Come celebrate the 10th anniversary of Matthew Perpetua’s mighty Fluxblog, the very first mp3 blog, at Fluxblog Live: 10 Years of Perfect Tunes at Housing Works (126 Crosby St.) in Manhattan tomorrow night, Monday, July 23, at 7pm. Matthew, Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone, Emily Gould, Mark Richardson from Pitchfork, Heather D’Angelo from Au Revoir Simone, Dick Valentine from Electric Six, Amanda Petrusich, Amy Rose from Rookie, and I will each be playing and talking about a song from the past ten years, Fluxblog-style. I’m told there will also be free t-shirts on a first-come first-served basis. I would like to see you there!

Come celebrate the 10th anniversary of the mighty Fluxblog, Matthew Perpetua’s marvelous mp3 blog, at Fluxblog Live: 10 Years of Perfect Tunes at Housing Works in Manhattan on Monday, July 23, at 7pm. Matthew, Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone, Emily Gould, Mark Richardson from Pitchfork, Heather D’Angelo from Au Revoir Simone, Dick Valentine from Electric Six, Amanda Petrusich, Amy Rose Spiegel from Rookie, and I will each be playing and talking about a song from the past ten years, recreating the Fluxblog format IN THE FLESH. It’s a pretty good group. See you there!

* Tom Spurgeon hadn’t even arrived in San Diego yet before he started rolling out killer coverage of the comics side of Comic-Con:

** Here’s his list of five stories to watch at the show this year. If it really is more of a festival now, the CCI organization should go full Angouleme and allow a guest of honor to create a special programming slate. Kick the selection of the guest of honor to a vote by the previous year’s Eisner Award winners or something.

** Here’s the first in a series of posts on comics to buy at Comic-Con. I can get behind two of the three.

** Tom also lined up a couple of announcements. First, AdHouse is releasing an extremely limited edition collection of Jim Rugg’s painstaking notebook drawings called Notebook, available now. Rugg describes the project as “vacillat[ing] between celebration and satire,” which if you recall is the same sweet spot that made his and Brian Maruca’s Afrodisiac such a success.

** Second, PictureBox is releasing an extremely limited edition book by Renee French called Bjornstrand, available at SPX in September. Like the Rugg project, it’s limited to 300 copies.

* Drawn and Quarterly previews the new Brecht Evens graphic novel they’re unveiling at San Diego, The Making Of. Would you believe it looks pretty?

* Graeme McMillan on the 30th Anniversary of Love and Rockets. For what it’s worth, Beto’s recent work is far less frivolous and indulgent than Graeme believes. It’s actually nothing less than an ongoing interrogation of, even condemnation of, his fetishes. It’s as strong an exploration of the consequences of child sexual abuse as comics has ever produced this side of Debbie Dreschler, too. Not an easy read, to be sure, but also not a stupid read.

* In other news…

* Tucker Stone runs down some of the year’s most anticipated remaining releases for Flavorpill, including works by Chris Ware, Hope Larson, Jacques Tardi, Johnny Ryan, David Lasky, Noah Van Sciver, and Los Bros Hernandez. Always a pleasure to read Tucker’s dead-on, succinct summaries of the appeal of folks like these.

* LOL, James Robinson is off that not-appealing-to-people-who-like-He-Man He-Man comic after one issue, replaced by DC’s designated dogsbody Keith Giffen.

* MoCCA intends to relocate its museum, which seems like the kind of thing they might have included in their announcement that they were closing the old one.

* Hooray, new Cindy and Biscuit from Dan White!

* I enjoyed Steven Hyden’s piece on Nine Inch Nails’ masterpiece The Fragile for the Onion AV Club. Music writing about work I really, really, really, really love, even when we’re basically on the same wavelength, almost always contains one or two ideas that make me want to turn a cereal bowl upside down and smash it to pieces with the fleshy underside of my fist—this is why I’ve read a grand total of, I think, half an entry on that Bowie Songs blog—and there’s no album that means more to me than The Fragile, I don’t think, so I expected to be driven nuts, but no. I’ll take “alt rock’s Raging Bull,” sure.

* The winners of the final round of Xeric Grants for comics self-publishers have been announced. Aidan Koch is the only name I recognize; given how many known quantities applied in use-it-or-lose-it fashion, that’s quite a compliment to all the other winners. While the Xeric Foundation is correct when they assert that cartoonists have far more options for self publishing now than they did when the Xeric was conceived, from crowdfunding to publishing direct to the web, the Xeric was much more than a means to an end — it provided opportunities for cartoonists who lack the fanbase or the social-networking aptitude to make crowdfunding viable, and it was as much an honorific as a practical grant. I wish they hadn’t stopped it, and I’m glad to see Tom Hart and Leela Corman’s SAW school pick up the tradition, albeit with far fewer zeros on the checks, with their new SAW micro-grant initiative.

* I’m enjoying the emergence of Tim Marchman as the guy who smacks around comics’ unethical practices for mainstream media publications. Today he holds the feet of Len Wein and DC to the fire over Before Watchmen for the Daily Beast. Wein is an interesting test case for this sort of thing, of all people doing Before Watchmen. He edited the original and thus could reasonably be expected to have a keener sense of the integrity of the thing, which I assume is why Marchman chose to interview him about scabbing for the prequel. And he himself has been screwed way harder in a similar fashion than anyone else involved, never seeing a multimedia dime for his hand in co-creating Wolverine, though that could cut both ways in a situation like this. Finally, his house burned down in the last few years, bringing to the fore the economic issues that might entice someone to take on a project like this, which has been hinted at but infrequently discussed. Marchman doesn’t bring up any of that, unfortunately, but other than that it’s a barnburner of a piece, especially in terms of addressing and outright mocking the ethical justifications offered for the treatment of Alan Moore. (It certainly beats this much-linked A.O. Scott/Manohla Dargis thing on superhero movies for the Times, which passes off rhetorical packing peanuts like “Every age has the superhero it wants, needs or deserves” as insight, though I do agree with the broad thrust of their argument against the genre.)

* Matthew Perpetua’s mighty Fluxblog has just released its 2007 survey mix, the latest in his series of sprawling eight-disc best-of compilations for each year of Fluxblog’s decade of existence. This one is a real doozy.

* AdHouse is shutting down its distribution wing, noting that many of the boutique- and self-publishers AdDistro handled are more widely available now than they used to be. Good on Chris Pitzer for doing yeoman’s work on this.

* Marvel is relaunching many of its series with reshuffled creative teams this autumn in an initiative called Marvel NOW! As a reader, I see this primarily through the lens of having a beginning, middle, and end to long, high-quality runs on various books I’ve enjoyed over the past few years, which I’m looking forward to.

* PictureBox announces delays to CF’s Powr Mastrs 4 and Brian Chippendales (still ongoing-as-a-webcomic) Puke Force, but a reveals a new CF book, Warm Genetics House, to make up for it. I’ll take it!

* This CAKE recap makes it official: Closed Caption Comics is running neck and neck with Secret Acres for “best con reports.” As a bonus, this includes Noel Freibert’s review of Thickness #3, the first and afaik only such review to date. I’m grateful that in reviewing my contribution with William Cardini, Noel didn’t seek payback for the “cat in the microwave” incident. See, Noel — I told you there was a nicer way to explore splattery textures!

* As far as I know, this is our best glimpse yet of the cast for Bryan Lee O’Malley’s next comic, Seconds.

* My pal TJ Dietsch interviews Brandon Graham about Prophet, his marvelously modular sci-fi adventure series for Rob Liefeld’s Extreme line. Prophet is an object lesson in making individual installments count, and in the value of thinking biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig in SFF yet never getting lost in the caverns of your own ideas.

* Chris Butcher on the problems with professional publishers using Kickstarter to fund the books they publish. It always seemed to me that publishers take your book, print it, distribute it, and market it, on their own dime. That’s what a publisher is. Chris’s point is basically “Well, that’s what a publisher was.” He’s not outraged, he’s simply pointing out that this is changing — has changed — and wondering how to proceed.

* Today in the “saving it for when I’ve read the books” column: Tom Spurgeon on the Joe Sacco collection Journalism and Tucker Stone on Carl Barks’s Disney ducks comics. The last panel he uses to illustrate the post should be issued to superhero artists with their 1099s.

* Speaking of which: Tom Spurgeon on Jaime Hernandez’s superhero slobberknocker, God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls. No greater pleasure in writing-about-comics than reading my favorite critic write about his favorite cartoonist.

* The Mindless Ones annotate/critique Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. III: Century #3: 2009: Part one, part two, part three tk. Some pretty robust debate in these.

* One last “good critics on good comics” entry: Chris Mautner guides you through the work of Jacques Tardi, who probably goes hand in hand with Jason as the European cartoonist who’s most benefited from Fantagraphics’ thoughtful, consistent approach to collecting his work.

* Gabrielle Bell is doing another round of July Diary daily comics! This one’s my favorite so far. So subtly funny.

* I was so convinced that this remarkable installment of Ant Comic by Michael DeForge was an homage to the third Where’s Waldo? book with all the battles in it, but I asked and it’s not. It’s still remarkable, however.

* Jonny Negron does a dream comic. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Looks like my friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan will be drawing a lot this summer.

* Julia Gfrörer does fanart for Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” What a country!

* A child’s guide to Dogs and Water, by Anders Nilsen.

* This pinup of Megg from Simon Hanselmann’s webcomics by Marc J. Palm represents the shortest amount of time between “discovering a webcomic” and “discovering sessy fanart for that webcomic” I’ve ever experienced. Hooray!

* Happy Fourth of July from Jillian Tamaki and Frances! (And a not-so-happy one from SuperMutant Magic Academy guest artist Frank Stockton. My god.)

* The new Charli XCX song sounds exactly like a collaboration between Katy Perry and Leviathan from Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

* One of the nice things about the Internet is I can operate a dedicated site where posting pictures of Kristen Stewart in shorts and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt is part of the remit.

* “I had a lot of fun with it – it gets extremely gross and gooey!”—William Cardini on our collaboration “The Cockroach” from Thickness #3. Order your copy today!

* According to Midtown Comics, new comics from Joe Sacco, Alan Moore, Carl Barks, Kevin Huizenga, David B., Gilbert Hernandez, and Josh Simmons come out tomorrow. And for fans of more traditional genre serials, there’s also new Grant Morrison/Chris Burnham, Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips, Mike Mignola/Cameron Stewart, and Brandon Graham. That’s a fantastic new comics day right there.

* American film critic and auteur-theory pioneer/popularizer Andrew Sarris died last week, as you no doubt heard. It’s tough to think of another critic who had as much of an impact on popular understanding of their chosen field of coverage. Run, don’t walk, to David Bordwell’s lengthy and thoughtful post comparing Sarris to his arch-rival Pauline Kael. On the more personal end of things, I enjoyed Roy Edroso’s tribute.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Ed Brubaker. This is one of the best superhero-creator interviews I’ve read in a very, very long time, both in terms of breaking news — Brubaker is leaving Captain America after nearly eight years writing it, during which time it was never less than a great time and frequently just great — and opinion — Spurge and Brubaker directly address creators’-rights flashpoints like Jack Kirby and Before Watchmen. Good on Tom for asking those questions, but better on Brubaker for answering them — you’d better believe that’s why they don’t get asked more often; there’s often just no point.

*

I haven’t even looked at these comics since the day I bought my last of them, and if you had asked me at the time I would have thought I’d have read them a half-dozen additional times by now. A lot of comics are like that, instant friends of the dormitory hallway variety and then suddenly you’re both decades older and you haven’t spoken in years and years.

—Spurge on Alan Moore & company’s Marvelman/Miracleman.

* George R.R. Martin updates us on various projects, including three that pertain to A Song of Ice and Fire.

* I’ve seen way too many people talk about Geoff Johns inserting a He-Man character he made up when he was eight years old into a He-Man comic he’s writing today like that’s a bad thing. Ahem.

* Submitted for your approval: Freak Scene, a new-underground art show opening at L.A.’s Synchronicity Space on July 6th featuring Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Johnny Ryan, Zach Hazard Vaupen, Jim Rugg, Bald Eagles, and many other leading lights of nasty alternative comics.

* Yeesh, this comic by Eleanor Davis is a doozy.

* I’d never seen Simon Hanselmann’s Megg and Mogg before, but my goodness. The character designs and humor are, heh, a bit indebted to Ben Jones, but the linework (that hair!) and sumptuous, understated coloring are things unto themselves. Terrific large-scale presentation on Hanselmann’s tumblr, too. (Via Frank Santoro.)

* Kate Beaton’s chops are ridiculous, which when coupled with the rigorous idiosyncracy of her sense of humor — her sense of where jokes are to be found — is what helps elevate her above her now-legion imitators.

* I’m sure I say this nearly every week, but this is my favorite sexy Jonny Negron drawing in a long time.

* You’d think it’d be tough for Sam Humphries and Pete Toms’s new comic for Study Group, “Virginia,” to live up to the promise of this cover image, but they pull it off. It’s worth noting that Humphries is doing this at the same time he’s self-publishing more traditionally “indy” comics and doing work for hire for Marvel. It’s gratifying to see someone who could choose to do something else still do bonafide alternative comics.

* Your Uno Moralez gif/image gallery of the week.

* Why was I not told about Rose O’Neill’s kewpie comics before?

* Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle #8, in stores in July!

* If you’ve got a hundred bones you can buy yourself a first printing of Kramers Ergot 4, the most important art comic of the ’00s. (Via Frank Santoro.)

* Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which is to L. Ron Hubbard what Velvet Goldmine is to David Bowie, has thus far had two of the most compellingly off trailers since, well, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. I continue to maintain that if Anderson ever makes an outright horror movie he’ll have a bead on scariest of all time. Based on these trailers, it’s getting tough to think of a better current director/composer pair than Anderson and Jonny Greenwood, too.

* The young Patti Smith was many things, and one of them was “extremely attractive,” which I find interesting both for obvious reasons and because that doesn’t seem to be part of her rock-star legend at all.

* Ann Magnuson is crowdfunding a Jobriath musical; Henry Rollins is narrating a Jobriath documentary. I didn’t see this coming.

* It has probably been thirteen years since I last heard the phrase “boot and rally.”

* I wrote about one of my favorite funk songs/guitar solos, “Very Yes” by Bootsy’s Rubber Band (featuring, obviously, Bootsy Collins and his brother Catfish) for Cool Practice.

* Finally, feast your eyes on this gallery of double-page spreads by Jack Kirby — proof that the King of Comics was one of the greatest artists, of any kind, of the 20th century. (Via Joe Keatinge.)

* People drawing an equivalence between DC’s use of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen characters in Before Watchmen and Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s pastiche of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would have a point if and only if Moore released this issue as “BEFORE HARRY POTTER,” starring all the actual Harry Potter characters rather than parody versions of them, using the Harry Potter trade dress, through Harry Potter’s publisher, exploiting a loophole in a contract he arranged with Rowling, over Rowling’s explicit and unequivocal objections, following a two-decade string of mistreatment and broken promises.

* I had no idea that Matt Groening was still doing Life in Hell. That should have been a bigger deal, right? Anyway, that link takes you to Tom Spurgeon talking about the strip upon the announcement that it’s ending.

* Also, Tom Spurgeon reviews Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown. The more I see that cover, the funnier and better it gets.

* And in his continuing series on ’80s serialized comics, Spurge reviews Frank Miller’s Daredevil (starring the Stan Lee/Bill Everett creation) and Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin. The Elektra piece in particular is a bracing bit of what-could-have-been on everything from politics to Marvel Comics’ collected editions program.

* Hey look, it’s my Thickness editors, born-again-hard Michael DeForge and wide-eyed ingenue Ryan Sands, at CAKE this past weekend. (Via CBR.) Related: an excellent photo parade from the Happiness crew, and one of Secret Acres’ trademark comprehensive/catty con reports.

* My friend Jason Dean, who designed thishyere blog, has started a webcomic based on his many years in retail. Should be a pip.

* Jason also designed the spiffy new site for my friend Alex Segura Jr., who works and writes for Archie and does much more besides. His thoughts on Mad Men Season Five are well worth your time.

* Speaking of Mad Men, Matt Zoller Seitz, Deborah Lipp, and Kevin B. Lee of Press Play put together a fantastic, revealing, comprehensive video essay on death imagery in the fifth season. I guarantee you there’s stuff in there you missed.

* And I’m extraordinarily late to the party once again, but Molly Lambert’s Mad Men recaps for Grantland are spectacular, getting better as they go. You could skip the first couple if you wanted, probably, as they really are pretty much just recaps, but there’s something to be said for going through all of them and reaching that point where you’re like “whoa, where did this come from.”

* A new Uno Moralez comic! My five favorite words in the English language?

* I know nothing about the comics of Frederik Peeters but that’s one hell of a cover.

* The artist Frazer Irving has been doing one-hour warm-up sketches in the morning before working on comics projects. I’ve posted three of them below. This is what a one-hour warm-up sketch looks like for Frazer Irving.

* Jeepers creepers, the forthcoming collection of Pippi Longstocking comics by Astrid Lindgren and Ingrid Vang Nyman from Drawn and Quarterly looks beautiful and silly.

* The new Study Group webcomic Haunter by Sam Alden is quite something — alt-fantasy that looks like Brecht Evens colored it.

* Ha! The new book from Closed Caption Comics’ Conor Stechschulte, Lurking Nocturners, appears comprised in part of just the adjectives from H.P. Lovecraft stories.

* Real Life Horror: This short memoir essay by former American interrogator Eric Fair about living with the knowledge that he’s tortured people is…you know, it’s one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever read. Probably one of the most important, things, too.

* I can’t bear to leave you like that. Here are pictures of David Bowie and Beyoncé looking extremely attractive.

I wrote about a memorable live performance of “Sex Type Thing” by Stone Temple Pilots for my music tumblr, Cool Practice.

I felt like I should again note here that I’m writing about music for my new blog Cool Practice, about songs and videos that read as “cool” to me.

* Beastie Boys – “So What’cha Want”
* Public Enemy – “Fight the Power”
* Country Joe McDonald – “The ‘Fish’ Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag”
* Nine Inch Nails – “March of the Pigs”

I hope you like it.

* It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Time for Tom Spurgeon’s comically massive guide to the San Diego Comic Con, fully revised and updated this year and as wise and funny and practical as ever. It is literally the next best thing to being there, and every time I read it, I miss the show more. If you want a taste of what it’s like without going, spend your lunch hour with this sucker.

* Matthew Perpetua has unleased another monstrous eight-disc survey mix, this one featuring the best songs of 2006. It’s funny: I don’t disagree with him that 2006 was a weak year overall, but I look at this mix and it’s jam after jam. But I think I started regularly reading Matthew’s Fluxblog site in 2006 because I liked the songs he was writing about, so I suppose it’s not surprising that I’m 100% behind the majority of his selections here.

* Tom Spurgeon also interviews Study Group/Press Gang cartoonist and impresario Zack Soto, who’s at the center of a lot of interesting things going on in alternative comics making and publishing right now.

* By all means enjoy Marc Spitz’s oral history of The Wire for Maxim. The revelation of this little bit of actor business by Jamie Hector, the actor who played the evil-eyed druglord Marlo Stansfield, was dynamite:

You know, I never looked in the mirror, never worked on that stare. I’d look through the other person, like they just don’t exist.

* DC Comics’ big New 52 relaunch helped, but didn’t transform, the company’s sales.

* Okay, so apparently there’s some kind of anthology called CAKE BOOK 2012 edited by Andy Burkholder (related to CAKE the con? I don’t know) and featuring, and I quote:

Dane Martin
Anna Haifisch
Paul Nudd
Brecht Vandenbroucke
Patrick Kyle
Sua Yoo
Michael Olivo
A. Degen
Anders Nilsen
Jason Overby
Nick Drnaso
Sanya Glisic
Jason T Miles
Ginette Lapalme
Blaise Larmee
Otto Splotch
Eamon Espey
Molly O’Connell
Paul Loubet
Jesse Balmer
Aidan Koch
John Hankiewicz
Jeff Lok
Max Morris
Lyra Hill
Karneeleus
Henry Glover
Jaakko Pallasvuo
Michael Deforge
Jesse Fillingham
Edie Fake
Jesse McManus
Mike Redmond
Leslie Weibeler
Matthew Thurber
Josh Bayer
David Alvarado
Chris Day
Mickey Z
Scott Longo
Austin English
Julie Delporte
Andy Burkholder
Conor Stechschulte
Onsmith
Zach Hazard Vaupen
Joe Tallarico
Bret Koontz
Aaron Shunga
Noel Freibert
Andy Ortmann
Shalo P
Anya Davidson

Holy moses.

* Anders Nilsen talks about what looks and sounds like an extraordinary sketchbook-based book and gallery show he’s doing called Rage of Poseidon.

* Zach Hazard Vaupen, the weirdest gag cartoonist on the planet, has started another humor strip called Pixel Dog’s Soft Bark. That’s what this is.

* Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color (of course it is) is now playing on the Study Group webcomics portal.

* Isaac Molyan revisits one of our old collaborations, “I Remember When the Monsters Started Coming for the Cars.”

* Lovely cartooning from Michael DeForge.

* Uno Moralez, image/gif gallery, solid gold, you know the drill.

* Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing a Lisa Hanawalt collection. Great news for all involved, including the readers.

* Filing these away for when I’ve read the book: The Comics Journal’s Nicole Rudick and Ken Parille on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?.

* Tom Ewing on the silence of Star Wars. I know exactly what he’s talking about, and it’s the sort of thing one misses when watching contemporary blockbusters.

* Not that I expected any less, but I sure am glad to see the Mindless Ones avoid the new “Wolverine wouldn’t do that!” school of Mad Men criticism in their review of last week’s pivotal episode “The Other Woman.”

* Speaking of, Gwynne Watkins’s Mad Men interview series for GQ has made for marvelous reading. Big surprise: the actors tend to be very smart interpreters of the show. Particularly recommended but ONLY IF YOU’RE ALL CAUGHT UP: Jared Harris and Christina Hendricks.

* Real Life Horror: What kind of person voluntarily sits in on Obam’s Kill List meetings? Like, where are you in your life where you think to yourself “These are calls I’m comfortable making”?

* Finally, news you can use: Emma Watson will be performing in full Rocky Horror lingerie regalia in her next movie.

How do we feel about this, ’90s high-school drama-club goth Christina Hendricks? “Well, at first I was like…”

“But then I was like…”

Click on over to the tumblr of music writer Jamieson Cox to hear him interview me for his delightfully titled writer-to-writer podcast series A Shot of Jamieson. Topics include David Bowie, Beyoncé, A Song of Ice and Fire, Internet generation gaps, and Tumblr itself. Enjoy!

* Let’s start with a couple of quick updates to the piece I wrote yesterday about Tim Marchman’s essay on superhero comics for the Wall Street Journal. First, I thought it was important to add that I read and like quite a few Big Two superhero comics being published today, and I enjoy the field overall more than Marchman does, so that would be another quibble of mine with the piece. My attitude for the last few years has been that since I have an easy enough time finding superhero comics I enjoy, I don’t bang my head against the overall health of the genre. (Indeed it’s been a long time since I felt worrying about the Health of Comics was a productive or worthwhile goal for me as a writer.)

* Second, the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna wrote in to point out that he has indeed been covering the ethical ramifications of the Avengers movie and Marvel’s treatment of Jack Kirby for WaPo’s Comic Riffs blog: here he proposes Marvel just up and giving the Kirby heirs a million dollars, and here he interviews writer-artist Roger Langridge about his decision to cease working for Marvel and DC over creator-rights issues. I guess there’s a difference between the book review section (where Marchman’s piece appeared) and a dedicated blog for comics and cartooning, but I said that the national media hadn’t touched these issues at all, and here you have one of the most national-est and mainstream of national mainstream news publications talking about it. My only defense is that I simply missed the articles. Thanks to Cavna for bringing them to my attention, and for bringing these issues to the attention of his readers.

* Normally I’d save items like this for All Leather Must Be Boiled, but Entertainment Weekly’s big scoop on all the new characters in Game of Thrones Season Three (I’ve linked to Westeros’s coverage because they add a couple scoops of their own) is good enough news to share it over here, too. Basically, that character you love and were worried wasn’t going to be in the show, whoever that happened to be? He or she is in the show.

* Another one bites the dust: Like it did with me, fatherhood has forced my old Robot 6 editor JK Parkin to retire from the blog. John’s a smart writer and a tireless editor, who was responsible for making perhaps the great “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” comics blog — Robot 6 covers the entirety of comics from the home base of a superhero-centric site, and John’s the one who navigates the conflicts and congruencies — as good as it’s long been. Good luck, Papa John, and good luck to the equally awesome Kevin Melrose, who’s officially taking over.

* Speaking of Robot 6, Chris Mautner provides an introductory course on Charles Burns.

* Whoa: Benjamin Marra unveiled a whole new primitive style this past week. Feast your eyes on “Inner-City Wizard” and “College Buds.” But don’t worry: “High School Hooker Vigilante” still has that old-school Marra magic.

* Catching heavy Renee French vibes, of all things, from Tyler Crook’s portrait of the Childlike Empress from The NeverEnding Story.

* Mind you, the original Renee French is always available for your perusal as well.

* You anti-London Olympics people out there, and I know there are a bunch of you, ought to appreciate this savage, vulgar thing from Pete Barn Paulsz. (I wish I could remember how I found this.)

* Jonny Negron, man. Jonny Negron.

* Music writer Jamieson Cox interviews music writer Brandon Soderberg for his tumblr-centric music-writing podcast. Two great writers who taste great together.

* Aw man, that Jack Kirby “Spiderman” image that went around last week was a fake. (Via an apologetic SHIT COMICS.)

* Fun fact I learned from Glenn Greenwald #1: Did you know the Obama administration defines any military-age male in a strike zone as a combatant? Keep this in mind next time you hear about how many militants our fleet of flying killer robots blew up.

* Fun fact I learned from Glenn Greenwald #2: Did you know that the way we caught Osama Bin Laden was by hiring a Pakistani doctor to pretend to vaccinate children for Hepatitis B when in actuality he was collecting DNA samples? Keep this in mind the next time you hear about how those evil Pakistanis put that guy in jail for 33 years for the crime of “helping us find Bin Laden.” And try to imagine the damage this will do to vaccination rates in Pakistan — “Oh, you want to vaccinate my kid? Sure, sign me up for the program that could well be a CIA front to find someone, shoot him to death in view of his family, and dump his body in the ocean.”

* I already knew this was going on so it’s not a fun fact I learned, but as Glenn Greenwald points out, the Obama administration’s interpretation of “due process” is as ludicrous and laughable as it is totally horrifying.

* On a palate-cleansing final note: this fake menu handed out at the Brooklyn food festival Googamooga is the funniest bit of writing I’ve seen in a very, very long time. Panty slaw has entered the lexicon of the Collins household in a big way.

I’m always telling people that the most important thing to do as an artist or critic or what have you is to run hard right at the stuff that moves you, frightens you, upsets you, turns you on, delights you the most. I think I’ve done all of those things here and there, but I’ve never really run hard at the stuff I find/found the “coolest.” That’s just as big a part of who I am as any of those other things, but it’s more complicated and more interesting because it’s a construction. I don’t think I can really help my reaction to stuff I find horrifying or moving or joyous or sexy, but do think I have some control over how I respond to coolness, how I do or don’t see any given kind of cool as something to which I can aspire, or which I can incorporate into my own life. I think that’s why I’ve addressed this area so little: It’s like a magician revealing where the rabbit came from, only I’m not just the magician here, I’m the rabbit. That I’ve never done it is exactly why I’m doing it.

I started a new music tumblr called Cool Practice. I’ll be writing about songs and videos I found “cool,” and what that meant to me. So far I’ve done “So What’cha Want” and “Fight the Power.” For more information, click here.

* Phoebe Gloeckner is struggling with depression due to her decade-long immersion in a still-unfinished project about horrific crimes against women and girls in Juarez, Mexico. She says she feels alone. Phoebe is one of the best living cartoonists, creator of some of the best short stories and one of the best graphic novels of all time, and I’m as deeply connected to her work as I am to any comic. If you feel similarly and there’s any way you can make these feelings known to her, go ahead and do it.

* Well well well, what have we here? It’s Ticket Stub, a new Tim Hensley book coming soon from Yam Books.

* Gilbert Hernandez talks to CBR’s Shaun Manning about his forthcoming drug/zombie book from Dark Horse, Fatima: The Blood Spinners. Beto skeptics please note that he declined to make this a Fritz book because huge boobs would look silly on a super-athletic zombie killer. (Fritz makes a cameo, though, apparently.)

* Against “Was that really necessary” as a criticism of art:

I think “is it necessary?” is the single most overrated rubric for evaluating quality in art. For starters, no art is “necessary,” that’s what makes it art. Moreover, this allows only for utilitarian plot-advancement and arc-based character growth. All the weirdness that really matters — the spectacle, the symbolism, the dead-ends and meanderings and tics, the funny and frightening and unclassifiable flourishes that make art luminous — is argued out of existence. The daisy-chain of voyeurism [in a recent Game of Thrones episode] wasn’t necessary, no, but it was vital in that it was bizarre and ridiculous and awesome.

—me, in the comments for my Rolling Stone piece on the 10 biggest differences between the show and the books. It’s not just disgruntled book-fans you see complaining in those words, either. I love excess, so I’m not a fan of this line of argument.

* Related:

Some people have rules about sex in comic books or stories in general. It needs to serve the story and not just exist to titillate the reader. Do these people have sex at all?

Sex never “serves the story” in the way these people want. Hell, you could take the sex out if 9 Songs and the story would be there. It just wouldn’t be the story that anybody wants to watch.

Generally, people don’t look at war stories and complain that there’s a war in it. If someone does make that complaint, they get sent to the kids’ table.

—Darryl Ayo. He’s not talking about Game of Thrones, but he might as well be.

* Great music writing #1: Eric Harvey’s epic-length history of Quiet Storm, the ultrasmooth, bedroom/wallpaper-friendly R&B format that he likens to “ambient soul.” A week that produces this and Tom Spurgeon’s tribute to the comic-book creators of the Avengers is a pretty great goddamn week for long-form writing on the internet.

* Great music writing #2: It’s nothing so epic as the Quiet Storm piece, but Lindsay Zoladz’s review of Garbage’s new album is the kind of music criticism you’ll enjoy reading even when you haven’t heard the music in question. She’s just very straightforward and very clear and very entertaining and very insightful.

* The three My Bloody Valentine reissues are now out, and yet somehow remain a comedy of errors. Do I splurge for the CDs or will the remastering remain evident in the mp3 versions? Are there mp3 versions?

* Tucker Stone reviews Jean-Pierre Filiu & David B.’s nonfiction graphic novel (I know, I know) Best of Enemies: A History of U.S. and Middle East Relations. He describes it as feeling like not-comics in a way you’d think would be a dealbreaker, but which he argues totally isn’t. Very intriguing. David B., of course, like Gloeckner and Gilbert, is a top 10 cartoonist on the planet today.

* Matthew Perpetua interviews Arne Bellstorf about his admirably low-key Beatles-in-Hamburg graphic novel Baby’s in Black. Apparently Bellstorf wasn’t (isn’t?) even much of a Beatles fan.

* TCAF organizer Chris Butcher’s con report on the Toronto convention/festival’s latest go-round actually includes the methodology behind its attendance figures! This is kind of amazing if you’ve followed the comic-con circuit for any period of time, especially in contrast with an unfortunate tendency to release questionably high numbers in the wake of bad publicity. MoCCA, Wizard, take note.

* Speaking of, Noel Freibert’s TCAF photo parade is my favorite such post in a long long time. What a haul! What a karaoke outing!

* Finally, Jamieson Cox’s insider account of R. Kelly’s expansion into the world of pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Eternal. Thank you Donna Summer.

* Here’s everything George R.R. Martin is working on at the moment. Sounds like the fourth Tale of Dunk and Egg is finished.

* How far did you get in Jennifer Kahn’s New York Times Magazine piece on psychopathic children before you recoiled in horror? I hit the panic button at the cat thing, predictably. But in all seriousness, this is a very strong and very troubling article about something that I’ve wondered and worried about since I first started reading about serial killers years ago. Violent sociopathy is a real challenge to a liberal democratic society’s ideas of justice and liberty, and pop-psych serial-killer books tend to hammer that home hard. Kahn’s article adds some welcome, though no less challenging, ideas to the discussion, pointing out that a graduation to adult violent sociopathy is not guaranteed, and thus something likely can be done to save these kids and their future victims, just as people who’ve inherited heart disease can be prevented from dying from it. The problem is no one’s really sure what that something is. Lots more to ponder in this thing: Could you love a cruel child? Why is it so disturbing that the kid at the heart of the article doesn’t just lash out, that instead, he…waits?

* Roger Langridge quits working for Marvel and DC over creators’-rights concerns. I guess this is how it’ll work: people at the margins leaving, and publicly declaring why.

* The Mindless Ones come forth to tackle Mad Men‘s “Lady Lazarus.” A friend planted a far less optimistic appraisal of Peggy in my mind a while back than the one espoused by the Mindlesses, and I’m finding it tough to shake.

* Andrei Molotiu has had it up to here with your so-called “stories.” I like Andrei and I like many of the abstract comics he’s championed, but this post reminds me of that Sopranos episode where the local rock band guy complains about how the Beatles have boxed in his own genius.

* Oooh, a new I Just Figured It All Out from Tom Neely.

* Oooh, a new A Wrinkle in Time promo image from Hope Larson.

* Oooh, a new gif/image gallery from Uno Moralez.

* This is a gorgeous Karl Wills page. Funny, great physicality, love the blood spatter, love the big white thighs, love the erasure of the faces as the fight begins.

* Rob Bricken’s piece on the CW’s forthcoming Green Arrow show Arrow made me laugh. “People might accidentally recognize the name ‘Green Arrow’ — we all know how unpopular superheroes are nowadays!”

* Can you imagine listening to M83’s “Kim and Jessie” as a real-live emotional teenager?

* “You think you’re better than me?” is humankind’s worst emotion.

* Finally, there’s a panel in this Puke Force strip by Brian Chippendale that sums up America’s drone wars so perfectly and devastatingly I don’t even know what else to say. You’ll know the one when you click the link for the full comic.

Twenty years later and this is still what cool looks like to me. I love you Adam Yauch.

* Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog returns with its latest eight-disc (eight disc!) survey of music from the ’00s; this time it’s 2005 in the spotlight.

* I think I may have missed an earlier announcement, but my RSS reader insists this is breaking news: The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, historically the best comics convention, has announced its date for this year: Saturday, November 10, 2012. That’s about a month earlier than usual, and while I’ll miss the gray wintry Brooklyn weather and holiday-season vibe a bit, I don’t see any reason the new time frame won’t work.

* Ooh boy, Secret Acres is publishing a print edition of the profoundly strange and uncomfortably sexy webcomic Slechtemeisjes called Wayward Girls, now revealed to be by Netherlands art-school graduate Michiel Budel! That’s a good get.

* Thickness #3 may be the final issue of the series, but co-editor Ryan Sands reveals a collected edition with added material is in the works.

* This Comics Journal roundtable on the comics of Jack Kirby and critic Charles Hatfield’s book about Kirby The Hand of Fire, is an absolute feast, and as of this writing there’s no end in sight. Featuring Jeet Heer, Dan Nadel, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah Boxer, Glen David Gold, R. Fiore, and Doug Harvey.

* Speaking of the Journal, here’s a great review of Benjamin Marra’s Lincoln Washington: Free Man by Matt Seneca. And Brandon Soderberg’s review of Derf Backderf’s memoir My Friend Dahmer, about the author’s adolescent friendship(ish) with Jeffrey Dahmer, makes me want to read the book even more than I already did.

* Salon’s Willa Paskin is a fabulous TV critic, and her piece on the exquisite awfulness of Joffrey from Game of Thrones offers ample evidence as to why. I’m going to print out that first paragraph and keep it under my pillow at night.

* Speaking of fabulous TV critics, don’t miss the Mindless Ones on last week’s Mad Men.

* So I guess the picture quality of The Hobbit‘s revolutionary 48 frames-per-second filming technique is so good that it actually goes back around to ugly-looking. Peter Jackson defends the move, while TheOneRing.net’s Quickbeam (whoa, flashbacks to 12 years ago!) says it’s a matter of taste that takes getting used to.

* Sam Costello talks to Robot 6’s Brigid Alverson about his decision to end his very, very ambitious webcomic/print-comic horror anthology series Split Lip. Sad to see it go.

* How bright will seem, through mem’ry’s haze, those happy, golden, bygone days: Grant Morrison waxes thoughtful on the big superhero characters for Playboy. Also Frank Quitely is now drawing him to look like a nightmare cross between Crowley and Burroughs.

* I don’t know how Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic is able to keep making me feel worse and worse, but I’m…glad it does…?

* Keep going, Jonny Negron. Just keep going.

* Let’s ask people about Alan Moore Before Watchmen. Let’s ask people about Jack Kirby and The Avengers. Let’s note for the record what they say.

* Julia Gfrörer on Dylan Williams. What a moving video.

In its original version, which I think is the ’90s dance-industrial act Lords of Acid’s single best recording proper, “The Crablouse” was already one of the sleaziest songs I owned. What can you say about a paean to the erotic and orgasmic potential of pubic lice? The lyrics, barked by a female vocalist in a mic-distorted Euro-rap that gives way to a reach-for-the-heavens ululation in the chorus, don’t actually, you know, make any sense, but they didn’t need to. The point was simply “THIS IS A DIRTY SEXY SONG ABOUT DIRTY SEXY DIRTYSEX,” and the music flung a gigantic beat and huge guitars and synths and snarling raging panting jungle-beast vox at you to reinforce the point. (The immortal album cover by friend of the blog COOP didn’t hurt, either.)

Much as I like that original version, though, I think I like this remix by Carl. S. Johansen even better. I like it for its focus. Instead of the frantic, distortion-laden industrial instrumentation of the original, this is just big glittering washes and skittering snakes of synth, the kind of beat that always sounds like you’ve turned the bass up in your car too loud to be properly heard, and seven words’ worth of lyrics (not THOSE seven words, but you’re not on the wrong track) that boil the Lords’ entire dirty-dance project down to its barest and most goal-oriented essentials. (The EP it came on had a pretty great cover of its own.)

Maybe I’m overthinking it now, years later, but looking back this song must have hit me at just the right time. It’s loud, scary, heavy, danceable, utter anathema to square notions of taste, futuristic, weirdly lovely at times, and hyperbolically sexual in a relentlessly pleasure-seeking and bluntly honest way. A terrific fantasy version of adulthood for someone just becoming an adult! It didn’t all work out quite that way for me, I suppose, but you know, I did alright.

* Is this the best line-up of comics creators ever assembled? Appearing at the University of Chicago’s Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference: Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Francoise Mouly, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, and Chris Ware. You’re just the Hernandez Brothers away from running the table on the Greatest Living Cartoonists. Burns, Clowes, Gloeckner, and Ware are my personal pantheon even before you consider towering figures like Crumb, Spiegelman, Mouly, Sacco, Panter, and Katchor. Good god almighty. (Via Drawn & Quarterly.)

* So this explains Guy Davis’s abrupt, weirdly underaddressed-by-Dark-Horse departure from Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s near-peerless B.P.R.D.: He’s working on the next Guillermo Del Toro film.

* Tom Spurgeon and David Brothers on Before Watchmen, the shame of comics.

* Tim O’Shea talks to Kevin Huizenga about Gloriana, his forthcoming hardcover re-release of what I consider to be one of the greatest comics ever made by anyone, ever. Huizenga’s a difficult interview, but Tim makes it work.

* Comics Grid’s Nicholas Labarre’s essay on Roy Thomas and Mike Mignola’s adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most possessive-apostrophe-heavy link I’ve made in ages, but worth your time nonetheless. I remember the owner of my teen-years comic shop really giving that book the hard sell to me, to the point where I felt bullied into buying it. At the time I assumed he knew I was a big fan of the film and thus an easy mark for the tie-in, but now I wonder if he was simply trying to expose me to Mignola.

* Okay, Jillian Tamaki, now you’re just showing off.

* Tom Neely #1: Rob Clough review’s Neely’s fascinating The Wolf, one of the best comics of 2011.

* Tom Neely #2: My God, Neely’s parodies of various Kramers Ergot contributors (drawn in the style of KE regular Tom Gauld’s great-author comics) are unbelievably hilarious and mean, and I say that despite really liking the work of almost everyone lampooned thereby.

* Tom Neely #3: He’s drawing beautiful naked women again. PROCEED.

* OCCUPY BASIN CITY

* Did you know? Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval was the original model for Paul Pope’s character HR in THB. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

* Fine writing by Matthew Perpetua about the enduring appeal of Kraftwerk.

* Fine writing by the Mindless Ones, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Deborah Lipp on recent Mad Men episodes.

* Related: Josh Wigler, host of the MTV News Watching the ‘Thrones’ video roundtables on Game of Thrones in which I participate, put together a pretty dizzying summary of all the geek-culture references and connections on last weekend’s Mad Men. I missed the Lost homage, myself.

* Watching this gameplay video from the old SNES sidescroller/sim hybrid ActRaiser, I suddenly understood Proust and his madeleines.

* Finally, I’m not a big gamer, I’m definitely not a big fighting gamer, and I don’t even own one of the systems for which such a game would be available, but boy oh boy do I want a Game of Thrones fighting game. (Via Topless Robot.)

* First, a suggestion: Why not load up this delightful 50-minute DJ set from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy before reading the rest of this post?

* Second, a public service announcement: Charles Forsman’s Muster List aspires to be a comprehensive link repository for minicomics cartoonists and the places online where you can buy those minicomics. It’s amazing.

* Speaking of Forsman, the new issue of his fine series The End of the Fucking World is out.

* Hoo boy: Benjamin Marra’s latest is Lincoln Washington: Free Man #1, a headlong dive right back into Gangsta Rap Posse #2‘s racial swimming/cess pool. “Eagerly anticipated” doesn’t cover it. Read a preview at the link.

* Jillian Tamaki’s figurework deserves some kind of tribute album.

* As do Brian Chippendale’s colossal environments.

* And speaking of figurework, look how fully formed, considered, and lively the bodies and faces were in R. Crumb’s earliest work. It’s like he mastered the hardest stuff first.

* Oooh, this is a good one from Tom Neely. And a relatively rare opportunity to see him do panel-to-panel stuff, too.

* I hope the recent burst of activity (relatively speaking) from Uno Moralez continues unabated.

* L. Nichols has a tumblr and she’s posting some knockout shots of murals and other art she did in a local restaurant. I promise you’re more interested in seeing this than you think you are.

* I have to hand it to DC for coming up with an approach to a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comic book that isn’t appealing to me in a single way. That takes hard work!

* For a brief moment as I scrolled toward it in my Google Reader, I thought this David Bowie photo was a Renee French drawing. Renee, if you’re reading this, you can still make me right.

* Decoding the aesthetics of Beyoncé’s new tumblr. <3 (Hat tip: Beebles.)

* If you’re not familiar with the bracingly frank sex writing of Vanessa at Nightmares and Boners, you should fix that forthwith.

* Glenn Greenwald is writing about the egregious, openly unconstitutional treatment of journalist and documentarian Laura Poitras, but he could just as easily be talking about Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Occupy protesters, and anyone else who makes the mistake of openly opposing American state power in a way that directly impacts or embarrasses the wielders of that power:

As is true for all states that expand and abuse their own powers, that’s what the U.S. Government counts on: that it is sending the message that none of this will affect you as long as you avoid posing any meaningful challenges to what they do. In other words: you can avoid being targeted if you passively acquiesce to what they do and refrain from interfering in it. That’s precisely what makes it so pernicious, and why it’s so imperative to find a way to rein it in.

See also Greenwald guest columnist Jesselyn Raddack on the Obama administration’s legal actions against journalists. The dark beauty of detainment, harassment, confiscation of personal electronics, mass arrests of and police brutality against nonviolent protesters, press blackouts, and so on is that none of it, none of it, has to stick in a court of law, at all. It’s all a fait accompli. The action’s been taken, and by the time it gets rectified in the near term (you’re released, no charges are filed, you get your computer back, someone gets put on desk duty), let alone in the long term (judicial pushback, as unlikely as that may seem with the current courts), your life has been made vastly more unpleasant, and everyone who sees what happened to you knows that their lives will be made vastly more unpleasant too should they do something similar. Message sent.

* Finally, might you consider Kickstarting my friend Simone Davalos’s fighting-robot documentary RoboGames?