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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Here are some ways to kill time until Bruce Baugh blogs about Cataclysm.

* Radagast, Balin, and Beorn have been cast and Cate Blanchett has been re-signed as Galadriel in The Hobbit. Yes, ex-Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy is Radagast.

* Holy moley: Problem Solverz, the upcoming Adult Swim cartoon from Ben Jones, is almost literally unbelievably gorgeous. Do yourself a favor and watch this fullscreen at 720p. The colors are astonishing. It’s also really funny! Well done. (Via Sammy Harkham.)

* Here’s a very informative interview from the Innsmouth Free Press with artist and blogger Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains fame. It includes the breaking news that Alfrey and Mat Brinkman are making a board game together.

* Today on Robot 6: Early and rare Bill Watterson art.

* Check out these effusive BCGF reports from AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer and pood‘s Adam McGovern.

* Speaking of AdHouse, AdDistro has added Revival House Press, publishers of the entertaining Trigger and Shitbeams on the Loose.

* AMC will be re-running Breaking Bad in its entirety, two episodes every Wednesday night starting tomorrow through March 2011. Sold.

* I don’t think all that much of the films of Christopher Nolan, and this post by Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken struck me as a pretty efficient film-by-film explanation of why.

* Today the New York Times’ RSS feed for Paul Krugman’s blog uploaded a post with the headline “Ice And Fire Update” and the synposis “The saga is getting better.” Man oh man was I disappointed when I clicked through to see it was a post about Iceland’s economy and not, you know, Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman blogging his thoughts on the chapters he recently read from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

* Real Life Horror: This Telegraph piece on potential UFO/extraterrestrial-related documents in the WikiLeaks diplomatic document dump is a Real Life Horror candidate for two reasons. One, hey, awesome, confidential government cables about aliens! Two, the litany of astonishingly bloodthirsty statements by various American conservative politicians and pundits calling for the state murder of Julian Assange and anyone who helps him. It’s almost as if the movement had been waiting with bated breath for a political enemy whose death they it could call for without reproach.

* America is Number One!

* Good eye, Ben.

* The inclusion of Bryan Ferry’s Olympia on Pitchfork’s Worst Album Covers of 2010 list is just bizarre. Like they’re asking, “Can you believe Bryan Ferry put a recumbent model on his latest album cover?!?” Um…yes?