The Great Council has convened! This week, my Boiled Leather Audio Hour cohost Stefan Sasse and I are the special guests on the mother of all ASoIaF podcasts, A Podcast of Ice and Fire. The explicit goal was for me and Stefan and APoIaF cohosts Amin, Ashley, and Kyle to let our collective hair down; mission accomplished. We get into some high-grade nerdery: a bunch of “who’d win in a fight”s, picking our ideal Small Council and Kingsguard (well, someone’s ideal, anyway), the pros and cons of Tumblr as a platform and a fandom, our biggest controversies…and, naturally, a spirited co-ed game of “how much sex would you have with this character,” guest starring Elio & Linda from Westeros. We all had a great time and I think it shows.

I’ve been listening to A Podcast of Ice and Fire since the earliest days of my fandom. I’ve hoped to be invited on with a fervency you’d find unbecoming, and not just because they’re all, like, really hot. (I’m not the only person who sits and reloads podcastoficeandfire.com for the rotating “Current Hosts” photo eye-candy buffet, am I? Amin, put some more pictures in there, you handsome devil.) Thank you to Amin, Ashley, and Kyle for having us; hopefully we’ll get to “meet” Mimi on a future episode.

My comrade Stefan Sasse and I have posted a new episode of our A Song of Ice and Fire podcast the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, focused on the latest preview chapter George R.R. Martin has released from The Winds of Winter. Get your Dorne on!

The latest episode of The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, the podcast about Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire that I do with Stefan Sasse, is up. In this one we review a pair of recent books about the series, The Lands of Ice and Fire (a collection of maps) and A Flight of Sorrows (a collection of essays), just in time to buy them, or not, for the fantasy fan on your list. Servicey!

My pal Stefan Sasse and I are back in the podcasting saddle with The Boiled Leather Audio Hour Episode 15. In this installment of our A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones podcast we take a look at two prominent anomalies among that world’s women, Brienne of Tarth and Asha Greyjoy.

These are pure joy to record. I hope you like listening to them!

Episode 14 of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is now up. This one is about the impact of prophecy within the world of the story itself, as per some really insightful writing by my co-host Stefan Sasse. Give it a listen!

The new episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast The Boiled Leather Audio Hour is up! It’s the first in what sure looks like it’s going to be a hella long series of discussions about the women of Westeros, starting with Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister. Enjoy!

Elio & Linda of the venerable A Song of Ice and Fire super-site Westeros.org join Stefan Sasse and I for a discussion of Romanticism in the series in our podcast, the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. Lots of provocative ideas about how the way the characters view history shapes their present. Check it out!

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, is up, and this one has a very special guest: Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress. We’re discussing women, sexual assault, and sexuality in the books. Lots to sink your teeth into, so give it a listen!

The latest Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast episode went up a few minutes ago, and it’s all about Game of Thrones Season Two. My co-host Stefan Sasse and I tackle many of the big issues of adaptation from book to screen, and I’m pretty pleased with what we come up with. Hope you dig it!

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!

In the latest episode of my Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, my co-host Stefan Sasse and I discuss this weekend’s tremendous “Blackwater” episode before launching into a lengthy examination of violence against children in the books. Not exactly light lunchbreak listening, I suppose, but food for thought.

My A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones podcast is back! This time my co-host Stefan Sasse and I are joined by Race for the Iron Throne’s Steven Atewell for a brief discussion of the A Game of Thrones graphic novel and a lengthy discussion of the nature of prophecy in the series that manages to be both nerdy and heady. Enjoy!

My latest A Song of Ice and Fire podcast is up, focusing on the sample chapter from The Winds of Winter that George R.R. Martin posted to his website a few weeks ago. My co-host Stefan Sasse and I are once again joined by the illustrious Amin of A Podcast of Ice and Fire. Go have a listen!

Stefan Sasse and I are back with an all-new episode of our A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour. This time out we’ve brought along a very special guest, Amin from A Podcast of Ice and Fire, the grandaddy of ’em all. We’re discussing “Southron Ambitions,” Stefan’s provocative essay for The Tower of the Hand on a certain conspiracy theory advanced by one of the characters in A Dance with Dragons. Read up, then listen up.

Episode 04 of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, has been posted. This week Stefan Sasse and I take a look at the role of religion in Westeros.

* 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.

The third episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast with Stefan Sasse, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up on my Game of Thrones blog at boiledleather.com. This week we end up focusing on the difference between 21st-century morality and faux-medieval morality, and what that means for the reader’s experience of the books. I was really looking forward to having this discussion. Hope you enjoy it!

The second episode of my A Song of Ice and Fire podcast, The Boiled Leather Audio Hour, is up! This time out Stefan Sasse and I discuss morality, leadership, and reform in the context of such august personages as Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, Roose Bolton, and Tywin Lannister. Enjoy it with your leftovers.

Meanwhile, I contributed a couple of entries to the first installment of Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2011 countdown: Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise at #80 and Tom Neely’s The Wolf at #78. Enjoy them with your gift cards.

I’ve started an A Song of Ice and Fire podcast! It’s called the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, because who could resist that acronym, and its first three episodes, to be rolled out over the course of the holidays, were the brainchild of Stefan Sasse, the hugely insightful writer behind some of my favorite ASoIaF essays. Stefan noticed that he and I share a focus on issues of morality when discussing the books’ warriors and leaders, so he suggested we just get on Skype and start talking about it. I’m glad he did; this was a ton of fun.

Part one is up now at my ASoIaF/Game of Thrones blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. Part two will go up next Monday, and part three the Monday after that.

Enjoy!