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

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

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

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

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

* Game of Thrones t-shirts!

* Jim Woodring Frank t-shirts!

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

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

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

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

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

* The bargain of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics festival: All five of the books in Benjamin Marra’s Traditional Comics line for $10 total. You are nuts if you don’t buy them at that price.

* Great interview alert: Arthur magazine’s Justin Farrar talks to Ron Regé Jr. about Yeast Hoist — both the comic series and the beer that is its latest installment.

* Jeet Heer sings the praises of Todd Hignite’s The Art of Jaime Hernandez. I don’t know why things always get so nasty in Comics Comics comment threads — I think they may have imported bad behavior from their various sparring partners, or maybe it’s just that any site with the word “Comics” in the name brings out the worst in people — but check it out anyway to watch various smart people (eg. Evan Dorkin) try to figure out why no one talked about this and other recent books of note.

* Destructor item of the day: Thanks to Agent M, NeilAlien, Comics Alliance, Xaviar Xerexes, Brian Warmoth, and Family Style for recommending the site to people.

* Anyone know if there’s a way to acquire back issues of Desert Island’s house anthology Smoke Signal? Can’t get ’em through the website except for the most recent one. If they’re at the Festival tomorrow then by God I’m grabbing them!

* Quick housekeeping note first: I posted a quick guide to some of DestructorComics.com’s navigation features. I think they’re pretty neat.

* Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that Fantagraphics will be publishing Daniel Clowes-designed collections of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, arguably the great as-yet-uncollected classic comic. Over on Robot 6 I have a brief spiel about why I think the strip will work in the Tumblr Age.

* Also on Robot 6: Please pay Michael Kupperman, you monsters.

* Here’s more engrossing writing on life after recent developments in World of Warcraft by Bruce Baugh. I think the points he raises here about constructing a player’s early experience to maximize enjoyment in the immediate term and the impact of the story in the medium-to-long term can apply to pretty much any form of narrative storytelling.

* Moreover, as I think I’ve said before, it’s really only after reading Bruce’s posts of late that it’s occurred to me that the “line-wide event” model of superhero comics publishing developed by Marvel and DC over the past half-decade echoes the way WoW is set up. Like, okay, here’s this new expansion pack, and now everyone has to deal with the Lich King, or now everyone has to deal with natural disasters caused by a crazy dragon; here’s this new event, and now everyone has to deal with Captain America fighting Iron Man, or now everyone has to deal with President Obama offering a Cabinet position to the Green Goblin because he shot an alien on live TV. If you figure that there’s some sort of nerd collective unconscious that welcomed both these developments, you can also see why that collective unconscious has rebelled somewhat now that the events aren’t quite so all-encompassing, or indeed jostling up against one another in a way that confuses readers looking for one single direction to march in.

* Benjamin Marra on Fox News. Benjamin Marra in The New Yorker. I’ll take “Sentences I’m Delighted to Be Able to Write” for $1000, Alex. (Via Bill Kartalopoulos.)

* Speaking of which! Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal interviews David Lynch about his burgeoning career as a recording artist.

* I really like today’s Wolverine contribution to the Covered blog from Patt Kelley simply because the header he added to the image, USE YOUR CLAWS MY BELOVED, is a band name waiting to happen. Click the link to see what he’s riffing off of.

* Matt Madden is absolutely right: This photo of Killoffer by Ana Alexandrino is one of the greatest photos of a cartoonist of all time.

And do click that link — it’s a con report on the RIO Comicon from Jah Furry, and he’s got a lot of terrific photos of what looks like a very vibrant artcomics scene.

* Finally, David Fincher should do a shot-for-shot remake of Fight Club with Justin Timberlake as Tyler, Jesse Eisenberg as the narrator, and Kristen Stewart as Marla.

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

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

* and a new minute-long teaser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—on incoming NYC schools chancellor Cathleen Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Joe McCulloch reviews Jacques Tardi’s masterful loogie in the face of World War I, It Was the War of the Trenches, which I liked a lot myself. Between this and Boardwalk Empire, which I probably should be writing about weekly instead of The Walking Dead, it’s been a great year for examining the horror of war through the lens of the War to End All Wars.

* Ooh look, Pood #2! (I’m acting surprised, but I got a copy in the mail the other day. Just one of the perks of being a glamorous comics blogger.)

* Off the beaten path: Chris Allen reviews Gerry Alanguilan’s animal-rights parable Elmer. I need to get a copy of that book and read it back to back with Duncan the Wonder Dog.

* Things are not going well for John Porcellino, apparently. Ars gratia artis, I fucking guess.

* Halfway between Chris Cunningham’s clip for Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” and a Tool video, you’ll find this creepy-lovely video for School of Seven Bells’ practically perfect certain-slant-of-light dreampop ballad “I L U.” (Via Pitchfork.)

School of Seven Bells – I L U – Official Video from Vagrant Records on Vimeo.

* Ooh, look, Jeet Heer uncovered the cover for Paying for It, Chester Brown’s prostitution memoir! Check the comments to watch noted comics aesthetes recoil.

* The way this excellent Dan Nadel essay on Jack Kirby’s California years for Vice magazine is spread across six hitcount-whoring pages is irritating, to be sure, but don’t let that stop you from reading it. It’s a beautifully written appreciation of Kirby’s art and anti-war humanism. One thing I come back to a lot when thinking about Kirby and about Grant Morrison is Tom Spurgeon’s contention that Kirby’s idea of Anti-Life (essentially, war) is a lot more challenging than Morrison’s (essentially, being a fascist creep). No reasonable person can think up reasons to support Morrisonian Anti-Life. Kirbyan Anti-Life, on the other hand–well, you know.

* More Vice: Nick Gazin interviews Chip Kidd on his new book of superhero pop-culture ephemera, Shazam!, as a part of his latest comics review round-up. I like how he pretty much openly sticks it to Jon Vermilyea and Koren Shadmi, as if that really were the role of the critic after all. (Maybe he’s kidding, I dunno, it’s Vice and the dude says he hates cats so there’s obviously something wrong with him. Also, add the damn comics-only RSS feed already.)

* This is a pretty terrific interview of Charles Burns by the Onion A.V. Club’s Sam Adams. The bits on color and William S. Burroughs’s Interzone were especially interesting. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Jeremy Renner really has no idea what his role as Hawkeye in Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie will be like. What an odd experience it must be to sign on to one of these big movies-by-committee without knowing much more than your character’s name.

* Here’s a trailer for Moon director Duncan Jones’s new movie Source Code. Two thoughts: 1) Wow, he sure knows what he likes, huh? 2) Inception sure opened some doors, huh? 3) The quality of this film notwithstanding, I wonder how much longer “watching major forms of transportation blow up in trailers” will last as a thing.

* Matthew Perpetua assembles a mix that shows the softer side of the Smashing Pumpkins. Well, it includes “Drown” and “Rhinoceros” and such, so “softer” is relative, but you get the idea.

* Lots to chew on in this Tom Ewing piece on Kanye West’s new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Some of it’s even about the music!

* Curt Purcell liked last night’s Robert Kirkman-written episode of The Walking Dead a lot more than I did.

* Today on Robot 6: Box Brown on the COEXIST bumper stickers.

* Hellen Jo sure can draw.

* A new Marc Bell comic called Pure Pajamas is coming from Drawn & Quarterly in 2011! Marc Bell’s comics are great. So excited about this. Suck it, fine art world!

* Strange Tales II #3 are popping up everywhere. Robot 6 has James Stokoe and Michael DeForge, the Beat has Toby Cypress and Harvey Pekar/Ty Templeton, and Comics Alliance has Benjamin Marra, Eduardo Medeiros, and Nick Gurewitch/Kate Beaton.

* John Allison pops up in the Robot 6 comment thread to clarify some of the ideas expressed about artcomics in his Indie Comics Manifesto.

* Wilson: The Movie.

* Still no permalinks, but please do read Gabe Bridwell’s third report on the ACA residencies of Paul Pope, Craig Thompson, and Svetlana Chmakova. My favorite tidbits from this one: Paul invited his mother and girlfriend to work with his students, as well as Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, who Bridwell says gave the best critiques of anyone he’s ever known.

* Music video of note #1: Watch Grant Morrison murder his way through My Chemical Romance in “Sing,” the second clip from their new concept album Danger Days.

* Music video of note #2: The Klaxons have a Cronenbergian orgy (really no other way to put it) in “Twin Flames,” the second video (I think) for their new album Surving the Void. (Via Pitchfork and the Quietus.)

Klaxons — Twin Flames (NSFW) from Mark Twain on Vimeo.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Very nice programming line-up at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival–Anders Nilsen, Jordan Crane, Brian Chippendale, Sammy Harkham vs. Françoise Mouly, Charles Burns vs. Lynda Barry…

* John Allison’s Indie Comics Manifesto. Allison conflates being a crowd-pleaser with artistic merit in a way that makes me pretty uncomfortable, and there’s some crawl-into-your-grave-and-die-old-man rhetoric that doesn’t really help either. That said, he’s also got some common-sense financial advice in there.

* Comment-thread bonus: Here’s a list I came up with of a dozen great “art-damaged visual tone-poem[s] about the inside of [the artists’] psyche[s],” the kind of comic Allison would like to avoid but without which I wouldn’t really want to read comics anymore.

* Is Marvel — for our sins — collecting Mark Millar’s Trouble?

* Comment-thread bonus: links to every issue of David Tischmann, Darko Macan, and Igor Kordey’s Cable/Soldier X run, available to be read on Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited.

* Tom Adams of Bergen Street Comics on the onslaught of Thor comics. Is that what killed Thor: The Mighty Avenger?

* No permalinks unfortunately, and the least user-friendly scrolling interface I’ve ever experienced double-unfortunately, but artist Gabe Bridwell has in-depth reports on the Atlantic Center for the Arts residencies of Craig Thompson, Paul Pope, and Svetlana Chemakova. I found the stuff on Craig and Paul (admittedly two of my favorite people in comics) really revealing–Craig’s group did the most physical playing-around, Paul basically dances around and attacks the bristol board like a painter dancing around and attacking the canvas. Also, looks like the great Dave Kiersh was in Craig’s group. (Via Paul Pope.)

* Ron Regé Jr. talks about his Cartoon Utopia concept/project with the international altcomix publication Gazeta.

* Burn of the Day #1, via Tom Spurgeon: “There isn’t a lot in 2011 that compels from a ‘Battle Of Conventions’ standpoint, and neither one has anything to do with Wizard’s Big Apple show Vs. New York Comic-Con, which wouldn’t be a fight held at the same time in the same building.” It really is the case that Wizard’s Con War battle plan inflicted a massive friendly-fire wound on the company, which couldn’t have damaged its own reputation worse than it did by trying to force the industry to take sides during a major economic downturn if one of the Shamuses had strolled through the con hotel lobby with a prostitute on his arm.

* This bit in the Mindless Ones’ annotations for Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 set off a lightbulb over my head with the word “DUH” written on it in magic marker: “‘Did Darkseid release something… from any kind of box?’ Diana, with her origins in greek myth, would be all too familiar with the kind of nastiness that crawls from evil boxes.” Well done, Amy.

* Burn of the Day #2, via Rich Juzwiak: “[Rihanna’s] voice is not very interesting either, although on her fifth album Loud, she does interesting things with it. Not Diamanda Galás-interesting, but interesting in the way zombies are interesting — when something that once lay flat gets up and starts doing stuff, it’s remarkable.”

* Bruce Baugh walks you through the status of World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm event circa now–where it’s at, where it’s headed, what he’s up to, and what he’s planning.

* Real Life Horror: Embassy bomber largely acquitted because evidence derived through Bush Administration torture is inadmissible; conservatives demand trial by jury be replaced by telephone poll of Bristol Palin’s Dancing with the Stars supporters.

* “You shouldn’t go to jail for an idea, even an abhorrent one.”

* Finally, Entertainment Weekly has a photo gallery and set report from Game of Thrones. (Via Winter Is Coming and Westeros.) Looks pretty good! I mean, so what — the Dark Is Rising adaptation looked good when it had cast Christopher Eccleston and Ian McShane and released that first photo of the Rider — but hey, I’ll take it. I sent the link to a coworker who I hooked on the books and she popped out of her cubicle to tell me she was now in love with Jaime Lannister, so there’s that.

* 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.)

* As you no doubt heard, the Beatles are on iTunes now. Good! They should be everywhere.

* Anders Nilsen has finished Big Questions #15. Comic of the decade candidate.

* Whoa, look at the cover and title for Sammy Harkham’s long-awaited Crickets #3! “Sex Morons,” people.

* Today in superhero event comics I’m interested in reading: War of the Green Lanterns is on the way from Geoff Johns and company.

* Guillermo Del Toro and David Eick are the creative team for the new Incredible Hulk TV series? I’m listening. And I say that as a major Del Toro detractor–I just feel like the constraints of the format will reign him in.

* This may be the first time I’ve ever felt a tinge of guilt for trade-waiting: Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger is cancelled with January’s issue #8.

* Very glad to see that Grant Morrison’s extremely toyetic Batman run is being properly exploited.

* Joe McCulloch on David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King and Jason’s What I Did.

* Very cool, innovatively laid-out horror comic from Conor Stechschulte called Two Broken Branches.

* Here’s a great bit from Adam Serwer’s review of The Walking Dead episode 3: “Robert Kirkman’s original source material reminds us of an essential truth about violence, which is that its effectiveness has less to do with physical strength than an ability to break through the psychological barriers to inflicting pain on another human being.” As Serwer’s overall review indicates, it really is weird the way gender has come to the forefront of the show in ways it never did in the comic, usually to the show’s detriment.

* This is the strangest comics interview I’ve ever seen. Charles Burns is a good sport! (Via Matt Maxwell.)

* This really is a magnificently sexy-sleazy drawing of Boom Boom from New Mutants. Do Los Bros Hernandez have an alibi?

* Here are a couple of reports from recent George R.R. Martin speaking events at which he talked about Game of Thrones. Interesting stuff, albeit EXTREMELY SPOILERY toward the end.

* The Martyrs remake: You’re doing it wrong.

* That story I linked to yesterday about the guy who refused an x-ray and pat-down at the airport and was threatened with a $10K fine if he simply declined to fly and left the airport–after they escorted him from the security area for that very purpose? Now the TSA is planning to prosecute him. In the immortal words of Brendan Filone, “It’s like not only does he shit on our heads, we’re supposed to say ‘Thanks for the hat.'”

* Oh, Richard. (Via Matt Maxwell.)

* Finally, if there were a comics version of the Netflix Watch Instantly queue, what would you put on it? Click the link for my queue. I feel so vulnerable.

* Woo hoo, a new Girl Talk album! Unabashedly excited about this. I feel like as enthusiasm wanes for him in indie-rock-crit circles, we can better appreciate him for what he is: the best mash-up DJ, no more and no less.

* Frank Santoro presents his favorite comics of 2010. He counts 2010 as lasting from SPX 2009 to SPX 2010, which may be the single best year-ender list cheat I’ve ever heard of. He also has a special category reserved for the old lions of alternative comics, who between Sacco, Crumb, Clowes, Woodring, Ware, and Burns have had an astonishing 12 months. The post gets bonus points for illustrating how a strict no-nonsense, no-aliases commenting policy should be adopted Internet-wide when it comes to discussing the work of Blaise Larmee and his Comets Comets crew–including, if Sam Gaskin’s exasperation is any indication, at Comets Comets itself.

* More depressing news out of the Direct Market as its monopoly distributor declines to handle a project of obvious artistic worth. When you’re the only game in town, I think you have an obligation to include as many people in that game as possible, especially when you’ve made plenty of room for people playing another game entirely.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Holy moley, Emily Carroll;

* I think I might…love these Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark images?;

* Mark Waid relentlessly hounds the person who stole his iPad;

* and by all means, bring Doomsday back and let him cut a swathe of destruction through the DC Universe. Seriously, I’m really happy about this! For one thing, The Death of Superman was a great time at the comics. For another, Doomsday is a great visual and a memorably relentless antagonist. And finally, I’ve long been of the opinion that it’d be great to tie tie-ins revolving around villains to dropping a real daisy cutter on your book’s status quo. Like, for example, back in the “Countdown to Infinite Crisis” days, I was always disappointed by how little the seemingly indestructible OMACs did when they showed up in all these books. They were programmed only to kill superhuman, but they did precious little of it when it mattered. I always thought a great way to drive home the threat and make readers feel like the crossovers were more than just a device to goose sales would have been to insist “Okay, Creative Team X, you can use Crossover Villain Y, but only if you kill off one of your major characters or otherwise totally upend business as usual.” Having Doomsday slaughter his way through the mildlist strikes me as a terrific way to clear out some dead wood and pave the way for a new direction. Y’know, like Cataclysm in World of Warcraft. (However, let me join the commenters in hoping that this doesn’t mean they’re gonna kill Steel, one of the great undervalued superheroes on a visual and conceptual level, to say nothing of the need for good non-white characters.)

* Speaking of which: Yep, still digging Bruce Baugh’s extensive pre-Cataclysm WoWblogging.

* A documentary about the early ’70s creative relationship between David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed called The Sacred Triangle? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Bookmarking these for when I’ve seen the episode: Curt Purcell and Sean P. Belcher on The Walking Dead episode 3.

* The Matthijs van Heijningen/Eric Heisserer/Ronald D. Moore prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing has been yanked from the 2011 release schedule. Weird.

* Very excited that my new blogging platform allows me to place the proper accent mark when linking to Ron Regé Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #6 on What Things Do. Longer and more diaristic than previous installments.

* Somewhere between Ben Katchor, Jeffrey Brown, and Brian Chippendale lurks Victor Kerlow’s “Black Shit Monster.” (Via Floating World and Arthur.)

* Speaking of Chippendale, today’s Puke Force installment is a black-comedy kick in the face.

* And speaking of Brown, Aviv Itzcovitz repanels Bighead.

* Real Life Horror: Two stories about the increasingly invasive and pointlessly humiliating security theater at America’s airports; two stories about the Obama administration’s lawless imperial free-for-all approach to dealing with accused terrorists. 2 + 2 = ? (NOTE: Fuck Anwar al-Awlaki and Go Team Comics, but still.)

* Sheila O’Malley writes in praise of Jeremy Renner. I’ve said this for literally years now, but ever since I saw him in Dahmer I knew he was something special. One day I’ll finally review that damn film. (Via Matt Zoller Seitz.)

* Tom Spurgeon against poptimism, more or less.

* Finally, did Doug Wright invent the infinite canvas? More via Matt Seneca.

* Today on Robot 6, three quotes on three different aspects of J. Michael Straczynski’s abrupt departure from his much ballyhooed Superman and Wonder Woman runs:

* Mark Waid compares him to Sarah Palin;

* Tom Brevoort notes that he’s still working on his similarly departed Marvel series The Twelve;

* and Tom Spurgeon wonders about the messaging inherent in a high-profile writer leaving monthly comics because that’s “where the business is headed.”

* Speaking of Spurge, he catches that the San Diego Convention Center expansion will be designed by Curt Fentress, who did Denver International Airport, by far the nicest airport I’ve ever been to.

* David Bowie has no plans at this time to make more music. 🙁 (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* A New Cult Canon column on Clue? Yes please! I have every word of that film memorized and I probably haven’t seen it in twenty years. It basically did for me as a kid what a different movie about Tim Curry running around a giant scary mansion on a stormy night did for me as a teenager.

* I thought it was a little weird that the next Gilbert Hernandez pulp graphic novel had a Beto cover rather than a painted one like the first two did. Turns out it’s got a painted cover after all! My goodness.

* Jim Henley on Armistice Veteran’s Day.

* DC opens up its own DC Digital Comics Store.

* J. Michael Straczynski in not-finishing-what-he-started SHOCKER!

* Wait–what?

* A new Fritz B-movie-verse book on the way from Gilbert Hernandez! Love from the Shadows, coming in January. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Tom Devlin takes a few seconds to crow about Drawn & Quarterly’s 2010 release slate. With some justification!

* The Game of Thrones news blog Winter Is Coming examines existing scripts, casting sides, and so on to determine how much the show will be deviating from the book. The answer seems to be “some, but probably not much in any way that really matters,” which is what you’d expect from an adaptation on the faithful end of things.

* One of the reasons I’m so grateful for the existence of Grant Morrison’s Batman run is that it really, truly does lend itself to annotations of the sort done by David Uzumeri for today’s The Return of Bruce Wayne #6. On the reader end, it’s not over-earnest fan overreach at all, and on the creator end, it’s not something required to enjoy the story on the page, but it’s all there if you want it. Just such a pleasure to read a superhero comic that works in that way.

* It’s a pleasure watching Spurge unpack a book like Mouse Guard.

* Finally, if you like the Venture Bros., you can buy original storyboard art here to help raise money to save the life of a cat. I truly love all the cats of the world so I hope you consider this. (Via Spurge.)

* 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!