Last week I saw The Avengers and its immediate Marvel-movie predecessors, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. (And just for reference: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2.) Here’s the most important part of the following review of these three films: I gave three times as much to The Hero Initiative upon viewing them I did to Marvel and its business partners. Yes, this means that I gave Marvel and its business partners a non-zero amount of money to see these movies, more than they gave the family of Avengers/Iron Man/Hulk/Nick Fury/Captain America/Thor co-creator Jack Kirby (who despite what you may have heard did receive a brief on-screen credit, for what it’s worth) for making these movies possible. That’s deeply unfortunate and deplorable and wrong, and as both an occasional freelancer for the company and a fan of any number of its comics and creators, I encourage Marvel to change its tune on this matter, just as I encourage those of you who pay money to watch these movies to give an equal or greater amount to The Hero Initiative to help take care of creators who are in need because the companies they built never did so themselves. Indeed the bad taste in my mouth would have kept me from going to the movies to see Avengers at all but for the intervention of, literally, my three oldest friends, who were in town and wished to recreate our summer-blockbuster theater trips of old. When life gives you $4 concession-stand sodas, you make lemonade, I suppose.

First, I watched Thor. It was bad, pretty much. I mean, it had its moments, largely via the fantastic casting of its two leads, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston as Thor and Loki. Think of what an unwatchable turd this would have been if those two had been less committed and gleeful about their ridiculous shouty roles! Space Éomer and Cosmic Wormtongue were a real coup, especially given how important Hiddleston’s Loki ended up being for The Avengers. A tip of the hat to Kat Dennings as well for her turn as the kind of sarcastic, kind of dopey friend/assistant. In a film as flatly functional as this one was, any part that that isn’t strictly required to advance the narrative should be celebrated, and Dennings made the most of it, especially when required to embody the female gaze while Thor walked around with his shirt off. For real, the presentation of male superheroes as eye candy for the female audience in both this and Captain America is a funny, smart, sexy, and welcome development — imagine if the comics had the stones to do something like that!

So yeah, that was good. So was the reasonable gravitas projected by Stellan Skarsgaard and Idris Elba in their supporting roles as a scientist and the most interesting Asgardian — y’know, they got the job done. And the big epic visuals were surprisingly effective as well. It wasn’t Kirby, of course, nothing but Kirby himself is, but I thought the golden architecture of Asgard was suitably grand and smartly designed; the Bifrost’s spherical teleportation mechanism was a memorable bit of business, for example. Meanwhile, the closest the film got to saying something really unexpected and smart was its frequent use of awe-inspiring rainbow-colored shots of the distant stars and galaxies, implying that the reality of our universe is at least as amazing and unknowable and impressive as anything a science-fantasy can conjure up.

The rest of it, of course, was the purest anonymous hackwork from Kenneth Branagh. I’m really hesitant to ever use the h-word simply because I’m not a mindreader and don’t presume to know whether an artist really was just banging something out for cash, but in Branagh’s case we have enough of a track record on other projects involving adaptation and interpretation to see how rote this Lord of the Rings knockoff really is. Dull would-be sweeping opening narration. Vast armies of undifferentiated CGI baddies. A band of warriors distinguished solely by their hair. Purple clichés like “You’ve come a long way to die, Asgardian” and “Allfather, we must speak with you urgently” dropping like bricks from the mouths of flimsy supporting actors, as if someone had taken the “give up the halfling, she-elf” line from the Jackson/Walsh/Boyens Fellowship of the Ring adaptation and made an entire screenplay out of it…gah, what a tedious and derivative mess.

Just as disappointingly, Branagh displays no proficiency whatsoever for directing action, and that really could not be more crucial to making a good superhero movie. The frost-giant fights were murky and lazy, just a bunch of people swinging things around and knocking things over. Worse still was Thor’s break-in to the SHIELD compound, in which what could have been a Bourne-style tour de force of ruthlessly efficient takedowns became a supporting-card match-up between pro-wrestling jobbers who don’t know how to sell. You got that one big wish-fulfillment moment when Thor got his powers back and took the fight to the Destroyer, where you’re like “Yesss, that’s what it’d be like to wield the hammer of the gods, Robert Plant was totally right,” but that was about it. No, wait, there was the scene where he beat up a hospital room full of doctors and nurses, but the success of that sequence had more to do with how odd it was to see something like that in a hero’s-journey-by-the-numbers flick like this than for particularly memorable ways in which to coldcock phlebotomists.

The key non-Hemsworth/Hiddleston performances were pretty brutal to watch, too. Anthony Hopkins eats so much scenery that I suspect the Odinsleep is actually a diabetic coma. Natalie Portman as the love interest is just horrible, like her insufferable Garden State character got an astrophysics doctorate. She’s one of the most beautiful human beings on God’s gray earth, yes, but has she ever been good in anything not Closer or the SNL thing where she cursed a lot?And that’s when you start paying attention to the plot and realizing how flimsy that is, too, even beneath the actual good performances. For example, both Portman’s Jane Foster and Hiddleston’s Loki undergo 180-degree reversals of their entire lives up inside, what, 48 hours? The brilliant astrophysicist takes the word of a person she has no reason to believe isn’t mentally ill, because he’s hot and SHIELD is mean? Everything here happens because it must, because that’s the kind of movie this is. Take away Hemsworth and Hiddleston’s joie de vivre and you’ve got Marvel’s 2nd-quarter financial report, not a movie.

(I will say this for it, though: Making Thor’s opposition to genocide the hinge on which the climax swings is a very interesting, and frankly wonderful, idea. Given that writer Geoff Johns just used the commission of genocide as a way to get his new, younger, tougher version of Aquaman over with the audience of his comic, apparently successfully, you can see that this could very easily have gone the other way. More easily than the way it went, in fact.)

Captain America: The First Avenger, though? This thing was pretty good. It had heart, and it had wit, and it had smarts. First, the heart: a warm, slightly sad performance from Chris Evans (!!!) as Steve Rogers, one that made him feel as much like a man out of time during World War II as he would later in the present day. I understand that the line in which Steve presents his zeal to enter the Army and fight the war not as a hankering to kill Nazis but as a deep-seated dislike bullies of all shapes and sizes, given that he’d been victimized by them his entire life, was a Joss Whedon contribution, so good on Whedon; that cracked open that character and showed me what’s inside in a way that no other interpretation of him, not even Ed Brubaker’s fine ongoing multi-series megastory of the past half-decade or so, has done. (As an aside: Jeez, does this version of Cap reveal Mark Millar’s line from Ultimates, “You think this A on my head stands for FRANCE???”, as the single worst comics line of the decade or what? Shame, shame, shame on me for not seeing it at the time. And for many other things besides, but mostly that, for our present purposes.)

Then the wit. Unlike Thor‘s random, listless swinging of arms and knocking-about of bodies (seriously those fight scenes played like my baby daughter tearing into block towers), Captain America‘s director Joe Johnston made his fight scenes memorable by dint of effort and attention to detail. He figured out like maybe no one ever has before how to make Cap’s nebulous “peak human ability” not-quite-a-power-set work in the context of action: Imagine the coolest, most amazing possible move a person could make, if they were both as skilled and as lucky as they could possibly be, then imagine a guy who can make move after move like that, without fail. If he leaps, he’s going to make it. If he dodges, they’re going to miss. If he shoots or throws or punches or kicks, he’s going to hit the target.

Johnston peppers the action sequences with little flourishes of visual imagination and humor, too: using multiiple countdown clocsk for the destruction of the Hydra lab instead of just one; the Red Skull firing off a dud round with his magic laser, then trying again, then nodding with self-approval when it works this time, like “Ah, there we go”; ending a “he’s got a gun on the kid!” hostage situation by having the bad guy toss the kid into the water, only to discover him treading happily, telling Cap, “Go get him! I can swim!” Even the gunfire, of which there was a surprising amount for a superhero movie, felt concrete and dangerous without being grotesque, in that bloody/not-bloody Indiana Jones way.

Indy, of course, is the film’s lodestone, from the Nazi-relic-hunter maguffin on down. The trick–and this is where the smarts come in–is in flipping the Indiana Jones conventions around in novel and entertaining ways. The film begins with the Nazis successfully acquiring and using the magical artifact rather than being a race to stop this from happening. The places-on-a-map travel montage doesn’t depict Cap’s quest across the globe, but his USO tour. Cap is the good-hearted mensch who recruits affable rogues to help him, not the other way around. And Cap actually gives himself over to the ameliorative, sacrificial oblivion that Indy always seemed required to surrender to, only to save his own bacon at the last moment.

Moreover, a few of Captain America‘s shrewdest moves have multiple purposes. Chris Evans joins Chris Hemsworth on the list of Marvel men whose bodies are presented unambiguously as sex objects, somehow threading the needle between appealing to women without turning off men — four-quadrant success, here we come — but also selling a historically undersold dimension of superhero physicality. (No sculpted-muscle rubber bodysuits required here!) Making Hydra a cult of personality in service of the Red Skull both obviates the need to keep the icky Nazis a key part of this international-audience family blockbuster, but it also provides an explanation as to how its marvelous, anachronistic weaponry never spread outside the narrow conflict between Hydra and Cap’s crew, altering both the war and the course of human history.

Cap also boasts the liveliest supporting cast of the bunch. Like Thor, it could probably have gotten away with its core protagonist-antagonist pairing, the strong performance from Evans and the delightfully cartoonish villainy of Hugo Weaving, who knows from cartoonish villainy. (And dig the voice: Hugo Weaving presents Werner Herzog as the Red Skull! He joins Daniel Day-Lewis as John Huston as Daniel Plainview and Heath Ledger as David Lynch as the Joker in the pantheon of Great Movie Villains Who Sound Like Great Movie Directors.) instead it gave us Tommy Lee Jones’s most effective turn as himself this side of The Fugitive and No Country for Old Men, Hayley Atwell as a believably steely and caring Allied intelligence operative, and lookalikes Sebastian Stan and Dominic Cooper as tough-guy Bucky and swaggering scientist Howard Stark, a pair of alpha males working different angles on that role and quietly setting an example for Steve as to how he does and doesn’t want to behave himself.

I don’t mean to oversell Captain America, mind you. It could just be my decade in the sausage factory souring me on its prospects for capturing the imagination of a generation the way Indiana Jones did for me, but I can’t help but feel it’s not going to be returned to in quite the same way. It almost certainly won’t by me. But it feels like a film, a work of art/entertainment with a unique personality and point of view which one could locate in its director’s overall oeuvre, in a way that Thor simply didn’t. It does more than what is strictly necessary and sufficient, and that can be a lot.

Which brings us to the crown jewel in the Marvel Studios “cinematic universe,” Joss Whedon’s Marvel’s The Avengers. Two of my favorite elements of this film never even appeared on screen. Rather, they were in my head, as I pictured rooms full of multi-millionaires putting their heads together about the Hulk and concluding “Nope, we can’t make this guy work for movie audiences, let’s kick it to Jeph Loeb for a TV show,” and another room full of multi-milloinaires putting their heads together about Joss Whedon and concluding “Nope, we can’t make this guy work for movie audiences, let’s scrap his Wonder Woman movie and concentrate on Green Lantern.” I’m a big believer in the Hulk and completely agnostic about Whedon (this screening popped my Joss Whedon live-action cherry, as a matter of fact), but I’m bullish to the fucking extreme on Big Two corporate execs eating crow, so way to go, Avengers!

Beyond that? Every lead actor not a SHIELD agent was just terrific, all the action and fight sequences were wonderful, and everything else was boring. Was it just me or was the film one-third uninteresting espionage, one-third flabbily written “we’re not so different, you and I” attempts at revealing character through various antagonistic dialogue pairings, and one-third wish-fulfillment/celebration of competence and cooperation/checking off items from the fanboy wishlist one by one? Could we not have expanded that last third to encompass the entire film?

To expand a bit, I realize Whedon deserves basically no credit for the cast—aside from the wonderful Mark Ruffalo, his primary contribution was Cobie Smulders; everyone else was imported from the other Marvel movies. And I realize that when they weren’t running around punching things, Whedon’s screenplay was an enervating, unfunny mess. I laughed a grand total of three times: “Legolas”; the thing where the Hulk just slams the shit out of Loki–that one brought down the house; and the shawarma stinger, which nevertheless made me feel like I did the first time I sat and watched all the way through the closing credits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail because my best friend, who accompanied me to Avengers by the way, told me something awesome happened at the end. The non-fight stuff was tepid enough to get me thinking about plot holes, even. Quick: What’s German for “Sorry, sir, but I don’t speak a word of English?” If the Hulk is always angry and thus always in control of his transformations, then shouldn’t he go to jail for hulking out and attempting to hunt down the Black Widow and beat her to death? Why are we and the characters supposed to care so passionately about Agent Coulson, a guy whose job is to lie about things and bigfoot everyone in the name of almighty Security? Why does the allusion to the Holocaust in the Germany sequence feel so much more tasteless than the use of actual Nazis as antagonists in Captain America?

And yet! Somehow Whedon and his spotty script never got in the way of what made each of the leads compelling and entertaining to watch. Even aside from obvious highlights like the Downey Jr./Ruffalo buddy comedy, or the relationship between Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and the always excellent Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye (you see their scene together and picture an alternate universe in which they’d co-starred in an autumn indie drama of mild renown), or the Hemsworth/Hiddleston reunion, I was just happy to watch all the superheroes walking around and talking even when I was completely bored by what they were saying and doing. I’m not sure I can think of another film like that (not that I’d necessarily want to).

It’s really the fights that made it happen. Like Johnston and Jon Favreau before him, but now multiplied out to half a dozen characters, Whedon understood each character’s unique power or skill set, what makes them exciting, and how best to showcase them in a fight. Thor’s hammer-and-lightning was a pleasure every time, not just in one big moment of glory. The Hulk was alternately terrifying and utterly joyful, as the Hulk ought to be. Cap once again rolled a 20 with every saving throw, and added to that repertoire a ground-level mastery of tactics that served the dual purpose of explaining to the audience why he was in charge rather than Iron Man and giving each character’s personal action arc a sense of location and purpose. Black Widow and Hawkeye didn’t seem ludicrously out of their weight class when fighting alien robot monster things as they ought to have by rights — their “power” is just “being really good at killing things,” which is kind of a subversive thing to use as a way for people to earn their way into Captain America’s superhero team. And Whedon cracked open Iron Man’s modus operandi nearly as well as he did Cap’s in the previous film: Iron Man can almost always find a solution rather than a sacrifice, and that’s the defining characteristic of how he fights as well as how he lives.

Best of all, particularly in that magnificent CGI-aided long shot in the final battle, the fight is choreographed to depend on teamwork, with each character using the others’ unique abilities to enhance their own. Contrast it with the lame group battles involving Thor, Sif, Loki, and the Warriors Three in Thor — no comparison, is there? Visually as well as emotionally, you’ve been given a reason to value these characters as they fight the computer-generated hordes, and a reason to be impressed by their successes in doing so.

It’s also kind of a sexy movie, you know? Sexy in that stealthy, PG-13 family blockbuster kinda way, a way that reminded me of Laura Dern’s hinder in Jurassic Park kinda way. Gwyneth Paltrow’s jean shorts and bare feet, Jeremy Renner’s eminently fondleable biceps, Chris Evans’s clenching asscheeks and inverted-triangle torso as he pounds a punching bag into oblivion, Scarlett Johansson’s lovingly lingered-upon kiester, even the less physical sex appeal of RDJ and Ruffalo and Smulders…equal-opportunity hubba-hubba stuff that made the film feel alive and cut against the numbing effect of the violence. Was the fact that much of that violence, heroic and thrilling and inspiring though it may have been, was the result of an ethically dubious bureaucrat tricking its authors into perpetrating it a commentary of some sort? Sit in silence, chew on your shawarma, and decide for yourself.

* Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog returns with its latest eight-disc (eight disc!) survey of music from the ’00s; this time it’s 2005 in the spotlight.

* I think I may have missed an earlier announcement, but my RSS reader insists this is breaking news: The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, historically the best comics convention, has announced its date for this year: Saturday, November 10, 2012. That’s about a month earlier than usual, and while I’ll miss the gray wintry Brooklyn weather and holiday-season vibe a bit, I don’t see any reason the new time frame won’t work.

* Ooh boy, Secret Acres is publishing a print edition of the profoundly strange and uncomfortably sexy webcomic Slechtemeisjes called Wayward Girls, now revealed to be by Netherlands art-school graduate Michiel Budel! That’s a good get.

* Thickness #3 may be the final issue of the series, but co-editor Ryan Sands reveals a collected edition with added material is in the works.

* This Comics Journal roundtable on the comics of Jack Kirby and critic Charles Hatfield’s book about Kirby The Hand of Fire, is an absolute feast, and as of this writing there’s no end in sight. Featuring Jeet Heer, Dan Nadel, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah Boxer, Glen David Gold, R. Fiore, and Doug Harvey.

* Speaking of the Journal, here’s a great review of Benjamin Marra’s Lincoln Washington: Free Man by Matt Seneca. And Brandon Soderberg’s review of Derf Backderf’s memoir My Friend Dahmer, about the author’s adolescent friendship(ish) with Jeffrey Dahmer, makes me want to read the book even more than I already did.

* Salon’s Willa Paskin is a fabulous TV critic, and her piece on the exquisite awfulness of Joffrey from Game of Thrones offers ample evidence as to why. I’m going to print out that first paragraph and keep it under my pillow at night.

* Speaking of fabulous TV critics, don’t miss the Mindless Ones on last week’s Mad Men.

* So I guess the picture quality of The Hobbit‘s revolutionary 48 frames-per-second filming technique is so good that it actually goes back around to ugly-looking. Peter Jackson defends the move, while TheOneRing.net’s Quickbeam (whoa, flashbacks to 12 years ago!) says it’s a matter of taste that takes getting used to.

* Sam Costello talks to Robot 6’s Brigid Alverson about his decision to end his very, very ambitious webcomic/print-comic horror anthology series Split Lip. Sad to see it go.

* How bright will seem, through mem’ry’s haze, those happy, golden, bygone days: Grant Morrison waxes thoughtful on the big superhero characters for Playboy. Also Frank Quitely is now drawing him to look like a nightmare cross between Crowley and Burroughs.

* I don’t know how Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic is able to keep making me feel worse and worse, but I’m…glad it does…?

* Keep going, Jonny Negron. Just keep going.

* Let’s ask people about Alan Moore Before Watchmen. Let’s ask people about Jack Kirby and The Avengers. Let’s note for the record what they say.

* Julia Gfrörer on Dylan Williams. What a moving video.

* Sabrina, don’t just stare at the limited edition broadsheet collection of Benjamin Marra’s American Psycho illustrations, buy it.

* Chris Mautner reviews Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem and Jean-Pierre Filiu & David B.’s Best of Enemies, two nonfiction comics about the Middle-East by two world-class cartoonists. I look forward to tearing into both of them.

* Hooray! The Closed Caption Comics-anchored smut-comics anthology Sock is returning for another issue, featuring guest stars like Edie Fake, Andy Burkholder, and Anya Davidson. You can pre-order it at the link. (That’s from Ryan Cecil Smith’s contribution below.)

* More CCC news: Apparently Noel Freibert’s Weird anthology has a tumblr? (Via Shit Comics.)

* Still more CCC news: I’m quite excited for Difficult Loves, the debut full-length from Molly Colleen O’Connell, whom I believe is of mixed Portugese-Ethiopian-Maori-German extraction.

* Speaking of anthologies, I was happy to see that the crowdfunding project for the next issue Happiness was successful; here’s a page from contributor Krysta Brayer.

* Oh my, am I pleased to have made the acquaintance of the comics and short fiction of Aaron Shunga. (Via Shit Comics again.)

* Jonny Negron. Jonny Negron. Jonny Negron.

* “I Am the Arm” by Matt Rota, for the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me art show at CoproGallery in Los Angeles.

* I’d actually intended to write about this project not at all, in any way, but oh well: Rob Bricken of Topless Robot speaks for a lot of people (ha, that’s not a sentence I get to write every day) in this piece absolutely laying into Before Watchmen, as well as the treatment of Jack Kirby vis a vis the Avengers movie, especially in the final sentence: “Hey Marvel and DC — it sure would be great to enjoy your products without feeling like an asshole.” Related: Tom Spurgeon on the implications of the recent dust-up between DC and writer Chris Roberson (when the latter announced his intention to stop working for the former following the completion of his current commitment, citing ethical concerns, the former ended that commitment preemptively) and DC’s recent legal victory over the laywer who represents the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. That’s probably it from me on the Watchmen 2 issue barring further newsworthy developments.

* Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Michael Hastings! Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald has recently focused on three areas about which he has formed genuinely revelatory theses, for me at least. 1) A separate, even harsher American judicial system exists for Muslims, one that inflicts punishment up to and including execution without trial; 2) Genuine dissent, dissent that truly challenges or threatens or even upsets the American government and its business and military allies, is functionally illegal; 3) The range of opinion and information afforded Americans regarding their conduct versus that of other countries is just as narrow, and the resulting opinions just as deluded, as those of more traditionally tyrannical or even totalitarian states.

* Wow, that was heavy. Okay, here’s Geoff Grogan’s endearingly lo-fi promo vid for his webcomic Babyheads.

* The Mindless Ones may well be doing the best Mad Men writing around.

* Finally, something to chew on that combines a bunch of my interests into one post that in retrospect strikes me as serious overreach on my part but whatever: I wrote about fanfic and creators’ rights in the context of a fic-based civil war amid George R.R. Martin/A Song of Ice and Fire fandom.

* Is this the best line-up of comics creators ever assembled? Appearing at the University of Chicago’s Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference: Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Francoise Mouly, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, and Chris Ware. You’re just the Hernandez Brothers away from running the table on the Greatest Living Cartoonists. Burns, Clowes, Gloeckner, and Ware are my personal pantheon even before you consider towering figures like Crumb, Spiegelman, Mouly, Sacco, Panter, and Katchor. Good god almighty. (Via Drawn & Quarterly.)

* So this explains Guy Davis’s abrupt, weirdly underaddressed-by-Dark-Horse departure from Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s near-peerless B.P.R.D.: He’s working on the next Guillermo Del Toro film.

* Tom Spurgeon and David Brothers on Before Watchmen, the shame of comics.

* Tim O’Shea talks to Kevin Huizenga about Gloriana, his forthcoming hardcover re-release of what I consider to be one of the greatest comics ever made by anyone, ever. Huizenga’s a difficult interview, but Tim makes it work.

* Comics Grid’s Nicholas Labarre’s essay on Roy Thomas and Mike Mignola’s adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most possessive-apostrophe-heavy link I’ve made in ages, but worth your time nonetheless. I remember the owner of my teen-years comic shop really giving that book the hard sell to me, to the point where I felt bullied into buying it. At the time I assumed he knew I was a big fan of the film and thus an easy mark for the tie-in, but now I wonder if he was simply trying to expose me to Mignola.

* Okay, Jillian Tamaki, now you’re just showing off.

* Tom Neely #1: Rob Clough review’s Neely’s fascinating The Wolf, one of the best comics of 2011.

* Tom Neely #2: My God, Neely’s parodies of various Kramers Ergot contributors (drawn in the style of KE regular Tom Gauld’s great-author comics) are unbelievably hilarious and mean, and I say that despite really liking the work of almost everyone lampooned thereby.

* Tom Neely #3: He’s drawing beautiful naked women again. PROCEED.

* OCCUPY BASIN CITY

* Did you know? Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval was the original model for Paul Pope’s character HR in THB. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

* Fine writing by Matthew Perpetua about the enduring appeal of Kraftwerk.

* Fine writing by the Mindless Ones, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Deborah Lipp on recent Mad Men episodes.

* Related: Josh Wigler, host of the MTV News Watching the ‘Thrones’ video roundtables on Game of Thrones in which I participate, put together a pretty dizzying summary of all the geek-culture references and connections on last weekend’s Mad Men. I missed the Lost homage, myself.

* Watching this gameplay video from the old SNES sidescroller/sim hybrid ActRaiser, I suddenly understood Proust and his madeleines.

* Finally, I’m not a big gamer, I’m definitely not a big fighting gamer, and I don’t even own one of the systems for which such a game would be available, but boy oh boy do I want a Game of Thrones fighting game. (Via Topless Robot.)

* The nominees for the Doug Wright Awards, comics’ classiest award slate, have been announced. A strong selection of respectable choices, but no so strong that you won’t want to pick winners. And only three categories! A marvelous way to run a railroad.

* The Sopranos vs. The Wire, officiated by Matt Zoller Seitz. ‘Nuff said.

* Somehow it’d escaped my notice that the makers of The Art of Daniel Clowes have a Dan Clowes blog stuffed with rarely-seen Clowes goodies. Fixed! My eye naturally gravitated to this selection of Eightball t-shirts and this unpublished comic starring Vida from Eightball #22/Ice Haven. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* My collaborator Matt Rota has an art show opening up in the Last Rites Gallery Manhattan in a few weeks. It’ll be pretty.

* Benjamin Marra’s got a show coming up, too. It probably won’t be pretty, strictly speaking.

* Some strikingly cartooned Michael McMillan art in this brief profile by Dan Nadel.

* I often think to myself “Self, you should post more art by COOP.” Done and done.

* Renee French is a national treasure.

* Jillian Tamaki made a lovely-looking SuperMutant Magic Academy minicomic, but it’s all gone.

* Stunning use of flat color by Tom Scioli in American Barbarian, about which he is interviewed extensively by Tom Spurgeon at the link.

* Ryan Cecil Smith draws Nat King Cole.

* Michael DeForge is in an anthology with Kramers Ergot 8 space-age standout Robert Beatty called Rat Hex. I mean, Michael DeForge being in anthology isn’t the surprising part, he’s in every anthology (except that Kramers), him being together with Beatty’s a two great tastes deal is all.

* Ross Campbell draws Leonardo. It’s weird to say “gorgeous” about a drawing of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but there you have it.

* Fortunately, the Happiness Comix tumblr appears to have exaggerated rumors of its own demise, but it’s mainly posting a smattering of art from the unrelated Dimensions anthology. I am not complaining. (Below: Hiromi Ueyoshi, Tim Beckhardt, Tom Toye, Lincoln Bostian, Bethany Price.)

* Fanmaking Moebius art selections from Monster Brains and Same Hat.

* “If you ever see a one-armed bunny, you’ll know it used to be an evil wizard.”

* FIONA ÜBER ALLES

* Jason Adams loved The Hunger Games, which overcame his initial casting skepticism, as it appears to have done with virtually every human being. I’m gonna make an effort to see this one in the theater.

* Deadwood creator David Milch said he knew the show was ending when he wrote the finale for Season Three, which most people have long believed to have been a wholly inadvertent series finale regardless of how thematically appropriate a capstone to the whole show it would have been. I feel like this is something he might have let us know earlier!

* You can get loads more Game of Thrones stuff at the gettin’ place, including four excellent new preview/trailer/featurette things and George R.R. Martin reading a new preview chapter from The Winds of Winter.

* The Press Play blog did a series of video tributes to Mad Men in anticipation of the season premiere; the one below is my favorite.

* For pete’s sake, someone please hook Rick Trembles up.

* These “q v i e t” sex comics are wondrous. Sexy, funny, dissonant, imaginative, as sex tends to be at varying times. (Via Conor Stecschulte.)

* Big PictureBox sale all month long!

* Have I used the “Brian Chippendale is the best he is at what he does, and what he does is write lengthy, funny, thoughtful essays on the on-page and off-page ethics of Marvel comics” formulation yet? Because if not, let me do so here.

* Great news for film fans: Bordwell and Thompson celebrate the tenth edition of their seminal Film Art by partnering with the Criterion Collection for online examples of the techniques they discuss in the book. By the way, “seminal” gets tossed around a lot, but get this: “Film Art was the first introductory film textbook to use frame enlargements rather than publicity photographs as illustrations.” Let that sink in for a moment.

* Michael DeForge starts collecting his own go-to tropes. He seems a bit anxious about repeating himself, but I think it’s a lot of fun to have amassed enough work that you start to notice things repeatedly popping up without your having intended to put them in there. Related: Read Leather Space Man and Abbey Loafer and Military Prison and and and…

* Ben Katchor’s “Logo Rage” is his funniest, bleakest strip in some time. Go read the whole thing.

* Jason tries crosshatching.

* Hot stuff from ADDXSTC fave Conor Stechschulte.

* Meanwhile, Conor’s Closed Caption Comics compatriot Andrew Neyer has a new series of panel paintings I quite like.

* Aeron Alfrey’s not just the President of Monster Brains, he’s also a client.

* Upon the great artist’s death, Joe McCulloch and Chris Mautner select six essential Moebius books. It’s amazing to think that more well-done, in-print English editions exist for Jacques Tardi or Lewis Trondheim than for Moebius, but that’s where we’re at and where we’re likely to remain.

* Bruce Baugh on California gothic (The Lost Boys, Blue Velvet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.).

* Remembering the “go-motion” animation technique of Phil Tippett. This is what “real” looks like to me, in terms of movie monsters.

* Longtime friend of the blog Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants counts down his Top 20 Movies and Top 10 Scary Movies of 2011.

* Animals are killed during the making of all shows and films. How do you think catering and craft services get their chicken and burgers and whatnot, the meat fairy?

* Finally, the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus isn’t as good as you’ve heard…it’s better. Charles Barkley was right when he said that any knucklehead can cut together an awesome trailer (I think that’s what he said), but even so. This thing is pretty much predicated on validating your continued belief, over the course of decades and in the face of reams of inferior entertainment-product based thereupon, that the concept at its core is just as majestically horrifying as you remembered it to be. Well done all around.

* When I saw that the Comics Journal had transcribed Tom Spurgeon’s panel interview with C.F. and Brian Ralph from Decembers BCGF, I quite literally stopped everything I was doing and read it from start to finish. Starting the panel with “Do you ever get tired of talking about Fort Thunder?” is perhaps the best first panel question I’ve ever seen.

* The Lands of Ice and Fire, an official box set of unprecedentedly detailed maps of Westeros and Essos based on the hand-drawn originals by George R.R. Martin and edited by Martin and the Westeros.org team? Oh, indeed.

* Speaking of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, for various reasons I’ll reveal sooner or later I’ve picked up the pace of blogging at my all-ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled, on everything from prophecy and free will to cruelty and empathy in art. (HEAVY SPOILERS at the links, as is always the case on Boiled Leather.)

* Extremely good news: The Voyeurs, a new collection of Lucky strips and brand-new comics by Gabrielle Bell, who at this point is one of the best in the biz, from Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books — the imprint’s first book-format release, if I’m not mistaken.

* Monster Brains unleashes the cover and a five-page preview of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Four.

* Kudos to Heidi MacDonald for this wondrous discovery: James Killian Spratt’s extremely faithful, extremely NSFW adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, the basis for this weekend’s much-anticipated/dreaded John Carter. If there were a way to print out an entire website and deliver it to Benjamin Marra by hand, that’s what I would do. Heidi provides context at the link — you’d be hard pressed not to see Fletcher Hanks and Basil Wolverton and Tim Vigil and any other weirdo Art Out of Time type you’d care to name in Spratt’s work, which is beautifully colored and features a nice rounded sense of line and character/creature/set design, however gonzo/outsidery it may otherwise be.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two continues in its magnificently morbid vein.

* Michael DeForge started hisself a tumblr.

* Links to every single Drawn and Quarterly cartoonist’s blog.

* The great critic Matt Zoller Seitz on the true appeal of Mad Men. He doesn’t mention them, but this is like a devastating rebuttal to those epically point-missing promos AMC’s running.

* Elsewhere, Seitz and Simon Abrams wonder why cinematic superheroes are such an artistic dud as a genre. I think Seitz sells the Iron Man movies short — no other superhero movies are based so completely on banter — but I think the point that the economics of these films mitigate against innovation or idiosyncracy is well-taken. The best superhero movie, in terms of success as art, remains Tim Burton’s Batman.

* Oh, this is just marvelous: At Press Play, Dave Bunting Jr. edited all the opening sequences from Breaking Bad Seasons One and Two together, then played them for film critic Sheila O’Malley, who’d never watched the show and was then asked to summarize what it was about based on only those introductions.

* Jonny Negron’s “Birthday Cake” > Rihanna & Chris Brown’s “Birthday Cake”

* Lauren Weinstein’s entire belief system = the Savage Dragon’s entire belief system

* New Renee French art is always a linkblogging gimme.

* Tom Neely, you rascal!

* Axe Cop is legitimately one of the most inventive and unpredictable and funny comics around, I don’t care if using a little kid to plot it is cheating.

* Here’s a list of things that are sexier than L’Avventura-era Monica Vitti:

* Real Life Horror: Our constitutional-lawyer president and his attorney general have determined that “the President says so” is sufficient due process to have an American citizen executed without charge or trial. That’s a load off!

* Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who provided much of the visual imagination behind George Lucas’s Star Wars films, has died. Aeron Alfrey at Monster Brains remembers him the best way anyone can: with a gallery of his fascinating creature designs.

* Chills from this Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

* Matthew Perpetua has posted his 2003 Survey Mix as part of his Fluxblog 10th Anniversary celebration, and this one’s an absolute beast. Hey Ya!, Maps, Heartbeats, Yeah, Seven Nation Army, Crazy in Love, Milkshake, Galang, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, Strict Machine, 99 Problems (Sean’s Imaginary Remix Wherein Jay-Z Doesn’t Structure the Chorus Around Referring to Beyoncé as a Bitch), Transatlanticism, We Will Become Silhouettes, Pass That Dutch, Never Leave You, Ignition (Remix), Toxic, In Da Club, Danger! High Voltage…What a goddamn year. Eight discs of fun.

* Here’s another big one, but for movie buffs rather than music buffs: David Bordwell’s masterfully enlightening and readable essay on the aesthetic, technical, and ineffable differences between film and digital projection. If you’ve ever really wanted to know what the difference is — resolution, artifacts, the process of projection, the impact on theaters, the reactions of audiences, the opinions of filmmakers, idiosyncratic observations on seeing a digital movie vs. a film one in any number of settings — this is quite simply the best piece on the topic I’ve ever seen. You’ll be smarter for having read it, but it’s a joy to read in the process.

* Jim Woodring is looking for contributions to help fund his next standalone Frank graphic novel, which I’m excited to see is called Fran.

* Zak Smith and Shawn Cheng’s collaborative webcomic/fighting game Road of Knives is back, and they’ve brought my Destructor collaborator Matt Wiegle along for the ride!

* Hooray, Cindy and Biscuit #2 from Dan White! That is a very good comic.

* Did I never mention that Gilbert Hernandez is doing a zombie comic called Fatima: The Blood Spinners for Dark Horse? Shame on me, then.

* A couple of frequent ADDXSTC commenters and friends of the blog have posted strong pieces on some of my favorite works of fiction. Here’s Bruce Baugh on Stephen King’s The Stand and Rev’D on David Chase’s The Sopranos, particularly the last few seasons.

* Andrew White’s taking Frank Santoro’s correspondence course! That oughta be interesting to see.

* Well, this photo of Jonny Negron and friend certainly looks promising.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force is still great, if you were wondering.

* Lovely Evan Hayden piece from Electric Ant #2.

* The tumblr for the Happiness Comix anthology series has made the regrettable decision to shut down, but for now it’s still posting compelling work by Heather Benjamin and Tom Toye, drawn for still another anthology, Dimensions.

* This is quite a sketch of Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane’s Joker by Frank Quitely.

* I sure am glad Tom Neely’s now in the naked lady business. Lots more where that came from at his blog.

* Here’s a list of things that are sexier than the young Patti Smith:

* The write-up gets a little too “totes amazeballs” for my taste, but just the other day I was talking with friends about the haunting Sesame Street special in which Big Bird and the still-believed-imaginary Mr. Snuffleupagus spent the night in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and tried to help the ghost of a young Egyptian boy escape the underworld, and here’s an impassioned tribute to exactly that. (Hat tip: Simone Davalos.)

* Jeeeeeeeez, Ta-Nehisi Coates on the life and death of Andrew Breitbart.

* “The NYPD did not respond to our request for comment about allegations it has violated the law.”

* If President Obama loves Omar from The Wire so much, why doesn’t he marry him? Oh right, because he believes marriage is between a man and a woman. Also he’s the commander-in-chief of the drug war. Enjoy the show, Mr. President!

* Finally, can I point out that Christopher Young’s “Leviathan” theme music from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 did the Inception Sound thing like two decades before the fact? And in Morse code for “God,” at that? In many ways my adult life is just a fruitless search for a way to replicate the high of that first hit of Hellbound.

* Last week Tom Spurgeon made a modest proposal: Any time you talk about one of the major corporate superheroes, mention their creators. I will be doing this from now on.

* Kramers Ergot #1-3 are busting out all over! Last week, a small number of copies of these early, extremely hard to find issues of Sammy Harkham’s no-way-to-describe-it-but-seminal art comics anthology (the less artcomixy ones) went on sale at Secret Headquarters in L.A.; I bought the bundle via the Secret Headquarters web store, where it looks like all three individual issues are still available, believe it or not. This week they’re also on sale on-site at the Beguiling in Toronto. About the only downside to all this is that awkward moment when you’re all excited to read and write about the first three Kramers Ergots and then Joe McCulloch does it first and renders anything you’d say redundant. Read that review, though, seriously — such a pleasure to read Joe combine his recent beat of off-the-beaten-path stuff with his old alternative-comics stomping grounds.

* How the hell did the announcement of the sequel to Henry & Glenn Forever escape my attention??? Well, no longer: Tom Neely has announced Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever, featuring him and the rest of the original Igloo Tornado gang, plus Benjamin Marra, Ed Luce, COOP, and more.

* Tom’s also drawing lovely nudes now and then, it seems.

* Local boy makes good! Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith is now a part of Jordan Crane’s peerless What Things Do webcomics portal — they’re currently serializing his Kazuo Umezo/Blood Baptism horror-manga tribute minicomic Two Eyes of the Beautiful.

* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, and the memory of cities. I think that if you were forced at gunpoint to make an argument on behalf of the irreducible necessity of the comics form, Katchor’s work would be one of the first things you would reach for.

* Last time we visited Bruce Baugh’s newly resurgent World of Warcraft blogging, he was investigating the possibility of playing the game without dying. Now he’s examining the potential of playing the game without killing. Amazing how these entirely self-imposed rules can totally alter one’s experience, even mindset.

* Eve Tushnet warns against “evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!” horror movies. A fascinating framework I’d never before considered.

* My favorite t-shirt maker, Travis of Found Item Clothing, interviews my favorite nerd blogger, Rob Bricken of Topless Robot.

* I know there are any number of reasons why people do this, but I’m always baffled when the creators of television shows leave those television shows before the shows end. It’s your show! (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Frank Santoro has discovered that people are wrong on the internet. I imagine him staying up four, five days at a stretch, reblogging and correcting every tumblr post that doesn’t properly credit an artist.

* Speaking of Frank, it’s amazing how clear his imprimatur is on the comics made by students in his comics-making class.

* And still speaking of Frank, I think this post may have been posted and deleted before, but here’s his valuable run-down of all the major formats and dimensions available to comics-makers today.

* I don’t believe I’d ever seen this lovely piece by Jonny Negron, who can and does work in a lot more styles than the one or two that made his name. (Via Lisa Hanawalt’s inspiration tumblr. Oh, right, Lisa Hanawalt has an inspiration tumblr.)

* This is a very pretty bit of Becky Cloonan art.

* Lovely and intriguing work from Jackie Ormes, a Golden Age cartoonist who was an African-American woman.

* Fabulous picture of a young Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly from Mouly’s new mostly-New Yorker-cover-themed tumblr. (Via Robot 6.)

* Real Life Horror: You know, when you think about the clearly illegal surveillance of virtually all aspects of Mulsim life in the tri-state area by Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly’s NYPD, it’s not as though history isn’t littered with instructive examples of what becomes of a society when its politicians and law-enforcement authorities start to routinely and relentlessly scapegoat and persecute a religious minority for no good reason, and when other politicians and the news media line up to support this, and when the public either doesn’t notice or says “Hey, good job.”

* Here’s the latest trailer for Game of Thrones. Surprise! It looks good. The location shoots in Iceland are added-value city, man.

* Finally:

* Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, SPX 2012. Holy shit. That’s…that’s probably the best possible cartoonist line-up of all possible cartoonist line-ups. Can someone get Gloeckner there so I can truly kill myself afterwards?

* After a link like that I feel like a shitheel for directing you toward some doom and gloom, but needs must: Tom Spurgeon’s five reasons to worry about comics, non-piracy edition. I think that a sixth reason that could serve as an umbrella for the other five is the “tough titties” attitude so many people who ostensibly derive enjoyment from comics throw in the direction of those individuals who fall victim to those five problems.

* Ross Campbell on sexiness in his comics. As always it bums me out to see Campbell distancing himself from his very good comics Water Baby and The Abandoned, and even early Wet Moon at this point.

* Kate Beaton dispenses career advice for cartoonists.

* Matt Zoller Seitz and Steven Santos make the argument for adding a new Best Collaborative Performance award to the Oscars to honor performances created by actors, mocap, digital animators, makeup, puppeteers and so on in tandem. As you’d suspect, they were inspired by Andy Seriks, and as far as I’m concerned any such eventual award can just be called the Andy. The resulting essay series has so far championed Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle/Brundlefly from David Cronenberg’s The Fly as a proto-example of what they’re seeking to honor. Bonus points to the initial video essay for reminding me that every time I see Gollum falling into the Cracks of Doom, I involuntarily burst into tears.

* BK Munn makes the long-overdue case for a long-overdue comics-creator union.

* That Hans Rickheit short story collection Folly is on its way!

* Bruce Baugh returns to World of Warcraft blogging! And there was much rejoicing. I’d need two hands to count the number of times I’ve thought “Gee, I wish Bruce Baugh was still blogging about World of Warcraft” over the past year or so.

* Bruce also penned a couple of lengthy posts on potential new approaches to zombie horror. I’m partial to the idea of zombies as symbolically resonant with economic attrition as opposed to total societal collapse, myself.

* Grim reading from Anders Nilsen.

* Looks like Michael DeForge went and snuck out another comic book, Incinerator, because why not.

* And he posted a comic strip called “Exams” to Study Group while he was at it.

* Real Life Horror: The ever-more-lawless NYPD has been spying on law-abiding Muslim-American citizens not just in the five boroughs but in colleges and suburbs all around the Northeast, including where I went to school and towns near where I live.

* I don’t think you need to know anything about Robert Wyatt, or any of the music he’s talking about, to get a lot out of Ryan Dombal’s wonderful interview with Wyatt about his favorite music throughout his life at Pitchfork.

* This promo video for Game of Thrones season two is basically just a bunch of actors and crew members saying “It’s gonna be great,” but it also contains our best views so far of several key new characters.

* Did I not point out my guest appearance in Puke Force?

* The new Game of Thrones characters look fucking great, if you’ll pardon my Tyroshi. I’m giving you the ones you really want to see below; many more publicity stills of faces new and old at the link.

* Wow. Michael DeForge’s Rescue Pet is astonishingly troubling.

* “Cartoonist Chris Ware on why other cartoonists fear Clowes”

* Gabrielle Bell is serializing her Kramers Ergot 8 contribution “Cody” on her website. I’m not clipping anything from it — you need to read the whole thing as it unfolds.

* Check out the comic Mark P. Hensel/William Cardini made for Frank Santoro’s comics correspondence course, Moon Queen. You can really see Frank’s fingerprints on this.

* Young altcomix journo of the moment Ao Meng interviews French altcomix maker of the moment Boulet.

* I’m only running the black-and-white version of Jim Rugg’s Sleazy Slice #5 cover here, because the full-color version is a must-see and his site deserves your traffic for showing it to you.

* Nice art by Renee French, and by nice I mean not nice at all.

* I found these early Dave Berg pin-up gag comics pretty sexy. (Via Tom Spurgeon, from whom I got the Rick Trembles link I posted earlier, too.)

* Saving this for later: Rob Clough’s massive TCJ interview with 1-800-MICE cartoonist Matthew Thurber. I think I’ll read this and the Dan Nadel/Marc Bell monstrosity from a while back back-to-back.

* Matthew Perpetua makes the case for Goldfrapp, the most underrated band of the past decade.

* Real Life Horror: A majority of self-described liberals love President Obama’s army of flying killer robots. A majority of self-described liberals are assholes.

* I don’t pretend to understand George Lucas.

* Finally, one last way to feel a little better about your involvement in comics: Donate to Steve Niles’s fundraiser page for Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to help defray the $17,000 judgment against him on Marvel’s behalf.

* They’re gettin’ the band back together, man! Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that company co-founder Mike Catron and former art director Preston White are going back to work at Fantagraphics. Spurge also interviews Catron about his return to the fold.

* I love everything about this powerful post by Jessica Abel, in which she takes a look back at the last fifteen years of her life upon her and her husband Matt Madden’s recent decision to leave Brooklyn for France. And under “everything” I most definitely include their bookshelves.

* Marc Arsenault presents a visual tribute to artist Mike Kelley, who sadly took his own life last week. Kelley’s friend and publisher Dan Nadel shared some thoughts as well.

* It’s the triumphant return of Zack Soto’s The Secret Voice!

* New Sexbuzz pages by Andrew White.

* Allow me to be the last to direct you to Darkness by Boulet, a very cute and crazily gorgeously drawn 24-hour comic. Man, the way this guy draws women.

* Speaking of crazily gorgeously drawn, Frank Miller’s Holy Terror is apparently even prettier than I thought it would be. No, I still haven’t read it, because no, I still can’t bring myself to pay for it, and no, I haven’t had any more luck finding a publicity contact for Legendary’s publishing imprint than you have. (Have you?)

* Jonny Negron celebrates the return to print of his anthology Chameleon #2 the only way he knows how.

* Zach Hazard Vaupen is still making the strangest humor comics around.

* The great Benjamin Marra has an art show opening up later this month in Brooklyn.

* Chuck Forsman is about to release The End of the Fucking World #4. This is a good series.

* If you were wondering when Emily Carroll‘s influence would start to be felt on other webcomics, the answer is right about…now. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Sarah Esteje drew this picture of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album cover using only ballpoint pens. So, you know, jeez. (Via Andrew Sullivan, of all people.)

* I am going to link you to this Michael DeForge comic about facial growths and lesions and then never look at or think about it again.

* Tucker Stone’s excellent review of Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Tyler Crook’s very good B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Russia (he’s dead-on about Crook and company proving themselves and resuscitating the series after a stumble or two) has the bonus feature of functioning as a sort of “state of the Mignolaverse” report.

* The Mindless Ones’ David Allison/Illogical Volume writes about Batman Incorporated and a great many other things besides. The broad theme is how the sadness at the heart of Batman’s story taints his grand utopian projects in much the same way that the malfeasance of his real-world corporate promulgators taints his real-world utility as an icon of positivity. I go back and forth on whether that’s a reasonable thing to expect from art anyway — Grant Morrison’s brand of positivity has long struck me as a bit head-in-the-sand-ish, even before his unfortunate comments on Siegel & Shuster — but I’ve certainly felt the sting I.V.’s describing. Then again, I believe the pleasure we derive from art is quite independent of whether pleasurable things are happening in that art — Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad have at varying times and for varying reasons provided me with more emotional uplift than just about anything I can think of, and Christ, think about those shows for a moment. But I.V.’s not just talking about the content, he’s talking about the circumstances of their creation, which is quite another matter. It’s a meaty post.

* Ryan Cecil Smith, Lane Milburn, and more weigh in on the endangered art of Stephen Gammell in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

* I absolutely loved the elegant simplicity (not a phrase you’d ever associate with the guy under normal circumstances) of Zak Smith/Sabbath’s post on how to advance the narrative in RPGs without railroading your players:

I call it Hunter/Hunted.

-The idea is simple and comes from about a million horror and cop stories: sometimes a scene happens because Sam Spade has found out about a baddie and sometimes a scene happens because the baddie has found out about Sam Spade. And, there, aside from a few stops for bourbon and kissing, is the plot of everything from Lost Boys to Blade Runner.

-Most investigative scenarios advise breaking things up into “scenes”–the idea is you have a scene, find clues in it, these clues lead to the next scene. They then usually cover their ass by saying either “if the PCs don’t do this or find this clue or go to the wrong place give them a bunch of hints or a prophetic dream or otherwise nurse, nudge, or nullify them until they go to the next scene” or just give some vague advice like “hey Venice is interesting, think of something”

-Not so here. Or not exactly: Basically we keep the “scene chain” structure. If the PCs go from clue to clue in a timely fashion like good investigators they follow the scene chain. However, we also give each scene a twin situation, this twin is what happens if the PCs don’t follow a given clue, follow it up the wrong path, or otherwise take too long (in-world game time) to follow the clues. In this twin situation, typically, the PCs have taken long enough to figure out what’s going on that the enemy has noticed their efforts and started hunting them.

* Real Life Horror: America’s flying killer robots target rescuers and mourners of flying killer robot victims. Warning: not liking this state of affairs may make you an al-Qaeda supporter.

* Related, in Professor T.’s “applicability” sense: Bruce Baugh flags two beautiful passages on the horrors of war from The Lord of the Rings.

* Celebrate 10 years of Fluxblog with this interview with its creator, Matthew Perpetua, my favorite music writer and a swell guy.

* Farewell to the first modern zombie, Bill Hinzman. You changed everything, sir.

* Though I think I’ve only ever played the original and Ocarina of Time, I love that Legend of Zelda continuity is so convoluted and contradictory that people theorized it must involve divergent timelines; I love even more that they were right.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates has what ought to be the final word on the vices and virtues of Louis Farrakhan Ron Paul. I don’t know why I never thought of Paul advocacy in messianic terms before, but of course that’s what’s going on; the support of noted Great Man enthusiast Andrew Sullivan, who appears to have retracted his recent retraction of his slightly less recent endorsement of Paul for the Republican Party presidential nomination, is surely evidence of that. The problem is with seeing individual politicians, with all their flaws (and in most cases “flaws” is putting it mildly, whether you’re talking about States’ Rights dogwhistler and gold bug Ron Paul or indefinite-detainer and non-due-process-assassinator and Skynet-activator Barack Obama), in memetic-engineering terms — “If we support this person we’ll change the conversation and steer the nation toward the good” — fails to consider the systemic nature of successfully implementing change, and dismisses a host of hugely problematic issues with any given candidate in a rush to paint an Alex Ross version of their portrait. And again, no one’s forcing anyone to endorse anyone; doing so as an act of supposed bravery but downplaying your candidate of choice’s problems is in fact an act of cowardice.

* Related thought triggered by Coates’s material on Farrakhan: All religions are completely crazy in terms of their “supernatural history,” if you will; it’s just that we’ve been hearing about the major ones for so many centuries that receiving celestial instructions from a brushfire or rising from the dead and then flying up to Heaven no longer seem quite as crazy as more recent developments like the Angel Moroni or Intergalactic Warlord Xenu do. That said, I feel like between Mormonism, Scientology, and the Nation of Islam, America has cooked up some uniquely science-fictional cults-cum-full-fledged-denominations, and I wonder if anyone’s ever stacked them up side to side as such.

* Jim Henley wrote a song for America; they told him it was clever.

* I hadn’t been super enthused for Ridley Scott’s yes-no-maybe-probably-yeah-definitely Alien prequel Prometheus, because it’s 2012 and it’s Ridley Scott. Then I saw this trailer. Any knucklehead can make a compelling trailer, but pacing and music and title font treatment aside, you simply don’t see scary cosmic monoliths like you did in ’70s SF anymore. Seeing that giant whatever-it-is on that alien planet was like coming home.

* In case you missed it, my favorite fantasy franchises gave us several Christmas presents:

** Here’s a sample chapter from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter. (SPOILERS, of course!) The great Elio & Linda of Westeros.org discuss it here.

** Here’s a trailer for Season Two of Game of Thrones. Everyone looks great and Stannis sounds great.

** And here once again is the trailer for The Hobbit, which I suppose I should get used to calling The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for the purposes of this first film. The chills I got when the Dwarves started singing their song! Straight-up outreach to everyone who was raised on the Rankin-Bass cartoon, and successful outreach at that. BTW, I saw a lot of talented artists complaining about what they perceived to be fussy, overly toyetic, off-brand Dwarf designs, but let’s face it, the filmmakers had to help the audience be able to differentiate between thirteen axe-wielding beardos, because it’s not really like Tolkien himself even tried!

GANDALF TAKE THE WHEEL

* 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?

* 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?

* 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.

* 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.)

* 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.