* 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.

* Is Green Lantern the psychedelic superhero movie we’ve been waiting for?

* Dave McKean’s new sex comic Celluloid looks lovely,

* I thought this was kind of neat: There are so many Marvel writers located in Portland that for the company’s latest creative summit, the New York-based editorial staff flew there instead of the other way around.

* Here’s an excellent critique of Chester Brown’s Paying For It by Douglas Wolk that echoes many of the thoughts and complaints I had about it. Douglas is harder than I am on Brown’s cartooning here, though, which is as beautiful as ever.

* Buy some Zach Hazard Vaupen originals and prints and comics and help him pay his rent!

* TJ Dietsch on Grant Morrison’s JLA and its lessons for superhero team books:

Morrison didn’t put the team together by having our heroes looking at pictures and weighing their options or all meeting up by happenstance and deciding to join forces, THEY WERE JUST THERE! I’d like those potential super hero team writers to take note of this too. We don’t need to see how the team is put together. It’s boring. Just put them together and if questions arise (or better yet, if mysteries abound) answer them as you go. I don’t want to see how next season’s Steelers come together, I want to see them play football!

* Trent Reznor and Karen O. covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”? Oh, indeed. Actually, who cares about Karen O., it’s Trent Reznor covering Led Zeppelin, a prospect that would thrill me equally at any time between now and about 1992.

* Missed it somehow, but Dan Nadel catches that Fantagraphics is publishing some Guy Peellaert graphic novels. Peellaert is best known (to me anyway) as the guy who painted the cover for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.

* Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley dig into the series finale of Smallville. I watched the last 20 minutes or so, making that the first 20 minutes of Smallville I ever watched; Darkseid possessed John Glover and was killed by a montage, and the part of 10 years of audience expectations vis a vis Tom Welling in a Superman suit was played by a tiny CGI man in the sky.

* Real Life Horror: Jared Loughner, the man who killed six and injured 12 during an attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was found legally insane. I wanted to point that out since the day it happened I jumped to the conclusion that the shooting was politically motivated, and I was wrong.

* Bruce Baugh on Victor Frankenstein and genius youth.

* The San Diego Comic Con International gets its first comics-centric counterprogramming slate in the form of Tr!ckster, a mini-con centered on indy guys like Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and Scott Morse. Now we need an artcomix show and we’re all set.

* Over at Robot 6, I talked a bit about Tom Brevoort talking a bit about how Marvel’s Avengers movies and Marvel’s Avengers comics help each other out versus the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises.

* Dan Nadel rounds up recent reviews of Yuichi Yokoyama’s excellent Garden, including efforts by ADDXSTC faves Chris Mautner and Douglas Wolk.

* Curt Purcell on religion in A Song of Ice and Fire and Battlestar Galactica. This is spoilery as hell for both series, but if you’re all caught up with them, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to read this. Very astute comparisons.

* When Josh Simmons draws things like this you know they can’t be headed anywhere good.

* Another day, another wondrous Uno Moralez image/gif dump.

* I can’t post an image without ruining the gag, but Axe Cop gets better and better.

* Aeron Alfrey has been spotlighting some real treasures at Monster Brains lately, from some ornate skeletal creatures by Pedro Izique to multiple He-Man and the Masters of the Universe galleries, about which I wrote a bit for Robot 6.

* Finally, this picture of January Jones as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class is truly a joy.

* Murderers’ Row, from left to right: Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, John Porcellino, Peter Birkemoe, Chris Butcher, Chris Oliveros, and Dan Nadel. That’s five of comics’ best cartoonists, two of its best retailers, two of its best publishers, and two of its best convention organizers (there’s some overlap). This photo comes courtesy of the equally magisterial Tom Devlin’s TCAF photo parade, which along with Robin McConnell’s is one of my favorites so far. Meanwhile, Secret Acres’ Barry & Leon and cartoonist Tom Neely contribute fine prose reports. I’ll tell you what: For me, this is the year that TCAF went from “that sounds really nice for people who live in Canada, but I’m all set with MoCCA and BCGF and SPX down here” to “road trip!”

* Every silver cloud has a dark lining, however, and in this case that’s the seizure by customs officials of the Ryan Standfest-edited black-humor anthology Black Eye and Blaise Larmee’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Young Lions, neither of which is smut.

* Hooray: Jordan Crane’s webcomics emporium What Things Do is revving up again, starting with Kevin Huizenga’s Kramers Ergot 7 contribution “Balloon”. I remember flipping through the printout of the book that Alvin Buenaventura brought to SPX that year and marveling at the colors in this one, mouth agape.

* This actually made me say “whoa”: Flashpoint #5, the final issue of DC’s big summer event comic this year, will be the only comic DC will release the week of August 31. That’s an unusual and gutsy strategy — it has an antecedent in that issue of Blackest Night that DC shipped early with instructions to retailers to sell it during Diamond’s skip week between Christmas and New Year’s in 2009, but this time it’s DC that’s making August 31 a skip week, not the distributor.

* Meanwhile, the cover for the fourth issue makes me think that perhaps making Wonder Woman and Aquaman the villains of an event comic is the best way to get these two iconic but historically underserved characters over with audiences right now.

* Joyce Farmer’s run in The Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has been fascinating. Here’s a post on her career as the owner of a bail bond agency; here’s one on her abortion.

* The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual uses Richard McGuire to make an important point, which is that aesthetic coldness does not equal emotional coldness.

* A list of everyone who’s been in Ryan Sands’s zines. As a fan of impressive lists, I am impressed by this list. Speaking of which, you can buy his and Michael DeForge’s smut anthology Thickness #1 now, and get psyched for the just-announced Brandon Graham/Lisa Hanawalt-led line-up for issue #2.

* Everything you need to know about Uno Moralez’s aesthetic project, you can learn from the massive jpeg and animated gif dump he just posted.

* New York sports cartoonist Bill Gallo has died. I do not watch sports, but any time I’d come across one of his comics in the Daily News I’d just sit and appreciate the fact that he filled such a niche with such evocative and comforting cartooning.

* WAT

* Finally, you Game of Thrones folks, including the ones who’ve only just seen the show, oughta get a lot out of this gorgeous infographic guide to character relationships by HauteSlides. Click the link to see it at its full, elegant size.

* This is the first year since the festival’s inception that I was unable to attend MoCCA. How was it? The first report I came across was from Secret Acres’ Leon Avelino, and it jibes with the overall impression I’ve gotten on Twitter and the like of a successful show, moreso perhaps than its previous two years in the Armory location.

* Nick Bertozzi debuted Rubber Necker #5 at the show! OMG I can’t wait

* Two of my favorite critics have reviewed Chester Brown’s Paying For It. Here’s Chris Mautner; here’s Tom Spurgeon. And here’s my review, if you missed it.

* Must-read of the week: The Comics Reporter’s Bart Beaty on the death of L’Association, arguably France’s best comics publisher. L’Asso is a bit like if Image Comics were founded not by a bunch of hot Marvel artists, but by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, Chester Brown, and Los Bros, and its acrimonious break-up and potential downfall is therefore that much more fascinating and train-wreck compelling.

* I quite enjoyed this 25-minute making-of documentary on Game of Thrones. I dare say it was mostly stuff even I hadn’t seen yet, and I’ve watched a whole lot of these preview video things. The Eyrie is stunning.

* I think the latest GoT trailer, titled “Poison,” is my favorite so far. It plays up the mystery angle, which I think will be important to a lot of newcomers’ understanding of what it is that they’re watching.

* This New Yorker profile of author George R.R. Martin is well worth signing up for the free four-issue digital-edition subscription to read. It has an especial focus on Martin’s anti-fandom, the people who’ve loved all or most of the books released so far but now hate Martin for taking so long to produce the remaining installments. The depth and dedication of this anti-fandom is far, far greater than I ever imagined, and reading about them is fascinating, in a “What hath Internet wrought” sort of way. (Via Westeros.)

* Hope Larson basically got her gig adapting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time into a comic by saying “I wouldn’t mind adapting A Wrinkle in Time” in an interview the book’s publisher read. Love it.

* This is pretty neat: Gollum actor Andy Serkis will be the second unit director for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

* The extremely talented cartoonist Dustin Harbin is ending his diary comic. I still owe him a review of the collection that came out through Koyama Press. In the meantime, I’ll be staring at this drawing he did.

* ComicsAlliance has posted a series of interviews with the folks who run the production of those Marvel Super Heroes: What The–?! videos for which I am a contributing writer. Here’s Alex Kropinak, here’s Jesse Falcon, and here’s Ben Morse.

* Michael Shannon is General Zod. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and Frank Miller’s The Spirit, making me sadder than ever that I haven’t seen either one yet.

* Related: Frequent ADDXSTC commenter rev’D really didn’t like Sucker Punch.

* Jason (yes, Hey, Wait… Jason) reviews Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale.

* Here’s an enormously uplifting look at the surprisingly, faith-in-humanity-inspiringly progressive treatment of race in Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie by Jeet Heer.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones takes a look at Frank Miller’s rewardingly off-model, possibly Bowie-inspired Joker in The Dark Knight Returns. It’s really tough to have the DKR Joker as your first in-comics exposure to the character, because it really is so different from how he’s portrayed pretty much anywhere else — he barely speaks, and smiles twice — yet so effective for all that. I think part of why the “evil homosexual” subtext (if anything in a Miller comic could be called subtext) of the character has never bothered me the way it otherwise might is because he’s not portrayed as a figure of giggling, creepy revulsion, but as this sort of godlike, implacable killing machine. There’s a feminized elegance to him, but it’s the elegance of Pinhead.

* Rob Clough reviews the intriguing-looking international comics anthology Gazeta.

* Tom Brevoort on Jim Shooter.

* Alt Screen lists all of New York City’s special film screenings — revivals, previews, festivals, repertory, special appearances, and so on. Very cool resource. (Via Chris Weingarten.)

* Dave Kiersh’s latest comic is partially about my current place of residence, Levittown, NY.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan will kill himself if he doesn’t finish this comic that’s “kinda about suicide” within one year. Draw, Isaac, draw!

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force webcomic drops episodes like this on you without warning every once in a while.

* Jonny Negron draws David Bowie. And draws him well.

* Another rollicking Fight or Run battle from Kevin Huizenga. I’d have run, too.

* Michael DeForge’s abandoned comics are better than most people’s not-abandoned comics.

* Finally, my God, Frank Quitely draws He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Look at the way this thing bristles. It’s all swords and spears and blades. He gets it.

* Tom Neely thinks the curator of the 100 Euros art show, Antonio de Luca, may have stolen his artwork. Beware.

* Ed Brubaker is relaunching his excellent Captain America series as a period piece called Captain America and Bucky, focusing mainly on the latter, co-written by Marc Andreyko, illustrated by Chris Samnee. I’ll be there like I’ve been there for everything Brubaker has done with these characters and their milieu.

* Dan Nadel sings the praises of Ben Jones and his new Cartoon Network show Problem Solverz. Did anyone do better than me and remember to set their DVRs for it last night?

* Zach Hazard Vaupen started a webcomic called Rusted Skin Collection! It’s smutty and funny!

* My movie-going days are dunzo, but I must say that this comment by Jon Hastings (aka the Forager) and this review by Oscar Moralde have me reconsidering my ambivalence toward seeking out Sucker Punch. Sayeth Moralde: “This critical paroxysm against Sucker Punch is quite possibly the most colossal collective misreading of satire since Paul Verhoeven was accused of being a fascist for Starship Troopers.” Now that’s the kind of statement that’ll make me sit up and take notice. Equal time: Curt Purcell.

* Speaking of “Hmm, I guess I better check that out” pieces, Eve Tushnet loved Lake Mungo.

* And speaking of Curt Purcell, he continues to write eloquently about any number of things; here he is on one of the key aspects of Lost‘s final season.

* Another day, another terrific Comics Grid piece, this time Jacques Samson on anonymity, facelessness, and the “perfect progressive tense” of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #18. You really ought to be following this site.

* Tim O’Shea talks to Jess Fink about (mostly) her fun porn comic Chester 5000 XYV.

* Tom Spurgeon visited the Center for Cartoon Studies, and all you got was this in-depth report.

* Matt Seneca has launched a dedicated site for his comics. Check ’em out.

* Dustin Nguyen draws Spider-Man and his amazing rogues gallery. I love drawings like this, where an artist with a certain aesthetic basically creates a “set” of characters from a particular property. If I could draw, I’d draw shit like this all the time. (Via Agent M.)

* Uno Moralez is drawing things just for me at this point, I’m pretty sure.

* This is what the new version of Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne looks like. Wow. The artist is Owen Gieni.

* It’s cool to see Gary Panter incorporating the influence of people he influenced.

* Check out lots of Strange Tales II process art at ComicsAlliance.

* This slow, vocoded George Michael cover version of “True Faith” by New Order is one of the stranger things I’ve heard in a long time. That is not to say I don’t like it, though. Certainly the combination of lyric and artist is enormously apt in this case. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Music critics really, really need to stop treating unusual versions of a certain genre as rebuttals to that genre. That goes for critics on both the pro and con side of any given debate, by the way. First of all, genres are built to be broad, or else you’re not talking about genre, you’re talking about formula. Second, when you definitionally remove unusual instances of genre from genre, you’re hamstringing that genre; rock, for example, would be Chuck Berry and Elvis to this day. Third, I just think it makes no more sense to hold up (say) James Blake as someone out to do (say) R&B or soul or dubstep “right,” whether you’re for such an attempt or against, than it would to say Scott Pilgrim was Bryan Lee O’Malley trying to do shojo manga or videogames “right.” Influences may be incorporated without becoming a commentary, positive or negative, on those influences.

* I started a tumblr dedicated to (SPOILERY) thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, in case you missed it.

* I reviewed Thomas Ott’s best-of collection R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004 for The Comics Journal. I didn’t care for it.

* Over at Robot 6, I wrote about site stats for Wizard’s digital magazine.

* You’ve only got a couple more days to take advantage of an awesome sale on Lane Milburn comics. Go!

* Tom Tomorrow is Daily Kos’s new Comics Editor. Lots of intriguing possibilities there.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Chris Mautner wrote a terrific introduction to the work of Frank Miller, listing the books to read first, the ones to read next, and the ones to avoid. I don’t agree with him on all of it, but it’s a cogent and at times passionately argued piece.

* Groovy Age of Horror indeed: Curt Purcell reviews Gossip Girl! Sometimes I think I have too much influence. Anyway, Curt brings his usual eye for unusual, revealing detail and his attention to structure and expectation to the proceedings.

* Curt’s also up to A Clash of Kings in A Song of Ice and Fire.

* Michael DeForge has been posting remarkable material on the daily lately. Here’s a few pages from a graphic novel he actually destroyed rather than finish and publish.

* Geoff Johns is writing an Aquaman series. Hooray!

* I’m saving this for when I have more time and energy, but Sean Belcher reviews Dragon Age II at length. I really have no idea what Dragon Age is, other than a thing a lot of people get excited about when it comes out, but I link to this anyway because the mere existence of this sort of writing seems to put paid to the notion that video games can’t be art. (Cf. this idiocy.)

* Buy more stuff from Tom Neely!

* Reach for it! J.H. Williams III channels funk for a Static Shock cover. Wouldn’t it be rad if more superhero artists did things you hadn’t seen before with color?

* Wow, this is a great Seth Fisher piece. Thanks, Corey Blake.

* Fresh from his triumphant run of drawing sexy women, Tom Kaczynski is now drawing ’80s action figures. It’s like he’s reading my mind.

* Robert Goodin covers Johnny Ryan. Indeed.

* Anders Nilsen reveals the cover for the collected Big Questions…

* …and Anders Nilsen draws some covers for Richard Brautigan books.

* Really digging these promotional images for Strangeways‘ new online iteration.

* Well played, Iron Man 2.0.

* This Axe Cop kicker made me laugh and laugh.

* Uno Moralez, man. Uno Moralez. (Wait for it.)

* Sucker Punch as camp is one of the few reads of that film that could persuade me to see it. Nothing against Zack Snyder — until now he’s made three films, all of which I enjoyed, two of which I enjoyed immensely — but it occurred to me that lo and behold, I really don’t have any interest in schoolgirls fighting robot samurai. The fanservice failed to service me, in essence.

* Hey, congratulations to my old boss and friend Brian Cunningham on taking over the editorial reins for the Green Lantern line, DC’s biggest franchise.

* LOL: The Xorn retcon happened Grant Morrison didn’t write Magneto well enough. Well, they certainly showed him!

* It’s quite telling, but also strangely depressing given that he’s the person who introduced me to the phrase “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” that Andrew Sullivan believes he must formulate and articulate a position on literally every issue of import. That’s simply crazy. You’re not an expert on everything; you’ll be outright stupid on some things. So I learned to my eternal regret.

* Real Life Horror: This chart is hilariously awful, just on a “something is obviously wrong with this picture” level.

* Real Life Horror 2: War oughta be fun! People really think this way about the enterprise of killing large numbers of people to achieve a political goal, and feel no shame about saying so. Fuck those people.

* On the other hand, I do enjoy the Captain America trailer. Rob Bricken is right: The emphasis it places on Steve Rogers having been a bullied weakling until very recently reveals an element of the character too often forgotten. (I find Ultimate Captain America all but unreadable any time I come across him now for that very reason.)

* Another Game of Thrones trailer? Don’t mind as I do.

* Finally, George R.R. Martin has finished two more chapters in A Dance with Dragons. He says the end is truly nigh.

* The interview with Phoebe Gloeckner about her Juárez project to which I link in this Robot 6 post is the must-read of the year. Great cartoonists like Chris Ware and Joe Sacco and Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez are cutting closer and closer to the bone lately; this great cartoonist is already sawing through. Her next project will be a multimedia ebook for tablets, it seems. Christ, I can’t wait.

* Here’s some information on how you can help fund the next projects for Hans Rickheit (who recently lost his job) and Tom Neely, two of my favorite cartoonists.

* Whoa, Achewood is going on indefinite hiatus.

* Grant Morrison and (mostly) Yanick Paquette’s Batman Incorporated will likely face further delays, but it’s almost okay now that DC has signed Chris Burnham to an exclusive contract so he can draw more of it.

* There have been so very, very, very, very, very many bits of new news on Game of Thrones I hardly know where to begin. But I can tell you that none of them were more eagerly anticipated by me than Curt Purcell’s post-read review of A Game of Thrones. In all seriousness, every time I opened Google Reader during my little baby-hiatus, his was the first feed I checked for, just to see if this post had gone up yet. Worth the wait; I’ll have more to say about it at some point, I should think.

* Meanwhile I started my own A Song of Ice and Fire blog STRICTLY FOR PEOPLE WHO’VE READ ALL FOUR BOOKS, I.E. SPOILERS AHOY.

* And HBO has just been pumping out the promotional video featurettes. Of late they’ve rolled out an entire series, each focusing on one House or one character. Check out the HBO GoT YouTube channel for most if not all of them: Stark, Baratheon, Lannister, Targaryen, Ned, Catelyn, Bran, Sansa, Arya, Robb, Jon, Jamie, Cersei, Tyrion, Danaerys, Drogo, and Robert are all out there somewhere iirc, if not more besides.

* Brian Ralph drew a brand-new epilogue for the collected edition of his first-person zombie comic Daybreak. Could be a pip, could be a pip.

* Kevin Huizenga says that Or Else #2, his best comic and I think potentially the best single issue of any comic ever pound for pound, is soon to be reprinted. (Either that and/or Supermonster #14, of which OE2 was a remake, will be.)

* Speaking of Huizenga, here are some very pretty Fight or Run images.

* Hooray: My pal Matt Maxwell is relaunching his quite good Weird Western comic Strangeways as a webcomic. He’s posting both of the completed Strangeways graphic novels first, so check ’em out.

* Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul’s lovely and underrated Flash series is ending, or I suppose I should say “ending.” This is a book that featured a gigantic mirror the Rogues found labeled “IN CASE THE FLASH COMES BACK, BREAK GLASS” or something like that.

* The Comics Grid continues to be very good, lately on the work of Daniel Clowes: cf. Tony Venezia on architecture and environment in Ghost World and Greice Schneider on the use of the visual vocabularies of different modes of comics in David Boring.

* I’m with Ben Morse: The recent match-up between Iron Man and Doctor Octopus courtesy of Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s Invincible Iron Man has been fun so far. I’m almost positive I’m cribbing this insight from Tom Spurgeon, but the unexpected hero-villain match-up is a lot harder to pull off than it used to be. I was flipping through The Essential Thor phonebook, and there’s this truly awesome battle between Thor and Magneto. Unlike today, where such a fight would consist of giant two-page spreads of Thor causing electrical storms and Magneto hitting Thor with magnetic fields big enough to level skyscrapers with no discernible effect to any given stage of combat, this was as close to a fistfight as a God of Thunder could have with a Mutant Master of Magnetism. Neither combatant really knew the extent of his opponent’s powers, so their moves were intimate and all business; the one I remember most vividly was Magneto sealing Thor in a room apart from his hammer (so he reverted to his human form as Donald Blake), then using his powers to firing metal rivets out of the wall in hopes of shooting him to death. Nowadays, nearly all the Marvel Universe characters have met each other so many times that their every meeting has the feel of a high school reunion. But back then, there really was an air of the unpredictable about such confrontations: The readers truly had no way of knowing who might come out on top. Visit Tom Brevoort’s Formspring account sometime to see how much the accumulation of “statistics” from various encounters by battle-board users has sucked the fun out of these things.

* Over at the Nu-Journal, Matt Seneca offers an intriguing but to my mind not entirely convincing take on Brecht Evens’s gorgeous Night Animals, labeling it a sex comic that kind of fails to perform. I’d say that the ending of that second story—”brusque,” as Matt puts it—is a statement of its own, not a cop-out, albeit not a sex-positive statement and therefore one apt to engender a bit of head-scratching in the subculture that is the book’s natural audience.

* Saving this for when I have time to read both the book and the review: Beth Hewitt reviews Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark for The Panelists.

* Another day, another wonderfully unpleasant comic from Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, here’s a preview of Johnny Negron’s contribution to DeForge and Ryan Sands’s porno anthology Thickness.

* And speaking of wonderfully unpleasant, I actually have a hard time reading Lisa Hanawalt’s “Extra Egg Room.” Keee-rist.

* Eleanor Davis is working on a YA comic about medieval Uzbekistan with her mom. In other news, Eleanor Davis can fucking draw. (Via Tom Spurgeon, I think.)

* Dave Kiersh presents three whole chapters of his next book, Afterschool Special.

* Hooray, weekly (I think) comics from Michael Kupperman!

* Love this Jeffrey Brown Incredible Change-Bots piece. Click for a link to the full-sized thing.

* Benjamin Marra draws the Savage Dragon. YES. Click for the full size thing.

* Please keep drawing those sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* Jason (yes, that Jason) draws Tin Machine.

* It’s great to see Frank Santoro draw ol’ Senator Wastmor again.

* Renee French runs the gamut.

* David Slade is directing the new Daredevil movie; Darren Aronofsky is not directing the new Wolverine movie.

* Hahahaha, the Red Dawn remake is digitally replacing all the China stuff it already shot with North Korea stuff to avoid screwing up its international box office? Hahahahaha! WOLVERINES! hahahahahaha

* The doofus who started a fake twitter account under the name of Powr Mastrs artist C.F. doesn’t think there was any harm done–this explains why throughout all of human history people have been so thrilled to discover that other people were going around impersonating them–while Chris Ware’s The ACME Novelty Library #20 has failed to live up to Jason Overby’s exacting standards. Hopefully you’ll get there some day, Chris! (That said, the Comets Comets redesign is gorgeous.)

* Tim Hodler asks: Who did Tarantino really crib the Superman/Clark Kent Kill Bill speech from?

* Congratulations to my old boss and friend Pat McCallum on his new gig as an editor at DC.

* Finally, thank you, everyone. It has meant so much.

* I want to thank everyone for all your kind words and warm wishes about the Missus and baby Helena. They have meant a great deal to us over the past few days. They also give me a great excuse to run this piece of Destructor/Helena fanart by Isaac Moylan.

* Two new Game of Thrones videos: One’s a new trailer that sets up the basics and show some skin, the other a featurette on House Stark.

* They did a really nice job with the official Game of Thrones poster. click to see it at its full huge size.

* Looks like GRRM managed to add hisself an extra chapter to the still-unfinished A Dance with Dragons. Slowly he turned, step by step, inch by inch…

* Curt Purcell has finished watching Lost. What did he think? The ANSWERS await you!!!! Seriously, Curt has maybe the sharpest take yet on why what didn’t work didn’t work.

* I just like reading Tom Brevoort talking about how comics are made.

* Nice little piece on the infant section of ACME Novelty Library #20 by The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual.

* This is a fine suite of nominees for the Stumptown comic con’s awards program, with what seems to my eyes like a unique and considered emphasis on illustrative chops.

* Speaking of awards, I found myself quite happy to see that Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream won About.com’s Readers’ Choice Award, just because I’m happy to see Hagio’s book win anything anyone cares to award it, but also because a “readers’ choice award” indicates that it’s clicking with more people than just dudes on the internet who don’t read a lot of shojo with which to compare it, like me.

* Bookmarking this for a likely imaginary future in which I have enough free time to read it: The Mindless Ones annotate Batman Inc. #3, an unusually dense issue in terms of annotable things, even by Grant Morrison Batman standards.

* Over at the Nu-Comics Journal, Matt Seneca reviews the revised/expanded edition of C.F.’s City-Hunter Magazine #1.

* I’ll take a new full-color Ben Katchor comic strip, sure.

* Benjamin Marra needs to keep on doing pin-ups for people’s pulp comics.

* Tom Kaczynski needs to keep sketching sessy ladies.

* I really like this Shining piece by Matt Rota.

* “Involuntary Collaborations: I buy other people’s landscape paintings at yard sales and Goodwill and put monsters in them.” (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* Jacob’s Ladder is one of those films that I saw for a class in college, liked a great deal, but then never watched again for some reason. I feel like I should.

* Prepare to flash back to your childhood like whoa: Rue Morgue takes a look at the Crestwood House series of books about classic horror movies. I’ll never ever forget those orange hardcovers.

* What, are you dense? Are you from Harvard or something? What the hell do you think I am? I’m a goddamn Yalie.

* Now that the newsy element of the new Comics Journal website has receded into the background a bit, I’m better able to appreciate the actual content. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into Bob Levin’s report on the civil war between members of Frank Frazetta’s family, or Patrick Rosenkranz’s piece on the history of autobio comics. I’m also really thrilled that Tucker Stone is writing reviews for them, too — if you only know him for his “Comics of the Weak” smackdowns, this is a whole new side to discover, and a great look. And back on the newsy tip, Tim Hodler has a morning-after piece on the relaunch and reactions thereto.

* One of the cooler things I discovered via those reactions was Graphic Ladies, a Tumblr by Erin Polgreen that collates and collects links to comics and comics criticism by women. There are only a few days’ worth of entries up at the moment, but so far it’s got excellent taste — it’s not just throwing in anything done by people with the right set of genitals, if you were worried about that sort of thing. (And if you’ve spent any time in any kind of parameter-based publishing ecosystem — the horror Internet, anyone? — you know how important it is to apply standards on top of meeting your basic coverage criteria.) A great idea with great execution so far.

* And via Graphic Ladies I discovered a rock-solid-looking group blog called The Comics Grid, featuring mostly European mostly academic critics writing short, sweet pieces on good books. (I recognize the name of contributor Ernesto Priego.) Right now I’ve got posts on The Wrong Place, The ACME Novelty Library, Footnotes in Gaza, and Maus cued up.

* I was pleased to read that the wildly overrated ex-Hobbit director Guillermo Del Toro has left yet another fantastic-fiction adaptation dear to my heart, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

* Speaking of The Hobbit, Sam Bosma’s Hobbit illustrations are gorgeous.

* Andy Khouri put together some killer cool-image galleries for Comics Alliance and Moviefone lately. The latter is all Tyler Stout movie posters, while the former includes such wonders as by-god Gilbert Hernandez drawing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

* I’m really impressed by this Monster Brains gallery of A. Paul Weber illustrations. Yeesh.

* Behold the new Game of Thrones paperback edition!

* Speaking of GoT, it’s a pleasure as always to follow Curt Purcell as he makes his way through a well-done work of genre fiction.

* Real Life Horror: It’s always worth reminding ourselves what an immoral, dangerous, genuinely bad person my Representative, Republican Peter King, really is.

* The Comics Journal has relaunched its website under the auspices of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler. They run down its major features and contributors in this welcome letter. They say bid adieu to their old hangout, Comics Comics, in this farewell note. They speak about the changeover and their plans at length in this Tom Spurgeon interview. Spurgeon bids adieu to the old TCJ.com’s genuinely evil message board in this Comics Reporter post.

* I write at some length about the Journal’s past, present, and future in this Robot 6 post. I make my first contribution to the new site in this review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise. And I will be a regular contributor via my soon-to-launch interview column, Say Hello.

* Phew! I’m very excited about all of this. PS: I recommend tapping into the Journal’s soon-to-be-online-in-their-entirety archives with this Gary Groth interview with the great Phoebe Gloeckner, one of my all-time artistic heroes and one of the all-time great cartoonists.

* Artist Guy Davis is leaving B.P.R.D., one of the very very very best superhero(ish) comics of the past ten years thanks in large part to his contributions. Click the link for my take on Davis’s work on the title. What he and main writer John Arcudi and co-plotter/overseer Mike Mignola did on that book is a genuine achievement. And this is one of my all-time favorite comics pages.

* The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition is coming out in a Blu-Ray box set at last. It contains all three extended-edition films, all the bonus materials from the Extended Edition DVDs, and those weird behind-the-scenes docs from the Limited Edition releases. I don’t think it includes the theatrical editions, but that’s fine. I already preordered it.

* Jay Babcock is discontinuing Arthur magazine’s online incarnation. Even after the print version was shuttered, it continued to be an underrated source of good comics. Best of luck to Mr. Babcock.

* Carol Tyler on her series of memoirs You’ll Never Know and “the legacy of war.”

* Tom Cruise really is starring in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. I still think that this works remarkably well.

* Writer Nick Spencer is now Marvel exclusive, though his creator-owned Morning Glories will continue at Image and, remarkably, his T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents revival will continue at DC. That’s a big get for Marvel.

* The very good cartoonist Tom Kaczynski has launched a blog for his publishing imprint Uncivilized Books. Also, his comic in Mome Vol. 21 looks sick, and he drew a sexy woman.

* This is a beautiful spread from Amazing Spider-Man #655 by artist Marcos Martin (and writer Dan Slott). It also basically crushes any given similar image or sequence of images in Inception, by the by. (Via Agent M.)

* Topless Robot’s Chris Cummins lists the 20 Greatest Liquid Television Segments. Man, what a marvel that show was. I so vividly remember feeling like I was watching something genuinely strange and genuinely adult. I still remember the “Cut-Up Camera” and “Dog Boy” theme music, and those silent Aeon Flux shorts crush the property’s later iterations.

* For some reason I really like this very simple poster for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. (Via Agent M.)

* Michael DeForge remains very talented.

* Kevin Huizenga revisits the ongoing debate over the existence of Hell, the topic of one of his (or anybody’s) best comics, “Jeepers Jacobs.”

* Real Life Horror: Every day, the Obama Administration’s military agents force non-violent, non-suicide-risk Army whistleblower Bradley Manning to sleep and stand for inspection fully naked during his solitary confinement on charges for which he has yet to be convicted and for which he is eligible for the death penalty.

* Finally, sink your teeth into this meaty Tom Spurgeon interview with Renée French. It’s fascinating to see an artist of French’s caliber talk so frankly, and yet without hyperbole or self-pity, about her artistic struggles. Also, I really love the declaration “Fuck narrative.”

* Hip hip hooray, the latest Game of Thrones trailer is now available in hi-res! I really don’t know why you’d land an exclusive trailer and then not post it properly, but what do I know. Unsurprisingly the thing is a lot more impressive when you can actually see it clearly.

* Related: I started re-reading A Game of Thrones yesterday–before the news about A Dance with Dragons hit, no less!–and I’ve now had to put the book down twice in the first few chapters because I was literally too excited by everything to come in this volume and all the subsequent ones to concentrate properly on the page at hand.

* Ron Moore, Michael Rymer, Jamie Bamber, and now James Callis — whose Gaius Baltar was one of my favorite television performances of all time — are all part of the big Battlestar Galactica reunion that Moore’s new supernatural-cop show 17th Precinct is turning into.

* Here’s a typically thoughtful Tom Brevoort Q&A at Comic Book Resources, tackling issues of pricing, title cancellations, submissions and talent recruitment, the status of the X-Men/mutant franchise, character gluts, continuity glitches and more — the difference this time around being that the questions are from one selected message-board user. It’s interesting to see how these issues are approached, and what about them is prioritized, by someone with the perspective of pure fandom.

* Now that’s a good idea for a listicle: Steve Erickson presents the Top 10 Artsploitation Films. Worth the price of admission for the Fat Girl screencap alone. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I first discovered the art of Johnny Negron via Ryan Sands a few weeks ago and had been waiting for the right image to come along to send you his way as well. This was the one.

* Real Life Horror: “Nine Years of Nudity in American Detention.”

* Be a birther, be a racist dogwhistler, be an anti-Muslim bigot, be a homophobe if you must, Mike Huckabee. But what kind of idiot fuckface can’t get behind the idea of impregnating Natalie Portman?

* Golly gee willikers, today was a big day for Game of Thrones. In addition to the news about A Dance with Dragons‘ release date (and btw, you can preorder it now on Amazon), HBO debuted a full-fledged two-minute-plus trailer for the show. Right now it’s only available in a streaming, unembeddable, non-HD crappy version exclusively on EW.com, but hopefully we’ll get a better version soon that I can share.

* It looks as though the two Hobbit movies will be subtitled The Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again. (I’m just assuming they’ll use the definite article for the former.) I’d figured “There and Back Again” would be involved but wasn’t sure about the other one.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part one: Ron Regé Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #16: The Chronically Hallucinating Insomniac is being republished by him after a sold-out 100-copy limited edition from French publisher Kaugummi as an even more limited 15-copy edition for $25, with a free drawing from GR2’s latest Post-It note art show thrown in for good measure. Wish I could afford it these days.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part two: Tom Neely has completed his new graphic novel The Wolf.

* “Martha I’d Like to Fuck.” (I actually think I may have gotten there first.)

* Johnny Ryan draws Junji Ito’s Gyo, courtesy of Ryan Sands.

* Real Life Horror: Today was one of those days where the atavistic, sociopathic, autarchic, bigoted shittiness of our great nation really fucking got to me. Those are links to fully five separate instances of nightmarish heartlessness and idiocy, and I haven’t even gotten to union-busting or Mike Huckabee yet. The Others take it all.

* Neilalien, the first comicsblogger, has retired after an astonishing eleven years of blogging. I talk a little bit about what this means, and what it means to me personally, over at Robot 6.

* Quentin Tarantino has apparently finished putting together the long-promised Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which will debut theatrically on March 27th with seven new minutes of O-Ren Ishii anime.

* Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, Videodrome/Thriller/The Ring make-up effects demigod Rick Baker, and Velvet Goldmine/Reign of Fire star Christian Bale all won Oscars at the Academy Awards last night. That’s three for the good guys.

* Jinkies, get a load of the new Game of Thrones trailer. This looks pretty much exactly how I’d want it to look. I do feel, however, that I should say I found myself a bit concerned today that it could devolve into a bit of a harridan-off between Catelyn and Cersei. Hopefully it won’t, but after The Walking Dead I think people will certainly be paying attention to this sort of thing, and rightfully so. (Via Westeros.)

* Variety notes that the pending TV show is already boosting book sales in a big way. This link was also via Westeros, which has more.

* Speaking of Westeros, HBO’s official Game of Thrones site interviews Westeros co-founder Elio Garcia. What a delightful story of the impact A Song of Ice and Fire fandom has had on his life.

* Very very pretty A Song of Ice and Fire fanart by Kali Ciesemier: Sansa Stark, Jon Snow, and Brienne of Tarth. (Via Westeros yet again.)

* Finally, they’re a bit pricey, but there are now official Game of Thrones t-shirts featuring the emblems and words of various major Houses. Have we reached Peak Nerd? (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Zack Soto is relaunching his much-missed alt-superhero/fantasy comic The Secret Voice as a weekly webcomic! Very exciting news.

* FX has greenlit a pilot for an adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s very good cops-and-capes series Powers. Lots and lots of potential there.

* It’s looking more and more like the upcoming Marvel event Fear Itself will indeed be about giant dudes getting Asgardian warhammers and wrecking shop with them. I fully support this, even given the Tron costume piping.

* Curt Purcell is still working his way through Lost: Here he is on Season Three and Season Four. I have a lot i want to say about all this but I’ll probably wait till he’s finished the series.

* Are these new Cenobite Halloween costumes, designed by Clive Barker himself, the greatest Halloween costumes of all time?

* The Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson won’t be working on The Hobbit due to prior commitments. That’s really a shame, and evidence, perhaps, of the potential tolls on talent and experience the films’ endless delays have taken.

* A John Hankiewicz comic I totally missed? Folks, I count on you to prevent things like this from happening.

* Black Swan/Red Hulk.

* Hey, I made Kanye + Comics!

* Recently on Robot 6:

* I’ve barely talked about the Egyptian Revolution in public at all; I try to explain why in this piece on Domatille Collardey and Sarah Glidden’s webcomic “Egypt from 5,000 Miles Away”;

* Valentine’s Day comics #1: In the tradition of Henry & Glenn Forever comes Johnny Ryan’s Mark Mothersbaugh/Gary Numan slashfic strip “Mark + Gary Forever”;

* Valentine’s Day comics #2: a great made-up myth by webcomic wunderkind Emily Carroll;

* and hey, did you know a bunch of Ben Katchor’s Metropolis magazine strips are online?

* There’s a pair of new, off-the-beaten-path interviews with the two prime movers behind the very best serialized superhero comics of the past half-decade. First up, Alex Carr of Amazon.com’s Omnivoracious blog interviews Grant Morrison. One thing I like about this interview, and it’s a minor thing but still kind of neat to my mind, is that since it’s for Amazon, it refers to Morrison’s comics exclusively in terms of their collected editions. Anyway, this is part one of a longer interview, and focuses mainly on Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne, The Return of Bruce Wayne, Joe the Barbarian, 18 Days, and Morrison’s desire to one day tackle the Flash and Wonder Woman. There’s a bit that explains an object that shows up in the Stone Age with time-displaced Bruce Wayne that I for one found extremely helpful. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Next up, BLDGBLOG interviews B.P.R.D. and Hellboy impresario Mike Mignola, with an unusual and fascinating focus on Mignola’s use of architecture and environment. It’s quite neat to hear that Mignola prefers Lovecraft’s settings to his bestiary. And this passage was wonderful:

Well, once upon a time, when I started all this stuff, the one thing I didn’t want to draw at all was buildings. Because, growing up in California, buildings to me were an exercise in using a ruler and perspective, and shit like that. I just had no interest in drawing that kind of stuff.

It was only after having lived in New York for a while, around really old buildings—where you see that, actually, this building’s kind of sagging and that building’s kind of leaning against the other building next door and this chimney looks like, if those three wires weren’t there, it would all fall over, and that fire escape is at some odd angle—that’s when I really started to love architecture.

(Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* I’m not sold on Austin English’s comics, but I greatly enjoyed his Inkstuds guest post on the artists and cartoonists who influenced him, since it reminded me of the existence of the D’Aulaires, whom I’d completely and shamefully forgotten.

* The cartoonist L. Nichols writes on Joe Sacco’s word balloon and caption box placement, with copious marked-up examples. I’ve talked about all the heavy lifting they do, too. Very much worth your time — and it’s maybe worth reading it and then revisiting that Emily Carroll strip above, too, to see how such techniques work on the web as well as the printed page.

* What does this lovely Justin Green illustration for The New Yorker have to do with Colin Ferguson, the man who shot 25 people on the Long Island Rail Road before it pulled into a station located about five minutes from where I grew up? Let Green explain it to you.

* Jesus Christ, Michael DeForge.

* My friend Matt Rota sure can draw.

* I’m pretty tired of designy Internet-supported minimalist movie posters, but Sam Smith’s take on David Lynch’s Mullholland Dr. maps so neatly onto my personal iconography for the film and Lynch’s work and supernatural horror in general that how could I resist? (Via Shaggy.)

* Allow me to be the 3,892nd person to excitedly inform you that Radiohead are releasing their new album The King of Limbs on Saturday. I really, really enjoyed In Rainbows, thinking it was their best thing since Kid A and digging it hard enough to go back and reevaluate Hail to the Thief (the quicker stuff is really strong, the slow songs aren’t except for “The Gloaming”; still not a big Amnesiac person), so I’m looking forward to this.

* This Rich Juzwiak review of Lady Gaga’s new song “Born This Way” is what finally sold me on it. (Finally being a matter of, like, two days, but whatever.) At first listen I wasn’t crazy about it, because it seems really simple and obvious. I mean, i understand everything she’s doing here — she’s making a gay club anthem for the ages; she’s trying to have the final word on the current UNF UNF UNF UNF four-on-the-floor pop-house revival; she’s trumping earlier, vaguer, far less actually gay “yay empowerment, yay gays” songs by Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Pink; she’s being way more uplifiting and positive, and less sleazy and focused on sex and fame, than all her other hits. So it’s definitely smart on all those counts, and successful on all those counts. It’s just way less interesting to me than the songs from The Fame Monster, especially “Bad Romance,” which was a knockout I’d never heard anything like before, like Britney covering Marilyn Manson. “Born This Way,” by contrast, is just kind of a peppy dance song. And as far as the ubiquitous comparisons to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” goes, “Born This Way” doesn’t really sound like it in any way that matters — except that the melody for “Born This Way”‘s chorus is totally cribbed from the “so if you want it right now, better make him show you how” part from “Express Yourself”. So you get to the big anthemic chorus part for the big anthemic song, and it’s a snatch of someone else’s melody, and therefore it just didn’t click for me the way it was supposed to. And I say this as someone who’s totally fine with the ABBA/Ace of Base riff she did with “Alejandro,” or the “All the Young Dudes” thing she did with “Speechless,” and so on and so forth. The weird thing is that those two songs actually sound more like their inspirations overall than this one sounds like Madonna, but there’s no specific passage in either of them that sounds as much like a specific passage in their inspirations as the chorus for “Born This Way” sounds like that one bit of “Express Yourself.” But where Juzwiak saves the day is by likening the song not primarily to “Express Yourself,” but to Patrick Hernandez’s unbelievably wonderful disco anthem “Born to Be Alive.” “Born to Be Alive” is one of my all-time favorite songs by anyone ever, a massive onslaught of delightful sounds (“Yes we were BAWRN! BAWRN! BAWRN!”), kind of ridiculous lyrics (a lot of it doesn’t really rhyme or even make sense grammatically), and cockeyed optimism. And that’s pretty much what “Born This Way” is. Hearing it with those ears gives me a workaround for the “Hey this sounds like ‘Express Yourself'” bug when it comes up.

* And in case you just saw the big Destructor image and clicked right through it in my early post, here’s part one of my big interview about Destructor with The Cool Kids Table’s Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley.

* Hot cha, look at the cover for the Strange Tales II hardcover! Art by Kate Beaton, design by Paul Hornschemeier, very silly jacket copy by yours truly.

* Very useful: HBO’s official pronunciation guide for Game of Thrones. The “CAT-lin” thing blows my mind, but I’ve heard George R.R. Martin pronounce it that way, so it’s canon. Westeros notes that one difference between GRRM’s preferred pronunciations and the show’s is that they’ll be pronouncing the honorific “Ser” as “SAIR” rather than “SIR.” This makes sense to me, actually: In the books, the changed spelling was sufficient exotification, but viewers can’t hear a spelling change.

* Oh man, JEEZ, this Kate Beaton panel. JEEZ.

* Another fine, candid CBR interview with Marvel’s Tom Brevoort. This time he reveals that Nick Spencer is taking over Secret Avengers because Ed Brubaker wasn’t having a good time writing it, just for example. And whoa, those are some nice colors on that Thor #620 preview! Is that Pasqual Ferry doing his own colors? I forget. Anyway, you may disagree with some of what Brevoort says, but wouldn’t it be marvelous if all the major figures in the North American comics industry were this vocally opinionated and forthright?

* Real Life Horror, Actual Class Warfare Edition: Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is threatening to deploy the National Guard to help him take away the collective bargaining rights of state employees. (Via Atrios.)

* Bilbo and the dwarves!

* The first trailer for Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree is out. It’s cut for maximum red-band-osity, but aside from that it does indeed look intriguingly weird, as befits the spiritual (if not literal) sequel/remake/reboot of Hardy’s own The Wicker Man, one of the most intriguingly weird films of all time. At this point I should probably abandon even the pretense of going to see interesting-looking horror movies in the theater — I still haven’t seen fucking Midnight Meat Train, let alone Monsters — but this could be entertaining.

The Wicker Tree – Trailer
Uploaded by dreadcentral.

* My Robot 6 colleague Kevin Melrose has the best round-up of the critical beatdown Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark took in today’s papers, and the best headline for it as well. One silver lining I think we can all hope for for this thing is that it could maybe serve as the “Uncle Ben getting murdered”-type catalyst for a late-period U2 creative self-reevaluation and renaissance, which is badly needed right about now. (Fun fact: In the show, Uncle Ben dies not from a burglar that Peter Parker failed to stop, but from an unrelated car accident.)

* Hey, Richard McGuire’s “Here” is online in its entirety. One of the all-time great comics.