* 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!

* Oh boy, my first Carnival here at the new digs!

* So yeah, welcome to seantcollins.com. This has been a long time coming, as anyone who’s ever had to suffer through me trying to tell them the url for my old blog can no doubt attest. Thanks once again to Ken Bromberg for helping to move everything off of the old site, to the All Too Flat team of Ken, Ben, and Ton for hosting me for over seven years even though their own interests led them elsewhere, and especially to Jason Ervin for designing and building this wonderful new site. It’s still a work in progress in some respects, of course, especially given the plans I have for it–and my laptop’s meltdown last week didn’t help either–but I think it will only get better and more useful. Thank you for being here!

* Josh Cotter needs your help. Please consider buying something to keep this enormously talented cartoonist and his family afloat after they were afflicted by a fire.

* Recently on Robot 6, a bunch of cool comics links:

* Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red”, a quiet knockout of a horror comic;

* Gabrielle Bell’s “Voyeurs”, which I can relate to a bit more than I should perhaps admit;

* Gabby Schulz’s “How Every Single Discussion About Sexism and Woman-Type Stuff on the Internet (and Real Life) Has Ever Happened and Will Ever Happen, Always, Forever, Until the Earth Finally Falls into the Sun. (Or Until the Patriarchy Is Dismantled.)”, which is sort of the “Calgon, take me away” moment for any of us who endured the horrible Kate Beaton debate last week;

* and, I’m quite pleased to say, me and Isaac Moylan’s “I Remember When the Monster Started Coming for the Cars.”

* Meanwhile, you can check out all of our Robot 666 Halloween horror posts here.

* ZOMG Benjamin Marra draws Brian DePalma’s Body Double! Lots of drawings at the link. Please do yourself the favor of watching that film if you haven’t. Spectacularly bizarre, and perfect for Marra.

* Now here’s an odd, unexpected, potentially positive development: sales for the lowest selling books in Diamond’s monthly Top 300 comics sales charts have increased over their historical norm. Does this mean that at least some of the people who stopped buying the big books when the events ended and the prices went up started buying other stuff? Or does it just mean that the big publishers’ product glut has pushed smaller publishers even further down the trough?

* Frank Santoro talks about a variety of recent releases, including books by Seth, Frazer Irving, Darwyn Cooke, Charles Burns, Aidan Koch, and John Romita Jr. Man, I could not disagree more with Frank’s contention that Irving doesn’t do clarity of action.

* DC’s Source blog has posted a pair of cool process-related, art-heavy posts drawn from the back matter of the deluxe Batman & Robin Vol. 2: Batman vs. Robin hardcover.

* I still haven’t had the chance to watch The Walking Dead, so I’ll spare you my thoughts on other people’s thoughts on something I haven’t seen myself. (The poor guy I blew up at on Twitter over Glee‘s bowdlerized Rocky Horror episode last week should’ve been so lucky!) In the meantime I can link you to some things that friends of mine are saying: Rob Bricken (who hasn’t read the comic) was quite impressed, Curt Purcell and TJ Dietsch (who have) were not.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in very good form today.

* Real Life Horror: A good sign that a whistleblower is doing something right is that various keyboard tough guys want him murdered.

* Finally, at some point I’m going to go back and read all the way through 31 Days of Knife, Sean P. Belcher’s woefully under-linked-to-by-me October slasher-blogging marathon. For now, his concluding essay about the subgenre is a good place to start.