Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Swanlights by Antony & the Johnsons, released by Secretly Canadian — an album recorded to sound like you’re sitting in a room around a fire listening to live music, only it’s coming from the fire.

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 Disconnect from Desire by School of Seven Bells, released by Ghostly — dreampop fundamentally without flaw.

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

* Dang: Dirk Deppey has been let go. Take it from someone who was there: Dirk midwifed the comics blogosphere as we know it. Vaya con Dios, Journalista — most of us wouldn’t be here if not for you.

* Two great Quotes of the Day today on Robot 6: Ta-Nehisi Coates on comics as the literature of outcasts (fun, potentially corroborative fact: all of my gay friends are also big nerds);

* and Joe Casey finds today’s superhero comics boring. Oddly, so do I, for the most part, and judging from multiple conversations I’ve had recently, so do a lot of people I know. There are some counterexamples, certainly, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to talk about them if I can collect some thoughts. (Here’s one that’ll be going in: the conclusion to Brian Hibbs’s year-ender essay on the troubles faced by the Direct Market.)

* The Joe Casey quote comes from Tom Spurgeon’s excellent interview with him, which kicks off Spurge’s Holiday Interview series for the year. Curling up next to my in-laws’ dogs in Colorado while reading these things on my laptop genuinely is one of my favorite Christmas traditions. I look forward to the rest of ’em. As for this one, Casey’s Ben 10 insulation from repercussions for calling a spade a spade has made him one of the most consistently entertaining interviews in comics on a “here’s where the bodies are buried” level.

* Speaking of Spurge, in this piece on his favorite WildStorm comics he makes the case for that incest storyline from Alan Moore and Zander Cannon’s Smax, the idea being that it’s a jarring enough custom that it makes us feel the kind of response that the characters themselves would feel, instead of setting up afterschool-special-type mustache-twirling antagonists who are racist or homophobic or some other thing we in the audience can gloss right over as “bad guys!” The idea is that it’s sort of the narrative equivalent of the way Shaun Tan used the fantasy elements of The Arrival to better simulate for readers the disorientation of the immigrant experience. It’s smart; given that Moore has shown himself to be prone to afterschool-special literalism in this area — including in Smax‘s fellow Top 10 spinoff The 49ers — I’m not sure I buy it.

* Marvel has made a big deal out of how Fantastic Four will be ending after the current “Three” storyline, which ostensibly will kill one of the Four; today they announced that the Fantastic Four creative team will be launching a new series called FF in March. I don’t understand these kinds of maneuvers. Do they even really goose sales anymore beyond the #1 issue? I mean, these things can work fine if you’re Grant Morrison, but Hickman and Epting are having a swell run on Fantastic Four, and to me the gimmickry just distracts from it.

* Kevin Huizenga has posted three new Fight or Run strips! Someone with more influence over Kevin Huizenga than I have should beg him to make this a weekly webcomic.

* The great Norwegian cartoonist Jason, of all people, pretty much nails Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, or at least what I think of it, right down to some very specific points of comparison with how it probably ought to have been filmed, and to calling out the silliness already present in the original. That said, it seems pretty clear that I like both the comic and the movie a lot more than Jason does.

* Vice’s Nick Gazin says some smart things and some stupid things in his latest comics review round-up, which is par for the course, but it’s entertaining either way, which is also par for the course. (Seriously, PictureBox haters are the new Fantagraphics haters.)

* Ooh ooh, Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Movie Uncut by J.A. Kerswell — a Portable Grindhouse/Destroy All Movies!-style book about slasher flicks!

* Benjamin Marra’s ROM: Spaceknight art is now available as a one-of-a-kind print to raise money for Bill Mantlo’s medical bills. Bid on the thing — as of this writing it’s available for freaking $9.99! (Via Zack Soto.)

* Emily Carroll is a real talent.

* Dave Kiersh is a real talent.

* I can’t wait to talk about Battlestar Galactica with Curt Purcell.

* And here’s another Quote of the Day, this time music-related: Scroll to the bottom of this page from Pitchfork’s Artist Guest List Best of 2010 feature to read OMD’s Andy McCluskey thoughtfully and passionately explain the brilliance of Robyn.

* I think this Alyssa Rosenberg piece on Game of Thrones for the Atlantic (WARNING: more spoilery than I’m comfortable with) fairly misses the boat. Rosenberg argues that the show will require more “sustained leaps” of belief than not just series like The Sopranos and The Wire, which require us to suspend our potential disbelief that murderers struggle to behave decently and contribute usefully in other ways, but also shows like True Blood or The Walking Dead, which depict fantastical things happening “firmly within the existing world” and “in a world discernibly our own” respectively. But the appeal of the Song of Ice and Fire books, and presumably the series, absolutely is that the characters’ motives and their societies’ constructions are recognizable from where we stand, the occasional dragon or bit of sorcery notwithstanding. The fact that it doesn’t take place on “Earth,” not even the alternate near-future Earths of Sookie Stackhouse and Rick Grimes, makes no difference in terms of the show’s approach. (Its reception might be a different matter, but only because swords and armor and accents make a lot of people think “old-timey” and tune out, and that’s not what she’s talking about; she’s saying things like that the show’s in a class by itself because it’ll have “to convince viewers not only that dragons are real, but that they are a literal bulwark against a real and frosty evil,” which in reality is just a difference in degree from “vampires exist and want marriage rights,” not in kind.) “The Sopranos with swords” is dead-on, if the show is done right.

* Finally, no idea how I missed this, but on December 16th George R.R. Martin wrote that he “might have an exciting announcement…maybe two” on January 9th at the Game of Thrones TCA thingamajig in Los Angeles. I suppose it’s easy enough to guess what the first exciting announcement is, but what about the second? I’ll bite: I’ve often wondered if he was actually writing the next two Song of Ice and Fire books at once…

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s albums is Light and Gold by Eric Whitacre, released by Decca — choral music for people who (like me) don’t listen to choral music, or: it’s not just a clever title.

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 City by Matthew Dear, released by Ghostly — perfect for when all you want your music to do is quietly bounce, bubble, and brood.

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 A Reality Tour by David Bowie, released by Epic — a double-live retrospective of pretty much every single phase of a career that may well now be over, performed with evident glee.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

I read a couple of interesting things about Sleigh Bells and their excellent album Treats today today. My pal Matthew Perpetua is right to note that unlike a lot of the artists and microgenres that are playing around with how their music is recorded, Sleigh Bells isn’t doing so to evoke the past, but to emphasize the intensity of the present. Yet critics often invoke the past when talking about Sleigh Bells anyway — not in terms of era, a la chillwave and the ’80s, but in terms of age groups, an age group all of us used to belong to: teenagers.

In writing up the record for Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2010 list, Tom Ewing says: “The most convincing take on Treats— the one which makes emotional sense to me– is that it’s a kind of teenpop: the mess, posturing, chaos, and unrelenting immediacy of an adolescent’s headspace crushed into two-minute blurts.” I don’t find this take convincing at all. Mess and chaos? Sure. But posturing? Not so much.

Here’s what I mean: Two nights ago I was driving home from the middle-school chorus Winter Concert my wife, a music teacher, conducted. Every year she takes requests from the kids and writes her own choral arrangements for pop and rock songs they’d like to perform in the spring concert, and this year, naturally, some girls in her classes requested Justin Bieber. She turned them down flat, because she had literally promised the boys she wouldn’t make them do a Justin Bieber song. Middle school boys, it turns out, haaaaaaaaaaaaaate Justin Bieber, the same way middle school boys have always hated pop culture performed by young men but aimed at young women. In my day I hated the New Kids on the Block and Beverly Hills 90210; a few years later I’m sure it was N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys; today it’s Biebs and Twilight; I know that when I was very young in the early ’80s, I could sense how the older boys hated Duran Duran. Fast forward a few years into full-fledged high-school adolescence and the battle of the sexes angle was less important, but the desperate need to define yourself by what you weren’t into as much as what you were was, if anything, even more keenly felt. Fuck jock music like the Dave Matthews Band and the Grateful Dead, fuck poseurs like the Offspring and Stabbing Westward, fuck even too-cool snobs like Pavement and Sonic Youth. As a kid who very much self-identified as Alternative my story’s no doubt a bit different from those with different tastes, but I think “this is good and THAT SUCKS” is universal for teenagers no matter what genre you’re really into. Even the ballyhooed egalitarianism of Top 40 radio, I think, is predicated on the fun of yelling “ewwww!” and changing the station when that song you can’t stand comes on.

It took me until after I graduated college and discovered David Bowie to free myself from all of this, to be willing to break it all down, to realize that my identity wouldn’t be threatened by an easing of definitional barriers but strengthened by it. Now I’ll try anything, and I write off nothing out of hand, on “principle,” to maintain my posture. (To be clear, I realize this is itself a posture of a sort!) I mean, still fuck the Offspring and Stabbing Westward, but fuck them for not being very good, not for failure to be appropriately authentic, you know?

And so I can appreciate and enjoy Sleigh Bells for all they bring to the table and for all the disparate genres from which they bring it — the bluntest, least subtle beats from hip-hop and riffs from metal and hardcore, the Rainbow Brite sing-songy vocals from disposable girl pop, the meta-trickery with recording and dynamics from noise and industrial. And I’d love to live in a world where a broad swathe of teenagers were open enough to all of that to make “teenpop” an accurate characterization. (As opposed to “pop a small handful of teens might like” — there are always gonna be outliers with good ears, even if they’re not consistently put to use. To pat myself on the back for a minute, I remember bumping into an old high-school classmate on the train and getting to talking about music, and he said to me “Jesus, you listened to Aphex Twin in high school!” with something approaching awe. This was true, and good for me, but at the same time I hated Depeche Mode and New Order.) But that’s certainly not the world we live in. The kids who might get into the aggression and power of the gigantic beats and towering riffs would have no idea what to do with Alexis Krauss, and the kids who might enjoy the sweet singing about wondering what your boyfriend thinks about your braces would turn the thing off the second the distortion kicked in. For pete’s sake, the Sleigh Bells album’s title track alone swipes the guitar sound from both “How Soon Is Now?” and “The Thing That Should Not Be” — in teen terms it’s like if the Hetfields Hatfields invited the McCoys to their family reunion!

It’s a very, very rare pair of teenage ears that can even tolerate liminality, let alone appreciate it. And this is not to say that boundaries can never be blurred — I feel like kids my age were on the leading edge of a cohort that completely collapsed the wall between liking rock and liking rap, even aside from Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys and even before you got to the Limp Bizkits and Linkin Parks; I listened to as much A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. Yet these were all their own lines drawn in the sand, too: “Rap is not pop — if you call it that, then stop,” remember? So maybe this is why the Bieber incident leaped to mind when I read Ewing’s “teenpop” comment: My guess is that the hardest boundary to erase would be the one that separates music that teen listeners feel is gendered in some way. Thus I think the best we adults can do is characterize Sleigh Bells as pop that reminds adults who know better of feeling like a teenager. But — well, you know.

Far, far more convincing to me was Mark Richardson’s earlier Pitchfork review of the record, which compared it to Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey, among other mostly less vicious records, in terms of how it expanded his conception of what “loud” could mean in music. I made that same comparison myself the other day. And Ewing himself did too, actually, when he compared the record to the likes of Prodigy and Lords of Acid. These were hugely ear-opening comments for me, helping me understand not just what I was reacting to in Sleigh Bells, but also what I was always enjoyed so much when listening to Psalm 69 or Voodoo-U or whatever the case may be: The thrill! As Matthew put it in his post today, it’s about taking some awesome sound and making it not just sound but feel as awesome as possible — like putting a great colorist on a great superhero artist, you know?

This is the territory where I think we can tease out what makes Sleigh Bells pop — adult pop, but pop — when much of what it’s drawing from really isn’t. Take Ministry. Lately I’ve been listening to the live version of their song “Burning Inside” almost constantly. The insanely ominous beginning actually makes me laugh out loud, it’s so thoughtfully put together in how it conveys cartoonish, apocalyptic evil: Massive bowel-shaking low-end rumbles, portentous pauses, ghostly human voices fading in and out, a warning siren, and finally the clicking and clacking rudiments of a rhythm, all before you’ve heard the first pound on the drum or distorted riff. And once those kick in, forget about it: It’s pure anger and disgust. But the key thing is Al Jourgenson’s vocals, which chant every word on the same not-quite-a-note through a vast field of distortion. They’re not spat out or shouted out, they’re emitted, like one of those disconcerting sci-fi/fantasy images in which some entity blasts energy not out of its fingers or hands or even eyes bout out of its mouth. There’s something robotic or demonic about it — not human at all.

Compare that to Nine Inch Nails’s “Wish,” a not at all dissimilar song and one that invited a lot of derisive comparisons at the time it came out. (I remember reading letters to the editor in the local paper about what a Ministry rip-off Broken was.) The stop-start riff and breakneck tempo and overwhelming hatred for everyone and everything are more or less consistent between the two songs, although as usual Al adds a sort of supernatural/mystical/eschatalogical angle, things raining down from the sky and so on, that it would take Reznor a while to get to. But whereas Jourgenson’s vocals are processed into becoming almost an additional buzzsaw guitar, Reznor is clearly a singer. There’s a body and a soul to what he’s doing; I think that’s what made him a sex symbol and what made Nine Inch Nails, for all its nihilistic aggression and self-loathing, fuck music for a lot of people, whereas Jourgensen’s sex references in Ministry, and even far less dark, more smutty side projects like Revolting Cocks, were almost resolutely non-erotic.

Alexis Krauss, in her way, is doing to the Ministry template of power and loudness what Reznor did to it in his way: She’s humanizing it, making it relatable and accessible to people beyond Ministry’s audience of gleeful misanthropes. With Trent and Alexis, women/men want them and men/women want to be them (take your pick!); I worshiped Al, I connected and still connect (intensely!!!! four exclamation points!!!!) with what he was doing, but I never wanted to be him. Reznor brought personal emotional intensity and erotic heat to the equation, Krauss brings joy, play, what Cosmo Kramer might call “unbridled enthusisasm,” but it’s the same principle: taking this sonic juggernaut and putting the spotlight on its pilot, in so doing conveying the notion that you could sit in that pilot seat yourself.

* I’m proud to present Superheroes Lose, a new tumblr in which I’ll be posting comic covers and promotional art featuring superheroes losing. In part I’m doing this because I think these things are unintentionally hilarious; in part I’m doing it because I have some half-baked ideas on what these things meeeeeeeean, and having a lot of them in one place may help me shake those ideas loose.

* That being said, I’m quite excited about the image above even aside from its Superheroes Loseworthiness, because I think it means that the Hulk — the plain old Bruce Banner green Hulk — will be involved in a major, Avengers-driven (was that redundant?) Marvel event for the first time in the modern event-comic era. (World War Hulk doesn’t count — that was really a Hulk comic blown up big, and the event angle came from fighting the Illuminati, not the Avengers, Marvel’s modern flagship team.)

* Here’s a heck of a find: a live-action short-film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole by director Rupert Sanders. As best I can tell it’s sort of smushing several scenes from different points in the book into one long thing, so it’s not necessarily the most accurate adaptation (especially if you have Keith’s first encounter with Eliza memorized panel by panel), but it’s fine work regardless, atmospheric in a way these things usually aren’t and true to the spirit of the thing. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Johnny Ryan (!!!) interviewed Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore about The Walking Dead for Vice, with suitably juicy results. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books imprint is now a going concern, with comics by Tom, Gabrielle Bell, and Jon Lewis. Check it out.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Two Eyes of the Beautiful II by the very talented Ryan Cecil Smith of Closed Caption Comics fame.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the appeal of superheroes — and supervillains — to marginalized groups beyond traditional geeks.

* I’m linking to ComixTalk’s 2010 digital/webcomics roundtable — featuring such august personages as Heidi MacDonald, Brian Heater, Brigid Alverson, Gary Tyrrell, Lauren Davis, and Larry Cruz — because it features my chum Rick Marshall of MTV Splash Page saying very, very complimentary things about Destructor, but even beyond that it’s stuffed with links to comics that come recommended by the participants and as such strikes me as a great way to launch a lazy pre-holiday weekend afternoon’s reading in a couple of days.

* Matthew Perpetua doesn’t like the gratuitous use of rap patois in hip-hop reviews, and the inconsistent application of stage names depending on the genre being talked about. I think in both cases this stuff is mostly showoffy; it’s interesting to see the differing directions that takes depending on whether or not hip-hop’s in the spotlight.

* Congratulations to The Country Club for mashing up Super Mario Bros. and Grand Theft Auto juuuuuuuuust about perfectly. I laughed out loud on the train at the ending. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Presume not to instruct Curt Purcell on matters pertaining to the Groovy Age of Horror when recommending Scissor Sisters videos, for he is subtle and quick to post far, far more pertinent giallo videos. Here endeth the lesson. Seriously, music people who read this blog, if you enjoyed the video for “Invisible Light,” you must click that link and watch Curt’s videos. Nude for Satan, ladies and gentlemen. (But aren’t we always?)

* Slowly George R.R. Martin turned, step by step, inch by inch…

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Autumn, Again by A Sunny Day in Glasgow, self-released — a little cauldron out of which love songs are poured.

Click here for a full review of the song “Drink drank drunk”; click here to download the entire album for free from A Sunny Day in Glasgow.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, released by the Null Corporation — Reznor’s finest instrumental suite yet is both warm and cold, like a computer rotting.

Click here for a full review of both the album and the movie for which it forms the soundtrack; click here to download a free sampler or the full album from the Null Corporation.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is There Is Love in You by Four Tet, released by Domino — as full in its restraint as How to Dress Well is barren in its release.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

* If you caught my LOVE AND ROCKTOBER wrap-up post early enough, you probably missed the update, in which I added advice as to which Love and Rockets books you should read first if you’re interested in giving either Gilbert or Jaime’s half of the series a try.

* Well, this is the most fascinating and exciting thing I heard all day. (Which says something about me, probably.) Okay, so you know how World of Warcraft’s big Cataclysm expansion/revamp has added various new races from which players can create playable characters, like goblins and so on. The best known of these is the Worgen — werewolves, basically. Now, I figured that the story would be that there’s some preexisting (albeit previously unplayable) race/civilization of werewolves just like the humans and dwarves and orcs and night elves and so on — but no, the story is much more interesting. Basically, when you opt to play as a Worgen, you start out as a human in the isolated, isolationist city of Gilneas. Trapped behind its own massive defensive walls, the city succumbs to a werewolf epidemic, a la a George A. Romero movie or 28 Days Later. You become a Worgen after you fail to save the city and succumb to the curse yourself. How cool is that? A brilliant and sinister approach to werewolves, and a fascinatingly creepy and unexepcted way to storytell this race of characters into existence.

* Am I the only person who didn’t know that Ben Jones was coming out with a new book of comics, art, and interviews about being a man called Men’s Group Black Math in January from PictureBox? And that the covers are denim? (Hat tip: David Paggi.)

* Speaking of Jones, The Problem Solverz is indeed a full-fledged Cartoon Network show for kids, not an Adult Swim show for adults on ambien. Can you even imagine???

* Today on Robot 6: How Scott doin’? He’s survivin’. He was drinkin’ earlier — now he’s drivin’. Where y’all evil exes, hanh? Where you hidin’?

* and yep, Lane Milburn’s Twelve Gems still looks pretty terrific.

* Wow, Chester Brown’s Paying for It and Anders Nilsen’s complete Big Questions can’t get here soon enough.

* Kudos and sympathy alike to the Onion A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps for dealing forthrightly and classily with a really, really lousy situation. Would that the same could be said for the A.V. Club’s commenters, among most insufferable on the Internet and currently deluging Comics Comics.

* Hey, Chip Kidd designed the cover for Andrew Sullivan’s book about weed.

* Real Life Horror 1: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, IRA collaborator Peter King is head of the House Homeland Security Committee. You almost have to admire the chutzpah involved in these Republican committee chair selections; it’s really like putting Doctor Doom in charge of the House Committee on the Fantastic Four. However, not even today’s GOP dares put Joe Barton in charge of Energy and Commerce, so good for them.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald points out, among other things, that most of the people who publicly fret about the innocent lives that could some day be lost due to WikiLeaks are incapable of acknowledging the actual innocent lives already taken by the U.S. government and its military on a daily basis. That lacunae in people’s moral calculus, to which I have obviously been far from immune over the years, bears thinking about. (Of course it’s also possible for the same group of dying innocents to go from visible to invisible, as is now the case with Republicans and sick 9/11 responders.)

* Real Life Horror 3: I always find military invasions of domestic areas in response to out-of-control law-enforcement issues darkly fascinating. I think it captures my inner eight-year-old just like opposite-number villains do. As a kid in affluent suburban America, the idea of a government not having control over part of its own territory, so that they have to send in the army to reclaim control from whatever criminal enterprise is running it in their stead, is pretty much straight-up science fiction, like Jabba the Hutt having the run of things on Tattooine, Empire be damned. And so it goes in Rio de Janeiro, where the military and police invaded and retook the Complexo do Alemão slum, with the predictable mixed results. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)

* Ugh, I can’t leave you with this cavalcade of awfulness over the weekend. Here, listen to this episode of Meltdown Comics’ Meltcast podcast, in which Sam Humphries of Fraggle Rock fame names Destructor his Pick of the Week. Thanks Sam! Hey, it cheered me up…

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Strange Weather, Isn’t It? by !!!, released by Warp — if this album had existed while I was in college, I don’t think my house full of white funkateers would ever have thrown a party to anything else.

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 Tomorrow, in a Year by the Knife in collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, released by Rabid — harsh, eerie, and lovely, like the detuning of the spheres.

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 Treats by Sleigh Bells, released by Mom & Pop — “Ministry” written in pink glitter pen with little hearts over the “i”s.

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 Barking by Underworld, released by Cooking Vinyl — unabashed body-music joy.

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 Head First by Goldfrapp, released by Mute — the ’80s’ most aggressively optimistic side, made to feel shiny and new.

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 All Day by Girl Talk, released by Illegal Art — the wedding DJ of your wildest dreams.

Click here to download it for free from Illegal Art.

* Quick housekeeping note first: I posted a quick guide to some of DestructorComics.com’s navigation features. I think they’re pretty neat.

* Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that Fantagraphics will be publishing Daniel Clowes-designed collections of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, arguably the great as-yet-uncollected classic comic. Over on Robot 6 I have a brief spiel about why I think the strip will work in the Tumblr Age.

* Also on Robot 6: Please pay Michael Kupperman, you monsters.

* Here’s more engrossing writing on life after recent developments in World of Warcraft by Bruce Baugh. I think the points he raises here about constructing a player’s early experience to maximize enjoyment in the immediate term and the impact of the story in the medium-to-long term can apply to pretty much any form of narrative storytelling.

* Moreover, as I think I’ve said before, it’s really only after reading Bruce’s posts of late that it’s occurred to me that the “line-wide event” model of superhero comics publishing developed by Marvel and DC over the past half-decade echoes the way WoW is set up. Like, okay, here’s this new expansion pack, and now everyone has to deal with the Lich King, or now everyone has to deal with natural disasters caused by a crazy dragon; here’s this new event, and now everyone has to deal with Captain America fighting Iron Man, or now everyone has to deal with President Obama offering a Cabinet position to the Green Goblin because he shot an alien on live TV. If you figure that there’s some sort of nerd collective unconscious that welcomed both these developments, you can also see why that collective unconscious has rebelled somewhat now that the events aren’t quite so all-encompassing, or indeed jostling up against one another in a way that confuses readers looking for one single direction to march in.

* Benjamin Marra on Fox News. Benjamin Marra in The New Yorker. I’ll take “Sentences I’m Delighted to Be Able to Write” for $1000, Alex. (Via Bill Kartalopoulos.)

* Speaking of which! Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal interviews David Lynch about his burgeoning career as a recording artist.

* I really like today’s Wolverine contribution to the Covered blog from Patt Kelley simply because the header he added to the image, USE YOUR CLAWS MY BELOVED, is a band name waiting to happen. Click the link to see what he’s riffing off of.

* Matt Madden is absolutely right: This photo of Killoffer by Ana Alexandrino is one of the greatest photos of a cartoonist of all time.

And do click that link — it’s a con report on the RIO Comicon from Jah Furry, and he’s got a lot of terrific photos of what looks like a very vibrant artcomics scene.

* Finally, David Fincher should do a shot-for-shot remake of Fight Club with Justin Timberlake as Tyler, Jesse Eisenberg as the narrator, and Kristen Stewart as Marla.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Wu-Massacre by Meth Ghost and Rae (aka Method Man, Ghostface Killah, and Raekwon), released by Def Jam — three men and a mythology.

Click here to download it from Amazon.