* One’s temptation to crumple the entire comics internet up and throw it in the garbage decreases considerably when everyone starts writing about Chris Ware. The Comics Journal is doing a whole series on Ware’s astounding new collection Building Stories; highlights so far include Joe McCulloch’s thoughts and Chris Mautner’s interview with Ware.

* Mike Mignola, John Arcudi et al’s excellent B.P.R.D., long an ongoing series in all but name, will make it official beginning with “issue #100.”

* Ware was one of the human highlights of the recent iteration of SPX, and unsurprisingly Tom Spurgeon has the best con report. One thing that happened there that had never happened to me before was that total strangers came up to me to compliment me on this blog four or five times, which was wonderful and uplifting, so thank you, strangers.

* If you’re looking for comics to try you could do a lot worse than to use Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s list of Notable Comics from Best American Comics 2012 as your guide.

* Or you could read all of the Kevin Huizenga comics that have been posted online.

* I’m digging Mr. Freibert’s new style.

* Michael DeForge’s “Leather Space Man” is as good at depicting the weird un-logic of urban legends and pop-culture mysteries like “Paul is dead” or “Andrew W.K. is an impostor” as Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges #2 was at depicting the weird un-logic of Mario-style video games. Meanwhile “Manananggal” is as strong a horror/SF thing as he’s ever done and “Splitsville” is the same for the sex-comic category and Ant Comic remains the best webcomic going. It’s a shame he abandoned Open Country, that awesome minicomic series about astral-projection art, though. Michael, don’t abandon/destroy your comics anymore. They’re good!

* Jonny Negron draws David Lynch and a woman in the woods. Those colors!

* Jeez, Simon Hanselmann.

* Josh Simmons made a minicomic called Flayed Corpse for Chuck Forsman’s Oily Comics line that I’d like to read, and he also drew this tribute to Hans Rickheit’s Cochlea & Eustacea and this one-panel gag comic.

* Wow, look at this comic “Sparring” that my collaborator Isaac Moylan made.

* Ben Max F. Urkowitz made a very nice comic here — a little Tim Hensley, a little Gilbert Hernandez, a little pre-Maus Art Spiegelman even. Click to read the whole thing.

* Go buy a whole bunch of troubling, compulsively drawn comics by Heather Benjamin, who’s really got everyone else in comics beat in terms of interview attire and candidness.

* Uno Moralez gif/image gallery gloriousness.

* Once you’ve learned the grim true story behind the making of The Birds, this gif, which I’ve thought for years and years now is Hitchcock’s single most revealing-of-self moment, takes on an even more troubling new meaning.

* I once wrote an oral history of Marvel Comics with a 13,000-word first draft for Maxim, yet I’m still absolutely enthralled and regularly enlightened by the clips I’ve read from writer Sean Howe’s forthcoming book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Here’s a bit on the ’90s boom and Image defection, and here’s a justifiably internet-famous bit on the freewheeling, acid-dropping ’70s.

* In her Bloggingheads.tv show “Critic Proof,” Alyssa Rosenberg, who is one of my favorite TV critics, talks to Willa Paskin and Todd VanDerWerff, who are two of my favorite TV critics. Paskin is just a mercilessly efficient and effective critic, man, jeez.

* I’m looking forward to listening to four excellent comics talkers, Tucker Stone, Matt Seneca, Joe McCulloch, and Chris Mautner, talk about Love and Rockets at length in their podcast.

* Vanessa Pelz-Sharpe is probably the best sex writer I’ve ever read. Her advice in that post makes for excellent sex scenes in addition to excellent sex IRL, too.

* LISTEN TO CARLY RAE JEPSEN

* Please read this marvelous, harrowing true story about the coolest kids in the author’s hometown. Blood Sugar Sex Majik is a hell of a drug. (Via Molly Lambert.)

* Ta-Nehisi Coates presents an escaped slave’s furious response to an infuriating letter from his ex-master’s wife demanding he pay for the horse he rode off on. Incandescent writing.

* Coates is actually responsible for some of the best political writing I’ve read in ages himself: “Fear of a Black President”, his magisterially angry essay on the reaction to the Obama presidency that dare not speak its name.

* Conor Friedersdorf on the debilitating psychological effects of living life in constant terror of American drone attacks. Think about this every day, please.

* I don’t really know Zak Smith beyond liking his writing on gaming, art, and fiction and exchanging the occasional tweet or comment, and I don’t know his girlfriend Mandy Morbid at all, so I felt weird trying to talk to either of them about the issues raised in this post directly, so instead I’ll tell you to read Zak’s profoundly moving and blunt post on Mandy’s chronic, intensifying illnesses and living with death as a presence in your life and leave it at that.

* A very happy belated birthday to Jack Kirby, the King of Comics and one of the greatest artists, of any kind, of the 20th century. That link takes you to this year’s Kirby tribute gallery by Tom Spurgeon, an annual comics-internet highlight.

* Finally, I like Beyoncé.

still funny to me; thanks, George R.R. Martin

* Behold: the greatest photo in the history of comics. Top row, from left: Gary Panter, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Ivan Brunetti, Seth, Danniel Clowes, Alison Bechdel, Gary Lieb, Justin Green, Chris Ware, Robert Crumb, Ben Katchor. Bottom row, from left: Joe Sacco, Françoise Mouly, Art Spiegelman, Hillary Chute, Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, Charles Burns. Photographer: Jason Smith.

* Pope Hats #3 by Ethan Rilly, coming soon from AdHouse! That book will burn up the alt-comics festival circuit this fall, that’s for sure. The first two were lovely, and good reads.

* I’m not sure why this hasn’t been a bigger deal — I was pretty sure this was one of Hollywood’s great mysteries for decades now — but Tippi Hedren says Alfred Hitchcock tried to blackmail her into sex and smothered her career when she refused him

* Matt Madden, Jessica Able, and Françoise Mouly have released the table of contents for this year’s Best American Comics. Some strong work in there, including excerpts Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits, Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions, Sammy Harkham’s Crickets, and Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” That last inclusion gives me another opportunity for an smh moment regarding the lack of major comics awards consideration given that work, a failure of judgment that borders on scandal. Oh well, looking forward to the Ignatz sweep.

* Here’s a short but impressive list of like-minded alt/art/underground comics anthologies currently operating, as recommended by Leah Wishnia, editor of the likeminded Happiness Comix effort. One thing that the contretemps over Dan Nadel’s anti-SP7 editorial brought to light for me is — well, it’s actually two things. The first is that the community of (mostly) young cartoonists making resolutely uncommercial comments is growing much faster than I can keep up with. To be honest I’d long flattered myself with the idea that I was keeping nearly all this stuff on my radar, but there’s so much I’m missing, so much I don’t even know I’m missing. I doubt that as a critic I’m on their radar, either, although who knows. The second thing spins out of that last sentence: I don’t think any critics are working this beat with any regularity. Maybe Rob Clough, since he reviews everything? Maybe someone I don’t know I’m missing either? But as best I can tell, aside from certain breakout talents I don’t think this cohort has critical champions or interlocutors. Which could explain some of the anger directed at Dan when he said he had no idea what “underground comics” means in 2012, ’cause these folks do, I’d guess. Anyway, I think that if a generation of cartoonists comes of age without criticism, that will have an effect on both cartooning and criticism.

* Related: Tom Spurgeon on the value of Nadel ripping the band-aid off these issues.

* “Where You Are King” is an impressively icky comic by Ian Sundahl for Study Group. The lettering is tremendous.

* Domitille Collardey’s new webcomic Wreckhall Abbey is indeed very new, but it’s the kind of comic that makes you nod your head and go “yep, there it is” — the moment a cartoonist finds the project her interests and talents were tailor-made to create. It appears to be a boarding-school strip in the vein of Jillian Tamaki’s excellent Supermutant Magic Academy; I think the internet’s plenty big enough for both. The layout seems super-considered and labor-intensive, too. Well done.

* I liked this Mark Richardson piece on associating the work of David Lynch with his own real-life brushes with fear and violence. This is an underdiscussed characteristic of Lynch’s work, his ability to accurately convey the sensation of proximity to violence that renders you powerless, and the terror of that. It’s usually overlooked in favor of the stuff to which the adjective Lynchian is more often applied — narrative ruptures, surreal horror, little people doing weird things and so on — but it’s absolutely a core element of his work, and one I’ve seen enough people bring up when discussing trauma from their own lives to know I’m not alone in detecting. You’d be hard pressed to find a better depiction of the impact of losing a classmate than the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, for example, or a better depiction of the psychic toll of sexual violence than Fire Walk with Me. Lynch’s “supervillain” characters, for lack of a better term, get the attention, but they really exist so that we can personalize the trauma in a way large and frightening enough to be commensurate with the size and impact of that trauma.

* Chris Mautner’s Comics College routine tackles the all-time-great Phoebe Gloeckner.

* My friend and collaborator Matt Rota has some gorgeous work in McSweeney’s #41.

* I don’t know much about the Spanish-language comics anthology Argh!, but I know it has Mike Diana in it and that this Jorge Parras cover is very striking. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Real Life Horror: They bomb funerals and it’s an outrage, we bomb funerals and it’s crickets chirping.

* Oh look, it’s Jessica Paré/Megan Draper from Mad Men singing “Just Like Honey” and “Sometimes Always” with the Jesus and Mary Chain, because I’m now Franklin Richards and can bend reality to my will, apparently.

What do you think of this, ’90s high-school drama-club goth Christina Hendricks?

* Drop what you’re doing and download Matthew Perpetua’s 8-disc Fluxblog 2008 Survey Mix. Ooftah, the first half of disc 2.

* Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is now a trilogy. Whoever tells me this and expects me to complain, he understands nothing about Sean, nothing.

* The Secret Acres hivemind weighs on in the Comics Journal/Kickstarter/SP7 fight in high Secret Acres thinkpost style, while Dan Nadel clarifies a couple of his points from the middle of what’s either the best-timed or worst-timed internet hiatus in comics history.

* Another day, another enormously dispiriting interview with Grant Morrison about (among other things) the legal issues surrounding Superman and Watchmen. This one sees Morrison go full Barkley, saying “I’m not a role model” while not-so-subtly mocking Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for the shitty contract they signed in “hey, I got mine” fashion, in addition to positioning his own refusal to stick up for Siegel & Shuster in any way besides celebrating their artistic accomplishments as a noble refusal to treat them like victims. Yeah, it’s a bummer alright, especially coming from a guy who argues that superheroes are contemporary mankind’s greatest and most inspiring artistic exemplars. Given that his goal is for all that to rub off on the culture to which he exposes them, it’s weird that he finds it so baffling his readers would expect some of that to have rubbed off on him as well.

* Semi-related: Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich is appealing the appallingly punitive decision against him in his copyright fight with Marvel.

* A pair of fine reviews of very important collections are up at The Comics Journal: Nicole Rudick on Gloriana by Kevin Huizenga and Brandon Soderberg on The Furry Trap by Josh Simmons. “The Sunset” in the former and “Cockbone” in the latter would make a list of my top favorite short comics of all time; “The Sunset” would top it in fact.

* Dan Clowes is going to make a show called The Landlord for HBO with the directors of that nightmarish-looking Ruby Spears thing.

* I’m kind of the opposite of Tom Spurgeon here: I knew Fantagraphics would be collecting the Ignatz series New Tales of Old Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez, but apparently I never said so on this blog, if my search function is to be believed.

* I’ve really been enjoying Dorothy Berry’s posts on Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy for Comics Workbook, like this one about how rare Nancy is as a fictional female child who is neither a tomboy nor a girly-girl. My daughter is young enough to still be in that limbo state where she dresses more or less like a girl because we buy girl’s clothes for her but her behavior is essentially genderless, and I can tell you that in flipping through the Nancy Is Happy collection, I see a lot of that kid in her.

* The Mindless Ones’ Bobsy gives the business to Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, a comic I did not like at all.

* Gabrielle Bell has wrapped up her July Diary series for the year. If it wasn’t quite the revelation that last year’s effort was, it still contained a freaking zombie comic, and a two-panel autobiography that just slays me.

* The Burning Brothel, a Raymond Pettibon tumblr, is a delightful resource for an increasingly influential-on-comics artist.

* Eleanor Davis is laying it on the line in her comics and sketches these days. Don’t miss it.

* Well, Arsene Schrauwen #1 by Olivier Schrauwen sure looks good.

* I think every artist should be required by law to do a series of Batman character portraits, and I will be introducing this legislation as the Bill Finger Bill. Jordan Crane caught Michael DeForge’s stab at it, which I’d never seen before and which is awesome. Who’s the smiley guy next to the Joker, though?

* Jonny Negron.

* I always enjoy it when Frank Santoro works a little blue.

* Nice little comic by Mr. Freibert.

* Jordan Crane’s been posting processy glimpses of an upcoming contribution to the next issue of the Fort Thunder-centric Monster anthology (! did we know this was on the way?) to his tumblr, and I know this’ll come as a huge surprise but it looks gorgeous.

* Go buy comics from Andy “q v i e t” Burkholder’s Bigcartel store. Guy’s talented. (Via Michael DeForge.)

* Jeez, C.F. makes a lot of comics.

* Real Life Horror: This is what policework in America looks like now.

* Glenn Greenwald, inspired by Chris Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites:

I see no evidence that “rich people are very, very afraid” — at least not by their actions. And that, to me, is the problem. That fear — a lot more of it — is necessary. Their ability to rope themselves off from the society they are degrading, combined with the para-militarization of domestic police forces (aggressively displayed in response to the Occupy movement and related protests), and the rapidly increasing domestic powers of surveillance and detention (designed to intimidate the citizenry and thus deter and guard against mass protests), have convinced them, I think, that they need not fear any protest movements or social unrest, that America can and will become more and more of a police state to suppress it. An elite class that is free to operate without limits — whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior — is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.

*Attention A Song of Ice and Fire fans who’ve read all five books: This EXTREMELY SPOILERY George R.R. Martin interview is unusually informative on various obscure but fervently debated plot points.

* I am allergic to watching anything Olympics, but I understand the opening ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle and music-directed by Underworld, was quite something — basically a tribute to socialized health care, rock and roll, and children’s literature. Most of the people I know from the U.K. feel about the place the way I feel about the U.S., but those people should take comfort in knowing that it’s unimaginable, unimaginable for America to conceive of itself in terms that humanistic. Anyway the soundtrack, Isles of Wonder, is out, and though most of the big famous songs I understand were in the production don’t show up here, there’s still a whole lot of terrific Underworld music, so I’m happy.

Here I am on CBS New York’s local news channel WLNY’s morning show Live from the Couch, talking about The Dark Knight Rises with Cinema Blend’s Katey Rich and hosts Carolina Bermudez and John Elliott last Friday. It was a tough morning, so I’m grateful to the hosts for their thoughtful, sensitive, and nonsensationalistic questions, and to both them and Katey, an old hand at this, for putting me at ease. Hope you dig it.

* The San Diego Comic-Con International starts tomorrow evening, but for all intents and purposes it’s already underway, if by “all” you mean “PR.”

* The main announcement to break through the fog for me so far is that Fantagraphics will be debuting not only Love and Rockets: New Stories #5, which I think it’s safe to say is eagerly anticipated following last year’s installment, but also a new line of L&R t-shirts OMGGGGGGGGG!!!! There’s no more t-shirt-ready artist in all of comics than Jaime, and Gilbert’s no slouch either. UPDATE: THEY’RE ONLY AVAILABLE AT THE CON, BOOOOOO TO THAT, BOOO BOO BOOOOOOOO, SERIOUSLY FUCK THAT

* If you didn’t read Tom Spurgeon’s essay about the 30th anniversary of Love and Rockets, Los Bros Hernandez, and the San Diego Comic-Con, you really should. Aside from making a terrific capsule-format case for the greatness of all three cartooning Hernandez brothers and their series as a whole, Tom reminds us that Comic-Con is what we make of it, and that a better way to keep the Comic in Comic-Con than joking about movie studio people is to find and engage with the comics portions of it. A milestone anniversary of one of the greatest comics of all time is a pretty easy way to do that.

* The death of a Twilight fan struck by a car outside the convention center is an awful way to start the show. (Via Jill Pantozzi.)

* In other news…

* The Mindless Ones wrap up their commentary on the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Adam’s right that something about the Harry Potter battle felt inconsequential, but I ultimately decided that was the point.

* MoCCA’s physical museum closed abruptly. They charged an awful lot of money for table space and admission at their festivals and it’s a shame to see it wasn’t spent in such a way as to prevent this.

* David Bordwell provides an overview of the latest edition of his and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art, which doubles as an essay on filmmaking as a series of choices. Killer new cover for the book, too. No pun intended.

* Hey, wanna see a 3-D Craig Thompson/Theo Ellsworth jam comic?

* I LOLd for this installment of Puke Force by Brian Chippendale.

* Matt Furie does Simon Hanselmann’s Megg & Mogg. From the upcoming guest-star-studded “acid episode”!

* We’ve all been there, Scott Pilgrim. (Via Kiel Phegley.)

* A lady by my collaborator Isaac Moylan.

* A lady by my collaborator Jonny Negron.

* Chris Ware is an articulate and empathetic interview subject, even a moving one as the end of this interview makes very clear, but he is also just a machine for churning out hilariously embarrassed reactions to his own work. I wish I had the cock-of-the-walk attitude of all the people I’ve seen making fun of Ware for his genuine self-effacement. Must be nice to breeze through life like that! (Via Drawn and Quarterly.)

Killer robots programmed by the American government to target an ethnic group beginning with the letters “M-U” during the 2010s—imagine that!

(hat tip: Jim Henley)

* 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.

* 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…”

* 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.

* Here’s a better look at Chris Ware’s elaborate packaging for Building Stories, via Chris Mautner, who helpfully contextualizes it with Jordan Crane’s NON #5 and Closed Caption Comics’ CCC #9.5. Also, they got J.J. Abrams to blurb it?!

* Dan Harmon, the mercurial creator and showrunner of the bizarre, hall-of-self-referencing-mirrors sitcom Community, has been fired from the show. With all my immersion in comics I thought of this in creators’-rights terms — how what’s now considered an outrage among fans of a show is frequently applauded by fans of comics (or comics characters, at least). The best thing I read about it is Maureen Ryan’s thoughtful essay on Harmon, Community, and learning to appreciate difficult people who don’t appreciate you back. I thought about that in comics terms, too.

* This piece by the New York Review of Books’ Elaine Blair on Lena Dunham’s increasingly terrific HBO show Girls is the best I’ve read so far due in large part to its focus on the show’s sex scenes. Girls is a sex comedy first and foremost, and they probably ought to have marketed that way rather than allowing it to become a referendum on what you think about wealthy artsy Brooklynites. The sex stuff is great, by the way — graphic and excruciating, like a ’90s alternative comic.

* If you like what Matt Wiegle’s doing Destructor, then you should be reading what he’s doing on Road of Knives.

* New Jonny Negron comic over at Vice. That opening image has me pining for autumn.

* The best thing about linking to Uno Moralez’s inimitable image/gif galleries is revisiting them to select representative images to post along with the link.

* Wow, Tom Spurgeon is right: Bill Everett’s imagery could be unsettling and odd. Click that link and see if you don’t come away with a whole new appreciation for Everett.

* Ross Campbell draws a worse-for-wear Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. I know Ross disliked the movie, and I expect it’s because he suspects, correctly, that she’ll never look like this at any point during the movie series.

* I post a lot of sessy art, but this piece called “Haircut” by Sam Bosma is, I think, the sessiest I’ve posted in a long time.

* The Mindless Ones on last week’s Mad Men. Ginsberg über alles, Don.

* Every once in a while it pays to consider the remarkable progress that’s been made for LGBT equality in such a short period of time, and as that Ta-Nehisi Coates post points out it’s as much to do with giving people shit for being bigots and hoping they’ll want not to be given shit anymore as anything else.

* Here’s part three of the Comics Journal’s sumptuous Jack Kirby roundtable. Long live the King.

* Territory, the comic Andrew White made for Frank Santoro’s correspondence course, is very pretty and, like all of the products of that course I’ve seen so far, very Frank!

* Good Mad Men writing: I liked Maureen Ryan’s take on how far above Don Draper’s head the Beatles are, and Deborah Lipp’s forthright reaction to the show’s death imagery, and the Mindless Ones’ comprehensive look at last week’s episode. Jeez, this is a rich text.

* Glenn Greenwald predicts the future:

…six more months of ritualistic, chest-beating dances over the body of Osama bin Laden and the constant hailing by Democrats of the stalwart, pulsating courage of our Commander-in-Chief for having safely sat in the White House, surrounded by layers of security greater than that enjoyed by any of history’s emperors, and ordering that bullets be pummeled into the skull of an unarmed man and his corpse thereafter dumped into the ocean.

* Sabrina, don’t just stare at the limited edition broadsheet collection of Benjamin Marra’s American Psycho illustrations, buy it.

* Chris Mautner reviews Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem and Jean-Pierre Filiu & David B.’s Best of Enemies, two nonfiction comics about the Middle-East by two world-class cartoonists. I look forward to tearing into both of them.

* Hooray! The Closed Caption Comics-anchored smut-comics anthology Sock is returning for another issue, featuring guest stars like Edie Fake, Andy Burkholder, and Anya Davidson. You can pre-order it at the link. (That’s from Ryan Cecil Smith’s contribution below.)

* More CCC news: Apparently Noel Freibert’s Weird anthology has a tumblr? (Via Shit Comics.)

* Still more CCC news: I’m quite excited for Difficult Loves, the debut full-length from Molly Colleen O’Connell, whom I believe is of mixed Portugese-Ethiopian-Maori-German extraction.

* Speaking of anthologies, I was happy to see that the crowdfunding project for the next issue Happiness was successful; here’s a page from contributor Krysta Brayer.

* Oh my, am I pleased to have made the acquaintance of the comics and short fiction of Aaron Shunga. (Via Shit Comics again.)

* Jonny Negron. Jonny Negron. Jonny Negron.

* “I Am the Arm” by Matt Rota, for the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me art show at CoproGallery in Los Angeles.

* I’d actually intended to write about this project not at all, in any way, but oh well: Rob Bricken of Topless Robot speaks for a lot of people (ha, that’s not a sentence I get to write every day) in this piece absolutely laying into Before Watchmen, as well as the treatment of Jack Kirby vis a vis the Avengers movie, especially in the final sentence: “Hey Marvel and DC — it sure would be great to enjoy your products without feeling like an asshole.” Related: Tom Spurgeon on the implications of the recent dust-up between DC and writer Chris Roberson (when the latter announced his intention to stop working for the former following the completion of his current commitment, citing ethical concerns, the former ended that commitment preemptively) and DC’s recent legal victory over the laywer who represents the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel. That’s probably it from me on the Watchmen 2 issue barring further newsworthy developments.

* Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald. Michael Hastings! Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald has recently focused on three areas about which he has formed genuinely revelatory theses, for me at least. 1) A separate, even harsher American judicial system exists for Muslims, one that inflicts punishment up to and including execution without trial; 2) Genuine dissent, dissent that truly challenges or threatens or even upsets the American government and its business and military allies, is functionally illegal; 3) The range of opinion and information afforded Americans regarding their conduct versus that of other countries is just as narrow, and the resulting opinions just as deluded, as those of more traditionally tyrannical or even totalitarian states.

* Wow, that was heavy. Okay, here’s Geoff Grogan’s endearingly lo-fi promo vid for his webcomic Babyheads.

* The Mindless Ones may well be doing the best Mad Men writing around.

* Finally, something to chew on that combines a bunch of my interests into one post that in retrospect strikes me as serious overreach on my part but whatever: I wrote about fanfic and creators’ rights in the context of a fic-based civil war amid George R.R. Martin/A Song of Ice and Fire fandom.

* 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?

* For pete’s sake, someone please hook Rick Trembles up.

* These “q v i e t” sex comics are wondrous. Sexy, funny, dissonant, imaginative, as sex tends to be at varying times. (Via Conor Stecschulte.)

* Big PictureBox sale all month long!

* Have I used the “Brian Chippendale is the best he is at what he does, and what he does is write lengthy, funny, thoughtful essays on the on-page and off-page ethics of Marvel comics” formulation yet? Because if not, let me do so here.

* Great news for film fans: Bordwell and Thompson celebrate the tenth edition of their seminal Film Art by partnering with the Criterion Collection for online examples of the techniques they discuss in the book. By the way, “seminal” gets tossed around a lot, but get this: “Film Art was the first introductory film textbook to use frame enlargements rather than publicity photographs as illustrations.” Let that sink in for a moment.

* Michael DeForge starts collecting his own go-to tropes. He seems a bit anxious about repeating himself, but I think it’s a lot of fun to have amassed enough work that you start to notice things repeatedly popping up without your having intended to put them in there. Related: Read Leather Space Man and Abbey Loafer and Military Prison and and and…

* Ben Katchor’s “Logo Rage” is his funniest, bleakest strip in some time. Go read the whole thing.

* Jason tries crosshatching.

* Hot stuff from ADDXSTC fave Conor Stechschulte.

* Meanwhile, Conor’s Closed Caption Comics compatriot Andrew Neyer has a new series of panel paintings I quite like.

* Aeron Alfrey’s not just the President of Monster Brains, he’s also a client.

* Upon the great artist’s death, Joe McCulloch and Chris Mautner select six essential Moebius books. It’s amazing to think that more well-done, in-print English editions exist for Jacques Tardi or Lewis Trondheim than for Moebius, but that’s where we’re at and where we’re likely to remain.

* Bruce Baugh on California gothic (The Lost Boys, Blue Velvet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.).

* Remembering the “go-motion” animation technique of Phil Tippett. This is what “real” looks like to me, in terms of movie monsters.

* Longtime friend of the blog Jason Adams of My New Plaid Pants counts down his Top 20 Movies and Top 10 Scary Movies of 2011.

* Animals are killed during the making of all shows and films. How do you think catering and craft services get their chicken and burgers and whatnot, the meat fairy?

* Finally, the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus isn’t as good as you’ve heard…it’s better. Charles Barkley was right when he said that any knucklehead can cut together an awesome trailer (I think that’s what he said), but even so. This thing is pretty much predicated on validating your continued belief, over the course of decades and in the face of reams of inferior entertainment-product based thereupon, that the concept at its core is just as majestically horrifying as you remembered it to be. Well done all around.

* 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.

* Last week Tom Spurgeon made a modest proposal: Any time you talk about one of the major corporate superheroes, mention their creators. I will be doing this from now on.

* Kramers Ergot #1-3 are busting out all over! Last week, a small number of copies of these early, extremely hard to find issues of Sammy Harkham’s no-way-to-describe-it-but-seminal art comics anthology (the less artcomixy ones) went on sale at Secret Headquarters in L.A.; I bought the bundle via the Secret Headquarters web store, where it looks like all three individual issues are still available, believe it or not. This week they’re also on sale on-site at the Beguiling in Toronto. About the only downside to all this is that awkward moment when you’re all excited to read and write about the first three Kramers Ergots and then Joe McCulloch does it first and renders anything you’d say redundant. Read that review, though, seriously — such a pleasure to read Joe combine his recent beat of off-the-beaten-path stuff with his old alternative-comics stomping grounds.

* How the hell did the announcement of the sequel to Henry & Glenn Forever escape my attention??? Well, no longer: Tom Neely has announced Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever, featuring him and the rest of the original Igloo Tornado gang, plus Benjamin Marra, Ed Luce, COOP, and more.

* Tom’s also drawing lovely nudes now and then, it seems.

* Local boy makes good! Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith is now a part of Jordan Crane’s peerless What Things Do webcomics portal — they’re currently serializing his Kazuo Umezo/Blood Baptism horror-manga tribute minicomic Two Eyes of the Beautiful.

* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, and the memory of cities. I think that if you were forced at gunpoint to make an argument on behalf of the irreducible necessity of the comics form, Katchor’s work would be one of the first things you would reach for.

* Last time we visited Bruce Baugh’s newly resurgent World of Warcraft blogging, he was investigating the possibility of playing the game without dying. Now he’s examining the potential of playing the game without killing. Amazing how these entirely self-imposed rules can totally alter one’s experience, even mindset.

* Eve Tushnet warns against “evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!” horror movies. A fascinating framework I’d never before considered.

* My favorite t-shirt maker, Travis of Found Item Clothing, interviews my favorite nerd blogger, Rob Bricken of Topless Robot.

* I know there are any number of reasons why people do this, but I’m always baffled when the creators of television shows leave those television shows before the shows end. It’s your show! (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Frank Santoro has discovered that people are wrong on the internet. I imagine him staying up four, five days at a stretch, reblogging and correcting every tumblr post that doesn’t properly credit an artist.

* Speaking of Frank, it’s amazing how clear his imprimatur is on the comics made by students in his comics-making class.

* And still speaking of Frank, I think this post may have been posted and deleted before, but here’s his valuable run-down of all the major formats and dimensions available to comics-makers today.

* I don’t believe I’d ever seen this lovely piece by Jonny Negron, who can and does work in a lot more styles than the one or two that made his name. (Via Lisa Hanawalt’s inspiration tumblr. Oh, right, Lisa Hanawalt has an inspiration tumblr.)

* This is a very pretty bit of Becky Cloonan art.

* Lovely and intriguing work from Jackie Ormes, a Golden Age cartoonist who was an African-American woman.

* Fabulous picture of a young Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly from Mouly’s new mostly-New Yorker-cover-themed tumblr. (Via Robot 6.)

* Real Life Horror: You know, when you think about the clearly illegal surveillance of virtually all aspects of Mulsim life in the tri-state area by Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly’s NYPD, it’s not as though history isn’t littered with instructive examples of what becomes of a society when its politicians and law-enforcement authorities start to routinely and relentlessly scapegoat and persecute a religious minority for no good reason, and when other politicians and the news media line up to support this, and when the public either doesn’t notice or says “Hey, good job.”

* Here’s the latest trailer for Game of Thrones. Surprise! It looks good. The location shoots in Iceland are added-value city, man.

* Finally:

* 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?

* Your must-read of Comics’ Grossest Fortnight is Tom Spurgeon on More Watchmen. That’s all I can really say — he says it all himself.

* Dave Kiersh fucking funded his Kickstarter book. Alright, man, alright.

* I quite enjoyed this account of the grotesque legal odyssey of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster by Comic Book Comics‘ Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey.

* Andrew White has posted the truly fabulous concluding pages for Sexbuzz Chapter Six.

* I’ll be checking out the Ross Campbell-illustrated Rob Liefeld revival title Glory this week, for sure.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force returns tomorrow! You are not prepared.

* Please go download Vito Delante and Rachel Friere’s genuinely delightful FCHS Vol. 1 for five bucks from Graphic.ly, if that’s the sort of thing you’re wont to do.

* Gabrielle Bell made a poster for Richard Linklater’s Slacker for Cinefamily. Then someone made a video out of it, set to a song by Oneohtrix Point Never, because why not. I’ll never forget how excited I was when I first saw that movie and the one guy said the words “psychic TV” in it.

austin, tx from Tony Groutsis on Vimeo.

* The great Tom Neely is doing a series of his weird one-panel non-gag cartoons for Zack Soto’s Study Group webcomics portal. This is great news, as these seem to be getting better and better as Tom goes.

* I think most all of it has been bought by now, but if you hurry you can buy some original art pages from Brandon Graham and James Stokoe to benefit Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich in his legally mandated time of woe.

* It’s been a while, but it looks like Uno Moralez is resurfacing.

* As with Michael DeForge, at a certain point it feels cheap of me to keep posting illustrations from Renee French. Shouldn’t you be willing to click on a French link sight unseen? I think you should.

* Finally, I should note that Clive Barker slipped into a coma and almost died recently due to toxic shock syndrome brought on by a trip to the dentist. Fortunately, he’s on the mend now. Clive is one of my favorite human beings — one of the best human beings — I’ve ever known. Get better, Clive.