* The first Monday of the month is the best Monday of the month because it’s the Monday Matthew Perpetua unveils his latest Fluxblog 10th Anniversary Survey Mix: 2004! We’re kicking off a stretch of years wherein I remember the music very fondly, because I listened to much of it in what my therapist referred to as a sensory deprivation chamber, my car during my 75-90 minute commute each way to and from Wizard magazine. You form some intense relationships with sound in those circumstances. Anyway, Matthew’s taste runs both broad and deep. And this year’s eight-disc mix has some killer transitions: “Vertigo” into “Evil” and “Blood on Our Hands” into “Pardon My Freedom” are my favorites.

* Rock-solid, basic biographical profile of Daniel Clowes by The New York Times‘ Carol Kino. This is not something I care about, really, but Clowes is a great ambassador for comics simply in that you can hand so many of his book-formatted to people, confident in their quality.

* The best of the spoiler-free reviews of the first four episodes of Game of Thrones that HBO sent to critics, at least that I’ve seen, is Willa Paskin’s at Salon.

* Here’s the cover for Hope Larson’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, out on October 2nd.

* It’s been a while since I directed you to Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic. So allow me to direct you to Michael DeForge’s Ant Comic.

* And while I’m sending you to various webcomics, the latest installments of Ray Sohn’s True Chubbo and Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force are unexcerptable but strong.

* Yeesh, Anders Nilsen.

* NEGRON

* In the flat-color vein of that Tom Scioli American Barbarian page from the other day comes the cover to Chuck Forsman’s Snake Oil #7.

* Another cover! This one for Everything Together: Collected Stories by Sammy Harkham, due from PictureBox in September.

* Ross Campbell draws Katniss & Peeta from The Hunger Games. Apparently he hated the movie, but Ross has idiosyncratic taste in movies, from what I can gather.

* My god, look at these pages for Vasilis Lolos’s forthcoming Electronomicon. Next level for Lolos, like an 8-bit Al Columbia. I hope this one actually comes out.

* A pay-cable series based on Clive Barker’s Nightbreed could be magnificent, but as with most of Barker’s potential live-action projects it’s best to see it before you believe it. (Via Jason Adams.) Elsewhere, Barker talks to his fansite Revelations about his recent, extremely grave illness — toxic shock brought on by a trip to the dentist that put him in a coma and damn near killed him.

* Frank Santoro on recent minicomics from Michael DeForge, Jesse McManus, and Chuck Forsman.

* Finally, the Happiness anthology’s crowdfunding campaign is nearing completion, while the publisher Sparkplug’s is about halfway there with a month to go — go donate and get some good comics in return.

* The nominees for the Doug Wright Awards, comics’ classiest award slate, have been announced. A strong selection of respectable choices, but no so strong that you won’t want to pick winners. And only three categories! A marvelous way to run a railroad.

* The Sopranos vs. The Wire, officiated by Matt Zoller Seitz. ‘Nuff said.

* Somehow it’d escaped my notice that the makers of The Art of Daniel Clowes have a Dan Clowes blog stuffed with rarely-seen Clowes goodies. Fixed! My eye naturally gravitated to this selection of Eightball t-shirts and this unpublished comic starring Vida from Eightball #22/Ice Haven. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* My collaborator Matt Rota has an art show opening up in the Last Rites Gallery Manhattan in a few weeks. It’ll be pretty.

* Benjamin Marra’s got a show coming up, too. It probably won’t be pretty, strictly speaking.

* Some strikingly cartooned Michael McMillan art in this brief profile by Dan Nadel.

* I often think to myself “Self, you should post more art by COOP.” Done and done.

* Renee French is a national treasure.

* Jillian Tamaki made a lovely-looking SuperMutant Magic Academy minicomic, but it’s all gone.

* Stunning use of flat color by Tom Scioli in American Barbarian, about which he is interviewed extensively by Tom Spurgeon at the link.

* Ryan Cecil Smith draws Nat King Cole.

* Michael DeForge is in an anthology with Kramers Ergot 8 space-age standout Robert Beatty called Rat Hex. I mean, Michael DeForge being in anthology isn’t the surprising part, he’s in every anthology (except that Kramers), him being together with Beatty’s a two great tastes deal is all.

* Ross Campbell draws Leonardo. It’s weird to say “gorgeous” about a drawing of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but there you have it.

* Fortunately, the Happiness Comix tumblr appears to have exaggerated rumors of its own demise, but it’s mainly posting a smattering of art from the unrelated Dimensions anthology. I am not complaining. (Below: Hiromi Ueyoshi, Tim Beckhardt, Tom Toye, Lincoln Bostian, Bethany Price.)

* Fanmaking Moebius art selections from Monster Brains and Same Hat.

* “If you ever see a one-armed bunny, you’ll know it used to be an evil wizard.”

* FIONA ÜBER ALLES

* Jason Adams loved The Hunger Games, which overcame his initial casting skepticism, as it appears to have done with virtually every human being. I’m gonna make an effort to see this one in the theater.

* Deadwood creator David Milch said he knew the show was ending when he wrote the finale for Season Three, which most people have long believed to have been a wholly inadvertent series finale regardless of how thematically appropriate a capstone to the whole show it would have been. I feel like this is something he might have let us know earlier!

* You can get loads more Game of Thrones stuff at the gettin’ place, including four excellent new preview/trailer/featurette things and George R.R. Martin reading a new preview chapter from The Winds of Winter.

* The Press Play blog did a series of video tributes to Mad Men in anticipation of the season premiere; the one below is my favorite.

* Matthew Perpetua has posted his 2003 Survey Mix as part of his Fluxblog 10th Anniversary celebration, and this one’s an absolute beast. Hey Ya!, Maps, Heartbeats, Yeah, Seven Nation Army, Crazy in Love, Milkshake, Galang, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, Strict Machine, 99 Problems (Sean’s Imaginary Remix Wherein Jay-Z Doesn’t Structure the Chorus Around Referring to Beyoncé as a Bitch), Transatlanticism, We Will Become Silhouettes, Pass That Dutch, Never Leave You, Ignition (Remix), Toxic, In Da Club, Danger! High Voltage…What a goddamn year. Eight discs of fun.

* Here’s another big one, but for movie buffs rather than music buffs: David Bordwell’s masterfully enlightening and readable essay on the aesthetic, technical, and ineffable differences between film and digital projection. If you’ve ever really wanted to know what the difference is — resolution, artifacts, the process of projection, the impact on theaters, the reactions of audiences, the opinions of filmmakers, idiosyncratic observations on seeing a digital movie vs. a film one in any number of settings — this is quite simply the best piece on the topic I’ve ever seen. You’ll be smarter for having read it, but it’s a joy to read in the process.

* Jim Woodring is looking for contributions to help fund his next standalone Frank graphic novel, which I’m excited to see is called Fran.

* Zak Smith and Shawn Cheng’s collaborative webcomic/fighting game Road of Knives is back, and they’ve brought my Destructor collaborator Matt Wiegle along for the ride!

* Hooray, Cindy and Biscuit #2 from Dan White! That is a very good comic.

* Did I never mention that Gilbert Hernandez is doing a zombie comic called Fatima: The Blood Spinners for Dark Horse? Shame on me, then.

* A couple of frequent ADDXSTC commenters and friends of the blog have posted strong pieces on some of my favorite works of fiction. Here’s Bruce Baugh on Stephen King’s The Stand and Rev’D on David Chase’s The Sopranos, particularly the last few seasons.

* Andrew White’s taking Frank Santoro’s correspondence course! That oughta be interesting to see.

* Well, this photo of Jonny Negron and friend certainly looks promising.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force is still great, if you were wondering.

* Lovely Evan Hayden piece from Electric Ant #2.

* The tumblr for the Happiness Comix anthology series has made the regrettable decision to shut down, but for now it’s still posting compelling work by Heather Benjamin and Tom Toye, drawn for still another anthology, Dimensions.

* This is quite a sketch of Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane’s Joker by Frank Quitely.

* I sure am glad Tom Neely’s now in the naked lady business. Lots more where that came from at his blog.

* Here’s a list of things that are sexier than the young Patti Smith:

* The write-up gets a little too “totes amazeballs” for my taste, but just the other day I was talking with friends about the haunting Sesame Street special in which Big Bird and the still-believed-imaginary Mr. Snuffleupagus spent the night in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and tried to help the ghost of a young Egyptian boy escape the underworld, and here’s an impassioned tribute to exactly that. (Hat tip: Simone Davalos.)

* Jeeeeeeeez, Ta-Nehisi Coates on the life and death of Andrew Breitbart.

* “The NYPD did not respond to our request for comment about allegations it has violated the law.”

* If President Obama loves Omar from The Wire so much, why doesn’t he marry him? Oh right, because he believes marriage is between a man and a woman. Also he’s the commander-in-chief of the drug war. Enjoy the show, Mr. President!

* Finally, can I point out that Christopher Young’s “Leviathan” theme music from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 did the Inception Sound thing like two decades before the fact? And in Morse code for “God,” at that? In many ways my adult life is just a fruitless search for a way to replicate the high of that first hit of Hellbound.

This is a tremendous performance of the saddest, most beautiful song I’ve ever heard, conducted by the composer, Eric Whitacre, and performed an ensemble assembled for the express purpose of singing his songs. It’s a little over 16 minutes long. Please, sit somewhere quiet and listen to the whole thing. It could not be more worth it.

“When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, and thus he said: ‘My son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee!'”

* Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, SPX 2012. Holy shit. That’s…that’s probably the best possible cartoonist line-up of all possible cartoonist line-ups. Can someone get Gloeckner there so I can truly kill myself afterwards?

* After a link like that I feel like a shitheel for directing you toward some doom and gloom, but needs must: Tom Spurgeon’s five reasons to worry about comics, non-piracy edition. I think that a sixth reason that could serve as an umbrella for the other five is the “tough titties” attitude so many people who ostensibly derive enjoyment from comics throw in the direction of those individuals who fall victim to those five problems.

* Ross Campbell on sexiness in his comics. As always it bums me out to see Campbell distancing himself from his very good comics Water Baby and The Abandoned, and even early Wet Moon at this point.

* Kate Beaton dispenses career advice for cartoonists.

* Matt Zoller Seitz and Steven Santos make the argument for adding a new Best Collaborative Performance award to the Oscars to honor performances created by actors, mocap, digital animators, makeup, puppeteers and so on in tandem. As you’d suspect, they were inspired by Andy Seriks, and as far as I’m concerned any such eventual award can just be called the Andy. The resulting essay series has so far championed Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle/Brundlefly from David Cronenberg’s The Fly as a proto-example of what they’re seeking to honor. Bonus points to the initial video essay for reminding me that every time I see Gollum falling into the Cracks of Doom, I involuntarily burst into tears.

* BK Munn makes the long-overdue case for a long-overdue comics-creator union.

* That Hans Rickheit short story collection Folly is on its way!

* Bruce Baugh returns to World of Warcraft blogging! And there was much rejoicing. I’d need two hands to count the number of times I’ve thought “Gee, I wish Bruce Baugh was still blogging about World of Warcraft” over the past year or so.

* Bruce also penned a couple of lengthy posts on potential new approaches to zombie horror. I’m partial to the idea of zombies as symbolically resonant with economic attrition as opposed to total societal collapse, myself.

* Grim reading from Anders Nilsen.

* Looks like Michael DeForge went and snuck out another comic book, Incinerator, because why not.

* And he posted a comic strip called “Exams” to Study Group while he was at it.

* Real Life Horror: The ever-more-lawless NYPD has been spying on law-abiding Muslim-American citizens not just in the five boroughs but in colleges and suburbs all around the Northeast, including where I went to school and towns near where I live.

* I don’t think you need to know anything about Robert Wyatt, or any of the music he’s talking about, to get a lot out of Ryan Dombal’s wonderful interview with Wyatt about his favorite music throughout his life at Pitchfork.

* This promo video for Game of Thrones season two is basically just a bunch of actors and crew members saying “It’s gonna be great,” but it also contains our best views so far of several key new characters.

* Did I not point out my guest appearance in Puke Force?

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force returns!

* Wow: Gary Gianni will be doing next year’s A Song of Ice and Fire calendar. That will be very, very attractive fantasy art. Gianni’s the best illustrator of the similarly rough-hewn Robert E. Howard Conan material by a country mile.

* Wow #2: Kraftwerk will be playing each of their albums in their entirety, one album per night, during an eight-night residency at the Museum of Modern Art. I may have to hire a sitter for this.

* Lisa Hanawalt reviews The Vow for Vanity Fair (!).

* A NOVI Magazine writer whose byline I can’t find has a life-changing encounter with the great Moto Hagio.

* Kristy Valenti pens a short panegyric for Frank Miller’s Ronin.

* I hadn’t seen the cover for Charles Burns’s forthcoming The Hive until the Italian about-comics publication Conversazioni Sul Fummeto posted it to their Facebook account. Lookin’ good.

* These four-panel comic strips by CF (!) are great.

* You should by all means go see the Matt Wiegle/Shawn Cheng/John Mejias art show at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis this weekend.

* This is the first Sam Bosma art I’ve seen that I’d describe as sexy. It’s a good look for him!

* Speaking of sexy, Bryan Lee O’Malley takes us on the express train to Bonertown with this pin-up of his Scott Pilgrim characters Wallace Wells, Kim Pine, Ramona Flowers, and Lisa Miller (whom I had to wiki).

* The new Game of Thrones characters look fucking great, if you’ll pardon my Tyroshi. I’m giving you the ones you really want to see below; many more publicity stills of faces new and old at the link.

* Wow. Michael DeForge’s Rescue Pet is astonishingly troubling.

* “Cartoonist Chris Ware on why other cartoonists fear Clowes”

* Gabrielle Bell is serializing her Kramers Ergot 8 contribution “Cody” on her website. I’m not clipping anything from it — you need to read the whole thing as it unfolds.

* Check out the comic Mark P. Hensel/William Cardini made for Frank Santoro’s comics correspondence course, Moon Queen. You can really see Frank’s fingerprints on this.

* Young altcomix journo of the moment Ao Meng interviews French altcomix maker of the moment Boulet.

* I’m only running the black-and-white version of Jim Rugg’s Sleazy Slice #5 cover here, because the full-color version is a must-see and his site deserves your traffic for showing it to you.

* Nice art by Renee French, and by nice I mean not nice at all.

* I found these early Dave Berg pin-up gag comics pretty sexy. (Via Tom Spurgeon, from whom I got the Rick Trembles link I posted earlier, too.)

* Saving this for later: Rob Clough’s massive TCJ interview with 1-800-MICE cartoonist Matthew Thurber. I think I’ll read this and the Dan Nadel/Marc Bell monstrosity from a while back back-to-back.

* Matthew Perpetua makes the case for Goldfrapp, the most underrated band of the past decade.

* Real Life Horror: A majority of self-described liberals love President Obama’s army of flying killer robots. A majority of self-described liberals are assholes.

* I don’t pretend to understand George Lucas.

* Finally, one last way to feel a little better about your involvement in comics: Donate to Steve Niles’s fundraiser page for Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to help defray the $17,000 judgment against him on Marvel’s behalf.

* They’re gettin’ the band back together, man! Tom Spurgeon breaks the news that company co-founder Mike Catron and former art director Preston White are going back to work at Fantagraphics. Spurge also interviews Catron about his return to the fold.

* I love everything about this powerful post by Jessica Abel, in which she takes a look back at the last fifteen years of her life upon her and her husband Matt Madden’s recent decision to leave Brooklyn for France. And under “everything” I most definitely include their bookshelves.

* Marc Arsenault presents a visual tribute to artist Mike Kelley, who sadly took his own life last week. Kelley’s friend and publisher Dan Nadel shared some thoughts as well.

* It’s the triumphant return of Zack Soto’s The Secret Voice!

* New Sexbuzz pages by Andrew White.

* Allow me to be the last to direct you to Darkness by Boulet, a very cute and crazily gorgeously drawn 24-hour comic. Man, the way this guy draws women.

* Speaking of crazily gorgeously drawn, Frank Miller’s Holy Terror is apparently even prettier than I thought it would be. No, I still haven’t read it, because no, I still can’t bring myself to pay for it, and no, I haven’t had any more luck finding a publicity contact for Legendary’s publishing imprint than you have. (Have you?)

* Jonny Negron celebrates the return to print of his anthology Chameleon #2 the only way he knows how.

* Zach Hazard Vaupen is still making the strangest humor comics around.

* The great Benjamin Marra has an art show opening up later this month in Brooklyn.

* Chuck Forsman is about to release The End of the Fucking World #4. This is a good series.

* If you were wondering when Emily Carroll‘s influence would start to be felt on other webcomics, the answer is right about…now. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Sarah Esteje drew this picture of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album cover using only ballpoint pens. So, you know, jeez. (Via Andrew Sullivan, of all people.)

* I am going to link you to this Michael DeForge comic about facial growths and lesions and then never look at or think about it again.

* Tucker Stone’s excellent review of Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Tyler Crook’s very good B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Russia (he’s dead-on about Crook and company proving themselves and resuscitating the series after a stumble or two) has the bonus feature of functioning as a sort of “state of the Mignolaverse” report.

* The Mindless Ones’ David Allison/Illogical Volume writes about Batman Incorporated and a great many other things besides. The broad theme is how the sadness at the heart of Batman’s story taints his grand utopian projects in much the same way that the malfeasance of his real-world corporate promulgators taints his real-world utility as an icon of positivity. I go back and forth on whether that’s a reasonable thing to expect from art anyway — Grant Morrison’s brand of positivity has long struck me as a bit head-in-the-sand-ish, even before his unfortunate comments on Siegel & Shuster — but I’ve certainly felt the sting I.V.’s describing. Then again, I believe the pleasure we derive from art is quite independent of whether pleasurable things are happening in that art — Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad have at varying times and for varying reasons provided me with more emotional uplift than just about anything I can think of, and Christ, think about those shows for a moment. But I.V.’s not just talking about the content, he’s talking about the circumstances of their creation, which is quite another matter. It’s a meaty post.

* Ryan Cecil Smith, Lane Milburn, and more weigh in on the endangered art of Stephen Gammell in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

* I absolutely loved the elegant simplicity (not a phrase you’d ever associate with the guy under normal circumstances) of Zak Smith/Sabbath’s post on how to advance the narrative in RPGs without railroading your players:

I call it Hunter/Hunted.

-The idea is simple and comes from about a million horror and cop stories: sometimes a scene happens because Sam Spade has found out about a baddie and sometimes a scene happens because the baddie has found out about Sam Spade. And, there, aside from a few stops for bourbon and kissing, is the plot of everything from Lost Boys to Blade Runner.

-Most investigative scenarios advise breaking things up into “scenes”–the idea is you have a scene, find clues in it, these clues lead to the next scene. They then usually cover their ass by saying either “if the PCs don’t do this or find this clue or go to the wrong place give them a bunch of hints or a prophetic dream or otherwise nurse, nudge, or nullify them until they go to the next scene” or just give some vague advice like “hey Venice is interesting, think of something”

-Not so here. Or not exactly: Basically we keep the “scene chain” structure. If the PCs go from clue to clue in a timely fashion like good investigators they follow the scene chain. However, we also give each scene a twin situation, this twin is what happens if the PCs don’t follow a given clue, follow it up the wrong path, or otherwise take too long (in-world game time) to follow the clues. In this twin situation, typically, the PCs have taken long enough to figure out what’s going on that the enemy has noticed their efforts and started hunting them.

* Real Life Horror: America’s flying killer robots target rescuers and mourners of flying killer robot victims. Warning: not liking this state of affairs may make you an al-Qaeda supporter.

* Related, in Professor T.’s “applicability” sense: Bruce Baugh flags two beautiful passages on the horrors of war from The Lord of the Rings.

* Celebrate 10 years of Fluxblog with this interview with its creator, Matthew Perpetua, my favorite music writer and a swell guy.

* Farewell to the first modern zombie, Bill Hinzman. You changed everything, sir.

* My friend Matthew Perpetua invented the mp3 blog when he launched the mighty Fluxblog ten years ago. He’s celebrating the anniversary with a series of his trademark, massive “survey” mixes, each one a multi-disc affair spotlighting the best music for each year Fluxblog’s been around. Here’s the 8-disc Fluxblog 2002 survey mix. I’m particularly gratified to see the big response in the comments for the Azure Ray and Doves songs — two of my all-time favorites.

* Fantagraphics will be publishing Ron Regé Jr.’s The Cartoon Utopia! That’s a big vote of support for a risky artist. Good for everyone involved.

* Ross Campbell is sorta semi-serializing Wet Moon Vol. 6 on his website, along with a bunch of bonus materials. I know he was bummed that Oni couldn’t fit the book into their publishing schedule until next Fall, so I’m glad they worked this out in order to get the work out there sooner.

* This interview with the Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor about his and Jim Rugg’s soon-to-be-re-released graphic novel about a leftist art-rock band One Model Nation reminds me that Taylor-Taylor is one of the great rock and roll talkers. Of all the interviews I’ve ever done, I probably think about stuff he said the most frequently. You’d be amazed how applicable a passionate endorsement of seeing Cinderella perform live is to any number of situations in everyday life.

* Tucker Stone reviews a couple dozen comics for The Savage Critics, i.e. more comics than I’ve reviewed in the last four or five months. Lots of gems in there, with two caveats: 1) He’s dead wrong about Garden being worse than Travel; 2) The impetus for the post is that these are comics he “couldn’t find the time (or space) to write about in a more ‘professional’ capacity,” which means that no website or publication out there is making it worth Tucker’s while to write about Acme Novelty Library or Kramers Ergot 3 and so on, which is a crime.

* Terrific review of Habibi and Paying For It by comiXology’s Kristy Valenti, who refers to them cheekily as “Dick Lit.” It’s hardly as dismissive a piece as that would make it out to be, though, and it’s stuffed with why-didn’t-I-think-of-that observations: Seth and Joe Matt as the Charlotte and Miranda to Chester Brown’s Carrie Bradshaw; the highlighted, isolated, orderly beds upon which Chester and the prostitutes he hires have sex as an operating theater. And by focusing on sex and love as the driving force behind Habibi she points the way to just how interesting it ought to be to see Craig Thompson do an out-and-out porn comic, as he apparently plans to do.

* Kate Beaton is signing off of Hark, a Vagarant! for a while, which is a bummer but an understandable one given the whole world throwing itself at her feet and all. I just hope she keeps getting to draw people’s hair, eyes, and hands.

* That’s a gorgeous Jillian Tamaki illustration is what that is.

* And Kali Ciesemier ain’t no slouch either.

* Yeesh, this is quite a page from Geoff Grogan’s Nice Work, which he’s begun serializing on his website.

* Mark P. Hensel interviews Ryan Cecil Smith. And Ao Meng also interviews Ryan Cecil Smith. Saving these for when I can read them back to back.

* Saving this for later, too: Amypoodle’s Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! annotations, part two. Any post on Batman comics that kicks off with a Oneohtrix Point Never video is okay in my book.

* At the always excellent Comics Grid, Peter Wilkins writes about the wonderful heartachey North No. 2 piano-playing interlude in Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto.

* I look at the villain mini-figures for Lego’s Lord of the Rings line and can see nothing but the hours and hours I will spend smashing them to bits in some future Lego LotR video game.

* Allow me to be the last to direct you to the latest Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

* Finally, D’Angelo presents the feel-good clip of the year, if you’re a D’Angelo fan. Try not to grin like an idiot during this. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Links to new pages of comics on What Things Do don’t really work, but I assure you that Jordan Crane’s morbid, masterful Keeping Two updated this week.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley is posting some very rough roughs from his upcoming project Seconds.

* Frank Quitely does Star Wars.

* Gorgeous short weird fiction from Sam Bosma.

* Woof–this page by Leiji Matsumoto explains why Ryan Cecil Smith was moved to do an Emeraldas tribute comic.

* Golly, these Arthur Rachkam Alice illustrations are stunning. James Jean city. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Kiel Phegley talks to Jeffrey Brown about the movie he co-wrote, the forthcoming Lizzy Caplan/Alison Brie wedding comedy (not to each other, alas) Save the Date.

* Tom Spurgeon lobbies for his Eisner Hall of Fame picks this year: Bill Blackbeard, Jesse Marsh, Mort Meskin and Gilbert Shelton.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his crowdsourced debunking of claims that the Civil War could have been avoided, this time focusing on other anti-slavery wars.

* Woop! Woop!

* America: We’re #47! (Scroll down.) This post also contains this quote, which should be tattooed on my forehead: “Convincing well-intentioned people to support a war in order to depose a wretched tyrant is an easy thing to do — alas, it’s probably too easy to do, since it’s usually what leads to great mischief, human suffering, and even more tyranny under a new name.”

* I assure you, Nitsuh Abebe, there are those of us who have not forgotten Hooverphonic. The North Remembers.

* Sometimes I like to picture an alternate timeline in which Pearl Jam made a video for “Black.”

* Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

* Finally, my friend and collaborator Matt Rota has a show coming up: It will contain art that looks like this.

* Dang, Ken Parille’s Comics Journal year-in-review piece tackles Habibi, 1-800-MICE, Holy Terror, Optic Nerve #12, The Death-Ray, Mister Wonderful, Crack Comics #63, and Ganges #4 as well as any individual review of any of them has done. (And I say that as a person who wrote about 5/8 of those books for the Journal myself.) Parille’s writing is like a really delicious sampler platter — you get the sense he just picked the tastiest morsels of insight on any given book and presented them to you for your delectation, but that there’s a whole lot more where that came from.

* Wonderful piece on Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve #12 by Tim Hodler. I like what he says about the unique characteristics of structuring a longer story as a series of funnypages-style strips, and this: “his storytelling displays a subtlety so far beyond most of what’s being published at the current moment.” Ayup. As alternative comics has begun looking less like RAW and more like Heavy Metal, we’ve lost something in exchange.

* I don’t know why, but a day or two ago the feed for Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures blog dumped like half a dozen posts on me all at once, and there were gems galore in there: Rundowns of their Best American Comics series’s 2010 Notables and 2011 Notables (aka honorable mentions/bigger-picture selections), and notes on Asterios Polyp and Ice Haven.

* Not that I’m opposed to all the Heavy Metal stuff. Duh. I mean, Lane Milburn, holy shit, look at his next book Mors Ultima Ratio:

* On a similar note I suppose, I just happened to really like the drawing of what looks to me like Grendel and Beowulf by Thomas Yeates that Tom Spurgeon selected for his birthday post on the artist. I am a sucker for big monsters in the Hulk/Rawhead Rex vein, admittedly.

* Still on that same note, Sam Bosma reminds me of a lesson I once learned the hard way: Never trust a Mindflayer.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates lets Jay-Z off the hook for his avowed intention to continue using the word “bitch” in his lyrics. While Coates is correct in saying that the context of the use of the b-word in rap is part of the problem, he’s wrong to say “Rap’s ‘bitch’ problem has never been about the word itself” — of course it is. It’s about that among other things, but it’s certainly still about that. Coates does that sort of thing throughout the post: “There is a whole school of thought that holds racism is impossible unless attended by the word ‘nigger.’ And there are plenty of ways to regard a women as bitches, without ever saying the word.” Certainly. But just because Newt Gingrich can go on national television and receive standing ovations and become the presidential frontrunner for a major political party by saying enormously racist things without using period-piece movie-villain epithets doesn’t mean you should ignore it when people do use them. And just because hip-hop and pop culture generally’s misogyny runs deeper than calling women bitches, you still shouldn’t do it. The way to disprove that “bitch” is problematic in and of itself would be to provide examples of a non-problematic, non-sexist way to use it in hip-hop. Coates goes straight for the strawman of “I have never wanted a world where white people were forever banned from using the word nigger,” but of course no one’s actually arguing for expurgating hip-hop’s theoretical equivalent of Huck Finn, because the difference between saying these words and using them is crystal-clear. I guess the closest Jay-Z has come to that sort of thing is “That’s My Bitch,” but for me that isn’t close enough. The long and short of it for me is that there’s no need for bitch as an insult when “asshole” exists, and even less of a need for it as a simple term for “woman” when “woman” exists; continuing to use it despite these genderless equivalents indicates a problem with that gender. I’d be interested to hear of cases where this didn’t hold.

* Tom Ewing and Matthew Perpetua on Lana Del Rey and the issue of “authenticity” in art. Man, are sneer-quotes ever called for there. I thought that most of the controversy around Del Rey centered on whether or not she was any good, and whether or not her sexual politics were retrograde, and the degree to which a major record label was involved in her initial burst of ostensibly organic/viral/indie success. Those are rubrics I can understand: hype vs. talent, and anti-sexism, and not wanting to be lied to by a giant corporation. But I was quite aghast to learn that apparently some people were holding it against her that she used to perform under a different name with a different sound and look and vibe. A world where artists must emerge fully formed in their teens or early twenties with their first quasi-professionally recorded work and then remain preserved in amber for all eternity is a scary, scary world. A Bowie-free, Beatles-free, Dr. Dre-free, Underworld-free, P-Funk-free, Ministry-free, Gaga-free world! Not to compare LDR to any of those artists on a qualitative basis, mind you — see the three aforementioned potential issues with her work — but all I can tell you is rejecting the notion of the authentic self is one of the top five best things ever to happen to me, not just as a consumer and sometimes maker of art, but as a person. By all means try on personae like clothes in a dressing room until you find one that fits you, and take it off and put on new ones whenever you feel like it. What on earth is the harm in that?

(Related: I can’t help but wonder if the backlash against LDR specifically is tied to the phenomenon Scott Plagenhoef addresses in online music culture’s quest to be the first to seize upon a new artist within very narrow, inoffensive aesthetic parameters. If that’s the filter for your interaction with music, a person who radically changes very early on in her career, and changes into a very divisive mode of presentation, is anathema.)

* Wow: Fantagraphics is publishing two books about Love and Rockets this year. One’s a companion volume with interviews, unpublished art, character guides, family trees, and so forth; one’s a Love and Rockets Reader with essays by Marc Sobel. Pretty great timing given that the series is getting as much attention now in its 30th year as it ever has, because it’s as good as it ever was.

* Marvel beat DC in dollar share and market share in the direct market in December. Think for a moment about everything that changed not just at DC but across the entire industry — some for the good, some for the bad, some for the “jury’s still out” — in the name of what amounted to a three-month sales goose. Same-day digital pretty much industry-wide, new continuity, new costumes, all the redundancies and obsolescences created by same in everything from licensing to ongoing storylines to planned and abandoned storylines to licensing images to the recently launched DC MMORPG, a new business model in terms of release schedules for DC, a competing new business model in terms of release schedules for Marvel, a new way of working with talent, new internal procedures for editing and trafficking books, various controversies over race and gender and sex, hirings and firings of creative personnel, new baselines for page count and price point, big-name writers carving out little bubbles of continuity-independence for their books, major media pushes, a shaky retail sector adjusting on the fly to all of the above…and Marvel beat DC in December. Really, really, really remarkable. Tom Spurgeon has more analysis, including the always welcome remonstrance that publishers who complain about the inaccuracy of publicly available sales estimates have it within their power to provide more accurate numbers in seconds, and on a basis more comprehensive than crowing about sellouts when it suits them.

* Speaking of Spurge, I enjoyed quite a few of his final “holiday” posts, including his interviews with Laura Hudson and Chester Brown and his New Year’s resolutions, at least two of which can be summed up with “Don’t be an asshole.”

* I have a pretty low tolerance for other people’s opinions on David Bowie’s songs — through no fault of its own there are few things I’d rather read less than that one blog that’s writing about every single Bowie song in order — but I sure did enjoy Matthew Perpetua’s take on “TVC-15.”

* Michael DeForge’s latest Ant Comic manages to be the most awful one yet.

* Gorgeous cover for SF Supplementary File #2C by Ryan Cecil Smith.

* Lisa Hanawalt does War Horse.

* Plenty of interesting work being discussed in Kevin Czap’s fifth and final BCGF haul roundup.

* Panels of 2011 is an accurately named and visually compelling new tumblr.

* Kali Ciesemier sketches Robyn.

* I’m historically not the biggest fan of the writer doing the adaptation, but the coming Conan comic being illustrated by Becky Cloonan will at least look as good as Conan comics have ever looked.

* Man did I like that one At the Drive-In record, a pretty peerless effort in terms of coming up with lyrics that demand to be shouted. DANCING ON THE CORPSES’ ASHES!!! Glad they’re getting back together.

* Real Life Horror: When is terrorism not terrorism? Related: I wish I’d bookmarked the post where he first made this connection, but in light of the apparent secret campaign of orchestrated murder against Iranian scientists it’s worth reiterating Greenwald’s contention that the wall of state secrecy behind which the United States hides violent overseas acts like these assassinations and our multinational drone wars is in every important way equivalent to the more voluble propaganda to which our despotic enemy regimes subject their populace, propaganda which we never fail to decry when we see it in others. The North Korean who believes the birds are crying over the death of internationally revered statesman Kim Jong-Il is not a world apart from the American who doesn’t know about all the children slaughtered by our army of flying killer robots.

* Gary Groth on his dinner with Christopher Hitchens.

* Go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox, AMC.

* Finally, behold the awesome power of Pizza Boomerang.

* Chris Mautner lists “The Six Most Criminally Ignored Books of 2011.” Shame on me for not having read Pure Pajamas yet, that’s for damn sure. (Noel Freibert’s Weird, too.)

* Fantagraphics is showing off covers for R. Crumb’s The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat and Jaime Hernandez’s God & Science: Return of the Ti-Girls. (I think my favorite thing about Jaime’s superhero team is how fans would no doubt debate how to properly pronounce their team name, a la Magneeto/Magnetto, Naymor/Nahmor, etc.)

* It wasn’t until I grabbed the jpg of Gabrielle Bell’s latest comic in order to drag it to my desktop and crop out a panel for posting here that I saw just how lovely the background colors look in relation to one another. See what I mean?

* Grant Morrison talks about Dr. Octagon.

* Ben Morse’s Big Two(ish) Best-Of continues.

* Finally, Monster Brains has unleashed the Furie with a beautiful Matt Furie gallery and a spiffy new Furie-designed logo.

* I hope you enjoyed your holidays! While you were out, I kept pretty busy. Here are some links to what I’ve been doing.

* I posted my list of the 20 Best Comics of 2011. It’s exciting to me that old established Grand Masters are about as well represented on it as people whose first comics came out after Obama was elected, and of course there are plenty of people in between as well. It’s also exciting to me that many of the cartoonists represented there are creating huge, consistently high-quality bodies of work without a regularly published solo series as their main venue or even as any venue at all, instead or in addition turning to anthologies, minicomics, and the Internet to get their work to the public. And I haven’t felt this blessed by an abundance of genuinely bizarre and powerful sex-horror stuff since I first discovered Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in 1994.

* Robot 6 celebrated its third anniversary with a massive two-day blowout of exclusive interviews, previews, and assorted other features. I contributed several pieces.

** I interviewed Sammy Harkham about Kramers Ergot 8. I think this is my favorite interview of all the ones I conducted last year. Sammy and I slowly circled around the thinking at the core of the book before finally plunging right into it. It was an exciting conversation to have. (That’s from Takeshi Murata’s contribution to the book below.)

** I interviewed Michael DeForge about the absolutely tremendous 2011 he had, specifically about Ant Comic, Open Country, “Dog 2070” from Lose #3, and “College Girl by Night” from Thickness. I asked a lot of questions about influence and intent, which is a hit or miss proposition, but I think Michael delivered.

** I interviewed the Press Gang triumvirate of Jason Leivian, Zack Soto, and François Vigneault about their plans for their publishing collective. They gave me a lot of exclusive announcements and previews; I think the top announcement is that Soto’s Study Group Comic Books is absorbing Randy Chang’s Bodega Books and taking over publication of The Mourning Star, but beyond that, Leivian’s publishing a book on magick, Vigneault’s Elfworld #3 looks rock-solid, and the line-up of creators contributing to Soto’s soon-to-launch sg12.com webcomics portal is just sick. (There’s no escaping DeForge!) (The page below is from the full-color Danger Country by Levon Jihanian that will be running on sg12.com.)

** And Annie Koyama announced some of her 2012 titles, including new books from Michael DeForge (natch), Julia Wertz, Dustin Harbin, Jesse Jacobs, and Tin Can Forest. You can see covers for the last three at the link.

* In case you missed it, I posted a four-volume mix of the best songs of 2011. (If you were wondering, songs from Underworld and the Game of Thrones soundtrack were cut due to time constraints, because as it turns out the time limit on CD-Rs is actually 79:50, NOT EIGHTY, YOU LIARS, while “Dance (A$$) Remix” was disqualified for the use of the word “anorexic” as a compliment.)

* Finally, I started an A Song of Ice and Fire podcast shortly before Christmas. I’ve posted three episodes so far, in which I’m joined by the Tower of the Hand’s Stefan Sasse in a discussion of honor, morality, and power in Westeros (and Essos). You can find links to all three episodes here. If you like the essays I’ve written about the books or the show, this should be up your alley.

* Pyongyang author Guy Delisle takes a few parting shots at Kim Jong-il.

* Charles Burns beer!

* Brian Chippendale, ladies and gentlemen.

* Okay, Lala Albert’s definitely on the radar now. Thanks, Same Hat!

* The 5 Best Things about Pitchfork’s Guest List Best of 2011 feature:

5. The weird way in which Colin Stetson runs down like four or five of my favorite deep cuts from my music library, including the Aphex Twin song during which I discovered that my baby daughter loves to dance
4. One of the Fleet Foxes really likes the X-Men books
3. Seeing which beloved indie rock acts let humanity down by listing Chris Brown songs
2. Seeing which of the Big Three chillwave acts each of the other Big Three chillwave acts does or doesn’t list
1. The concluding paragraph of the list from Ishmael Butler from Shabazz Palaces

DOWNLOAD VOLUME ONE
Live Those Days Tonight – Friendly Fires // Party Rock Anthem – LMFAO // Blow – Ke$ha // It’s Up There – The Field // Michael Jackson – Das Racist // Generation – Liturgy // Powa – tUnE-yArDs // Kaputt – Destroyer // 1+1 – Beyoncé // Holocene – Bon Iver // Super Bass – Nicki Minaj // Hurts Like Heaven – Coldplay // Loop the Loop – Wild Beasts // Take Care (feat. Rihanna) – Drake // Is Your Love Strong Enough? – How to Destroy Angels // Why I Love You (feat. Mr. Hudson) – Jay-Z & Kanye West

DOWNLOAD VOLUME TWO
Marry the Night – Lady Gaga // Over My Dead Body – Drake // Niggas in Paris – Jay-Z & Kanye West // Never – Orbital // Schoolin’ Life – Beyoncé // The Wilhelm Scream – James Blake // Are You… Can You… Were You? (Felt) – Shabazz Palaces // I Care – Beyoncé // Deeper – Wild Beasts // Marvins Room – Drake // No Church in the Wild (feat. Frank Ocean) – Jay-Z & Kanye West // Riotriot – tUnE-yArDs // Veins of God – Liturgy // True Faith – George Michael // Beth/Rest – Bon Iver // End Come Too Soon – Wild Beasts

DOWNLOAD VOLUME THREE [UPDATE: new file host]
Poor in Love – Destroyer // Party (feat. André 3000) – Beyoncé // ∞ ∞ / Romance Layers – Gang Gang Dance // Coastin’ – Cities Aviv // Recollections of the Wraith – Shabazz Palaces // Stay Away – Charlie XCX // Hurting – Friendly Fires // Claudia Lewis – M83 // Andro – Oneohtrix Point Never // Limit to Your Love – James Blake // BTSTU – Jai Paul // The King’s New Clothes Were Made By His Own Hands – Shabazz Palaces // Under Ground Kings – Drake // Before – Washed Out // It Takes Time to Be a Man – The Rapture // Sacer – Gang Gang Dance // The Ride – Drake // Separator – Radiohead

DOWNLOAD VOLUME FOUR
Born This Way – Lady Gaga // Bizness – tUnE-yArDs // Down On Me (feat. 50 Cent) – Jeremih // Show Me Lights – Friendly Fires // The Magic Place – Julianna Barwick // Zoo Station – Nine Inch Nails // Free Press and Curl – Shabazz Palaces // Replica – Oneohtrix Point Never // I Never Learnt to Share – James Blake // Glass Jar – Gang Gang Dance // Sexy and I Know It – LMFAO // Till the World Ends – Britney Spears // Downtown – Destroyer // A Real Hero (feat. Electric Youth) – College // Heavy Pop – Wu Lyf // The Edge of Glory – Lady Gaga

After making best-of mixes in 2009 and 2010, I knew I’d be doing it again this year. What I didn’t count on is going from three discs to four! But I listened to and loved a lot of music this year and quickly realized there was no way I could bring myself to cut a whole disc’s worth of material from my favorites. So I’m giving them to you at no extra charge!

If I had to rank my favorite releases this year, it’d be as follows:

9. Beyoncé – 4
8. The Field – Looping State of Mind
7. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
6. Jay-Z and Kanye West – Watch the Throne
5. Friendly Fires – Pala
4. Lady Gaga – Born This Way
3. Wild Beasts – Smother
2. Drake – Take Care
1. Destroyer – Kaputt

I basically could have kept putting song after song from these suckers on there (especially Kaputt, a stone masterpiece) and left it at that. Meanwhile there was sort of a three-way tie for tenth place between James Blake, Gang Gang Dance, Bon Iver, Oneohtrix Point Never, and tUnE-yArDs, about whom you could pretty much say the same thing. So that explains the need for the fourth volume.

But only partially. You may also have noticed an increase in the amount of both hip-hop and radio dance-pop in the mix. I think you can attribute both to the birth of my delightful daughter Helena. Helena spent the first six weeks of her life in the hospital, stuck in the neonatal intensive care unit. Her mother spent the preceding three months either in the hospital as well or on bedrest at home. So I ended up spending a lot of time in the car, driving to and from the hospital or running enough errands for two people. New York currently has two pop radio stations, both of which are increasingly indistinguishable from the dance station it also has, so a lot of that kind of music was drilled into my head almost by default. While I never ever ever want to hear the voices of Usher or Pitbull ever again, I still found many of these songs astonishingly entertaining. Months later, when my daughter came home and grew strong and healthy and old enough to enjoy dancing around the room with me, a lot of them doubled as a soundtrack for our Daddy Dance Parties. So yes, LMFAO is close to my heart. (Seriously though, that group is perfectly harmless, and those songs are good-natured and fun to dance to.)

As for hip-hop, it’d been years since I listened to as much new stuff as I did this year. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the records from which I drew most heavily sort of followed in the footsteps of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy from last year and treated the album format like the rock album format, with an emphasis on atmosphere and a journey from A to B and less obvious filler. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the big commercial acts are starting to audibly question and complicate commercial hip-hop’s enormously boring lockstep subject matter of sex, money, not caring for haters, and the artist’s own awesomeness, with a dollop of “life is hard” to take the curse off it. (I don’t say that to deny that life is, in fact, hard, or at least used to be, for a lot of these guys. Obviously a lot of rappers (though certainly not all of them, and more specifically not all of them at the top of the charts these days) come from circumstances involving pervasive poverty, the shadow of criminality, and institutionalized racism, circumstances I’m fortunate not to have an experience with whatsoever. My point is just that boring art is boring art.) This also helps mitigate against all the “bitch” business, which is the kind of thing that I and most everyone I know finds totally unacceptable in any other field (I mean, presuming you’ve followed the discussion of superhero comics this year, you know how (appropriately!) low people’s tolerance is for misogynistic nonsense there) and is becoming increasingly difficult for me to excuse, let alone enjoy, in hip-hop too.

But again, it’s the baby what did it, really. Most of the time I’m listening to music I’m also doing something else — reading, writing, working. I’m pretty good at multitasking where music listening is concerned, but hip-hop’s the great exception. Unless it’s an old album I basically have memorized and can thus sort of tune out as an immediate presence, I find the constant flow of spoken words too distracting to get anything else done, especially the writing that occupies most of my work time. Meanwhile, even if I managed to only semi-pay attention to the lyrics, that’s no way to listen to an art form that’s predicated on wordplay and lyricism. I’m not a lyric person with any music, almost to a fault — the sounds hit me first and foremost — but with hip-hop you have to make an exception to an extent or you’re missing out. Put it all together and you get me listening to way less hip-hop than I did in the mid-to-late ’90s, when it was the lingua franca for me and all of my friends.

But now that the baby’s home, my wife, who has problems with sleep at the best of times, goes to bed by herself while I hang out downstairs with the sleeping baby — this way she (my wife) can drift off to sleep in a bedroom she knows won’t be disturbed by a restless baby before she (my wife) is able to fall into a deep sleep. I wait a couple hours, usually doing work and chores, and then bring the baby up and go to sleep myself. During that time I wash dishes and bottle parts by hand since we don’t have a dishwasher. And that’s the perfect time to listen to music, particularly hip-hop, since I’m in a quiet house with a stretch of time at my disposal, and the work I’m doing is mindless and won’t distract from listening to an album-length torrent of wordplay. It’s been exciting to slip back into the genre a bit, even if only via the big acclaimed records everyone listened to. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel or blaze any trails, I just want to expose myself to as much good music as I can.

Hopefully this mix will help you do the same!

PS: If you like what you hear, please purchase it from the artists. People who make music you like deserve your money!

* Wow, Kristy Valenti interviewed the bejesus out of Tom Neely for The Comics Journal. It’s certainly a must for fans of The Blot or The Wolf, but even if you’re not it’s worth your time just as a portrait of an artist. I explain a bit more about that over at Robot 6.

* Craig Thompson is working on three new books: one’s all-ages, one’s non-fiction, and one’s erotica. It’s like he got zapped with that beam that split Superman into Superman Red and Superman Blue back in the day.

* Bill Karatlopoulos’s essay on Daniel Clowes’s superhero comic The Death-Ray doubles as an excellent capsule history of comics’ rise to pop-cultural and media prominence in the early to mid ’00s. That New York Times Magazine cover story was a true “Made it, Ma! Top o’ the world!” moment; I’m not sure it’d be possible for people who entered comics after it to appreciate what an Event it was.

* Massive BCGF haul review/report from Kevin Czap. And it’s only Part One!

* Ryan Cecil Smith’s stealthy BCGF debut SF Supplemental File #2B is now available outside the Closed Caption Comics #9.5 box set. It looks purty. Riso printing, amirite?

* Excuse me while I wolf whistle at this page from “Forces” by Noah Butkus, out of the Happiness Comix anthology that I now wish I’d made a point of picking up at BCGF. Good gravy!

* Real Life Horror: Drones in America.

* “We blew it.”

* But let’s end on a couple of up notes: In light of the news that Christopher Meloni is joining the cast of True Blood, Jason Adams asks the only question that matters.

* And there’s nothing I could say about this selection of photographs from a Van Halen in-store signing appearance from 1978 that could possibly top 33 1/3’s John Mark’s assessment for accuracy: “The kids in these pictures are the very definition of ‘at-risk teens.'”

* Cartoonist Jerry Robinson has died at age 89. In addition to creating the Joker, co-creating Robin, and basically co-creating what we all picture as “Batman” in terms of the concept’s look and cast, he was a pioneering comics historian and creators’ rights advocate — proof that even those who benefited from the system didn’t have to shy away from trying to better it.

* My BCGC con report can be found at Robot 6. I really like this show — a mainline hit of exactly what I love about comics today — and tried to articulate what sets it apart from comparable cons.

* Secret Acres’ dynamic duo of Barry and Leon always whip up the most well-written con reports, and this time is no exception. I don’t know how they do it. You really get a sense of their whole experience — creative, commercial, cultural, communal.

* Kevin Czap had one heck of a con haul! His brief overview articulates something I’d sort of picked up on myself, which is that Kramers Ergot is now the elder statesman of artcomics anthologies rather than the place you go to find shit you’ve never seen before. It’s interesting how the new volume’s more restrained and refined approach feeds into that vibe.

* And Nick Gazin at Vice has the best of the photo parades. Plus, if you are interested in finding out whether or not he personally finds a given woman cartoonist physically attractive, then boy howdy is it a treasure trove of information. No word on how hot he finds Dan Nadel, pictured below. (Via Jonny Negron.)

* Big get alert: Drawn and Quarterly is picking up Gilbert Hernandez’s forthcoming semiautobiographical graphic novel Marble Season. This could be a pretty interesting effort — I mean, okay, it’s Beto, so it’ll definitely be a pretty interesting effort. But what I mean is that a) the stuff he does for publishers other than Fantagraphics is usually off-brand for him in ways that demand examination, and b) by the sound of it, it’s an account of his childhood love of comics, which means it probably will eschew the extreme sex and violence of most of his Love and Rockets and Fritzverse work these days, and thus may help the audience appreciate just how good he is lately without those potential impediments if that’s not their thing.

* Holy — The 2011 and 2012 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendars featured Cor Blok?? It’s so refreshing to see artists interpret epic fantasy without working in the hyperreal visual tradition — cf. yesterday’s Danger Country review — and Blok was one of the best at it. The first time I saw his Tolkien art was a true revelation. Look what you could do with this material! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* I love it when Zak Smith/Sabbath just tosses out dozens and dozens of great fantasy storytelling ideas like it ain’t no thing. Today he’s doing it with barbarian cultures. Come for the ideas, stay for the oblique George R.R. Martin diss!

* Here’s a sharp little essay from Matt Seneca on John Romita Sr., “the quintessential Marvel artist.” The other week Tom Spurgeon got some José Luis Garcia-Lopez DC character art going around, so I said something on twitter about how José Luis Garcia-Lopez is to DC what John Romita Sr. is to Marvel, that they’re equivalently definitive artists for their respective publishers’ visual identities. Matt says the same thing in the comments. (Romita trumps Garcia-Lopez in terms of the comics themselves.)

* Whoosh, this Sam Hiti piece is hot stuff. (Via Sam Bosma.)

* My favorite band, Underworld, have been named music directors for the opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympics in London. Their longtime collaborator Danny Boyle is the artistic director. And so I’ll be watching some of the Olympics!

* A Goldfrapp singles collection could go a long way to showing just how strong their repertoire is. Most underrated band of the ’00s.

* Kiel Phegley reminds us that this is what Yvonne Craig looked like.

* I feel I’ve been lax in my duty to direct you to my tumblr for photographs of Beyoncé Knowles and David Bowie, Bowie Loves Beyoncé. Perhaps this will remedy that in some way. Some wonderful way.

* Finally, start the weekend off right with an Uno Moralez image/gif gallery.

If a twenty-year journey through heroin addiction leads here, it’s got to be almost worth it.

* Every year as the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival approaches, I start to see my wallet as an object of intermingled pity, dread, and revulsion, like the Eraserhead baby. I’m racking my brain to see if this is an exaggeration, but nope, I don’t think it is: There’s something interesting at literally every table. Can you say that about any other show? Anyway, I’ll obviously be there, so please say hello to me if you see me. I look like this:

The lack of lens glare over my left eye can be attributed to me breaking my glasses last night on the platform of the Jamaica Long Island Rail Road station while overenthusiastically acting out a scene I enjoyed from season one of Breaking Bad.

* Continuing from last Carnival, here are several guides to noteworthy books you’ll be able to buy there. If you read only one, make it Chris Mautner from Robot 6’s comprehensive round-up post. But beyond that, there’s info galore from…

* Zack Soto, who’s repping the new publishing collective Press Gang, his own Study Group Magazine, and about a million lovely prints;

* non-attendee Dustin Harbin, who notes among other things the opportunity to pick up this year’s alt-festival circuit sleeper hit, Ethan Rilly’s Pope Hats #2 from AdHouse;

* Barry Matthews and Leon Avelino at Secret Acres, who in addition to bringing nearly every single person they publish will have a new issue of John Brodowski’s excellent alt-genre series Curio Cabinet on hand;

* Ryan Sands, who’s bringing tons of work from the greater Same Hat!/Electric Ant/Thickness/Chameleon hivemind;

* Closed Caption Comics, who are literally just filling little cardboard boxes with comics they recently made and calling that issue #9.5 of their flagship anthology;

* Benjamin Marra, who’s bringing the whole panoply of Traditional Comics releases, including the brand new Night Business #4;

* Tom Kaczynski, who lists the goods to be gotten from his Uncivilized Books imprint;

* and Unciv artist Gabrielle Bell, who posts the latest in her ridiculously strong year of autobio strips.

* Few things on the comics internet excite me more than a new Tom Spurgeon review of a book I’ve read; each one reminds me that nobody does it better. Here he is on Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Three. And though I haven’t read the comic yet, here he is on Joe Sacco’s new minicomic from Fantagraphics, The Road to Wigan Pier, a review of George Orwell’s book of the same name.

* Here’s another massive TCJ.com interview I’m saving for when I can really savor it: Dan Nadel speaks with the singular talent Marc Bell.

* Meanwhile, Robin McConnell interviews Geof Darrow, who was practically Cartoonist of the Year this year despite not publishing anything simply by virtue of his influence. Over on Robot 6 I noted Darrow’s recent rejected Superman cover, which he talks about (and posts!) in the interview.

* Game of Thrones hits DVD and Blu-Ray on March 6.

* Dark Horse is the latest publisher to go same-day digital, as of a mere two weeks from now. Après DC la déluge.

* Adrian Tomine just says no to making graphic novels instead of short stories. I’m pretty okay with this.

* Will Jonny Negron’s winning streak never end?

* There’s not a great deal to dislike about Power Comics, a new tumblr dedicated, essentially, to the ’80s black-and-white-boom books Benjamin Marra is pastiching in Night Business. (Hat tip: Agent M.)

* Aeron Alfrey reminds us that it’s never a bad time to revisit Charlie White’s Understanding Joshua.

* First U2, now Bryan Ferry: Trent Reznor’s year in cover versions has been a fun one.

* Any time my friend and collaborator Matt Rota posts new art, it’s worth checking out.

* Like most people on the Internet, I enjoy artist Brandon Bird’s unique entertainment-industry surrealism, both in his own paintings and the shows he curates. His latest is dedicated to the humans of Jurassic Park. I find myself hoping that someone chose to immortalize this one low-angle shot I remember quite vividly of Laura Dern’s khaki-clad hind end as she prepares to sprint across an open field to safety — I’m pretty sure it put me through puberty. (That or an En Vogue video, most likely.) Anyway, that’s Lisa Hanawalt doing Jeff Goldblum below. (Via Agent M again.)

* And hey, that reminds me that longtime ADDXSTC fave Robert Burden (not Flaming Carrot Robert Burden, labor-intensive portraits of action figures Robert Burden) recently painted the Thundercats.

* Finally, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: Matthew Perpetua has posted the Fluxblog 2011 Survey Mix! 10 discs, 183 songs, 13 hours of music, yours for the downloading!