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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Craig Thompson, Habibi, Arabian Nights, Orientalism.

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

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

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

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

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

* 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.)

* Sammy Harkham, Edie Fake, and Michael DeForge lead a strong slate of Ignatz Award nominees this year. Who knows — maybe the voters will throw the obviously undeserving Chris Ware a pity win.

* Here’s the latest in a series of dispiriting interviews with the gifted superhero comics writer Grant Morrison. It’s related to this Rolling Stone profile, which in turn is accompanied by this quite good “best of Grant Morrison” list by Matthew Perpetua.

* The large Arizona comics retail chain Atomic Comics has abruptly gone out of business, with owner Mike Malve filing for bankruptcy. Comics people I talked to about this today were pretty freaked out.

* In a rare return to his home turf Jog the Blog, Joe McCulloch presents a short bit of (also rare lately) writing on art comics, among other things, with his Top Ten Comics list.

* Tucker Stone really liked Ryan Cecil Smith’s SF #1. I liked it too.

* Secret Acres’ Barry and Leon present their PACC con report. They also note that Dylan Williams of the very valuable comics publisher Sparkplug is ill, which I’m sad to hear. Get well, Dylan!

* Wow: Tom Neely is working on one of Matt Maxwell’s Western-horror Strangeways comics.

* Here’s a neat-looking project from Split Lip writer and nascent-horror-blogosphere veteran Sam Costello and artist Neal Von Flue: Labor and Love, a collection of four comics adaptations of American folk ballads. It debuts at SPX.

* Zak Smith on the most disturbing room in D&D.

* Matt Rota draws the Republican Party in action for the New York Times.

* Jerry Leiber, half of the Leiber/Stoller songwriting team, has died. What a monstrous talent.

Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

On Watch the Throne, the new collaborative album by Jay-Z and Kanye West, the title phrase or a variation on it is uttered nine times over the course of sixteen songs. Meanwhile, a recurring orchestral sample — its nervous energy evoking the spooky bits of Magical Mystery Tour, sinister ’60s children’s movies, and the shifty-eyed rhythm of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” — shows up in looped form as an unofficial theme at the end or beginning of four separate tracks, including the opener “No Church in the Wild” above.

Did this remind anyone else of George R.R. Martin’s character mantras/catchphrases from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones? “If I look back I am lost.” “Where whores go.” “It rhymes with…” “She’s been fucking [names redacted] for all I know…” “Kill the boy.” “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” “Valar Morghulis.” “Weese, Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling…” In each of these cases, these are phrases that wounded, worried minds keep circling back and back and back to, obsessively. They’re phrases they cling to and phrases that haunt them.

Can you think of a better way to describe what the the repetition of the words “watch the throne” might mean to two men whose unquestioned position at the top of their field means, as Jay-Z puts it, that the only place they can find an opponent is in the mirror?

I’ve been writing a post comparing Watch the Throne to ASoIaF/GoT since my first listen, but when you play the game of Game of Thrones comparisons, you publish or you perish. Oh well! I actually don’t mind that other people have gotten there first, because it means that the initial, incorrect critical narrative about the album — two rich people rapping about how rich they are, which is bad because of the debt deal and the London riots or something — is falling by the wayside. It’s as if the pressure to turn reviews of an important album around in 24 hours (due to the record’s unexpected, exclusive, leak-thwarting midnight release on iTunes) led critics to forget that anything ever happened at any other time. If it’s not okay to rap about fame and wealth to a struggling audience, then flush the last two decades of hip-hop, including multiple chart-topping critically acclaimed albums by Jay-Z and Kanye West, down the toilet.

But not only is the thesis ridiculous, it’s not even accurate. Obviously Kanye and Jay rap a lot about their money and the stuff they’ve bought with it on this album, and obviously the names they’re dropping are high-end and/or highfalutin’ enough to stand out to critics under deadline pressure. (I bet the Museum of Modern Art didn’t expect to have almost as much of a role on this record as Frank Ocean does.) But you’d almost have to purposefully ignore the rest of the lyrics, and most importantly the sound of the thing, to think that’s all there is to it, to characterize this album as a less forceful-sounding Rick Ross record. For all the talk about life at the top, they seem about as comfortable there as Robert Baratheon, Eddard Stark, and the stained knight Jaime Lannister. The music is foreboding and paranoid, minor-key prog samples, witch house synths, and soul legends chopped and pitch-shifted into demon shouts and banshee wails. The lyrics describe difficulties — from Jay-Z copping to depression, to Kanye’s R. Crumb-like dissections of his sexuality and misogyny, to overcoming the obstacles of a racist society to “make it in America” only to discover that the higher they go, the fewer people like them they find — that go a lot deeper than the usual litany of complaints about haters and biters. Both aspects of the record are embodied by those repetitions — that cycling, recurring, uncomfortable theme music; “watch the throne, watch the throne, watch the throne,” over and over again. If they were comfortable on the damn thing, they wouldn’t constantly be telling themselves and everyone else not to take their eyes off it for a second.

Jay-Z Kanye West “Why I Love You”

* Click here to find a list of my ten favorite comics, more or less.

* My friend and collaborator Matt Rota has an art show opening up on Saturday, August 13 at L.A.’s Copro Gallery. The art in it looks like this:

* Jeez it is a pleasure to witness Joe McCulloch’s return to writing about alternative comics, specifically one of my top three favorite cartoonists and one of the very best comics short stories of all time: Phoebe Gloeckner and “Minnie’s 3rd Love.”

* Meredith Gran on the importance of supporting women cartoonists buy paying them to draw comics.

* Ben Morse on the best of Ultimate Spider-Man, which has been a very good comic for more than a decade.

* The degree of schadenfreude I’m feeling from The Walking Dead TV show’s behind-the-scenes woes is unseemly.

* Six ancient things that were probably built by aliens. Nearly a decade and a half after I first read Illuminatus! and 20-25 years after I first heard of Stonehenge and Atlantis and Easter Island and so on, this kind of thing still gives me chills.

* There’s not a whole lot in comics right now more fun than the way Dan White draws Cindy & Biscuit launching themselves through the air at monsters they’re about to dispatch

* I can certainly support the idea of Miles Fisher as a male, American, horror/parody-video-making Robyn. (See also.) Bonus points for casting Steffi from The Bold and the Beautiful in the Kelly Kapowski role and the closing homage to Hellraiser III. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

* I posted Tom Brevoort’s comments on fan entitlement on Robot 6, and to my surprise, the ensuing comment thread largely cosigned his statement, as well as similar recent sentiments from Grant Morrison and Bryan Lee O’Malley. I thought about all this stuff today while flipping through Morgan Spurlock and Alba Tull’s surprisingly delightful photo book Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. The vision of Comic-Con and nerd culture presented in that book is, I’m sure, baffling or even troubling to some comics readers — cosplay, not comics, is its centerpiece; at a glance I’d guess Hollywood personages outnumber comics creators and publishers; and Tull’s portraits of Moto Hagio share a page with her pictures of Gareb Shamus. That said, it’s a picture of Nerd Triumphalism that is, in fact, triumphant. It’s not a bunch of angry, snarky naysayers insulting people and poo-pooing books and movies that haven’t even come out yet — it’s a vibrant, diverse (lots of women, lots of non-white people, lots of kids, even people in wheelchairs) selection of weirdoes, geeks, and creative types, coming together because they’re all excited about the stuff they love. If the people-power aspect of Comic-Con were the public face of nerddom all year round, nerddom would be a lot easier to support, and the crasser, more exploitative mass-marketing aspects of the show would be easier to ignore.

* Frank Miller talks Holy Terror in long-war terms I now find as dispiriting as his increasingly untethered cartooning is invigorating.

* Paul Gravett reviews Grant Morrison’s Supergods, with a focus on whether Morrison’s love of the superhero concept has caused him to undervalue the regular humans responsible for it. (Via Tim Hodler.)

* Dan Conner and Omar are joining the cast of Community. My goodness!

* Wow, Colleen Doran’s concept art for a Wonder Woman costume redesign is lovely.

* “Turtle City” is a deeply cool commission by Theo Ellsworth.

* This assembly of 80 different fan covers of “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin is almost moving in how well it conveys the simultaneous playfulness and brute force of that almighty riff. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* San Diego news and views continue to filter in…

* I missed this when it went up last week, but the great Tom Spurgeon suggested several potential stories to watch at this year’s Comic-Con just before it opened — I’d have been most interested in items 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8. The analysis is still worth reading, as is today’s follow-up post in which Spurge offers his take on how the con went this year.

* ICv2’s Milton Griepp gave calculating the total size of the digital-comics market the old college try at the ICv2 Conference at SDCC. The numbers he came up with are small, although they are growing rapidly. That stands to reason: Most companies simply don’t have those avenues open for business the way that making more money from them would require. But that’s obviously changing.

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken wonders: If a promotional video is screened at Hall H, but no one on the internet can see it, does it make a sound?

* I’m curious about the Jason Aaron/Marc Silvestri Incredible Hulk relaunch. And I’m super-curious about whoever its colorist is. That fire is lovely.

* In other news…

* Jesse Moynihan’s Forming Vol. 1 is now available from Nobrow Press. It looks gorgeous.

* My Robot 6 colleague Tim O’Shea interviews new B.P.R.D. artist Tyler Crook, who’s got some Guy Davis-sized shoes to fill with his first published professional comics gig.

* Tom Brevoort on what fans are entitled to:

Writers are writers because they know how to do what audiences don’t know how to do–tell stories that affect you and move you. It’s way tougher than it looks. Storytelling isn’t a democracy, you don’t get a decision in how the stories go. All you get is your one vote, with your dollars or your feet.

* Rest in peace, WRXP 101.9FM New York.

* 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.

Download it here

When my baby daughter gets fussy, which usually happens every night around 7:30, the one thing guaranteed to calm her down and cheer her up is for me to pick her up and dance around with her. So every night for about forty minutes or so we have a Daddy Dance Party, also known as Family Funky Time when my wife joins in. An undisputed highlight of the DDP playlist is this live version of “Cold Sweat” by James Brown from 1968, which over the course of its twelve minutes has exposed my daughter to more funk before age 2 months than I heard before age 20.

Virtually everything great about James Brown is on ample display in this recording. For starters, the man’s skills as a bandleader, even outside the studio and in a less controllable live setting, are quite simply astonishing. Listen as he and official bandleader Pee-Wee Ellis lead the group through an airtight version of the song, through minute after minute of vamping and solos, and back into the song again: Every note, every beat is hit hard enough to draw blood. As I listen to the thing, I marvel at his rapport with the band as they turn on a collective dime time after time — they seem linked almost at a telepathic level, where no cue comes as a surprise to anyone except everyone in the audience. Meanwhile, Brown’s charisma as a frontman is equally astonishing here. Those shrieks and yelps are really quite something, if you can try to forget you’ve heard them a million times and appreciate their ecstatic insanity afresh. But beyond that, his banter with both the band and the audience is funny and effortless, making cool-dude nonsense like “Excuse me while I do the boogaloo” or “If you ain’t got enough soul, let me know and I’ll loan you some — I got soul to burn” or introducing the latest dance move by challenging the band to guess its name (spoiler alert: it’s “the Detroit Pimp”) sound inspired, like a template young fans can apply when they want to be awesome.

But best of all, especially for those of us who’ve heard rock bands of Brown’s funk era stretch songs out into double-digit running times to enervating effect when performing live, there’s never a dull moment. The solos — fiery saxophone by Maceo Parker, follow-the-bouncing-ball bass from Alfonso Kellum, and most impressively, a double drum solo from Clyde Stubblefield and Nate Jones that ends with literally the funkiest break I’ve ever heard, driving the audience totally batshit — feel vital and exciting, an integral part of the performance, rather than a self-indulgent opportunity for the given player to show off while the rest of the band sneaks off for a cigarette break. And you never know when a lengthy vamp will be punctuated by Brown saying something funny or badass, or leading the band through snippets of Allen Toussaint and Lee Dorsey’s “Ride Your Pony” or Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man,” or quoting “my friend Sammy Davis,” or eliciting wild cheers from the audience with some unseen but undoubtedly crazy dance move, or god knows what else. The song is simply packed with pleasures I’m still discovering and delighting in after innumerable listens.

Buy it from Amazon.com

My friend Matthew Perpetua is fond of pointing out that beneath the gauzy haze of shoegaze is sex, at least when it’s done right. The formlessness and distortion isn’t just an anti-mainstream distancing aesthetic, it’s an evocation of sex’s obliteration of the self, the way the boundaries between you and your lover, your conscious and unconscious, your conception of the present as a step toward the future and a present that envelops all of existence, all blur. There’s more to it than Kevin Shields blowing Alan McGee’s money on the perfect guitar tone, and a bunch of lesser lights ripping it off.

If the maligned alt-pop subgenre commonly called chillwave can accurately be described as bouncy beats and bubbly synths subjected to a shoegazey sheen, then it seems to me that Washed Out has always been the act that acknowledges that heat beneath the Hipstamatic filter. I think people looked at the cover of his debut EP, Life of Leisure, and came away thinking it was the usual amorphous hat tip to summer and beaches and nostalgia, but I always thought something crucial was being conveyed by the fact that it’s not just any beach scene, it’s photo of his wife swimming in the ocean during their honeymoon. There’s an erotic component to it that goes beyond making the music sound like your synthesizer was left out in the sun to melt a bit before you started playing it. That’s what I get from “Before,” the standout track from Within and Without. (And hey, you wanna talk about a cover that tips the album’s hand?) I say this even though I can’t understand a word Ernest Greene is singing, even though I can’t even make out the two-syllable sample that recurs every fourth measure. That last bit is sort of the barb on the end of the beat, the part that hooks you, makes the beat exciting to listen to as it cycles through the song (itself the most beat-driven on the album, in a sort of trip-hop sense). It’s what keeps you moving through showers of sound that ebb and flow in intensity: high-pitched cascades, low pulses of synthesized strings, tinkling melancholy melodic lines where the chorus might go, texture provided by live percussion. In other words, for all its shimmering softness, it’s actually quite a pressure cooker of aural information, designed to create an intensely sensual listening experience — not background music, not hey-remember-when nostalgia. It is a super sexy song. Listen to it with someone you fucked on your honeymoon.

Download it from Amazon.com

* 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.

Pat as-above-so-below-isms like “the title says it all” normally drive me up the wall, but whaddayagonnado: “Pace Is the Trick” is the best Interpol song because of the rigorous and relentless pace of the guitar. The song itself is a midtempo number and not one of the band’s uptempo post-punk jams, but that distinctively brassy guitar never, ever ceases to be twanged with every eighth note. Like a traditional lead guitar line, each note is distinct, and the purpose is to deliver a melody; at the same time, like rhythm guitar, it’s a rhythmic element that gives the entire song a spine, even as its melody shifts and morphs from section to section. This pulls all the parts together and makes each new section and mood — determined by the varying timbre and intensity of Paul Banks’s vocals, the disappearances and reappearances of Sam Fogarino’s drums and the different beats he plays, and the degree to which the full band is engaged or holding back — feel like an inevitable outgrowth of the previous one. It’s one of those songs that makes me reflexively air-drum along when the loud parts kick in, and it’s that guitar, that literally non-stop “dundundundundundundundundundundundundundundundun,” that pulls me along for the ride. Meanwhile, Banks’s lyrics, delivered in perhaps his most finely struck balance between his laconic-croon and urgent-shout modes, use a variety of metaphors and outright declarations to cast love, or at least lust, as a matter of possession, predation, and destruction. As embodied in the song’s final lines — after ending the final iteration of the chorus (“and now I select you” etc.) by shouting about “the star-swept night,” Banks contributes to the lengthy outro by repeating “You don’t hold a candle” — it’s an enticingly toxic blend of seduction and contempt, tied together by a guitar that never allows any daylight between the two extremes.

When last I checked in with Drake he was sounding like Everything But the Girl. In “Marvin’s Room” he’s sounding even more like Everything But the Girl — specifically “Single,” in which Tracey Thorn engages her ex in a bit of extraordinarily bitter concern-trolling over a hotel phone, accompanied a shuffling beat and ghostly synths. Voila, I’ve just described “Marvin’s Room” as well. But what Drake lacks in Thorn’s luscious vocal instrument he more than makes up for in a level of lyrical candor that is either really exquisite artistry or the complete lack thereof. This is a guy who’ll lilt “Fuck that nigga that you love so bad” like it’s the most romantic thing in the world, who’ll say “After a while, girl, they all seem the same / I’ve had sex four times this week — I’ll explain” in a song whose sketch of a chorus revolves around chiding his ex “I’m just sayin’ you could do better.” I have no idea if he knows what a leap it is to expose his assholishness to the world like this and is consciously making that leap, or if he’s simply so fascinated by himself that he’s sharing this information because he’s his own muse. In the end I’m not sure it matters if it makes for sad, lovely, disturbing music like this. Bonus points for repeating the ex’s incredulous “Are you drunk right now?” like it’s one of those Houston-to-Apollo transmissions from The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.

Beyoncé – I Care

4 is the first Beyoncé album whose slow, serious songs I don’t automatically skip. Good thing, too, because it’s mostly slow-ish, serious-ish songs, as opposed to Dangerously in Love, which dumped them at the back end of album; I Am…Sasha Fierce, which gave them their own disc; and her best record, B’Day, which nearly excised them altogether. The up-tempo “Countdown” is getting a lot of attention right now, with its Franken-pop construction and inspired gibberish like “ME and my BOOF and my BOOF BOOF ridin'” (thus joining “Ra-ra ah-ah-ah, roma ro-ma-ma, gaga ooh-la-la” and “Mama say, mama sa, mama ma coo sa” in the annals of great pop nonsense), but the album’s undisputed highlights for me are the aforeblogged lovesexy scorcher of a ballad “1+1” and this song, in which Beyoncé addresses a lover’s indifference by attacking it with the nearest weapon to hand, her voice. Listen to the way she shouts “IIIII CARE!” in the chorus, or just plain screams at the end of it — it’s like Chris Cornell wailing into the abyss of Andrew Wood’s heroin overdose in “Times of Trouble” by Temple of the Dog. Sonically the two songs aren’t even all that dissimilar: state-of-the-art production that creates a nice melancholy purple cushion of air around the instrumentation, in “I Care”‘s case the tumbling drums in particular. Hell, in a world where Bey’s mashing up Prince and Kings of Leon and having freaking Tricky do the Sean Paul part in “Baby Boy” at Glastonbury, I wouldn’t be surprised if I woke up tomorrow to find out she’d covered it. It’d be a fine outlet for the sort of skill and conviction she displays here (like the way her voice warbles when she says she’s been “deserted” or the way she sings along to the guitar solo like she can’t bear to stop pouring out the emotion she’s feeling), and for her ever-sharpening taste for interesting arrangements (“I Care” and “I Miss You” are mostly synth tones and spare percussion; the latter just sort of disappears rather than ends the way proper commercial pop songs do; even the Diane Warren-penned “I Was Here” has some weird spectral Interpol guitar stretching out from the end of the chorus). She’s taking the sort of stuff that usually made for turgid one-listen mom-radio bait and making it lively and engrossing. Frankly there’s not much she can’t do at this point.

* 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

WU LYF – “Heavy Pop”

Played from start to finish, WU LYF’s debut album Go Tell Fire to the Mountain comes across like a music-nerd Mark Millar Idea: “What if there was the most uplifting anthemic indie rock album ever…but the lyrics were GIBBERISH?” And like most Mark Millar Ideas, real and imagined, the joke gets old quickly. The formula is simple and adhered to with minimal variation: Cavernous production (the album was apparently recorded in a church; the ever-present pipe organ’s a tipoff too) plus chiming guitar plus glossolalia screamed at the top of lead singer Ellery Roberts’s lungs. Slow songs, fast songs, quiet songs, loud songs, every song on the album gets the same treatment. By the time you reach track nine or so, the initially bracing effect of the approach, this sense that you’re witnessing something that’s half-hymn, half-howl at the moon, is diluted through repetition and general lack of imagination. No amount of Captain Caveman hollering is going to distinguish the umpteenth life-is-beautiful, we’re-all-in-this-together Joshua Tree legacy-character record.

But everything that makes WU LYF a lousy place to live makes it a terrific place to visit for the five minute, thirty-five second duration of the album’s concluding track, “Heavy Pop.” An admirably lengthy, virtually ambient organ introduction sounds like the world is slowly waking up, and when those first guitar notes hit, it’s like rays of morning sun, and Roberts is like a man screaming right back into the sky, greeting the dawn with defiance. It’s another answer to a goofy unasked question, in this case “What if the problem with Bruce’s vocals at the end of ‘Jungleland’ was that they sounded insufficiently committed?” At album length this doesn’t work at all, but for a single song it’s epic, genuinely so — it’s huge, it sprawls, it conjures images of great vistas and lone heroes and everything. There’s no need to press your luck with the other nine tracks. Unless you’re an Arcade Fire fan, I suppose, in which case go with God.

(Buy the album from Amazon.com)

* Nicole Rudick interviews Jim Woodring at glorious length for The Comics Journal:

RUDICK: Are [the apparitions you’ve seen] usually the same thing or similar things?

WOODRING: No, they’re always different. The last thing I saw was a guy standing upstairs in my hallway, standing bolt upright, with a leather harness on his face.

RUDICK: Does it frighten you to see those things?

WOODRING: That one was extremely frightening. At first, I thought it was my reflection in the mirror. Then I thought, There’s no mirror there. I saw this guy, just standing, wearing black pants and a white shirt, with his face in a leather harness with the number nine on leather tabs at every junction of the straps, and his mouth was open in a rictus. I could see his teeth, and his eyes were staring at me in this beseeching way. He left after a couple of seconds, but it was very vivid while it occurred.

Then a couple of years before that, I saw the Thompson Twins, Thomson and Thompson from Tintin. They were in black and white and were walking down the street with a full-color nine-foot streetwalker in fuchsia hot pants. That resolved into a woman and her two small children. Then the time before that, I was at the mall and my neighbor lady saw me and came up behind me and spoke my name, and when I turned around and looked at her, where her head should have been there was this eggshell of lint, which had the front pushed in, and there was a big gob of chewing gum or something sitting at the base of it. That was a frightening experience. I screamed when I saw that. That just scared the shit out of me.

The thing these all have in common is that they’re not at all vague, they’re very crisp, and I retain memories of them with extraordinary vividness. I’ve drawn all these things out. They’re very sharp, almost more sharp than real life, in the same way that when people meditate and they see the white light—it’s obviously not light, it’s not photons, it’s something else, more vivid than light. Because you’re not seeing with your eyes, you’re seeing with your mind when these things happen, they have sharpness and an intensity that regular visual things don’t.

That’s the juiciest part, but there’s stuff in there about the Surrealists, and horror as the sacred, and symmetry, and struggling with the presence of evil in a world that also contains wonderful things, and all manner of other stuff that hit me right in the gut. You must read this.

* Hey, it’s a new Emily Carroll comic! This contains one of her creepiest images yet.

* Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls will be adapting the Nine Inch Nails dystopian-future concept album Year Zero for Trent Reznor’s long-gestating HBO/BBC miniseries. That sounds fine.

* Too Much Coffee Man‘s Shannon Wheeler, of all people, nails the problem with Chester Brown’s Paying For It, as succinctly as anyone I’ve seen make the attempt. I think calling for a heavier editorial hand is a nonstarter, though, and for good reason. A heavier editorial hand would likely have preempted Chester Brown’s entire career.

* Curt Purcell salutes the proud wearer of Comics’ Greatest Jacket, Death Note‘s Naomi Misora.

* Paging Frank Santoro: Marcos Martin is really approaching page layout differently than anyone else in superhero comics, if this preview page from his and Mark Waid’s Daredevil #1 is any indication.

* I’m really not sure what Darryl Ayo’s comics call to arms is about — the problems, and the people, he’s addressing are described in terms too general to be useful. Mostly I find my enjoyment of comics increasing the less I worry about the state of comics, or more specifically the less I expose myself to the daily scrum of jawjaw about same. That said, he put together a gallery of lovely images to support the post, including these pieces by Al Columbia and Frank Quitely that I’d never seen before.

* Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains has posted a couple of killer galleries lately. First up is the cosmic horror of Anatoly Fomenko, with its wondrous and oppressive sense of scale:

* And next is the scabrous, texture-heavy creature portraiture of Hasama (warning: the image below is fine, but the rest are not for anyone who’s squeamish about facial disfiguration):

* Aled Lewis’s “Video Games vs. Real Life” is similar to a Star Wars-based photography project that made the rounds a while back, but even though I was familiar with the basic idea at play, I still found this Donkey Kong image kind of unnerving. Looking through the foliage and seeing something looking back at you is the great cryptozoological dream/nightmare image.

* If you can’t trust them to straighten their belts, how can you trust them to save us all from Despero???

* I’m pretty excited to discover a Broadway revival of Godspell is in the works for this October. Stephen Schwartz, the show’s creator, is involved, so that leaves me optimistic that they won’t just slap a coat of Rent paint on the thing. It’s my favorite show.

I admire how few concessions this song makes. I figured that after a few introductory measures they’d clean up and smooth out that guitar triplet, but nope, it stays fragile-sounding and rough around the edges the whole time. The expected “TICK two three TOCK two three” 6/8 slow-jam drum never really materializes, requiring you to lean into those rich-sounding chords, which are themselves constructed largely from a subtle interplay between piano and bass. Synth strings and a watery organ sound and a snippet of piano played backwards are sketched in here and there, but you really have to wait for them. Beyoncé’s vocals, to paraphrase her lyrics, pull you in close and won’t let you go — there’s simply no ignoring those big whooping “OO!” sounds at the end of each line, nor a chorus structured around the simple phrase “make love to me,” nor a final verse that sets this lovemaking up as an alternative to a world at war. And when the climax finally comes, all that pent-up energy isn’t diffused into a dully loud full-band finale with a full-fledged beat or whatever, but poured into a reach-for-the-sky guitar solo. Everything surrounding it stays relatively restrained; the guitar does the shouting. Then it all just kinda disappears. “1+1” is, fittingly, more than the sum of its parts, all of which are astutely selected and intelligently, unapologetically deployed to transport you to a more beautiful place for four minutes and thirty-five seconds at a time.

* My final Game of Thrones chat with Megan Morse is now up at The Cool Kids Table. I’d say this one’s most interesting for our talk of different approaches to season finales, and what was expected here versus what was delivered.

* Brian Chippendale is back writing about Marvel comics! Nobody does it better. He’s absolutely right that Uncanny X-Force is a really good book, by the way. Also, Brian Chippendale is on Twitter.

* Kim Thompson interviews himself about the new Jacques Tardi/Jean-Patrick Manchette book Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot. I really don’t like the sound of what he says about cat lovers beware.

* Over at Topless Robot, my pal Rob Bricken has some fun at Green Lantern‘s expense. As he and I have both said before, you can put up with almost any number of plot holes of whatever width provided the stuff those holes were poked in was worthwhile to begin with.

* John Porcellino’s King-Cat #69 is now up on What Things Do. I liked that issue.

* New Ben Katchor is always a delight.

* Uno Moralez is great update: Uno Moralez is great.

* I haven’t been following Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary; this page tells me I ought to get on that toot sweet.

* And how about that Moebius?

* Finally, I will miss Clarence Clemons, who helped make this.