* 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.

* Rob Bricken explains why you may or may not want to buy the Star Wars blu-ray box set. He’s on the fence, but his comprehensive assessment of all the set’s features, pro and con, ought to give you enough information to make up your mind. For me it’s a clear no. I don’t begrudge George Lucas the opportunity to endlessly tinker with the world he created. The guy built an entire industry with his imagination, and owns the rights to all of it, a fate that has eluded almost all of his antecedents and very few of his descendants. I’d guess that getting to constantly refine and mess with what you’ve built has got to be unimaginably delightful. But speaking personally, I’m not interested in seeing the tinkering — I’m interested in seeing the versions of the films that made me like them in the first place. I’m certainly not interested in rewarding a series of decisions/revisions/additions/subtractions that have made them worse films.

* While we’re on the subject of customer-independent film-industry business decisions, I find yesterday’s letter of apology cum backdoor announcement of a major overhaul of his entire company from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings maybe the most uniquely bizarre such move I’ve ever seen. People like Endgadget’s Darren Murph and Slate’s Farhad Manjoo are probably right about the underlying strategy: a sort of preemptive amputation of the company’s beloved DVD direct-mail business model, prepping for its eventual destruction on the company’s terms rather than dealing with it over a prolonged period on the market’s terms. In this light, everything that looks stupid or awful about the announcement is a feature, not a bug: Using an attempt to staunch customer-base and stock bleeding caused by the company’s last poorly handled major change as an opportunity to announce an even more complicated and infuriating business model; slapping the newly spun-off DVD business with a ridiculous name, Qwikster, that sounds like a failed Internet startup from ten years ago; spending a significant chunk of time explaining how much more user-unfriendly the new set-up will be; maintaining a sad-sack hostage-tape demeanor throughout the entire affair. But to me this only makes sense if all the damage were completely contained within the customer base for the red-enveloped stepchild DVD business, and it obviously isn’t. The Netflix-proper streaming customers got this letter and marveled at its lugubriousness, prolixity, and lack of understanding of what “apology” means along with everyone else. Maybe some next-level business mind can explain to me why deliberately making yourself look bad and your company less useful for nearly all of your customers, publicly, twice in a row, is actually four-dimensional-chess checkmate, but I don’t see it. I can tell you that the only thing that stopped me from cancelling my Netflix/Qwikster account yesterday is feeling like I need to get a return on my investment in having rented the same two unwatched Mad Men discs for the duration of my wife’s pregnancy and our child’s subsequent first six months of life.

* Here’s a photo of Tom Neely, Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, and Benjamin Marra from the SPX panel I hosted, “Excruciating Detail: Drawing the Grotesque.” They seem to have enjoyed it, which is nice. Both this and the Craig Thompson Habibi panel I moderated were filmed, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to link to the video soon.

* Frank Santoro will teach you comics by mail.

* S.H.O.O.T. First writer Justin Aclin once pointed out to me that the comics equivalent of Seinfeld‘s white-hot contempt for the elderly is Axe Cop‘s naked loathing of babies. In that light, the current Axe Cop storyline is the equivalent of any episode centered on Del Boca Vista or the Costanzas.

* Tom Spurgeon’s review of The Intrepids #6, a comic I haven’t read, also functions as a review of, really, the vast majority of superhero and superhero-ish comics today, many of which I have read. “Ruthlessly familiar” is just about right.

* This Adrian Tomine print is really really hot stuff. Sexiness has always been one of his comics’ secret weapons.

* Check out the colors in this Michael DeForge comic.

* Dave Kiersh keeps posting his old comics and art, which keep being one of the great hidden treasures in all of comics.

* Hans Rickheit made Cochlea and Eustacea puppets, which aren’t at all disturbing.

* Alisa Kiss as Red Sonja, photographed at Dragon*Con by Anna Fischer. “I just want you boys to see what you’re fighting for, that’s all.”

* It’s awful that anyone can have the last word on Dylan Williams, but if it has to be that way, let it be Tom Spurgeon.

* The Divine Invasion is the website put together to auction off art and comics to help pay for Dylan Williams’s cancer treatments, and it’s quite striking. It’s moving to see what a wide range of comic book people have contributed, from Periscope to PictureBox, from Matt Fraction to Michael DeForge. That money is still needed, so please bid if you see something you like.

* Here are your Ignatz Award winners.

* Top Shelf’s holding its annual $3 Sale as we speak. At the link you’ll find my recommendations for how to spend your money. Kolbeinn Karlsson’s The Troll King for $3 is basically the deal of the year.

* Tom Devlin spotlights Pure Pajamas, the new collection of comics from Marc Bell. Marc Bell comics are by far the best Marc Bell anythings, so I’m excited to read this. Tom reports that Bell may be working on a graphic novel for Spring 2013, too.

* Kiel Phegley interviews Jaime Hernandez in video form.

* Highly relevant to my interests: The Descent/Doomsday director Neil Marshall will be directing an episode of Game of Thrones Season Two. Oh, indeed.

* You can find all of Tucker Stone’s pieces on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s late, lamented Cable series Soldier X right here.

* Brian Chippendale reviews Justice League #1, Animal Man #1, and New Avengers Annual #1 as only he can. UPDATE: Brian says the post wasn’t finished and went up accidentally; expect a reboot sometime next week.

* My Robot 6 colleague J. Caleb Mozzocco reviews (among other things) Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions and Brian Ralph’s Daybreak.

* Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon column on Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead for the Onion AV Club is good, but the best part is this line about what Wright and Pegg do: “If you ever wonder what’s missing from a Kevin Smith film, watch one of theirs.”

* God, I love it when Dave Kiersh posts his old comics.

* I’m excited to (one day, probably years from now at this rate) see David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Kiera Knightley looks older and somewhat fleshier and kind of tired in this promotional picture, which as it turns out is a very good look for her.

* I wrote a well-received post on feminism and A Song of Ice and Fire over on my ASoIaF tumblr, in response to this pretty bad piece by Sady Doyle and this very good one by Alyssa Rosenberg. Spoilers abound at all three, so be careful. Related, and less spoilery: my big problem with the way the non-Western cultures in A Song of Ice and Fire are portrayed.

* Jeez, the hits just keep on coming in the comics world: The Center for Cartoon Studies’ library was flooded during Hurricane Irene. The books are basically okay, but the building’s screwed.

* On the Sparkplug/Dylan Williams front, Chris Mautner recommends six Sparkplug books you should consider purchasing to a) help out, and b) read great comics.

* And in happier news, this is a terrific idea: The Library of Congress is creating the Small Press Expo Collection, which will permanently archive all of the Ignatz Award nominees and select self-published books and minicomics.

* And if you enjoy alternative comics in the slightest, Rob Clough’s Top 50 Comics of 2010 is well worth your time. You’ll find a lot of the usual suspects on here, and he and I have a lot of overlap, but he orders things in an idiosyncratic way that will make you think about what you liked best and why.

* George Lucas added a bunch more nonsense–and I mean that, it’s nonsense, it’s stuff that it doesn’t really make sense to add–to the Blu-Ray editions of the original Star Wars trilogy. I’m in broad agreement with what Rob Bricken says about this at the link. It’s perfectly fine for George Lucas to do whatever he likes with his movies. He doesn’t owe me anything. It would just be nice if I could own a nice hi-def copy of the movies I loved growing up as they existed when I was growing up.

* Brigid Alverson put together a highlight reel from a recent Dan DiDio/Jim Lee interview about the rebooted DC Universe and its concurrent digital-comics initiative.

* Jeez, Sam Humphries sure knows what he’s doing.

* Zak Smith/Sabbath on what Rem Koolhaas can tell us about Dungeons & Dragons. (Now that’s a tough sentence to top.)

* William Monahan, the guy who adapted The Departed is doing a draft of Frank Miller’s Sin City 2 script. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Here’s the cover and creator line-up for Thickness #2, the latest issue of Michael DeForge and Ryan Sands’s alt/art smut comics anthology series.

* Both Rolling Stone’s Matthew Perpetua and Pitchfork’s Tom Breihan interviewed the Rapture’s Luke Jenner about his band’s comeback album, and he comes across like a mensch in both. He’s quite candid about why former co-frontman Mattie Safer left the band following his own return to it after he himself quit a few years back, but Safer emerges as a sympathetic figure too. He thought he was now the undisputed leader of the band, and then that was taken away from him. You can easily see how that would weigh on a guy.

* Jonny Negron is a talented person.

* This is what Ben Katchor used to draw like!

* Now and forever the King. (Additional thoughts.)

(A quick programming note: Though a hurricane-related internet outage appears to have resolved itself as mysteriously as it started (on Monday morning, well after the winds from a hurricane during which we never lost power or cable had died down), I’m still having some unrelated computer problems, as well as spending a lot of time writing for other outlets. So if you don’t see me here as often, that’s why.)

* Publisher Dylan Williams of Sparkplug Comic Books is battling cancer without medical insurance. Please help him out in the best possible way: Buy some Sparkplug comics. I posted some recommendations at Robot 6, along with some thoughts about just how unique and valuable a publisher Sparkplug really is. Meanwhile, Floating World is holding a two-day benefit sale, if you live in Portland and/or are a Phillip K. Dick fan (explanation at the link).

* What a horrifying story: Syrian security forces abducted, beat, and broke the hands of political cartoonist Ali Ferzat before dumping him on the side of the road. The mafia-like cruelty and chutzpah of Bashar al-Assad and his underlings on display in this attack really takes the breath away. I wonder if this is a case the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund can help out with in some way.

* Bummer: The great film scholar Kristin Thompson won’t be writing the Hobbit-centric sequel she’d planned to The Frodo Franchise, her book about the multimedia business of turning The Lord of the Rings from a book to a movie to a cross-platform empire. She’s also shuttering her ongoing blog on the subject.

* John Porcellino on the things he learned from redrawing one page of the Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four.

* Jason Adams on Trollhunter, which seems like a hoot and a half. After the unrelenting stream of insectoid aliens, J-horror knockoffs, and corroded/decrepit slasher/torture baddies, it’s just such a pleasure to see a monster that looks different from all of the other monsters.

* It’s like Nick Gazin reached into my head and pulled out the exact words I’d have used to describe the Smurfs movie.

* Guy Perez’s cover version of Al Plastino’s Superboy #6 cover is my favorite Covered contribution in a long time.

* I hereby invite you to read “Bongcheon-Dong Ghost” by Horang, one of the scariest webcomcs I’ve come across in a while. Leave your speakers on. More about the comic at Robot 6.

* Tremendous interview with Anders Nilsen about Big Questions by Alex Dueben on CBR. “It’s my newest book, but it’s also my oldest.” Wow, can you imagine? Big Questions was the first comic Nilsen ever did, and it’s about to be released in its finished 600-page form.

* Some of the Harry Potter movie people are working on a deal to make a mult-movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. That could certainly be very good, though in all likelihood it’ll be overwrought and mediocre with interesting moments like most big Hollywood versions of good ideas these days.

* The House Next Door’s Sumanth Prabhaker on Grant Morrison’s historicist reading of superhero comics, including his own, in Supergods.

* Filing this away for when I’ve read the book: Hayley Campbell reviews Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette for The Comics Journal.

* Apparently Julie Doucet’s cat carrier has sat at the bottom of the back stairs of the Fantagraphics office since 1993. This fits very well with my preexisting mental picture of the Fantagraphics office.

* Well this is certainly a great ad for The Beguiling that Michael DeForge drew. How many characters do you recognize? I got all but three or four, I think.

* Uno Moralez is creepy and sexy.

* Jonny Negron goddamn

* Yow–this new group sketchblog Ashcan All-Stars is doing Sin City and doing it well. In order: James Stokoe, Moritat, Sheldon Vella.

* No, seriously, it’s uncool how much I’m enjoying The Walking Dead‘s woes. They’ve all got mothers, you know?

* If there’s one thing HBO knows how to do, it’s make trailers that make their shows look like the baddest things ever. Boardwalk Empire is pretty great regardless, though.

* I literally cheered for this piece by the Comics Grid’s Katlheen Dunley on Ben Katchor and the world as a palimpsest.

* Chester Brown’s Paying For It: The Movie is probably not gonna happen.

* Jordan Crane’s The Last Lonely Saturday: The Movie actually has happened!

* My Spider-Man is black.

* News flash: Fantagraphics’ Jacob Covey-designed Carl Barks Disney Ducks comics are going to be very attractive.

* Tom Spurgeon’s description does a terrific job of selling Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe Back Home, but really, the cartoon on the cover speaks volumes. Can you imagine seeing this at the time? Lately it has seemed to me that deflating America’s self-image of World War II and its aftermath is vital to the country’s long-term health, and man, is this a shot to the face of those notions.

* Maybe I should just outsource this whole blog to Jonny Negron.

* And speaking of ADDXSTC “Hey look at this art” favorites, I don’t know if this Wei Yan piece is an homage to similarly formatted Renee French drawings, but either way, very nice.

* I won’t spoil the latest Zach Hazard Vaupen gag comic for you. Vaupen’s Rusted Skin stuff is fascinating to me, because comedically it’s totally gag comics, but visually it’s not at all. There’s nothing else like that.

* Okay, a Batman video game in which you have the option of playing as Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns Batman is a Batman video game I’d enjoy playing, but only if playing as that Batman.

* You know, it’s been way, way too long since I simply looked at a picture of Katee Sackhoff and went “guh.” Guh.

* Daybreak author Brian Ralph is doing a diary comic about his time at the San Diego Comic-Con this year for The Comics Journal. So far, so great. It starts off jaunty and funny and actually kind of uplifting, until, thanks to cameos from Tom Devlin and Peggy Burns and some personal revelations, it suddenly starts feeling like an outtake from A Serious Man.

* And here’s a nice interview with him at Giant Robot, too. (Via Drawn & Quarterly.)

* Now you can watch the Hernandez Brothers spotlight panel at San Diego from the comfort of your own home, courtesy of The Comics Journal!

Love & Rockets from The Comics Journal on Vimeo.

* And here’s a brief history of Fantagraphics courtesy of CBR’s report on their 35th Anniversary panel.

* The Hooded Utilitarian is posting the results of its first-ever critics poll on the 115 best comics ever. I chipped in a list, which you’ll see eventually.

* Tom Spurgeon, Steve Bissette, and Tom Spurgeon again on the Marvel/Kirby case.

* Jason Adams reviews several recent-ish movies of semi-note: The Devil’s Double, Cowboys & Aliens, Crazy Stupid Love, and Sucker Punch. I’m with him on Zack Snyder’s action choreography — it’s nice to be able to tell what’s going on and what happened to whom when a punch is thrown.

* Michael DeForge turned 24 today; to celebrate, he posted afreakingnother terrific comic page.

* Lovin’ that Jonny Negron.

* Finally, this essay hit me where I live: Middle-school history teacher Dwight Simon on all the ways we teach children to love war. The points on violence as a vector for redemption and violence as a supra-religion were depressingly on point. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* I’m impressed by DC’s response to the recent debate over the number of women creators it employs. Anyone who says “Well they had to say something, it was bad PR” has obviously not been following the comics industry very long. When you ask someone publicly to do something, and they say “You’re right, we’ll try to do better on that,” that’s a really good thing, especially on an issue like this. Good for DC.

* Grant Morrison in conversation with Neil Gaiman. A fun quote from Gaiman about Morrison: “Whenever I see you now, you are this glorious bird of paradise, but I remember, just as for you I will always be a nervous, hungry young journalist, I remember you as a kid in a black raincoat, incredibly shy. The thing that would get you animated was the point where you’d start talking about a story, and you would come to life.”

* There’s a Marvel/Gary Friedrich lawsuit going on over Ghost Rider right now as well.

* It’s always fun and informative to hear Tom Brevoort talk about how the sausage gets made.

* HBO execs talked about Game of Thrones in a reasonably interesting fashion recently: They’re standing very firm on the 10-episodes-per-season issue, which is unfortunate, but other than that they seem very supportive of a long run and not apt to try to cram too much material (i.e. the entirety of the fatter volumes) into a single season as opposed to spreading it out.

* RoboCop vs. Transformers vs. Hanawalt vs. Harbin.

* Uno Moralez is really one of the best.

* Funny stuff and sexy stuff from Michael DeForge.

* The Sylvester Stallone Character Name Generator made me laugh very hard. (Via Mike Barthel.)

* Here are some highlights from Thursday and early Friday at the San Diego Comic-Con…

* I recommend following Robot 6’s CCI2011 tag for your San Diego news needs. Tom Spurgeon is also keeping a running log of the major comics publishing announcements, with occasional commentary, at his recently revived Comics Reporter site — that’ll be worth checking daily as well.

* Pyongyang/Shenzhen/Burma Chronicles author Guy Delisle’s next travelogue will be Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, which will take place during the “Operation Cast Lead” Gaza War. That’s something to look forward to, though as I said at Robot 6, it won’t be without controversy. (I’ve already gotten one condemnatory Google Alert hit for that post.)

* Marvel will be releasing day-and-date digital versions of its major Spider-Man and X-Men comics. If you go in for the Marvel Movie Conspiracy Theory, you’ll note that these are the two major franchises that Marvel Studios doesn’t own the rights to, rather than the Avengers and their associated characters. Marvel says they’ll start rolling out same-day digital copies of their other titles at logical jumping-on points, like first issues or the start of major new storylines.

* Sticking with the digital beat, Top Shelf is releasing digital versions of over 70 of its graphic novels.

* Frank Miller’s Holy Terror looks quite entertaining. I hadn’t realized it was in black and white, although I guess with Lynn Varley out of the picture it stands to reason.

* Chris Mautner interviews Brian Ralph about his first-person zombie survival story Daybreak. Fun fact: I have a short piece on this book in the August issue of Maxim!

* In the Friday iteration of DC’s daily panel on its “New 52” linewide relaunch, DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio said planning for the relaunch began in October 2010, when 23 writers met to talk about the line’s direction. That’s the first firm date I’ve heard — it’s months before most of the speculation I’ve seen has pegged the initiation of the project — and the first time I’ve heard that that many writers were involved.

* In other news…

* I took a quick look at Grant Morrison’s recent comments on Siegel & Shuster’s claim to Superman on Robot 6.

* Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley on George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, and nerd culture’s cult of disappointment.

* Speaking of which, Sam Bosma has been doing some extraordinary portraits of ASoIaF characters lately. Spoiler warning: Unless you’ve read the first four books, there are plenty of characters in there you probably haven’t met, so look out.

* Those two links remind me: Things have really been hopping over at my Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog All Leather Must Be Boiled since I finished reading A Dance with Dragons. I’ve been posting a lot of commentary and links to interesting art and reviews, and Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, the good folks at the big-deal ASoIaF fan site Westeros.org, have been sending a lot of traffic my way, so there’s some good comment-thread action as well. Do check it out if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in. My review of/braindump on A Dance with Dragons is a good place to start.

* Peter Jackson has released an official composite image of all 13 Dwarves from The Hobbit. Pretty, pretty good.

* Jason Adams runs down the major horror movies slated for release during the back half of 2011, none of which I will get to see, sob sob sob.

* In defense of chillwave, by Nitsuh Abebe.

* The 2011 edition of San Diego’s Comic-Con International began last night with its traditional Wednesday Preview Night. Actually, it seemed to being on Monday, as publishers began rolling out their SDCC announcements early. Here are a few of the neater ones thus far.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley’s next project, Seconds, will be released by Villard in 2013. That’s all I got. That’s all anyone’s got about it, at the moment.

* After literally years of saying that publishing original graphic novels without serializing the content first doesn’t make financial sense for them, Marvel is doing exactly that with their new Season One line of standalone graphic novels retelling the origins of some of their major characters. I think there’s two interesting things to be said here. The first is that while Marvel’s no doubt going to get a lot of grief for “ripping off” DC’s similarly named Earth One line (or “line” — we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Batman book since it was first announced), Earth One is actually more similar in terms of content to Marvel’s existing Ultimate line, in that it’s taking the characters and basic concepts and restarting them from scratch with all-new continuity. Season One, by contrast, is just an origin retelling of the sort Marvel’s done many times in floppy funnybook form. The second thing is that the talent involved isn’t superstars, but people who seem to me to be roughly on the level that the folks who launched the Ultimate line back in the day were at. That’s undoubtedly a cost-saving measure, but maybe, as with the Ultimate line, it’ll provide a chance to establish some new voices on a project tangential to the success of the mainstream Marvel Universe.

* Drawn & Quarterly is debuting their very nice-looking collection of Kate Beaton’s Hark, a Vagrant! at the show.

* In other news…

* Hooray, Tom Spurgeon is back at The Comics Reporter! Man, did I miss him. He starts things off with a bang, too: A lovely essay on Jaime Hernandez’s lovely “The Death of Speedy Ortiz.” I like his point about how young people can incorporate tragedy into their self-mythologies in a way that’s both helpful and deceitful; I certainly did.

* Spurge also offers a provocative essay arguing that yes indeed, it’s time for the Xeric Grants to go. I don’t think I agree with his analysis at all. I think breakout success in the webcomics field of the sort Tom says is now possible in a fashion akin to what the Xeric does for its winners is, for the most part, only possible within a relatively narrow range of artistic expression. (I also think Kickstarter success is only possible within a relatively narrow range of audience appeal, but Kickstarter’s not really something Tom’s talking about.). I think that if arthouse publishers like Koyama, PictureBox, Secret Acres, AdHouse, Pigeon Press et al were really sufficient to cover worthwhile young/new cartoonists, then someone ought to have told recent winners like Blaise Larmee, Lane Milburn, and Dave Kiersh (Dave Kiersh!), who all seem to me to be eminently publishable by such outfits but who turned to the Xeric anyway. And I don’t really see a problem with the Xeric moving away from its old-school conception of self-publishing as an end in itself; none of the aspects of the new-model Xeric — an honorific people take seriously in a world where Brad Meltzer’s Justice League wins Eisners, a chance for cartoonists to be handed some money and some printed comics, a foot in the door with small-press publishers — seem any less noble or delightful to me.

* By contrast, Geoff Grogan pens the most eloquent eulogy for the Xeric grant I’ve yet read, tackling not just the “what this person, place, or thing that doesn’t exist anymore meant to me” business that’s as far as most of us comics people ever go in these things, but arguing persuasively that the loss of the Xeric is the loss of an opportunity for cartoonists (or comics-makers, as Geoff might prefer) to experiment, in print. Both these elements are key. He also notes that the Xeric Foundation provided him with legal help when his excellent book Look Out!! Monsters ran into some trouble, which a ComicPress site and Kickstarter page are never going to provide anyone. Read it.

* Grant Morrison takes nerd culture to the woodshed. If you’ve ever wondered why a forward-thinking guy like Morrison has never managed to maintain a web presence, I think you now have your answer.

* Good riddance to the Ron Howard Dark Tower adaptation project, for now at least. Those books stink.

* Fuckin’ Adams.

* The cartoonist Jason reviews John Carpenter’s The Thing. Ain’t the internet grand? My favorite thing about this is how he points out that as a Norwegian, he can understand every word the crazy Norwegian is shouting before the Americans kill him, making the whole movie that much more fatalistic.

* Curt Purcell didn’t care for Death Note overall, having realized that by the end he was reading more out of the residual goodwill engendered by the concept and the first few volumes than for interest in the increasingly byzantine doings of the killers, detectives, notebooks, and shinigami involved. That’s a fair read, although I recall enjoying myself right through the end.

* Matt Zoller Seitz and his ninth-grader daughter talk Harry Potter, the books and the movies, at length. I guess now’s the part where I say that the books convey the helplessness of children at the hands of adults really really well but are otherwise kind of a mess, the ending’s a convoluted punch-pulling trainwreck that gives way to a mawkishly sentimental and unimaginative epilogue, and I’ve had zero interest in seeing any of the movies since the first one. Every Potter needs a pooper!

* Man, Duel was a good movie. I probably haven’t seen it in a dozen years.

* Michael DeForge’s “College Girl by Night,” his contribution to the second volume of the alt-smut anthology Thickness, looks like potentially pretty hot stuff.

* Cool, creepy art from Jonny Negron.

* Cool, creepy art from Renee French.

* I read A Dance with Dragons. I liked it. If you’ve read it, come talk about it with me, artists Matt Wiegle and Sam Bosma, A Song of Ice and Fire superfans/megaexperts Elio & Linda, and other august personages.

* Last week I assembled a massive gallery of great Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire fanart from around the web for Robot 6. Do check it out; there’s something for everyone, or at least every ASoIaF fan. (This piece is by Rory Phillips.)

* Your top comics story: Peter Laird is discontinuing the Xeric Grants for self-published comics following one final round of grants in May 2012. This is terrible, terrible news. Laird says he’s doing that because digital publishing and digital fundraising have abrogated the need for the Xeric, but I think that’s a massive misreading of a) what kinds of comics are made feasible by webcomics; b) what kind of comics are capable of mounting successful Kickstarter campaigns without having first established a network of contacts in online comics fandom; c) the need North American comics have for one of the few awards that really is a mark of quality (for my money it’s the Xerics, the Ignatzes, and then perhaps the awards given by TCAF and Stumptown). This is going to make things a lot tougher on alternative comics creators — you need look no further than the list of past recipients to see how many noteworthy careers were made possible in part by the Xeric. That’s gone, now. It’s tough to object to Laird’s stated goal of transferring his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle millions from funnybooks to actual improving-people’s-lives charities, but I still think the Xerics will be sorely missed.

* Your other top comics story: Borders is dead.

* Your top nerd story: The Dwarves from The Hobbit look awesome. This is a fanmade photoshop of all the pictures released so far, and it fakes Thorin’s body based on the bust shot we’ve been given, but even so, my Hobbit enthusiasm has been officially awakened.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Grant Morrison about his new prose book about superheroes, Supergods. Superlawsuit watchers may want to note Morrison’s take on Siegel & Shuster.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort on what DC does and doesn’t do well: part one, part two. I doubt that many people reading this blog are Marvel or DC partisans, as is the case for the audience of those posts at Robot 6, so maybe you’ll be better capable of seeing just what a gift we readers of superhero comics have in a high-profile top-level editor who’s willing to say what he thinks about most anything, and can do so articulately and with ideas he’s actually thought through over the course of years in the industry, as opposed to regurgitating PR talking points. This is very, very, very rare.

* Speaking of Brevoort, he addresses a complaint I’ve had myself: Though all of his story has been told in Ed Brubaker’s Captain America series, Bucky’s death was relegated to Matt Fraction’s Fear Itself. Brevoort says Brubaker has written an epilogue one-shot that will address the death in the context of his excellent Cap run, which is good news.

* Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons. ‘Nuff said!

* The hardcover for Jesse Moynihan’s Forming Vol. 1 looks terrific.

* Dan White has launched a new Cindy & Biscuit website at Mindless Ones. I like that comic quite a bit.

* Paul Karasik reviews Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits for The Comics Journal. You, whoever you are, ought to read that book.

* Frank Santoro and I ask: Are comics like jazz — a once popular art form become the province of hobbyists?

* Jeffrey Brown of Clumsy and Incredible Change-Bots fame wrote the upcoming wedding comedy Save the Date starring Allison Brie and Lizzy Caplan. That is just wonderful.

* Whoa, NeilAlien resurfaced! It’s like I’ve died and gone to earlier in 2011.

* I’ll admit it, I love this kind of crazy collector’s project: DC is releasing a $150, 1,216-page DC Comics: The New 52 hardcover containing all 52 first issues from its September relaunch. Speaking of which: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! (Cf.) Elsewhere, Toronto’s The Beguiling comic shop is selling all 52 issues for a bundled price of $104; that strikes me as a great idea for retailers.

* Can you imagine getting a letter of praise from a master of your art like the letter Jim Woodring sent Hans Rickheit? Man oh man.

* Jonny Negron’s sexiest illustration, now in color!

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan sure can draw.

* I’m always up for a good look at James Cameron’s Aliens, a film that’s as good at what it does as any I can think of. This one comes courtesy of Edward Copeland.

* David Lynch made an animated video for Interpol’s very good song “Lights” called “I Touch a Red Button.” It’s like an exercise in how much creepy intensity he can wring out of four or five frames. He’s very good at making horrible faces, that’s for sure.

* Wow, watching this attempt to beat Super Mario Bros. with the lowest score possible without saving or cheating made for some pulse-pounding viewing. I was literally cringing and jumping in my seat. The Hammer Brothers sequence is like the 8-bit equivalent of the stairs of Khazad-Dûm.

* My excitement about Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit (that is still a nice thing to be able to say, given what could have been) mounts with each new official photo the production releases. Dig Nori, Ori, and Dori, for example — that’s an unexpected and welcome direction for the Dwarves to go, visually. I wonder if each grouping of brothers in Thorin’s party will have their own sartorial style.

* Keep your eyes peeled for Sam Humphries and Steven Sanders’s strange sci-fi sex comic Our Love Is Real, now available digitally and otherwise. I’m still working out what the hell I think of it, which I suppose is mission-accomplished territory. Something about it reminds me of Paolo Baciagalupi’s supremely troubling SF short story “The People of Sand and Slag,” to give you some idea of where its head is at — not necessarily that it’s that effective, but that it’s proceeding from a similar place of positing an uncomfortably unfamiliar future humanity.

* This ought to be a popular item at your better comic conventions: Uncivilized Books is releasing a collection of Gabrielle Bell’s San Diego Diary strips, recounting her outsider’s experience at last year’s Comic-Con.

* An ultra-limited-edition full-color Yuichi Yokoyama book from PictureBox called Color Engineering? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Michael DeForge’s Spider-Man nightmare “Peter’s Muscle” is now up for your reading pleasure at What Things Do. I liked this comic a lot.

* Over at Robot 6 I talked a bit more about Dave Kiersh’s Amazons and its depiction of fantasy femininity.

* Today’s Comics Grid must-read: Tony Venezia on Jaime Hernandez’s Ghost of Hoppers and the Freudian uncanny. Wow, the only way that sentence could be more up my alley is if David Bowie read it aloud.

* The great Josh Simmons has a schmancy new webstore.

* You know, normally, while I think Jonny Negron’s drawings of women are a blast, they don’t “do it” for me. But there are exceptions to every rule.

* DC pitched Grant Morrison on writing a Watchmen sequel; he declined. That tidbit comes from the Mindless Ones’ very fun interview with Morrison.

* Rob Clough examines the oeuvre of Dave Kiersh, perhaps the most underappreciated cartoonist of the last decade-plus given how present his nostalgia-tinged tone poems about the teenage wasteland are in the zeitgeist. And what a dreamy picture of him, too!

* People are organizing protests of the DC relaunch at the San Diego Comic-Con and of Odd Future at the Pitchfork Festival. Why not, says I. As silly as that pairing makes it all seem, the comment thread at the link is a surprisingly thoughtful conversation about the uses and limits of protest.

* Matt Zoller Seitz has launched a new group blog called PressPlay, dedicated primarily to video essays. That’s something to get excited about.

* 300: Battle of Artemisia — wow, that really rolls off the tongue.

* J. Caleb Mozzocco joins Robot 6 with a post on Ralph Cosentino’s Wonder Woman children’s book. Cosentino has done similar books on Superman, which I haven’t seen, and Batman, which is one of the best Batman anythings I’ve ever read. If he can distill WW’s milieu and appeal as beautifully as he did Batman’s, his book should be issued to DC executives.

* Thrilled to see What Things Do posting more Abner Dean.

* Finally, a couple of quotes that have been resonating with me since I read them.

Clarence’s ability to enjoy Clarence was incredible.

–from Bruce Springsteen’s eulogy for Clarence Clemons (via Pitchfork)

RUDICK: Did the Surrealism exhibition that you saw in 1968 have a similar effect on you?

WOODRING: That hit me harder and lasted longer than anything else I’ve ever seen.

RUDICK: What was it about that body of work that had such an impact on you?

WOODRING: I was still in high school. I didn’t know Surrealism existed. I just went with some people I knew down to the L.A. County Museum of Art to see this huge Surrealism and dada retrospective. I had no expectations. The first thing that I saw when I walked in the door was The Song of Love by Giorgio de Chirico, with the plaster cast and the red rubber glove. I saw that and my mind just started racing, trying to understand it because it had such a mood of such intensity, and I was thinking, A red rubber glove? Why is that affecting me like this? What is going on here? It’s like magic.

It was really an all-star show, and they had the crème de la crème: Dalí’s best paintings, Max Ernst’s best paintings, Victor Brauner, Magritte, Hans Bellmer. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I went back to see it a second time and realized, God, this stuff is just bristling with sex energy. These guys must’ve thought about sex all the time. Dalí’s Great Masturbator was there, and various libidinous Magrittes, Max Ernsts, and especially the Hans Bellmer stuff. It was just so heavily erotic that I, virgin that I was, thought, Sex is magic. It’s where all this hallucinatory power comes from.

My parents were very conservative, and all their friends were conservative—it was a very unresponsive, unnurturing environment for me. I learned from that show for the first time that there were adults who worked hard at unraveling those mysteries and capturing and putting them down. I had no idea. I just thought that I was stuck off in a corner of the universe by myself, and I’d never find a tribe of people to relate to or people to confirm what I was believing. It was like being reborn, seeing that this world of possibilities existed, to say nothing of the work itself, which was so heavy and intense and enjoyable. The pleasure I felt from seeing that stuff lasted for weeks afterward—years, really. I still get a frisson thinking about it.

–from Nicole Rudick’s interview with Jim Woodring in The Comics Journal

* Maybe my deep and abiding satisfaction with The Lord of the Rings has given this subsequent project an air of anticlimax. Maybe the lingering stink of Guillermo Del Toro, genre filmmaking’s most overrated non-Christopher Nolan exemplar, has dampened my enthusiasm. Maybe the advent of everything from Lost to Battlestar Galactica to A Song of Ice and Fire has diffused my ability to obsessively interest myself in another serialized work of fantastic fiction. Maybe the constant budget and legal and personnel problems and the resulting stops and starts in production have afforded me a little too much of a confidence-sapping glimpse into how the sausage gets made. Regardless, I’ve found myself bizarrely (for me, a man who has the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on his person) indifferent to Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies. But if you were Peter Jackson and you wanted to rectify that state of affairs, you could do much, much worse than releasing a production still as note-perfect as the one below and casting Evangeline Lilly as a Wood Elf, I’ll tell you that goddamn much.

* Jeet Heer scans the length and breadth of Daniel Clowes’s recent works — lots to chew on in the books, lots to chew on in the piece, though Jeet fails to tackle the critical question of whether he can identify with Wilson or not.

* Also at the Journal: Tim Kreider’s piece on Cerebus explains both why you’d want to read Dave Sim’s landmark comic and why you wouldn’t better than any I’ve read. I commented on the piece at Robot 6.

* Gary Groth on the state of the comics industry. Be sure to check the comment thread to discover that the publisher of Love and Rockets, Eightball, Peanuts, and The Acme Novelty Library has failed to live up to superhero fans’ exacting standards.

* Hans Rickheit has launched his Cochlea & Eustachia feature as a webcomic. That’s a great strip every time it appears.

* Curt Purcell on the fashion of Death Note. I’ll tell you what — I don’t remember the name of that ill-fated FBI agent from the second volume, but I sure remember her jacket.

* Sheeeeesh, this picture of a speaker stack by Paul Pope.

* I need to write this down someplace before I forget: that supercut video of the 100 Greatest Movie Threats should have included the bit from The Three Amigos where Steve Martin tells El Guapo “Let her go or I’ll fill your guts so full of lead you’ll be using your dick for a pencil” and the part from Invasion U.S.A. where Chuck Norris tells a guy “I’ll hit you with so many rights you’re gonna beg for a left.”

* The 2D material in this half-hour animated Italian-language adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is crude, yes. But the computer-rendered sequence in which the plane flies through the mountains and into the dead city beyond, starting around the 11:50 mark? Absolutely astonishing. The sense of scale is horrific, and the lighting…man, if a live-action horror film were lit this way today, we’d be celebrating in the streets. I had no idea gray could glow. (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* And from the makers of my beloved ELA, PepperMelon, comes a new short film called fIRST — four minutes of dayglo sci-fi splendor and emotional oomph.

“fIRST” – a short story by PepperMelon from PepperMelon on Vimeo.

* JK Parkin’s summary of the creative changes behind DC’s relaunch is the most comprehensive you’ll find, I think.

* Tom Spurgeon’s annual guide to the San Diego Comic-Con is probably my single favorite thing on the comics internet every year. Take a long lunchbreak and just soak in it.

* I used Dan Harmon’s big AV Club interview as a springboard for a post on why diversity in comics is fun, easy, and profitable for everyone.

* Matt Maxwell and I think superhero movies lack a certain je ne sais quoi.

* Hey, Jim Woodring’s new Frank book Congress of the Animals is out! I bet it’s good.

* Hey, Tom Neely’s new book The Wolf is on its way! I know this one’s good, from experience.

* Fun interview with Batman Incorporated artist Chris Burnham over at the Mindless Ones.

* Dustin Harbin recommends some recent releases.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates unearths a lengthy and deeply awful series of interview responses from avuncular Civil War historian Shelby Foote that will pretty much break your heart if you watched and enjoyed Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary on the subject. The comments from Cynic are worth reading in the thread below, too.

* Pleasure will always be the enemy for some.

* Recently on Robot 6, I ran down seven things we know (and don’t) about the DC relaunch, circa yesterday.

* I also rounded up some political pundit reaction to X-Men: First Class, mostly focusing on race and gender.

* Elsewhere, I did my weekly chat about Game of Thrones with newbie viewer Megan Morse.

* A new CF “art book” (Dan Nadel’s quotes, not mine) called Sediment is due out this fall, featuring “lotsa color,” which is exciting. I also like how much the cover looks like it could have come from the liner notes for Pigface’s Gub.

* Fuck, I’m gonna miss liner notes now that I’m not buying CDs anymore.

* Wow, this is really some cover for Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges #4.

* Speaking of Huizenga, today at the Comics Grid, Greice Schneider takes on one of Huizenga’s high points, “Balloon” from Kramers Ergot 7.

* Drawn & Quarterly has a strong Fall release slate on the way, with books from Daniel Clowes, Marc Bell, Anders Nilsen, Kate Beaton, and Brian Ralph that I’m looking forward to.

* The latest Michael DeForge strip up at What Things Do is “Dogs,” a forerunner to the main story from Lose #3.

* Oh look, it’s an “abandoned project” by Uno Moralez that’s better than most finished projects.

* My word, Jillian Tamaki’s illustrations of Irish myths and legends make me proud of my people. (Via Douglas Wolk.)

* I really hope I’m not too late to link you to Closed Caption Comics stalwart Mr. Noel Freibert’s “Name Your Price” art/print sale, which will help him move.

* DC’s line-wide relaunch/day-and-date digital push has dominated industry news since its announcement last week. A few links of note:

* The line will get a new flagship title in the form of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee’s Justice League. That should sell like gangbusters.

* DC’s mostly taking an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to its two most successful franchises: The creative teams behind both the Green Lantern and Batman lines stay more or less the same, though several of them trade titles.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort emerged as one of the move’s most persistent and persuasive defenders — I mean, he’s not cheerleading the thing, but he’s not lambasting it or laughing it off, and is defending it against some fans who are doing so. One caveat: He said this stuff before the creative-team announcements started rolling out.

* Some of the better reaction/analysis pieces I’ve seen: Tim Hodler, Tom Spurgeon.

* Finally, Kiel Phegley rounds up retailer reaction; any such piece that includes such divers hands as Floating World’s Jason Leivian, DCBService.com’s Cameron Merkler, and Midtown Comics’ Gerry Gladston is well worth your time.

* If you’ve been wondering how Michael DeForge manages to be so prolific, his first entry in the Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has your answer: 16-hour workdays. And if you’ve been worried, here’s how he’s been keeping busy lately.

* He’s also got a strip of his usual excellence called “Teen Wolf” up at What Things Do. It’s almost like a riff on Dave Kiersh.

* Bow before the might and majesty of Gary Groth’s interview with Joe Sacco for The Comics Journal #301.

* Dan Nadel talks about differing approaches to reprinting old comics. If you’re familiar with Dan’s approach you’ll know what side he comes down on, but he’s quite fair with and accepting of several different styles, and notes the difference between reprinting comics and reprinting comics art.

* The Comics Grid’s Esther Claudio takes a look at a page from Craig Thompson’s Good-bye, Chunky Rice; the Comics Grid’s customary high-quality close reading ensues. I’m certainly stealing the phrase mise en page.

* I used some new Spider-Man comics as an excuse to link to every single superhero comic Kate Beaton has done. I think the Kraven piece for Strange Tales 2 is the best of the bunch.

* This is one of Kevin Huizenga’s better Fight or Run strips.

* This Moebius drawing is like the Rosetta stone for Uno Moralez. Via Shit Comics, an inspiring altcomix tumblr.

* Speaking of inspiring altcomix tumblrs, I spotted this image from Panayiotis Terzis’ new book Time Tunnels at Same Hat!

* Wow, Ron Regé Jr. sure can draw cats! All of his commissions look well worth the cash, actually.

* Always glad to see new comics from my friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan.

* I fully support Jillian Crowther’s concept of “pinball music”: shiny, slightly overcooked rock pop circa 1979-1981, a la “Ah! Leah.” It reminds me of my own personal place-based subgenres, centered on my memories of the defunct Long Island roller rink Laces (freestyle, electro) and the heterosexual side of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach (Steve Perry, things that sound like “Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga, which of course would also work on the gay side of Rehoboth Beach).

* George R.R. Martin certainly keeps busy. I can’t imagine his detractors will be super happy about the order of items on his to-do list.

* I’m extremely happy my “Happiness Is a Focused Totality of My Psychic Powers” gag made it into the latest Marvel Super Heroes What The–?! video, featuring Professor X and Magneto’s madcap ’60s adventures.

* This supercut of the 100 Greatest Movie Threats is hilarious, not gonna lie to you. Still, I’m disappointed it doesn’t include “Let her go, or I’ll fill your guts so full of lead you’ll be using your dick for a pencil” from The Three Amigos or the bit from Casino where Nicky Santoro explains to the banker what it is he does. (Via Ed Gonzalez.)

* The rumors (which weren’t so much rumors as they were lots of people knowing exactly what was going to happen and talking about it privately but not being able to say so publicly just yet) are true: DC is scrapping, re-numbering, and relaunching its entire superhero line, launching fully 50 different #1 issues in September. What’s more, the entire line will go day-and-date digital, with digital versions of the books going on sale the same day as their print counterparts. Much more on this anon.

* The two Hobbit movies, subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again, will be released in December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013 respectively. See you there opening night.

* Ed Brubaker on superheroes, violence, and closure — one of the most interesting things I’ve read about superhero comics in a long time, from Tom Spurgeon’s very interesting interview with the writer.

* Bruce Baugh on John Carpenter’s The Thing:

Third, there’s a useful lesson in plotting in this story. You absolutely don’t have to nail down everything for it to feel like a tight, connected whole if you give the audience—or players—enough solid points for them to stand on while speculating about the rest. In the case of the Thing’s subversion of the various station members, we can tell with great confidence when some happened, and even get to see some right on screen. Others we can only wonder about. And that’s fine. Players often like to chew over the unresolved questions, if it doesn’t all just feel like an exercise in futility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this sort of thing, about questions left unanswered by various genre fictions, and how sometimes those un-answers remain a huge part of the work’s appeal years later while other times they’re the reason we rarely return to it, all in the context of how Twin Peaks seems to be a case of the former while it’s still unknown what side Lost will eventually fall on. I think it has to do with…I guess I’d call it a matter of “full absences” versus “empty absences”? You want a given absence of information to feel like it’s full of information that for whatever reason you can’t see, rather than just a gaping hole where information should be, but I’m not sure if I can nail down what the difference would be other than “I know it when I (don’t) see it.” I need to hash that out some more.

* This is exactly why I keep Corey Blake in my RSS reader: Here he’s collected links to all of my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” columns, which offer advice to newcomers on where to begin with the work of the great cartoonists.

* I wish there were an apostrophe after the author’s last name–that would make the title of Michael Kupperman’s next book even funnier.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in fine form today. First he coined the phrase “the fiscally fantastic” to describe fiction about the extravagantly carefree wealthy. My wife and I were talking about this just this past weekend, in reference to how Frasier, despite being more consistent over the course of its however-many seasons than its predecessor Cheers and the similarly ubiquitous-in-syndication sitcom Roseanne, really doesn’t hold a candle to either one. In the end, stories about Roseanne‘s nuclear family of working poor and Cheers‘ adopted family of three-time losers feel more inherently…I dunno, worth telling than the travails of the Brothers Crane as they try to balance failed romances with getting time on the squash court, drinking aged scotch and fine wines, and snagging season tickets for Seattle’s most expensive cultural attractions. I know I’ve also gotten kind of tired of movies about billionaire vigilantes and rich young beautiful urban professionals who learn something about life and laughs and love.

* Then there’s this piece on why male readers should read women writers. Basically, Rooney Ruling yourself to account for gender opens you up to the output of over half of the human population, which can only redound to your benefit compared to sticking just to the Y-chromosome set:

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

I think it’s worth murdering your inner sexist pig, but yes. One thing that the “eat your vegetables” metaphor for doing less-than-immediately-easy things undervalues is that when you eat your vegetables it’s not that the only benefit is that you’ve satisfied your mom and dad, you’re also getting vital nutrients necessary to stay alive. Plus, broccoli is delicious. You know?

* It’s been great to see Brian Hibbs, Graeme McMillan, and Jeff Lester — the Big Three of the fractured Justice League that is The Savage Critic(s) — return to regular capsule-review writing. You should go and browse through the past several weeks of entries, but for now let me direct you to Jeff’s most recent contribution, which contains this beautiful bit of writing on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy:

By [the ’50s], it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid’s world where nothing can be dismissed.

Ooftah, that last bit is good.

* Though I think Nitsuh Abebe is being too hard on Lady Gaga, who’s a better pop star than we deserve, and that he ultimately stops short of where he could have gone with his argument that provocation and “being yourself” are value-neutral concepts — that’s as may be, but surely we could look at the actual form these things have taken with, say, Odd Future and Lady Gaga and evaluate their respective value, no? — the rest of his column on the message of Born This Way is so stuffed with great ideas, expertly delivered, that I hardly know where to begin excerpting it. But here’s a start: “Aren’t ‘be yourself’ and ‘be what you want to be’ totally different instructions?” That’s an underexplored aspect of Gaga’s persona. “Born This Way” — what if you weren’t? Her embrace of artifice is so complete that it’s odd to think of how she’s simultaneously arguing for the primacy of personal authenticity.

* Some sweet, He-Man-cartoon-reffing fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit by Marc Palm.

* This looks like sketches for a new Uno Moralez comic.

* Always good to see a new Ben Katchor strip.