finely tuned sense of queasy, bottom-just-dropped-out horror and madness you’ll find in comics this side of Al Columbia.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

SPOILERS AHOY

* The entire season comes down to whether a guest star is moved by one of Rick’s speeches. Fundamentally it’s just a big miscalculation to make the climactic episode’s emotional lynchpin a conversation with a character we really don’t know and don’t care about. That’s a Matrix-sequel-level flub, a really basic error in storytelling. And even though much of the rest of what went on in the CDC was pleasantly handled — I particularly liked the pseudoscience’s presentation as a planetarium light show, an enjoyably weird way to approach that if you had to approach it at all — it’s impossible to get around wrapping up the first season with a conflict that didn’t tie into any of the conflicts or relationships established in any other episode. It’s like if the season had ended after Rick and company’s confrontation with the nursing home locos.

* And thus the Walking Dead two-step continues. For every believable, well-played moment, like Rick getting in the shower with Lori at the first available opportunity, there’s something dopey or hackneyed, like cutting immediately to Shane alone in the shower drinking straight from the bottle. The show had five episodes to shake itself out of the “for every torso zombie, there is an equal and opposite Wang Chung music cue” strikes-and-gutters pattern it established in the pilot and failed. So that’s The Walking Dead: The TV Show, it’s safe to say.

* Wow, last week’s “next week on The Walking Dead” sneak preview was one of the falsest false-advertising previews I’ve ever seen. They made it look like the doctor poisoned Andrea! Sheesh.

* “VAI, load up Celery Man, please.”

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

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

* and a new minute-long teaser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—on incoming NYC schools chancellor Cathleen Black

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

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

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

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

* I feel like this episode had the highest percentage of good-to-strong material yet. Jim’s departure was well staged, right down to Daryl’s unexpected nod of the head. The approach to the CDC was good and creepy, and I appreciated how minimal actual zombie shots were in it — they were more menacing because they were treated as an inevitability, rather than a clear and present danger. Shane’s near-snap may have been played a bit heavily, but the way he got all huffy-puffy was weird enough for that not to matter. And I was particularly struck by Amy’s resurrection, which was, of all things, sensual and beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen zombie fiction treat coming back in that way and I’d love to see more curveballs of that sort.

* But this episode was also a clear illustration of why I probably shouldn’t expect them. Of course Daryl’s the guy who says “I say we kill him now and shoot the dead girl in the head while we’re at it.” Of course the abused wife can’t stop once she starts hitting her dead husband in the head with a pickaxe. Of course we have someone who can’t let go of their dead loved one (cf. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) and someone else whose inevitable death we have to deal with sooner or later while debating whether we do things like that or not (cf. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead). Of course the CDC couldn’t stop it, there’s only one guy left there, he’s breaking down, and the grounds are littered with dead soldiers. I mean, I read The Stand too. And of course when the door finally opens up, everyone’s silhouetted in enough white light to recreate that Golden Girls episode where Sophia goes to Heaven but Sal tells her it’s not her time.

* Point is, if there’s a zombie/post-apocalyptic trope or cliché, they’ll hit it, as hard and as dead-center as they can. If they have time to do some stuff differently, great, but it’s not where their bread is buttered. I don’t know if this is due to a lack of imagination on their part, or one of ambition. That is, are the filmmakers just kind of pedestrian, or do they not trust the audience enough to get up the gumption zig where they’re expected to zag? I was glad to see that Curt Purcell used similar terms to talk about the show’s decision to address the pseudo-science behind the outbreak, something the comic has hardly ever done — in fact, Robert Kirkman has said he will never reveal the origin of the plague. The last thing The Walking Dead wants to do is risk alienating the audience with mystery like Lost or Battlestar Galactica did.

* Fortunately, I’m not too disappointed at this point. I said I was going to do this last week, and sure enough, I seem really to have recalibrated my expectations so that The Walking Dead is for me what The Vampire Diaries is for my wife, say. I went into tonight’s episode thinking “Oh boy, I can’t wait to see some good zombie attacks” — not much more or much less than that. I am at least enjoying the show on that level. When the “more” comes along, great! When the “less” comes along, oh well, it’s only The Walking Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPOILERS AHOY

* Prophetic dream, tough guys with hearts of gold, character doesn’t live to receive birthday gift from other character, least sympathetic and most sympathetic characters bite it first, racists are always vocally racist even in extreme danger when they’re relying on someone of another race, et cetera. No one’s reinventing the wheel here, is what I’m saying.

* That said, fun episode. The CGI blood remains really lackluster, given what Tom Savini did with a wing and a prayer three and a half decades ago, but it’s still always fun to see people get eaten and blown to smithereens in an emotionally resonant fashion. I actually think Jim’s stint as a captive was well-written, well-acted, and well-shot, maybe the first time since the pilot that the show hit the hat trick. And to the show’s credit I didn’t see Amy’s death coming, despite all the birthday rigamarole (and despite having read the comic!).

* I guess what I’m going to do is watch the show like I would a much more self-serious, less sexy Vampire Diaries. It hits some genre buttons I like having hit, and maybe once in a while I’ll get lucky and it’ll do more than that, but that’ll just have to be a pleasant surprise. The Walking Dead: good enough!

* I wonder what the Vegas oddsmakers are laying on “Merle is the Governor” now, god help us all.

* Here’s the trailer for the Green Lantern movie. I think it looks good as far as the notoriously unreliable medium of trailers goes. Iron Man In Space strikes me as the right tone to establish for civilian audiences.

* This is just a great interview with Lisa Hanawalt by Ken Parille. I had no idea she’d done a Boy’s Club tribute strip! One thing I’ve always wondered, and it’s one of the few questions Parille doesn’t ask, is why she publishes mainly in print vs. online. I feel like an I Want You weekly webcomic would get a lot of attention.

* Grant Morrison updates my pal Rick Marshall at MTV Splash Page on several of his film projects, including We3, Joe the Barbarian, and the BBC series he’s working on with Stephen Fry.

* Christopher Allen on the Blakean blend of innocence and experience that is CF’s Powr Mastrs Vol. 1.

* Benjamin Marra draws ROM Spaceknight! Draws the shit out of him, too.

* Michael DeForge’s new comic Spotting Deer made me a bit nauseous just now.

* The shirt Simon Pegg is wearing in the poster for his new movie Paul features the Death Ray from Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #23, which leads me to ask the question, why doesn’t Fantagraphics make t-shirts? Is it a hassle to get the individual creators to go along with it? Did they used to do it in the ’90s and got burned when their t-shirt distributor went under? Because seriously, wouldn’t a line of Maggie and Hopey shirts basically be like backing up the money truck to the Fanta front door?

* If Bruce Baugh keeps WoWblogging, I’ll keep linking to it. Right now I’m digging the way the game’s makers are doing a lot of prelude-to-Cataclysm stuff, like it’s a big comic-book event or something.

* Finally, am I the only person who was at times genuinely disturbed by this gallery of children’s drawings of the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos? They look like something the police ask a victimized child to draw to describe their attacker or work through their feelings, or like the automatic drawing a child in a horror movie might do of the entity only she can see, so far anyway. (Via Chris Sims.)

SPOILER ALERT

* Much, much better this time around! I mean, seriously, that opening scene with Michael Rooker was almost like it was crafted as a way to say to that terrible character’s many many detractors “On the other hand…” (Yikes, no pun intended!) It put you right there with someone buckling and breaking under the weight of what zombies hath wrought, which is where you want your zombie fiction to put you.

* Similarly, while I understand Sean B.’s reservations about Ed the Wife Beater, I feel like he too was a case study in how to do things done wrong in Episode 2 better here. Sure, his stampede toward misogynistic epithets at the drop of a hat was a bit much, but at least he didn’t do it three or four sentences into his introduction, which is about how long Merle lasted last week before dropping the n-bomb. Instead, we meet him in the throes of a sullen little you’re-not-the-boss-of-me bout of passive aggression around the campfire the night before. Al Swearengen he ain’t, but nor is he Episode 2’s Merle Dixon.

* And I’m with Curt on how much more effective the zombies themselves were in this episode.

* There was also some welcome zagging where I expected things to zig. Lori’s brutally abrupt cut-off of Shane from her and Carl, and the apparent revelation that Shane told her Rick was dead in no uncertain terms–I didn’t see either coming, whereas turning what was (if I recall correctly) an ill-advised one-time thing in the comic into a full blown love affair in the show was more or less where you’d expect the adaptation to deviate if deviate it must. It helped that actor Jon Bernthal gave his all this week, believably portraying an equilibrium-upending emotional swirl of relief that his best friend and partner survived, joy that the woman and child he’s come to care about are reunited with the husband and father they love, guilt over what he’d said and done in Rick’s absence, jealousy of his relationship with Lori, fear that he’ll get found out, regret that he’s lost his ersatz “son,” and on and on.

* The “Hattie McDaniel work” bit was nice, and again, welcome. A smart show could return to the reestablishment of traditional gender roles often and weightily. We’ll see if that’s what we’ve got.

* Merle’s brother name is Daryl? Does he have another brother named Daryl too? Good gravy. Norman Reedus did a pretty good job, though–not unnecessarily belligerent, which is what I was worried about.

* I love Bear McCreary, but the music cues hit things a little hard, I thought. And knocked off 28…Later a bit too heavily too toward the end.

* If, goddess forbid, Christopher Lee dies before he can finish his role as Saruman in The Hobbit, have Jeffrey DeMunn grow his beard out and drop his voice a few octaves and blammo, instant White Wizard.

* I’d been dismissive of the idea that Merle would end up being the TV show’s version of the Governor at some point, but him losing his hand makes me worry, given all that easy eye-for-an-eye (so to speak) potential.

* In a way, I think that this series is a mug’s game. No no, bear with me, I’m not writing it off. It’s just that–well, okay, before it aired the show had three things going for it. 1) It’s based on the most successful, widely acclaimed, and influential horror comic of the past decade, and probably of a few decades before that; 2) It’s on the network that airs Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the two of most widely acclaimed television dramas currently on the air; 3) Less directly but still importantly, it bore the promise of being to its genre what The Sopranos was to post-Coppola/Scorsese mafia dramas, what The Wire was to police procedurals, and what Deadwood was to the Western–an incisive take on a shopworn drama that succeeds partially through genre revisionism, partially through intelligent application of genre, partially through a singular creative vision on the part of its creators, and partially through its ability to use the serial mechanisms of television drama to tell its story and explore its characters in themes at ruminative length.

But here’s the thing about point #3: Length and serialization aside, isn’t that stuff basically true of all the great zombie movies? I mean, the very first canonical zombie movie was itself an act of genre revisionism. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead stripped zombies of their voodoo/hypnosis origin, added the cannibalism, made them an apocalyptic event, used them to light a fire under pressure-cooker human drama, and injected a healthy dose of social commentary into the proceedings. Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, the Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, even Shaun of the Dead–these all already basically do what you’d want “The Sopranos of zombies” to do. I can think of very very few potentially canonical zombie movies that are simply “zombies run amok amongst basically flat characters, and you like it anyway because the zombie shit is so rad”–Zombi 2, perhaps? Return of the Living Dead, which I haven’t seen and which is probably not a good example because it’s a comedy? So anyway, barring some truly spectacular filmmaking, The Walking Dead suffers from a duplication of services problem with all the zombie material its audience is likely to have seen. After tonight’s episode I’m reasonably sure I’ll see it through to the end of its very short first season, because after all I feel warmly disposed toward zombie stuff, and this seems to be reasonably to quite well done zombie stuff. But it’s probably never going to be an hour of peak-level Romero- or Boyle-type material every week.

* Ask and ye shall receive! Earlier today I blegged for good critical writing on World of Warcraft and It by Stephen King. So bless Sean P. Belcher for recommending this fine Margaret L. Carter essay on Lovecraftian cosmic horror sans Lovecraftian nihilism in It. Meanwhile, I’ve got the Rob Cockerham World of Warcraft diary that my old All Too flat major domo Kennyb recommended opened tab by tab and waiting to be read. Thanks, fellas!

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Jaime Hewlett’s adaptation of Pulp’s “Common People”;

* and Tom Brevoort’s advice to young comics writers. Clarity and emotional oomph get top billing.

* If you’re in the market for more Walking Dead episode 2 target practice, Sean P. Belcher and Adam Serwer have you covered. Serwer’s last line is almost maybe too harsh, but it’s also pretty accurate for at least a few of the characters we’ve met.

* Brigid Alverson’s exhortation to read Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary may be just the kick in the ass I needed.

* Tim O’Neil lists his five favorite Wu-Tang Clan solo albums. We have three in common; can you guess which?

* Bald Eagles covers Benjamin Marra. This should be submitted to the Covered blog, no?

* Jim Woodring keeps killing it.

* Real Life Horror: George W. Bush is a proud torturer and torture is legal because a lawyer said so once. One day he will die in comfort, surrounded by his loved ones, feted by leaders of both parties.

* There Will Be Blood: The Nintendo Game. Spoiler alert? (Hat tip: Bill Magee.)

* Finally, I love when comics critics calmly use some goofy comic to excoriate the society that produced them top-to-bottom. In that light, behold Tim Hodler on Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey. We haven’t seen its like since Brian Chippendale’s unforgettable take on The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu #34.

* Curt Purcell echoes a lot of what I said about last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, and adds something I barely touched on, which is that the zombie stuff wasn’t very good in it either.

* If I had to imagine the way network executives talk about genre programming, I’d probably come up with something like this exchange from a pair of HBO honchos about the upcoming Game of Thrones adaptation. “Transcends the genre”: check. Interchangeable use of “sci-fi” and “fantasy”: check. Dutiful referencing of the twin goals of pleasing the fans and appealing to a wider audience: check. Not that I’m upset about any of this–they mean well. It reminds me, though, that by the sound of it this will be a much more reverent adaptation of the source material, in terms of fidelity, than True Blood.

* LOVE AND ROCKTOBER: Frank Santoro notes the silent messages being sent by what panel grids Jaime Hernandez uses when in his gobsmacking “The Love Bunglers”/”Browntown” suite from Love and Rockets: New Stories #3.

* Speaking of Frank: Naughty, naughty!

* Nick Gazin reviews some recent comics and not-comics releases for Vice. I’m interested in what he has to say about Destroy All Movies!!!, Bent, and so on, but mostly I’m interested in having the opportunity to once again beg him and Vice to create a comics-only RSS feed. (Yes, I’ve tried to hobble one together myself using Page2RSS; no, it didn’t work.)

* Despite its obnoxious one-image-per-page linkbait format, this Wired slideshow previewing Destroy All Movies!!!, the aforementioned look at cinematic treatment of punks and punk, got me pretty excited. It also makes me wish that some current science-fiction filmmaker would populate his post-apocalyptic wasteland with emo kids. (Via Fantagraphics.)

* This Tom Spurgeon drubbing of Mark Millar & John McCrea’s Jenny Sparks Authority spinoff contains what will surely be the critical line of the week. See if you can spot it.

* The great cartoonist Jason lists his 15 favorite cartoonists. It’s as interesting to see the ones who didn’t influence him in any obvious way as it is to see the ones who did.

* Real Life Horror: Americans love the vengeance murders of imprisoned murderers.

* The Xorn/Magneto story is only confusing if you insist on counting things not written by Grant Morrison as part of the story. I understand that Marvel got cold feet about having Magneto slaughter thousands of Manhattanites in extermination camps, then get beheaded–though it frustrates me that they greenlit the story if that’s how they felt about it–but the thing is, there are a million potential outs for that scenario that don’t involve undoing the big reveal at the heart of Morrison’s whole run. Scarlet Witch could have brought him back and he could have repented. Phoenix could have sent him back to life with the mission of making up for his transgressions. Nanosentinels or Sublime particles could have been responsible for his rampage, or brought him back to life, or both, or whatever. All things built right into the story, or into other important stories; all things that don’t necessitate contradicting what was already on the page. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

* Today on Robot 6:

* Nick Gurewitch unveils a new Perry Bible Fellowship comic and some old BBC cartoons;

* and Douglas Wolk unveils the secret of All Star Superman. Or does he?!?!

* Hobbit news: Bofur and Ori have been cast, Gandalf has not.

* Neil Marshall’s Centurion is now out on DVD after a blink-and-you’ll-miss it theatrical run (and some time on VOD, I guess). Marshall’s three-film track record runs “overrated/masterpiece/great time at the movies” for me thus far, so I’m really looking forward to this one.

* More behind-the-scenes sketches and notes from the new Morrison/Stewart/Clarke Batman & Robin hardcover, this time focusing on the new characters in the book.

* I love that “Genesis P-Orridge Quits Throbbing Gristle” is a headline that can be truthfully written in the year 2010.

* I’m always glad to see Brian Hibbs put on his reviewer hat; this time out he reviews a trio of midlist DC books and a pair of zombie television shows.

* If you’re not all Halloween-mixed out, you definitely want to check out Tim O’Neil’s contribution to the genre. This one focuses on the sinister ambient/industrial/electronic end of the spectrum, much to its benefit. I’d also forgotten how the otherwise pretty dire Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was sprinkled with quotes nearly the equal of the iconic lines from the first two–thanks for reminding me, Tim.

* Finally, you’ll notice I’ve added one of those thingamabobs whereby you can instantly post my posts to the social network of your choice by clicking a button at the bottom of each post. My question is, which of these does anyone use? Twitter and Facebook seem like no-brainers, and the email icon seems to be gmail-specific, but I also put Google Buzz and Digg and Delicious and Technorati and StumbleUpon down there because I’ve at least heard of ’em. Do any of you use them? Is there anything you don’t see down there that SHOULD be down there? Please let me know what you think in our wonderfully fast, non-double-posting, non-spam-ridden comments!