* Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” column on the work of Grant Morrison was worth the wait. It’s a terrific capsule guide to the most important superhero writer of the post-Moore/Miller era. The “Avoid” section in particular nails it, although I think it’s way too early to call it a day on Action Comics — Morrison’s the first to tell you his new series tend to start off shaky. (And I actually like Action so far anyway.)

* I don’t think I linked to this yet, and I know I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to diving into Hayley Campbell’s interview with Anders Nilsen. It’s great to see all the Big Questions covers in one place like that, too.

* Michael DeForge showcases the four comics he’ll be debuting at this weekend’s BCGF, including a collaborative effort with Benjamin Marra! And lest you think he’s getting lazy in his old age, he’s got the latest Ant Comic up as well.

* And Ryan Cecil Smith is rolling out a three-part SF Supplemental File #2, with part one debuting at BCGF as well. Damn, look at this printing job!

* Matthew Perpetua talks to Tony Millionaire about his new book of illustrations, 500 Portraits, with a strong selection of said portraits accompanying. This is probably the best drawing of Art Garfunkel ever.

* Well lookee here, it’s a page from the best single comic I’ve ever seen, Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset.”

* Looks like Renee French is posting her art at her Posterous site nowadays, so update your bookmarks.

* Outsider graphic novels (by “outsider” I mean people operating totally independently from the comics-making industry as we know it) are a fascinating arena of discovery. Comics is such an oddball medium that when people arrive at expressing themselves using that medium on their own, it takes on an almost miraculous quality. For example, check out Brad Mackay’s piece for the Comics Journal on Bus Griffiths’ 1978 paean to his career as a lumberjack, Now You’re Logging.

* Gorgeous post-it note art by Theo Ellsworth. Longtime readers of the blog will understand why the one below is my favorite.

* Johnny Ryan is a national treasure.

* Sam Bosma draws Solomon Grundy.

* It’s tough to beat Uno Moralez.

* A whole bunch of Hieronymous Bosch-channeling drawings by Salvador Dali called Dreams of Pantagruel? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I really like this painting of Jack Kirby’s Darkseid by Daniel James Cox. As you scroll down to see it, at first it appears like it’s some giant monument with fires burning in the eyes as the evening sun shines through the retreating clouds of a summer thunderstorm.

* I thought Dan Harmon’s obsessive-compulsive sitcom Community got off to a really rough start this season — way too much Chang, way too much emphasis on the unpleasant aspects of the characters’ friendship given that that was the focus of the end of the previous season too, and frankly not enough actually funny jokes. But I caught up on the season this past weekend, and the two most recent episodes were both hilarious, with the character stuff tipped back toward “these people bounce off each other in unpredictable and occasionally destructive but ultimately funny and rewarding ways” from “ugh, stay the fuck away from each other already,” and the more outlandish bits actually connecting (the entire karaoke/hallucination/drifter serenade sequence was a scream). So I’m now joining the rest of the Internet in being bummed out that the show’s in limbo after midseason, and in celebrating gratuitously insular stuff like a Beetlejuice gag that took three seasons to complete.

* Finally, here is a picture of Kristen Stewart, who is attractive.

* I feel like every moment of my marathon run through all four seasons of Mad Men was leading me to this: A five-hour interview with series creator Matthew Weiner. This is heaven, absolute heaven. Everyone who created a work of art I enjoyed as much as Mad Men should be interviewed about the entirety of their life and career for five hours. And Sopranos fans will absolutely want to watch this as well, as he talks about his involvement in that show at length, and makes an argument for its greatness. (And reveals that he is the Peggy to David Chase’s Don.) My favorite thing about it is Weiner’s good humor and streak of genuine humility/self-deprecation. He’s not needlessly hard on himself — obviously he’s quite good at his job, it’d be stupid to deny that — and nor is he an egomaniac. If you know any talented successful creative people that you personally are friendly with, he sounds like those people. What a treat!

* Great googly moogly: Vince Clarke and Martin Gore are reuniting! This makes me happy in my heart. When I watched that BBC documentary Synth Britannia a while back, I was struck by how a dude like Clarke who made such warm music ankled the rest of Depeche Mode in such a cold way. These were his friends from school, and he ditched them because advances in technology had allowed him to do everything he needed to do (except sing) by himself, so his friends were now superfluous. So glad to see two of my favorite synthpop songwriters working together again, even if it’s for a minimal techno album.

* Five new B.P.R.D. miniseries next year! Way to take advantage of the apocalyptic 2012 zeitgeist.

* I’m bummed to see the very good Panelists group blog shutting down. I’d actually been wondering about this, seeing as how co-founders Craig Fischer and Charles Hatfield have columns going at The Comics Journal. But hey, there’s your silver lining, innit?

* Interesting: The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008. Curious to see what this looks like.

* Fantagraphics: minicomics publisher!

* “With Great Power Comes No Responsibility.” Tattoo it on your forehead, America!

* Wizard’s Gareb Shamus is blogging and tweeting and quietly shutting down his digital magazine.

* Amazingly, Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants interviews Michael Fassbender and never once asks to see his penis! He doesn’t even hint around at it! Jason, I’d like you to know that whenever I think of him now, I mentally refer to him as Fassy, without fail.

* Happy 71st birthday to Cardinal Fang Terry Gilliam, one of the very best people.

* And congratulations to Anders Nilsen for his book Big Questions‘ deserving presence on the New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year list. As you can see from the review-link sidebar on my blog, I’m its biggest fan, although I have yet read the collected edition. But then I have yet to read a ton of promising comics that have come out this year. I’m hoping to reorganize my life to make that possible again. It’s so important to me to have my hands in these things. It makes me feel better as a person and happier in life. Do you know what I mean?

* Benjamin Marra’s Night Business #4 is on sale now! Wow, this is a big year for Ben.

* I take this Michael DeForge post to mean that Lose #4 is on its way. And here’s some illustrations and a strip, because it’s Michael DeForge and a couple of days have past since the last set of illustrations and comics he posted.

* Jason Leivian reviews the Mat Brinkman-designed board game Cave Evil. Good gravy.

* Dustin Harbin draws Osgiliath.

* Ben Morse is right: This is an incredible Survivor Series team.

* I love Big Boa.

* Is it just me or are con/signing photos of cartoonists getting better lately?

* Finally, a happier Occupy Wall Street story: behold the bat-signal of the 99%. I can’t be the only person who saw this and thought Turk-182!, right?

* Recently on Robot 6:

* The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has announced its programming slate. Phoebe Gloeckner’s spotlight panel and a Tom Spurgeon/CF/Brian Ralph three-for-all are the highlights for me. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Tom talk about CF at length, now that I think about it…

* Related: AdHouse is gonna have a hell of a show, by the sound of it.

* And here’s a BCGF debut: Zack Soto and Milo George are (re)launching Study Group Magazine, with a killer initial line-up of comics and journalism that includes work by ADDXSTC faves Chris Cilla, Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, as well as interviews with Eleanor Davis and Craig Thompson.

* Does Koyama Press have the coolest publisher backstory ever?

* Inspired by a quote from Chris Mautner’s excellent interview with Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus in which Spiegelman explains the pain of having such horrifying and personal subject matter at the heart of his career for so long, I defend Art Spiegelman against his “what have you done for me lately?” detractors.

* And inspired by Nadim Damluji’s excellent interview with Craig Thompson about Orientalism in Habibi (although I must warn you not to enter the ensuing comment thread unless forced at gunpoint, and even then you might want to consider taking your chances at disarming the guy), I defend Craig Thompson against criticism to the effect that he doesn’t really know what’s going on in his own work.

* I’m really enjoying Ben Katchor’s increasingly explicit anticorporatism.

* Top Shelf is going digital in a big way, with a couple of comics apps. And damn, the price is right on the books they’re launching with. Clumsy for two bucks?

* At last! Image is releasing a collected edition of Brandon Graham’s much-lauded King City in February.

* John Porcellino has a new King-Cat coming coming out on Wednesday!

* So this is the cover for Jonny Negron’s Chameleon #2. That make sense.

* The Matthias Wivel-edited Nordic comics anthology Kolor Klimax sure looks good.

* Here’s a long and excellent piece by Zom on the horror of Uno Moralez. It’s a rare feat to analyze what makes something mysterious and horrifying with this kind of accuracy but with no intention of deflating the mystery and horror.

* Fear Itself ate itself, basically. This certainly isn’t the first time a major event comic involved elements of planned rapid obsolescence — it was the knowledge that they’d be wiping out Spider-Man’s marriage and with it whatever other aspects of his history they wanted to fudge that enabled Marvel to unmask Peter Parker for a mainstream-media bounce during Civil War — but it’s really quite unusual for three epilogue one-shots branded with the event’s name to undo the three biggest status-quo changes of the event, within three weeks of that event’s official conclusion. Still more unusual is that in all three cases Marvel’s clearly better off having undone them.

* Tucker Stone’s interview with Mark Waid about Daredevil is really entertaining on both sides of the tape recorder.

* Wow, they are dropping a lot of characters from A Clash of Kings in Game of Thrones Season Two. In some cases I understand both why they’re doing it and how it’ll work. In a few cases I’m kind of unsure how you do certain things you need to do at all without them. But when you think about it, the challenge faced by GoT the show is unprecedented. It’s one thing for The Sopranos to take bit parts and grow them into main characters at some point down the line — you’ve simply taken a presumably grateful character actor and given him the material of a lifetime. It’s still another to know up front that you’re casting a role who’ll get maybe five minutes of screentime this season but will turn into an opening-credits role in three, four years. What do you do, tell the Shakespearean actor you cast this past summer to clear his calendar for 2014? The answer will likely be not to cast such characters until the big stuff is happening, which of course will mean doing things differently than they were done in the books.

* Can you imagine having a sex ed class in which physical and emotional pleasure were valued and discussed? The clitoris, orgasms, the importance of making your partner feel comfortable emotionally, and being made to feel comfortable emotionally yourself? I can’t remember when that particular lightbulb was switched on in my head, but once the idea of such a sex ed curriculum was introduced to me, it became something that made me just shake my head in disgust that that’s not how things are. That’s absolutely how things should be. And in this New York Times piece about such a class in a school in a Friends’ school in Philadelphia shows you how it works.

* Speaking of the Times, unfortunately: Everyone I know thought Occupy Wall Street intended to shut down the New York City subway system yesterday, because they heard it on the news. I heard it on the news and so it’s what I believed. My in-laws, who are visiting us from Colorado, canceled their usual day in the city yesterday because they heard service would be disrupted on the news and so it’s what they believed. After the shutdown never materialized, today my co-workers said that OWS had simply failed to pull it off, because they’d heard of the plans on the news and so that’s what they believed. It turns out it was total bullshit, invented by Fox and the New York Times. But I heard it on several other outlets besides those, up to two or three days in advance, complete with responses to the supposed planned shutdown by NYC authorities. And it was all horseshit. As I’ve been saying on Twitter, it’s really rather amazing to watch all the organs of a body politic afflicted with terminal-stage capitalism work to expel OWS from the system. And this memetic inoculation against it — “protest Wall Street if you want, but once you start making it impossible for regular working people to get where they need to go…” — will likely never go away.

* Another case in point: The truly routine violation of protesters’ rights by the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD. The impunity with which they assault people, illegally arrest and detain them, illegally spy on them for their political beliefs, and so on is breathtaking. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates (via whom the aforelinked article) always says, we’ve got the police force we want, basically. If we didn’t want it, there are many ways in which we could make sure we didn’t have it.

* To end on a happier note, here are a few music links I enjoyed:

* Mark Richardson on freaking the fuck out over My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Man, we’ve all been there. I think my favorite part of listening to the album is when you get to that end section of “What You Want,” right before the final song “Soon” kicks in, and it’s so lovely you almost can’t bear it.

* Jaimeson Cox has been writing about Drake’s new album Take Care all week, and it’s been great. Actually, that album has coaxed great writing out of a lot of music writers. Off the top of my head: Brandon Soderberg, Zach Baron (the bit about the title track’s a must read), Ryan Dombal, Hua Hsu (terrific point about how disconcerting delivering similar sentiments via both singing and rapping can be). It’s early yet, but I think this may be my second-favorite album of the year after Kaputt by Destroyer? There’s just so much to talk about in the music especially, which is why I may inflict a post about hip-hop on you all in the near future. You’ve been warned.

* Sad news: pood is folding with its fourth issue. That was a nobly intentioned effort of the sort we need more of, not less.

* Ken Parille does his Ken Parille thing on Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray, which at the time of its release had a decent claim to “Best Single Issue of All Time.”

* Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem looks awfully promising. I think it’ll be an interesting book for a couple of reasons. First, unlike North Korea, China, and Burma/Myanmar, Israel is not an open dictatorship, regardless of what you think of its policies, and I’m curious as to how Delisle’s alien-abroad reportage will translate in that setting. Second, unlike those other nations, the degree of financial, political, and cultural complicity in Israel’s policies, good bad and different, is far greater for the West, so one assumes Delisle’s writing may get more openly political as a result. Regardless, damn, look at that cartooning. As elegant as he’s ever been.

* Closed Caption Comics’ Molly O’Connell will be debuting two books at BCGF; here’s what one of them is gonna look like, and my, it’s lovely.

* Speaking of CCC, Ryan Cecil Smith continues posting gorgeous pornographic pages on his tumblr. Not even reproducing this one, in deference to you shrinking violets out there.

* Michael DeForge, man. More Kid Mafia, stuff for The Believer. more Ant Comic, still more Kid Mafia, something called “Hot Dog.”

* Jim Woodring’s still posting splendidly troubling art almost every day.

* More Chameleon #2 promo art from Jonny Negron. I enjoy this pure concentrated Weirdness.

* Jeepers, take a gander at the art of Ulises Farinas. Darrow über alles these days, huh? (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* B.P.R.D. teaser art? Sure, I’ll eat it. No pun intended.

* Finally, Uno Moralez has a new image/gif gallery up. You know what to do.

* Lisa Hanawalt’s poster for BCGF gives me a good excuse to link to BCGF’s list of exhibitors, featured artists, and debut releases, which is astonishing.

* Ohhhhh man: The latest old Kevin Huizenga c omic to get a full-fledged hardcover reworking/repackaging from Drawn & Quartelry is Gloriana (previously known as Or Else #2), which features “The Sunset,” one of the greatest comics of all time. OF ALL TIME!

* Related: My Robot 6 colleague Graeme McMillan on Ganges #4.

* Drawn and Quarterly has posted its Winter 2012 and Spring 2012 catalogues for download. And Fantagraphics has published its Spring/Summer 2012 catalog for download. I actually carry new Fanta catalogs around in my backpack to read and re-read like a comic.

* Recently on Robot 6: My quick take on Matthias Wivel’s epic L’Association article.

* Hey now: Jonny Negron’s Chameleon anthology has a second issue on the way in December! Here’s the cover and here’s a page from Negron’s contribution to it, “Violence City.”

* And here’s a page from Uno Moralez’s contribution to it. That’s right, Uno Moralez’s contribution to it.

* Big Two news: Things are looking good for DC’s big relaunch right now, though as many, many people have pointed out to me, these initial few months’ sales figures reflect sales to retailers, not to customers, and have all sorts of huge returnability incentives built in, so sales will likely settle down significantly at some point soon. And Marvel is cutting staff, series, budgets, and royalties. I do believe many Marvel staffers’ protestations that this has nothing to do with DC’s recent success, but the timing sure is unfortunate from a PR perspective.

* Saving this for when I really have time to savor it: Curt Purcell on the psychological underpinnings of the appeal of crossover stories.

* Happy sixth birthday to the A Song of Ice and Fire fansite Tower of the Hand! TotH has the most elegantly coded solution to the problem of spoilers that I’ve ever seen. Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

* Tom Spurgeon on comic titles that read like Captchas.

* Tom Brevoort’s formspring seems to have gone from surprisingly candid to surprisingly lyrical.

* “The scientist’s plan worked perfect. The dog was now a super hero.”

* My Kraven story in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 got a couple more good reviews: Here’s the big-time spider-fan site Spider-Man Crawl Space, and here’s Robot 6’s Tim O’Shea, who singles out a little layout gimmick I was pretty proud of.

* Monster guest lineup at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this year. Aw, who am I kidding, by “monster guest lineup” I mostly mean “oh my God, Phoebe Gloeckner!!!!” Gloeckner is one of a very, very small number of people with whom I’ve had conversations that I’ve more or less memorized.

* Anders Nilsen reveals his five favorite comics to the AV Club. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Zak Smith/Sabbath explains how to make things weird. The answer may surprise you! As is often the case with Smith’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars blog, this post is applicable to a lot more than just playing D&D.

* Is anything in the world more comforting than Peter Jackson talking about the technological wonkery he’s deploying to make movies about Middle-earth? I’m serious — if you studied my brain chemistry while watching something like the making-of video for The Hobbit below I bet there’d be measurable changes. I love this man.

* My friends Ryan Penagos and Ben Morse have launched the This Week in Marvel podcast.

* Yep, those are Jason’s five favorite post-2000 bands, alright.

* I guess that if you’re going to troll Tom Brevoort’s formspring account, you might as well be a good writer in the process.

* You keep drawing them, I’ll keep linking to them, Tom Kaczynski.

* My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is one of those records about which I could read breathlessly effusive birthday celebrations all the live-long day. The best thing I ever read about that album was by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson: “I’ve long dreamt of an album that was ‘Like Loveless, but more,’ but I haven’t found it.”

* Real Life Horror: I briefly started following Andrew Sullivan’s blog again after one of my periodic hiatuses, though every time he asserted that the way to get both the country and the Obama presidency back on track is to “embrace Simpson-Bowles” I was sorely tempted to decamp again, and a post regarding a “debate” over whether or not liberals value “hard work” broke the camel’s back within less than twelve hours of re-adding the RSS feed back to my increasingly less useful Google Reader. But when he’s not espousing fatuous faith-based economics proposals or rounding up links about total nonsense he’s actually quite good, and indefatigable, on issues like torture, or in this case, pretty much the out and out murder/cover-up of several Guantanamo Bay detainees subjected to a suffocation-torture technique called dryboarding. Land of the free, home of the brave.

* Apparently this is just how Ryan Gosling looks now? Like, when he goes to music festivals and what have you?

* Susie Cagle, a cartoonist and journalist covering Occupy Oakland, has been arrested in one of the mass-arrest sweeps of protesters by police that are becoming depressingly routine in this country. According to her twitter feed, currently being run by her partner, she and other journalists and legal observers rolled up in the arrest were initially charged with unlawful assembly and are being held at the Santa Rita jail; Cagle is slated to be released, but has been charged with “remaining at the scene of a riot, etc.” [sic!]. This is, of course, totally outrageous in a country where the freedom of the press and peaceable assembly are nominally guaranteed. Ali Ferzat winning the Sakharov Prize because his political cartoons brought retaliatory action upon him should be the exception as to how these things work, not the rule. (See also the bombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in France, although at least there the bombers likely don’t draw government paychecks.) Cagle’s partner urges people to call the jail at 925.551.6590 and request their release.

* Marvel will offer same-day digital distribution of all its Marvel Universe comics by the end of March 2012. A year and a half ago they’d just announced day-and-date digital release of a single title; today they’re, what, third or fourth of the major publishers to do this? It happened very fast.

* Great reporting: Matthias Wivel on the crisis at L’Association, the hugely influential French alternative-comics publisher, featuring extensive quotes from the participants on both sides. L’Asso is mindblowing from the perspective of a North American observer — it’s as though the Image Seven were Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Seth and so on instead of guys who drew the X-Men — and so the acrimony surrounding its gradual takeover by co-founder Jean-Christophe Menu and his ensuing conflicts with the publisher’s employees, creators, and other co-founders, culminating in a strike and Menu’s ouster, are doubly fascinating. When you have people like Lewis Trondheim going on record with a reporter with statements like “Menu was the driving force in the creation of L’Association, along with us, but he also ended up a threat to its existence because of his lack of social intelligence and ineptness as a boss and as a manager, and because his alcoholism and paranoia got out of hand,” that is really quite something. The link takes you to part one of the report, which brings things up to the eve of the strike; part two to come.

* My Robot 6 colleagues are posting interesting interviews left and right: J.K. Parkin interviews Ian Harker about the Image Comics tribute zine Rub the Blood, Matt Seneca interviews Benjamin Marra about layout and sequencing, and Chris Mautner interviews Kevin Huizenga about Ganges #4. Bonus Robot 6 link: J. Caleb Mozzocco reviews Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray.

* What Beguiling retailer/TCAF organizer Christopher Butcher thinks about superhero comics and non-superhero comics. The answers may surprise you! I think his point about how you can easily cobble together a very saleable selection of ongoing series from mainstream-accessible genres from all the publishers who aren’t DC or Marvel, plus a handful of such books from those two to boot, is especially well-taken. So too his point that whereas the big mainstream-impactful superheroes have way too many books to their names to make any one the go-to for new readers, non-superhero genre series all have nice, easy to recognize Volume Ones that can be handed to customers with the promise of more to come.

* I would imagine this issue is complicated by Marvel’s pennywise and pound-foolish decision not to emphasize its backlist by keeping it in print. Historically, DC has aligned itself behind certain perennial collections, which not only enhance their sales but, I would argue, their critical reputation. While it is perhaps true that the Marvel of the 1980s didn’t produce any single work of the caliber of Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, they could easily answer Batman Year One with Daredevil: Born Again by the same creative team, and with some canny marketing and thoughtful maintenance of stock there’s no reason they couldn’t do with Marvels, The Dark Phoenix Saga, Kraven’s Last Hunt and so on what DC has managed to do with, say, Arkham Asylum, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Kingdom Come. I’d also argue that in turn, DC (Kirby books aside) doesn’t have Silver Age runs of quality comparable to those of the great Stan Jack Steve and JRSR books, but Marvel’s program has relegated those titles to the status of historical curiosities rather than positioning them as vital to the Marvel Universe (to say nothing of the art form generally) in the here and now. There’s no reason for that to be that way, either.

* Real Life Horror: Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article on the rise, reign, and fall of Muammar Qaddafi, and the Libya he left behind, makes for hugely compelling reading. You might say I have a professional interest in dictatorships, and this piece teases out some common threads I don’t think I’d thought of as common before. For example, Fidel Castro keeping the identity of his special lady a secret for years and years, Saddam Hussein’s near total disappearance from public view once his regime began taking serious black eyes, and Qadaffi’s penchant for creating a byzantine network of confusing and competing bureaucratic entities in order to both defuse potential rival power centers and diffuse culpability for poorly received actions — all three of these things were lesser-discussed items straight from Adolf Hitler’s playbook.

* Well, this is certainly nice: My comic in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 is getting good reviews from the folks who enjoy Spider-Man comics. Here’s Ray Tate at Comics Bulletin, and here’s David Walton at The Reilly Factor. Kitty’s Pryde liked my page layouts but didn’t like my jokes, which, hey, fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing if I pass muster with the big Spider-fan sites.

* Oh hey, look, it’s four of the best people in the history of comics. From left: Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Groth, Phoebe Gloeckner. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog, I wrote about the role of social justice in the series, using the conclusion of the Harry Potter series as a counterexample. I elaborated on the point for the benefit of a naysayer, too. I realized yesterday just how important this is to me.

* Recently on Robot 6:

*Good god: Gary Groth interviews Robert Crumb at glorious length. I ran down some of the high points for Robot 6.

* Ng Suat Tong annotated all the flashback panels from Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” I added my two cents at R6 as well.

* Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” has wrapped up. Some lingeringly creepy images in here, as you’d expect.

* And here’s a quick little highlight reel for the Journal’s Habibi roundtable.

* Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books, Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics, and François Vigneult’s Family Style have formed a publishing collective called Press Gang. That’s promising.

* Jesus: The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo put a caricature of Muhammad on the issue that came out yesterday. Later that day, someone blew up their offices.

* The Minneapolis small press show MIX may be having its last hurrah this weekend.

* David Bordwell’s latest absolute killer of a film essay is on visual density, specifically the way leaving objects that previously played a role in the narrative within the frame charges that frame with memories. The relevance to comics is obvious. And in terms of Bordwell’s recurring themes, he argues that this technique has largely been lost with the primacy of the walk-and-talk/stand-and-deliver binary for shooting dialogue.

* Matt Seneca on recent releases from the great Yuichi Yokoyama. While as usual I disagree with many of his emotional and thematic conclusions — I don’t get pessimism from Garden at all; it seems beyond that to me — I enjoy a lot of his specific observations, like the kindly feeling of the book’s slideshow-style finale. Plus, the piece includes a bunch of gorgeous art from Yokoyama’s thus far untranslated Baby Boom.

* Joe McCulloch on pre-Code horror comics for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Local boy makes good!

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the increasingly obvious problem with the NYPD.

* Dan White’s latest Cindy & Biscuit story is an all-Biscuit affair. Such vibrant cartooning!

* Michael DeForge previews his next comic, Kid Mafia. I’m detecting a lot of Tim Hensley/Wally Gropius in this one.

* Oh hey, Jonny Negron decided to mint money by offering prints for sale of his Drive pin-up.

* Andrew White appears to be prepping to post a comic every day this month.

* Keep drawing the sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* More hot stuff from Ryan Cecil Smith. You know, it’s times like these when I wonder if I should put some kind of NSFW tag at the top of the blog, or if it goes without saying.

* Your must-read of the day: The Comics Journal’s excellent Habibi roundtable, featuring Charles Hatfield, Hayley Campbell, Chris Mautner, Tom Hart, Katie Haegele, and Joe McCulloch. Savor it.

* Tom Spurgeon sounds off on people who approach acclaimed comics angry about their acclaim. Comics has a near-terminal case of “You think you’re better than me???”-itis sometimes. I’ve been there!

* I pulled out the superhero-related quotes because they were the pithiest, but Alex Dueben’s interview with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden about the Best American Comics series was a top-to-bottom fascinating look at their process, particularly the thinking behind the “Notables” section at the back of the book. Abel and Madden are two of contemporary comics’ most stealthily influential figures.

* Legendary will be publishing a new edition of Paul Pope’s The One-Trick Ripoff that will also serve as an omnibus of his non-THB work from the bulk of the ’90s, including his lost manga for Kodansha.

* Ganges #4 is out! This is a great comic book.

* Closed Caption Comics news: Did you know that Ryan Cecil Smith has a blog (via Shit Comix), or that Conor Stechschulte came out with a new comic called Fountain at BCGF last year? Because I sure didn’t! CCC folks: You realize I’m your target audience, right???

* Frank Quitely talks shop. I feel like that’s a rare occurrence?

* Chris Mautner didn’t think much of DC’s New 52.

* Rub the Blood is a noisy-alt tribute to the Image Comics of the early ’90s. Could be a pip, could be a pip. I mean, surely you want to see Victor Cayro take on Shadowhawk or whatever the case may be.

* Joe McCulloch on Yuichi Yokoyam’s Color Engineering. I’ll admit that Yokoyama’s painted style leaves me cold compared to his line art, but he also rarely disappoints, so I’ll certainly be reading this.

* Hooray hooray, Tom Kaczynski’s drawing pretty girls again.

* It’s always good to see new work from Tom Neely.

* Meanwhile I think we should take all available opportunities to look at the art of David B.

* Ben Affleck is maybe directing a feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, and is definitely directing Matt Damon in a Whitey Bulger biopic written by Boardwalk Empire‘s Terrence Winter. And that is two more interesting Ben Affleck stories than I expected to read this week.

* I sure hope this means Kevin Huizenga will be drawing characters from every book in his unsorted pile.

* Yeesh, King Con.

* I’ve gotten an awful lot of enjoyment out of Nine Inch Nails’ cover of U2’s “Zoo Station.” It’s interesting to see how those two bands’ post-’90s activities have affected conventional wisdom about their (mutually excellent) ’90s activities.

* Speaking of: I’ve listened to the freshly reunited Orbital’s new song “Never” probably thirty times today. I haven’t been this delighted by the comeback of a band from my youth since I heard Portishead’s “Machine Gun.”

* So it was the side effects of the cocaine! (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* I remain completely amazed by how bad Netflix is at being Netflix. I really have never seen anything like it, this string of necessary changes handled as badly as possible coupled with unforced errors of spectacular proportion. Read the letter to shareholders excerpted at the end of the article at the link and marvel at the tone-deafness and inattention to detail (typos???).

* Real Life Horror: Heads on sticks. Greenwald is right: That line in Obama’s speech about killing Bin Laden that said it’s proof that America can do whatever we set our minds to weirded me out as deeply as anything in politics since the introduction of the previously unheard-of term “Homeland” as a descriptor of American territory. There was something very bad about each of these ideas, and I recognized the latter even in the depths of my unpleasantness.

* When it comes to the reason why you can never do a google image search for any of the Simpsons with the safe search filter turned off, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. Michael DeForge is now part of the problem.

* So as you might have heard, I wrote a Spider-Man comic and annotated A Game of Thrones.

* On the latter score, Elio Garcia of Westeros.org has posted his own announcement of the project. Elio calculates that he and I and Anne Groell wrote over 1,000 notes on the book between us, which both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me at all given how into it we all got. I’m telling you, it’s a really rich vein to tap. Elio also notes that Subtext is working on a web version, so you non-iPad users out there, take heart.

* And this was a daymaker: An effusive write-up from big-deal SFF site Tor.com, and one that quotes extensively from me at that. I mean, get a load of this praise:

“this definite guide is interactive, comprehensive, ever-expanding, and most of all, made with the fans in mind….The annotations aren’t idle theories, rather, these are insights from those who know this world better than anyone else in the world, save George R. R. Martin himself.

Who am I to argue?

* My chum Rob Bricken of Topless Robot notes how useful the annotations will be for those readers who can’t tell the players without a scorecard. He also touts our bonafides as experts, which apparently I will never get used to.

* And a special tip of the hat to the Chief, Dan Nadel, who very kindly congratulated me for the project on the blog of the estimable Comics Journal itself.

* As for Spidey, I’d like to thank three of my favorite comicsbloggers, JK Parkin, Tom Spurgeon, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, for pointing their readers in my comic’s direction. Same for everyone on Twitter and Facebook who’s done so. Thank you all!

* And as noted, I spoke with my co-writer J.M. DeMatteis about all things Spider-Man for CBR.

* Meanwhile, I’m still making my way through Mad Men. Latest post on the end of Season Three here, archive of every MM post so far here.

* As I mentioned earlier, I reviewed Benjamin Marra’s Gangsta Rap Posse #2 for TCJ.com.

* Over at Robot 6, Eddie Campbell, Leela Corman, and I defend Craig Thompson’s Habibi against accusations of Orientalism.

* And Ron Régé Jr. says “Fuck Other Forms of Art.”

* Alejandro Arbona and Jody LeHeup, two of Marvel’s best editors and the men responsible for Invincible Iron Man & Immortal Weapons and Uncanny X-Force & Strange Tales respectively, were laid off by Marvel yesterday, among many other employees of long standing. I’ve been pretty upset about this. Comic Book Resources provides the facts; Tom Spurgeon and Heidi MacDonald provide much-needed and highly infuriating context.

* “Dylan [Williams] said something once that really stuck with me. ‘Art isn’t bullshit and love isn’t bullshit.’”—Austin English

* Wow, speak of the devil: Andrew White has posted the complete Chapter Five of Sexbuzz.

* Vasilis Lolos is prepping a webcomic called Supersword, the goal of which, he says, is “Lord of the Rings for the Nintendo generation.” Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Well, it happened: Jonny Negron saw Drive. AND THE REST IS HISTORY.

* Tom Gauld’s doing a book for Drawn & Quarterly? Tom Gauld’s doing a book for Drawn & Quarterly!

* Dustin Harbin drew some dinosaurs, Sam Bosma and Kali Ciesemier colored them, and it was good.

* Whoa: Matt Zoller Seitz says the new Kelsey Grammer drama Boss is a great show.

* The great cartoonist Jason lists his five favorite giallo actresses and posts a picture of Edwige Fenech for emphasis. Paging Dr. Purcell, Dr. Curt Purcell!

* Happy birthday to Mike Baehr of Fantagraphics. Like so many Fanta employees, he’s one of the good ones.

* Real Life Horror: I guess we’re sending flying killer robots to execute American teenagers from the sky at will now, which is super-fucking-exciting, isn’t it.

* Wow, Uno Moralez has really outdone himself with this image gallery. It’s called “Horny Goblyns,” and it makes the abbreviation NSFW a comical understatement.

* Sex, synths, teen angst/lust, eldritch horrors: Is there anything about Jérémie Périn’s video for “Fantasy” by DyE that isn’t one of my favorite things? (Hat tip: Steven Wintle.)

* I posted a rundown of all the things I’ve been working on lately over on my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog All Leather Must Be Boiled. Keeping pretty busy!

* BAD COMICS ARE THE DISEASE. JAIME HERNANDEZ IS THE CURE. I’m going full-court-press on Jaime and Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 this week, in case you hadn’t noticed. The latest:

** Springboarding off Tom Spurgeon’s excellent piece, I talk about Jaime as a literal alternative comic for disgruntled or jaded readers.

** And springboarding off Jeet Heer’s excellent catch-all column for The Comics Journal, I talk about “The Love Bunglers” as a potential career capstone, and Gilbert’s comics as an under-the-radar phenomenon of comparable quality and import vis a vis his thirty-year storyline.

* There’s lots more to talk about in Heer’s post, by the way. I’m particularly struck by his argument that the work of contemporary cartoonists on classic reprints in a design, editorial, or critical capacity helps fold those works into the current practice of comics the same way a Scorsese riff on Welles or Eisenstein does in film. It comes as a riposte to some bombthrowing on the topic of contemporary vs. classic cartoonists, too, and you know I always like to see bombthrowing defused.

* Also on the L&R tip: Matt Seneca on the bravura mirrored sequence in “The Love Bunglers.” No, not that bravura mirrored sequence — the other bravura mirrored sequence.

* Yeah, I’m pretty happy about Sexbuzz.

* Ben Katchor’s latest comic takes on the 1%.

* Like the Geto Boys, Michael DeForge can’t be stopped. He’s posted a new installment of Ant Comic, while his wondrous horror minicomic SM is now up in its entirety on Jordan Crane’s What Things Do. Jesus but his line really pops against that cream background.

* The good news: Ross Campbell has finished Wet Moon 6, the latest volume in his engagingly morose and meandering goth slice-of-lifer. The bad news: It’s not coming out until October 2012.

* A day may come when I don’t link to a new Uno Moralez image/gif gallery…but it is not this day.

* Speaking of Moralez, I don’t know if Google Translate is steering me right, and the post itself is showing up in my RSS reader but can’t be accessed directly, but a post that features the image below and appears to state that Moralez is self-publishing a collection of his work is too good not to at least try to share.

* I love Matthew Perpetua precisely for posts like this one. In one fell swoop he singles out the best song on the new album by retro synthgazer guy M83 and quickly describes why it’s good, while also explaining why his overall project never quite gets off the ground:

Their new album, a double disc set, is sprawling and “epic,” but its expanse is mostly numbing – a few setpiece numbers are surrounded by ethereal time-wasters and underwritten bombast.

That is exactly right, and it’s been exactly right for at least three albums running now. In theory M83 could not be more up my alley, and from single to single he’s one of my most listened-to artists of the past decade (up until now, that is — I’m not crazy about “Midnight City”; too much yelping), but in practice his albums feel overlong, undercooked, and too content with his (admittedly) great idea for a musical aesthetic to actually execute that idea well. But yeah, “Claudia Lewis” is pretty terrific.

* If you know the source of the image, this is one of the funniest Kanye + Comics entries ever.

* Recently on Robot 6: Everybody’s talking about “The Love Bunglers,” and everybody should be talking about Jim Woodring too.

* Dustin Harbin salutes Dylan Williams.

* Lisa Hanawalt draws J.G. Ballard and opens a spiffy new store.

* New comics from Jonny Negron! Not, perhaps, what you’d expect.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two has taken a turn.

* Grant Morrison’s long-discussed plans for a Wonder Woman series seem to be taking shape for sometime next year. Sounds kinky. I wonder if anyone will mutilate a horse, walk around a room naked, or dismember a guy in this one.

* David B. is working on a book on the history of U.S./Middle East relations?

* DC’s relaunch moved a lot of units. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the first time a Big Two publisher has ever brought forth its own set of actual sales figures since I’ve been following these things.

* Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy never seemed to find its way into Wizard’s hallowed halls when I worked there during its run, so I have yet to read any of it. I can’t tell if the NYCC announcement that the title’s moving to Dark Horse means they’ll also be reprinting the previous material in addition to the three new issues they’ve got planned. I hope it does. There couldn’t be a more influential artist than Darrow right now.

* The Sleeper/Criminal/Incognito team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are working on a Lovecraftian noir series called Fatale, surprisingly for Image rather than Marvel’s creator-owned Icon line.

* At Marvel proper, Rick Remender and Gabriel Hardman, one of their best writers and best artists respectively, will be taking over Secret Avengers. It’ll probably be pretty darn good. I read somewhere that Bettie Breitweiser, one of their best colorists, won’t be rejoining Hardman here, though, which is too bad. Also Jack Kirby deserved more credit and rights and money and so do his heirs, but you knew that.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort explains how nearly all of a given superhero franchise’s titles can end up dumped into stores on the same day. I do wonder how DC’s experiment with rigorous scheduling will affect this conventional wisdom.

* Worth noting: Zak Smith/Sabbath wrote an RPG manual for his fantasy city Vornheim.

* Real Life Horror: Wake me when Obama sends military advisors to take down the pope.

* They’re not making movie cameras anymore. My jaw dropped when I read this.

* Roger Corman, ladies and gentlemen.

* Scarlet Witch cosplayer at NYCC photographed by Judy Stephens. Sure, sure.

* Sparkplug Comic Books will continue, under the watch of Dylan Williams’s wife Emily Nilsson, his friend Tom Neely, and his colleague Virginia Paine. They haven’t decided whether or when they’ll be able to start publishing new work, though they’d like to, but they’re continuing to sell and promote the company’s existing, excellent line-up.

* Amazingly, Netflix has backed down off its previously announced plan to divert its DVD subscribers into a separate service with the absurd name Qwikster. I look forward to reading retractions from the folks who wrote that that was secretly a brilliant maneuver. As I said at the time, regardless of the underlying thought process, repeatedly and publicly antagonizing your customers with sweeping business-model changes that make your services more inconvenient and more expensive, delivered first with no real explanation and then with an “apology” that amounted to “sorry for doing that horrible thing, now here’s something even worse, something so bad that I, the CEO of the company doing it, seem on the verge of tears about it” is — surprise! — a bad business move. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen a popular consumer company do, and now it’s doubly so.

* My chums in the Partyka collective will be part of the Desert Island Comic Zine Party for kids at the Whitney Museum this Saturday afternoon. Sounds like a good time for the little ones.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Interesting insights into Ghost World and Shortcomings may be found in this Daniel Clowes/Adrian Tomine panel report.

* Bob Temuka’s post on the Jaime Hernandez/Locas material in Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 is appropriately emotional and dead-on. I talk a bit about it here.

* Buy the original newspaper edition of Frank Santoro’s Storeyville, direct from his dad’s storage space!

* The revived Wow Cool publishing/mail-order outfit is impressive.

* Here’s a very pretty picture of Batman by Rafael Grampá.

* Via everyone: Liquid Television is now online in its entirety, along with related weird animated programs and station IDs from the MTV vaults. That was a real atom bomb of alt-culture for people of a certain age, one that if I’m not mistaken slightly predated Nirvana’s opening of the floodgates for that sort of material and was therefore even more of a cultural category error when in arrived on our teevees between Janet Jackson videos.

* Tom Spurgeon’s nine thoughts on the DC relaunch’s success. Of the batch, I was struck by point six — DC’s newfound insistence on regular shipping will require fill-in slots that should provide better opportunities for new or new-to-the-company creators than the usual miniseries and tryout books — and point nine — the unpleasant-to-much-of-the-online-fan-press tone of many of these successful books will force a generation of journalists weaned on the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit of comics return to cultural prominence in the ’00s to reexamine those assumptions.

* It’s spoilery so I’m staying away (even though it says it’s not spoilery, the first thing they talk about was spoilery as fuck), but Clive Barker talks to his official site Revelations about the recently released Abarat: Absolute Midnight, the third book in his lushly illustrated YA fantasy series. I recommend you read the intro, however, as it details what seems like a hellish last few years for Barker in his personal life — surgery, divorce, death. He’s one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met in this business, hugely generous in spirit, so every time I hear about these things I feel just awful for him. Still, you have to figure that if anyone’s capable of channeling real life awfulness into his art, it’s Clive Barker.

* Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics is up to its second old-school alternative-comic-book-format release, Colleen Frakes and Betsy Swardlick’s Drag Bandits. To paraphrase Barton Fink, I got a feeling we’ll be hearing from that Colleen Frakes, and I don’t mean a postcard.

* What’s Closed Caption Comics member Mollie Goldstrom been up to?

* It bears repeating that Tales Designed to Thrizzle #7 is on the way.

* It also bears repeating that Jim Woodring is posting things like this five, six days a week lately.

* Hellen Jo draws girls masturbating for Vice. These are illustrations for an article on the topic that is the Vice-iest Vice article ever to Vice, so be warned, but still, it’s Hellen Jo drawing girls masturbating. (Via Same Hat!)

* I have no brief whatsoever with “the Milkyway films of Johnnie To Kei-fung,” but this David Bordwell piece on To’s work begins with an explanation of his elliptical storytelling method that should be of great interest to Jaime Hernandez fans.

* Would you like to watch Synth Britannia, the synthpop-focused edition of BBC4’s wonderful series of rock docs, on YouTube in its entirety? Of course you would. (Via Matt Maxwell.)

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

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

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

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

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

* Dash Shaw loves Blind Date.

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

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

* Randall Munroe channels Uno Moralez.

* Jesus, Renee French.

* Jim Woodring has been killing it lately.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Did you know that Michael DeForge launched a webcomic last month? I didn’t, and I even linked to one of the episodes. (Which I wouldn’t have posted in its entirety if I’d realized it wasn’t just an excerpt from some other project. Sorry, Michael!) It’s called Ant Comic and there’s a new installment every other Monday. So far it’s been pretty troubling.

* Brigid Alverson interviews Box Brown on his alternative comic book throwback publishing outfit, Retrofit Comics. It’s the most revealing piece I’ve yet read on Retrofit, with lots of interesting details about how the sausage is getting made. The insight on the relative costs of printing versus shipping is worth the price of admission alone.

* All of DC’s “Crisis” mega-events no longer happened in the new DC Universe. Dan DiDio announced this on Twitter over the weekend a month after the relaunch began, which is how things work when you’ve planned a relaunch since October 2010, I guess? To me, more interesting than the continuity questions this raises is what this means for DC’s view of and future marketing of book collections containing the Crisis comics. When the company last rebooted its decades-long storylines this thoroughly, with Crisis on Infinite Earths 25 years ago, book-format collections were basically a non-factor. Now they’re a huge part of DC’s business, and historically the publisher has been better at packaging and promoting (and heck, just keeping in print) its major books from throughout its history. Obviously all those stories still exist just as you remember them, and one’s enjoyment of them has nothing to do with what’s going on now — but comic fans tend not to see things that way. Now, neither DC nor its retail partners can point to Crisis on Infinite Earths, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, or Final Crisis as books you “need” to read to understand this or that, or as an intro course to the DCU, and future reprints can’t count on that sense of “this happened!” urgency to get themselves over. I wonder what they’ll do with them.

* The move’s also noteworthy given just how big a part of Dan DiDio’s tenure at the company books with the word “Crisis” in the title have been. The Brad Meltzer-written Identity Crisis served as a sort of statement of purpose for the then-new DiDio regime, reintroducing the “Crisis” concept, injecting a kind of troubling degree of sexualized violence into the DCU, and more or less kicking off the new event-comic era. Infinite Crisis was the first full-fledged line-wide crossover either of the Big Two superhero publishers had done in years, and marked the ascent of writer Geoff Johns to the top of the industry. Final Crisis was a somewhat stickier wicket: Grant Morrison’s take on the line-wide event was one of his most divisive books ever, and though it sold well, by the time it wrapped up DiDio was publicly making fun of it during convention panels. Still, it set up Morrison’s well-received and high-selling Batman run of the past several years, especially the storyline involving Bruce Wayne’s “death” and return; since Morrison has basically been allowed to continue writing Batman with his continuity unchanged, who knows what to make of Final Crisis‘s retconning?

* Lisa Hanawalt reviews Drive. Saving this one for later.

* Gahan Wilson says there’s no sexism among the male and female New Yorker cartoonists. That’d be nice!

* Finally for the Robot 6 roundup, I posted a few more thoughts on Emily Carroll’s new webcomic, Dash Shaw & Jesse Moynihan’s old Lost comic, and Benjamin Marra’s new Gangsta Rap Posse issue over there.

* Image Comics is going same-day digital with its monthly comics offerings, through the retailer ComiXology. As Tom Spurgeon put it at the link, “the specter of total Direct Market collapse as soon as comics gained same-day availability has been punched in the face and pushed out of the moving car by DC Comics with their New 52 initiative.” That’s a heck of a phrase-turn, but I think at this early juncture it’s only dispositive in terms of retailer jitters, not the long-term health of brick-and-mortar stores and other print outlets.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch on the comics of David Lynch, plus various new releases of note.

* Man, that Giorgio Comolo guy sure can draw Kirby characters.

* Jim Woodring at his most Lovecraftian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Craig Thompson, Habibi, Arabian Nights, Orientalism.

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

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

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

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

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

* Jesse Pearson’s interview with Johnny Ryan for The Comics Journal is tremendous, by far the most extensive and revealing I’ve ever read with the artist. I feel like it solves the Johnny Ryan mystery. I discuss why over at Robot 6.

* Also at Robot 6: Tim O’Shea talks to Michael Kupperman about Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010.

* Geoff Grogan has relaunched his website. He’ll be serializing his excellent comics Look Out! Monsters and Fandancer there, as well as reformatting his old comic Dr. Speck and launching some new projects as well.

* Frank Santoro wonks out on trim size in Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 and CF’s Powr Mastrs 3.

* Tom Spurgeon on Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets: New Stories #4, Ethan Rilly’s Pope Hats #2, and Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot.

* Looks like Uno Moralez is joining Jack Kirby, Paul Pope, Sergio Aragones, and Stan Sakai in the fraternity of non-autobiographical cartoonists who nonetheless look like they could have stepped out of one of their own comics.

* Man, that’s a lot of airtime to fill with variations on “Well, that wasn’t very good.”

* Ken Parille and Brian Chippendale explain what’s wrong with Justice League #1. That’s the previously deleted Chippendale post on the topic, revived and expanded, by the way. And do stay tuned for a delightful comment thread on Parille’s post. Personally, I think that a last-page reveal/cliffhanger predicated on wondering whether Superman is Batman and Green Lantern’s friend or foe in a series called Justice League with Superman side by side with Batman and Green Lantern in a portrait of the previously announced League line-up on the cover is indicative of the situation here.

* Jonny Negron remains wonderful/keeps my blog NSFW almost singlehandedly.

* If you have not yet been introduced to the joys of Kevin Fanning, allow me.

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

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

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

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

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

* And hey, how about that Hellen Jo?