* Myyyyyyy goodness, this new teaser for Game of Thrones is wonderful. The throne! (Via Westeros.)

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming rounds up reactions to the TCA sneak-peek footage. Speaking of which, Elio and Linda at Westeros offer a lengthy and thoughtful reaction of their own.

* Over at Robot 6 I posted a six-page preview of Night Animals, a graphic novel from The Wrong Place author Brecht Evens due out in March from Top Shelf. Looks lovely.

* Speaking of looking lovely, here’s a fun little comic about not liking Nirvana by Sally Bloodbath.

* There’s a super-limited-edition new Yeast Hoist issue (#16) from Ron Regé Jr.

* Wow, buy all four issues of Josh Simmons’s Top Shelf series Happy for the low low price of ten bucks!

* John Porcellino talks process with Frank Santoro.

* I’m posting this more out of obligation than genuine interest, because it’s difficult for me to imagine circumstances under which I’d be like “Oooh boy, a new Ridley Scott movie,” but Alien and Damon Lindelof are things that I’ve cared about, so here you go: Scott’s collabo with Lindelof is no longer an Alien prequel but a new thing called Prometheus. So there you have it. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, I’m just going to post two images from the brilliant Tumblr Kanye + Comics, which takes images from comics and splices them with Kanye West lyrics, but I assure you I could do this all day. Man, that first one should be the Superheroes Lose mascot. (Via someone on Twitter yesterday, I think.)

* Over at Robot 6 I pulled some of my favorite parts from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interviews with Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez, two of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Of all time!

* Spurge also interviewed my very talented Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson, who comes at comics journalism and criticism from about a 180-degree remove from virtually everyone else I know. If you care about the field, you should read her interview.

* Kiel Phegley conducts an exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and ongoing Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada. Quesada breaks (I think) the news that Nick Lowe has been promoted to Senior Editor, while Kiel notes that Quesada is the first Editor-in-Chief to depart on his own terms since Stan Lee.

* Tom Brevoort notes that Editors-in-Chief of Marvel comics don’t actually edit comics, which is why he didn’t want the job.

* Are nine of the top 10 bestselling comics of 2010 creator-owned properties, Hollywood tie-ins, or both?

* Theo Ellsworth is working on an ongoing horror-SFF series called The Understanding Monster. Yes please!

* This week, Diamond starts shipping comics to Direct Market retailers a day early, if they want. I hope that works out.

* Frank Santoro on Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the power of drawing comics at the same size they’re printed. “Comments are closed.”

* They’ve given up on making a Wonder Woman TV show. Good. Doing so seemed like an admission that They’re not talented enough to make a movie of one of the most famous characters in the world.

* Rickey Purdin calls the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival 2010 “a totally insane comics and art show that, per capita, was probably the highest quality of its kind that I’ve ever attended.” Yep.

* Game of Thrones stuff 1: New photo gallery. Direwolf puppies or GTFO. (Via Winter Is Coming.)

* Game of Thrones stuff 2: I really enjoyed this report from a roundtable with George R.R. Martin. Martin tells a great anecdote about an asshole at a Lord of the Rings screening who kept shouting shit like “Giant spiders? Oh, come on!” as an illustration of how some people will just never cotton to fantasy; he speculates that A Storm of Swords will be split over the show’s third and fourth seasons; he notes the difficulty of conveying when a character is lying on television, something I thought would be quite a challenge for the series in terms of one specific plot point later in the books; and so on and so forth. If you’re like me and hungry for any kind of smart discussion of the books you can get, you obviously could do a lot worse than a discussion featuring Martin himself.

* Game of Thrones stuff 3: Maureen Ryan posts excerpts of interviews with Martin, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actress Emilia Clarke. I liked Martin’s note of caution that big though the show’s budget may be, it can’t possibly compare to the roughly $15 million spent per hour of screentime on The Lord of the Rings. (Via Westeros.)

* Check out Michael DeForge’s fine Top 15 Comics of 2010 list. And then ask yourself if he ever stops working.

* Now Zak Smith is crowdsourcing an entire RPG: Gigacrawler, about a universe in which every available space on planets and in the void is part of one continuous, contiguous structure. In other words, all of existence is one giant dungeon. He and his crew start brainstorming the game’s major features here.

* Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, talks to Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal about his new album Kaputt, which is really something special. Avalon is referenced, and thus am I vindicated.

* I whipped up a nice long thumbsucker analyzing Axel Alonso’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Entertainment for Robot 6. I hope you’ll take the time to read it. The nutshell version is there are some big question marks even (perhaps even especially) pertaining to the areas where we have the most information by which to judge him, but also a lot of reason to be optimistic in terms of his approach to creators. One thing I didn’t include because because I’m not sure what its actual import is but which still seems worth noting as a positive for the biz: He’s the second Hispanic Marvel EIC in a row. (Memo to Iron Man editor Alejandro Arbona: Patience, grasshopper.)

* I suppose I shouldn’t’ve been, but even so I was surprised by the dominance of media tie-in titles on the list of 2010’s bestselling graphic novels for the Direct Market (as sold through monopoly distributor Diamond). The Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, and Kick-Ass leave a grand total of one slot open on the list, which was taken by a book that got over largely on the strength of a fortuitous “it’s Superman meets Twilight” blurb in the press.

* On the periodical comics end of the list, events still sell–that’s really the only lesson you can draw. Well, that, and books called X-Men #1 trigger some sort of lizard-brain response in the direct Market. One more: The Direct Market is all but a three-man industry at this point, with Brian Bendis, Geoff Johns, and to a lesser extent Grant Morrison dominating.

* Yesterday was the big Game of Thrones presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour. This bums me out because it means that yesterday would have been the day George R.R. Martin made his two big surprise announcements (one surely must have been the release date for A Dance with Dragons, but that pesky plural really has thrown me for a loop beyond that) were it not for his awful-sounding bout of urosepsis over Christmas. It’s also a bit of a bummer because the 15 minutes of footage screened for the assembled critics will likely never air publicly since it used existing film scores as a stopgap soundtrack. The most in-depth summary I’ve seen of the footage is from Chicago TV critic and über-nerd Maureen Ryan. It sounds like it was basically very very good, allowing for some quibbles of the strength of various wigs and Peter Dinklage’s English accent. (Via Westeros.)

* UPDATE: The series debuts April 17th.

* Here’s Drawn & Quarterly’s Fall 2011 release slate. Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray and Brian Ralph’s Daybreak are the big ones for me.

* Chris Mautner runs down six overlooked books from 2010, including my co-#2 best book of the year, Gilbert Hernandez’s High Soft Lisp.

* Alright, I really have no excuses for why I didn’t wise up to Zak Smith/Sabbath’s big “Gygaxian Democracy” experiment, but now he’s croudsourcing things a sea monster can do, so you know I’m all over it.

* Real Life Horror 1: Don’t forget that my representative, Peter King, is okay with terrorism as long as it’s English and Irish children you’re blowing up.

* Real Life Horror 2: Freedom.

* Finally, I’m happy to use Geoff Barrow from Portishead’s anti-record industry twitter screed as an excuse to post the video for “Chase the Tear.” (Via Maura Johnston.)

* Busy day on Robot 6 today:

* Jason Aaron tells Alan Moore to go fuck himself;

* Marvel was Joe Quesada’s Watchmen;

* John Boehner is the new Beta Ray Bill;

* and most especially, this Françoise Mouly interview is comprehensive and awesome. RAW, The New Yorker, Toon Books, Crumb gossip, personal history, the works. Must-read of the day.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Dirk Deppey.

* At long last, The Complete Pogo is about to join Fantagraphics’ ridonkulous reprint line-up. Updates on a lot of other late books of note in there as well, including various Nancy-related efforts.

* There’s something really heartwarming about the creative process for Axe Cop.

* The Star Wars series hits Blu-Ray in Septmember. It’s not clear if the original versions of the original trilogy will be a part of either the three-disc original-trilogy set or the 9-disc set for the enchilada. My hunch is that they’ll do it to please the nerds (and I include myself in that number), but there’s no predicting George Lucas.

* Nerdery at its finest: Zak Smith crowd-sources 60 different D&D dice-roll results for what getting smacked with something called “The Hammer of Exorcism” could do to you. I can’t decide which one I like best: The bit where the possessed victim develops a new orifice that swallows the hammer and allows him to subsequently extract it for use a la Videodrome, or your basic run-of-the-mill vomit hose.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones reviews Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma’s surprise hit series Morning Glories. I haven’t read it, but what Zom says roughly aligns with what I have a hunch I’d think of it based on what I’ve heard about it.

* For some reason, the common desire to wish the sins of America into the cornfield manifested in the bowdlerized Huck Finn now being produced and the bowdlerized Constitution read aloud in Congress today didn’t occur to me until Andrew Sullivan pointed it out.

* Real Life Horror 1: Animals are dropping dead all around the world.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald presents the story of 18-year-old American Gulet Mohamed, tortured in Kuwait and barred reentry into the United States because he’s on the no-fly list, both for crimes he never committed.

* The final installment of Christopher Allen’s Top 50 Albums of 2010 list contains one of the sharpest takes on Sleigh Bells I’ve ever come across. I also like his emphasis on the fun of Girl Talk, like it’s a game you play on road trips.

Here is a commercial for furniture retailer Raymour & Flanigan:

Here is the video for “Luchini” by Camp Lo:

* Well, shit and double shit: George R.R. Martin was hospitalized on Christmas Eve with the urinary tract infection from hell. Fortunately, he’s okay; unfortunately, the “big announcements” he’d planned for HBO’s TCA reception (why whatever could they have been!!!) are kaput. Get well soon, George.

* You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! Poor Steve Lyons does what he can with a thankless task.

* There’s a passage in my friend Ryan “Agent M” Penagos’s exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and reigning Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada that I find very revealing about the man’s approach to his job: He sees his tenure and the projects he helped develop as the Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns he didn’t have it in him to produce as a cartoonist.

* Springboarding off Fantagraphics’ Complete Carl Barks announcement, Graeme McMillan asks what it means that Disney is publishing comics starring its characters through publishers other than Marvel. The long and the short of it is that Disney sees Marvel as being not in the comics business, but in the Marvel business. That’s consistent with their approach to many of their other brands: It’s not like they made Jim Henson start building all the puppets for their theme parks or had Pixar do Tangled for them. But it also tells you something about what Marvel’s approach to comics will likely be for the foreseeable future.

* Elsewhere, Graeme and Jeff Lester ponder at length why Axel Alonso got the Editor-in-Chief gig at Marvel over Tom Brevoort, who’s both more visible to the public and more integral to the company now-flagship Avengers franchise and nearly all of its big line-defining crossover events. But I don’t think it’s a mystery at all, frankly: Brevoort has said multiple times that he had no desire to take that job. I also don’t think it’s any mystery what Quesada will be doing, as it’s what he’s already been doing for quite a while.

* DC goes day-and-date digital with its Batman Beyond ongoing series. I note these things because they seem noteworthy, not because I have any idea what they really mean. I also note that I hear a lot of these series have had problems actually coming out day-and-date even when announced as such, particularly at Marvel.

* Gosh, Yanick Paquette has come into his own as the artist for Batman Incorporated.

* Cliff Chiang does Jaime Hernandez doing the Archies, basically.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan does Jeffrey Brown doing MMA.

* I haven’t seen Gareth Edwards’s much-lauded first-person giant-monster romance Monsters, but what little I’ve heard about it makes him sound like a pretty good choice to direct the next American Godzilla remake. Then again, wasn’t that basically what Cloverfield was? I mean that as a compliment by the way.

* Good news: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an FCC fine against boobs and butts on NYPD Blue.

* Real Life Horror headline of the day: “Severed head full of bullet holes found dangling from bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, official say.”

* Real Life Horror photo of the day: I’m not posting it here because even though it’s not graphic, its immediate implications are disturbing enough that doing so might be hurtful to some readers. But basically, a family photo snapped by Filipino city councilman moments before he was shot to death reveal his assassin with gun drawn and pointed directly at him right behind his unsuspecting family, and you can see it at the link. (Via Heidi MacDonald via Ivan Brandon.)

* My Representative, IRA supporter and anti-Muslim bigot Peter King, is the new head of the Homeland Security Committee; he says the New York Times should be indicted under the Espionage Act. He is a terrible person, and a dangerous one.

* Lighter-note time! Hahahaha, Tom Ewing reviews “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme for Popular, the blog on which he reviews every UK #1 single ever. A number-one hit that misattributed leadership of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Raphael!

* Three music videos of note today:

* My gosh, what a song “Film Music” by Family Fodder is! (Via Douglas Wolk, through whom I first heard it a while back.)

* Here’s the hugely enjoyable video for master pasticheur Destroyer’s late-period Roxy Music homage “Kaputt.” (Via Ryan Catbird.)

Destroyer – Kaputt from Merge Records on Vimeo.

* Finally, this one’s unembeddable so you’ll just have to click through: Wubba wubba wubba, goodbye, God bless, not only in the USA but in the UK too, it’s Hercules & Love Affair’s “My House.” Perhaps only my wife, who hears me sing “Everybody Everybody” on the daily, has any idea just how ready I am for Club MTV/House of Style nostalgia. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Another huge news day: Axel Alonso is the new Editor-in-Chief of Marvel; Joe Quesada is now focusing solely on his Chief Creative Officer (read: multimedia) duties; Tom Brevoort has been promoted to Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing. The end of a ten-year era, although if any editor can be said to represent continuity with Joe Quesada’s approach it’s probably Alonso. The moves made by Quesada in the early days of his reign played as big a role in my getting back into comics as anything this side of Highwater Books, so I’ll miss him and wish him well.

* Related: Brevoort sounds off on DC’s “drawing the line at $2.99” pricing initiative. He paints a picture of a Marvel-Disney relationship that’s very different from that of DC-WB.

* DC is finally releasing a Flex Mentallo collection. Of course, I’ve had a Flex Mentallo “collection” on my hard drive for a while now, but still, awesome!

* YES: Curt Purcell on the relationship between Laura Roslin and Bill Adama in Battlestar Galactica.

* Frank Santoro is having some kind of art show in West Hollywood starting January 20th, it would seem. If I were in West Hollywood, I’d go to this.

* Joe McCulloch on the Batman comics of David Finch (and Scott Williams). I thought the Finch written/illustrated Batman: The Dark Knight #1was good silly fun, for what it’s worth.

* Here are two very different Best of 2010 lists from Ben Morse and Ryan Sands.

* Wow, Michael Hoeweler draws a mean Robyn. (Via Shaggy.)

* Anders Nilsen presents “The Allegory of the Apartment.”

* Spider-MODOK as designed by Gabriel Hardman? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio is joining Jane’s Addiction. Uh, okay, sure. One thing many critics are wrong about is the greatness of Jane’s Addiction up through and including Ritual de lo Habitual, that greatness being very very great. I understand that Perry and Dave’s subsequent self-parodic antics cast a long shadow, but man, before that? Goth Zeppelin.

* Would you like to hear Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” as rendered through the dulcet tones of Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV? I don’t see why you wouldn’t! (Via Cindy Hotpoint.)

1) Through some strange alchemy, Susan Cooper’s The Grey King has caused me to stop worrying and love the ending of Lost.

2) I wonder if Kanye West has ever listened to Pulp’s This Is Hardcore.

* Here are links to the three Carnival of Souls posts I did over the break through today: post-Christmas/blizzard, pre-New Year’s, post-New Year’s.

* Here’s a guide to all of Robot 6’s big 2nd anniversary special content, including some cool stuff involving yours truly;

* And here’s Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010, all in one place. This also includes a list of the list’s participants, which I think is helpful.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Bill Sienkiewicz is telling the story of his (mostly) unpublished collaboration with Alan Moore Big Numbers;

* Becky Cloonan is posting pages from her unpublished Tokyopop book East Coast Rising Vol. 2;

* and DC Comics makes a slew of announcements: all ongoing series are $2.99, letters pages are returning, Peter Milligan on Red Lanterns, and Sean Murphy on an American Vampire spin-off. That’s a pair of shots fired in the PR war, hopefully a step in the right direction for the Direct Market on pricing, a sign that Green Lantern is joining Batman as the two core franchises of the DCU, and a sign that American Vampire is joining Fables as the two core franchises of Vertigo.

* The Comics Journal has launched The Panelists, a new group blog featuring Derik Badman, Alex Boney, Isaac Cates, Craig Fischer, Jared Gardner, and Charles Hatfield. That’s a formidable crew.

* Dark Horse’s Facebook page hosts a very useful and thorough guide to the state of Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics.

* Which reminds me that the use of Facebook for PR was, along with now largely confirmed claims that the iPad is a digital-comics gamechanger, one of the big hobbyhorses of the late great Journalista blogger Dirk Deppey. “Seriously, what idiot ‘advertises’ their event solely on a website that requires registration to see the advertisement?” The kind of idiot who wants to advertise on the country’s most popular website, I guess.

* Chris Allen and Alan David Doane think that good superhero comics are the very least we should expect and demand. I see their point, although a good superhero comic is a good comic, after all.

* From good to bad: Graeme McMillan and the Comics Alliance crew explain what made some of 2010’s worst superhero comics so awful — very little schtick, lots of dragging very bad writing and art choices into the light of day and investigating what went wrong. Well done.

* If you’ve ever wondered what a smart critic with zero experience with any comics or video games would think of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, check out Edward Copeland’s review. He situates the movie in the (500) Days of Summer/Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist sphere, as you might expect, and preferred the rom-com stuff to the fighting and video-game stuff, as you also might expect.

* I’d need to reread the Fourth World saga to be sure — it’s been a few years — but I’m pretty sure that, contra Tim O’Neil, Jack Kirby’s Anti-Life wasn’t fascism, or more accurately it wasn’t just fascism — it was war. I cribbed that from Tom Spurgeon and I think it squares — after all, anti-fascist superhero comics from the World War II generation were a dime a dozen, but the Fourth World Saga stood out for a reason. Regarding Tim’s contention that Morrison’s Anti-Life is less powerful a concept than Kirby’s because it’s imposed rather than embraced, I think that’s probably true, but there certainly are people who want to impose Anti-Life’s real-life equivalent and it’s a valid avenue of exploration.

* Tom Spurgeon’s interview with the comics critic and journalist David Brothers helped me get at something I’ve often found frustrating about Brothers’s work. He’s a fine writer who brings welcome eye-on-the-ball focus and deserved indignation to his commentary on industry ethics, diversity issues, and business practices, but I’ve been frustrated by his tendency to focus so much on superheroes and other fantastic-action genre work and his occasional lapses into his particular character-specific version of “Wolverine would never say that!” But regarding the former, Brothers reveals that he only this year started reading Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez — and what a year to start! — and regarding the latter, he owns up to “basic fan entitlement.” In other words he’s young and (like all of us, hopefully) growing as a writer. Read the interview for his smart rejection of “hey, true art takes time!” defenses of late books and for a great bit on superhero comics’ civilian fashions (although I strongly disagree with his contention that “part of being an adult is wearing a shirt that has buttons on it every once in a while”):

The lack of attention paid to fashion in comics is baffling to me. We all pay a certain amount of attention, time, and money on what we wear, but you wouldn’t know it when you look at mainstream comics. Guys still wear Solid Colored T-Shirt and Latex Tight Jeans, with maybe a loose, formless leather jacket on top. Women wear Solid Colored Belly Shirt/Baby-T, Low Rise Jeans, and Visible Thong Straps. Belts, jackets, suspenders, and even something as simple as logos tends to be almost nonexistent, barring the relatively few artists who take the time to do it right.

The visible thong thing really is the post-millennial equivalent of ’70s and ’80s shirtless vest-wearing street toughs and ’90s mullet-based hairstyles.

* Can you imagine a world in which Lord of the Flies, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Waiting for Godot, Rear Window, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were in public domain as of this year? Yeah, neither can I. Fuck Thank you very much, Congress!

* Real Life Horror 1: I’m always up for reading about the giant octopus of that washed up on the shores of St. Augustine in 1896.

* Real Life Horror 2: Here’s a wonderfully written history of the bubonic plague by writer Mark Sumner on, of all places, Daily Kos.

* Real Life Horror 3: It’s always worth pointing out that my Representative, Peter King, supported IRA terrorism, especially given that he’s planning McCarthyite investigations of American Muslims who didn’t.

* Real Life Horror 4: The political blogger Digby has been doing yeoman’s work reporting on American law enforcement’s willy-nilly use of painful, frequently lethal tasers on non-violent non-criminals.

* Real Life Great Job: I can’t believe that one of the candidates for Republican National Committee Chairman is named Reince Priebus. Are we sure he’s not a Tim and Eric character? What do Prance Stuard, Bilb Ono, Doug Prishpreed, and Dun Dorr have to say about this?

* Cinema just got a lot less convincingly simultaneously genteel and dangerous.

* Whoa oh oh oh, ohhh.

* Oh, so that’s what’s up, Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, who apparently never stops drawing, he has a funny new strip up at Vice.

* I’m glad to hear that I played some small part in getting Curt Purcell psyched about blogging about horror again.

* Speaking of: I can’t help but be a bit disappointed with the (leaked and/or official depending on what post you’re reading) video for Kanye West’s monster, especially given such recent direct points of comparison as the clips for Scissor Sisters’ “Invisible Light” or West’s own “Runaway.” To the table occupied by the former’s dizzyingly trashy recreation of giallo and other groovy-age staples and the latter’s go-for-baroque parade of sexual, racial, and self-mythological neurosis, “Monster” brings a cornucopia of played-out “sexy dead model” visuals I saw in a fashion magazine, like, ten years ago. Moreover I think the whole sentiment behind “Monster” loses something when removed from the self-loathing draped all over My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; conflicted tracks like “Runaway” contain both sides of Kanye’s macho-asshole schtick in the way that the tough-guy songs just don’t. Finally, once you’ve read Nitsuh Abebe’s suggestion that Nicki Minaj should have been represented by a shapeshifter rather than a pair of good/evil twins, you really can’t unsee it. It’s like (as I’m fond of mentioning) when I learned that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was supposed to be filled by Pete Clemenza until it fell through over a wage dispute with Richard S. Castellano.

* Happy birthday to my favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien. I love you, Professor!

* Finally, HOLY SHIT

Just like last year, here’s a three-part mix I made featuring some of the best songs of the year. This year they’re almost kinda sorta themed: The first disc is mostly dancey, the second disc is mostly heavy, and the third disc is mostly, I dunno, ruminative. I hope you enjoy all three! And if you do, be sure to seek out and purchase stuff from the artists themselves. They deserve your money!

DOWNLOAD VOLUME ONE
Scissor Sisters – Night Work // LCD Soundsystem – Drunk Girls // Kylie Minogue – Get Outta My Way // !!! – The Most Certain Sure // Caribou – Sun // Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – In Motion // Underworld – Always Loved a Film // School of Seven Bells – Dust Devil // Pantha Du Prince – A Nomad’s Retreat // Delorean – Infinite Desert // Teengirl Fantasy – Cheaters // Hot Chip – One Life Stand // Goldfrapp – I Wanna Life // Robyn – Dancing on My Own // Underworld – Scribble

DOWNLOAD VOLUME TWO
How to Destroy Angels – The Space in Between // Kanye West – Power // Glasser – Apply // Meth Ghost and Rae – Criminology 2.5 // Amusement Parks on Fire – Flashlight Planetarium // Serena-Maneesh – I Just Want to See Your Face // Interpol – Lights // Liars – Scissor // Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – A Familiar Taste // Spoon – Who Makes Your Money // Big Boi – Shutterbugg (feat. Cutty) // The Knife – The Height of Summer // Caribou – Hannibal // Sleigh Bells – Infinity Guitars // David Bowie – Battle for Britain (The Letter) [Live] // Liars – Scarecrows on a Killer Slant // The Knife in collaboration with Mt. Sims – Colouring of Pigeons // Kanye West – Lost in the World (feat. Bon Iver)/Who Will Survive in America

DOWNLOAD VOLUME THREE
LCD Soundsystem – Dance Yrself Clean // Robyn – Fembot // Best Coast – Boyfriend // School of Seven Bells – I L U // Drake – Karaoke // Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – Hand Covers Bruise // Four Tet – Love Cry // How to Dress Well – Can’t See My Own Face // A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Moments on the Lawn/Drink Drank Drunk // Liars – Proud Evolution // Antony & the Johnsons – I’m in Love // A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Nitetime Rainbows (Acid Wash Edit by Benoit Pioulard) // School of Seven Bells – Bye Bye Bye // Azure Ray – Dancing Ghosts // Bat for Lashes – Let’s Get Lost (feat. Beck) // Goldfrapp – Voicething // Underworld – Louisiana

* They’ll look familiar to you if you’ve read my own 20 Best Comics of 2010 list, but I have some more write-ups in Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010 countdown: Weathercraft, Special Exits, Wally Gropius, Wilson, Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, Grant Morrison’s Batman comics, and The ACME Novelty Library #20. Given CBR’s mission and audience, that’s a really solid Top 10.

* Reading Paul O’Brien’s latest report on Marvel’s monthly sales made me realize the havoc that variant editions must wreak on retailers’ ability to properly judge how many copies of comics to order for their customers. I mean, read this paragraph about the publisher’s best seller, Avengers:

This is the start of the book’s second storyline, but don’t read too much into the big sales increase just yet. The first five issues were heavily supported by variant covers, including 1:75 “character” variants by John Romita Jr. Issue #6, for some reason, was allowed to fend for itself. But with issue #7, it’s back to business as usual – this has a 1:15 Tron variant, a 1:25 Ed McGuinness variant, and a 1:50 Marko Djurdjevic gatefold variant. It also introduces the Red Hulk into the cast, which might be something of a draw; HULK sales may have passed their peak, but there’s still a significant audience there who might not have been buying the book before.

DC, of course, does the same thing:

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6 and Batman and Robin #16, both of which were meant to be out in September, each had a 1:25 variant-cover edition to boost sales. Batman: The Return #1 (originally scheduled for October) and Batman, Inc. #1 had 1:200 variant editions in addition to the 1:25 ones. Batman and Robin #17, finally, which was solicited with a different creative team and ended up being the first part of a three-issue fill-in run, came with a plain old vanilla 1:10 variant-cover edition.

That’s a lot of hoops to jump through, and I have to imagine that’s the last thing the Direct Market needs right now. (Bonus points to DC analyst Marc-Oliver Frisch for reacting to the shenanigans the way that card dealer reacts to being able to leave the table after dealing to a drunk and belligerent Joe Pesci in Casino.)

* Chris Mautner interviews Eric Reynolds about Mome: part one, part two. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Alex Dueben interviews Joyce Farmer about Special Exits. Farmer says she worked on the book for 13 years, and threw away the first 35 pages after she finished them because she felt they weren’t up to snuff.

* I think this is the only time I’ve ever found eyebrowless-era David Bowie attractive.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is the Deluxe Edition of Station to Station by David Bowie — between the all-ought breakneck onslaught of the 1976 live performance in my hometown arena of Nassau Coliseum and the simpler, woodier sound of the analog-remaster version of the album itself, it’s a point-blank blast from the European cannon.

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Drawing Down the Moon by Azure Ray, released by Saddle Creek — quiet glowing balladry.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is One Life Stand by Hot Chip, released by Astralworks — their mixture of heartstring-tugging and butt-shaking is one of my favorites.

Hot Chip – One Life Stand
Uploaded by EMI_Music.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Ring by Glasser, released by True Panther — melodic and dark, it twitches and pops until it gets airborne.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Sir Lucious Leftfoot…The Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi, released by Def Jam — meaty beaty big and bouncy.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Subiza by Delorean, released by True Panther — endless summer.

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Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Interpol by Interpol, released by Matador — cavernous and lovely in its studied unloveliness.

Click here for a full review; Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Black Noise by Pantha Du Prince, released by Rough Trade — tinkling, twinkling, melancholy music for dancing in your head on the train.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is the Body Talk series by Robyn, released by Cherrytree — an exquisite one-woman anthology of songs about and for dancing and crying.

Click here to download them from Amazon.