* Well, this is certainly nice: My comic in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 is getting good reviews from the folks who enjoy Spider-Man comics. Here’s Ray Tate at Comics Bulletin, and here’s David Walton at The Reilly Factor. Kitty’s Pryde liked my page layouts but didn’t like my jokes, which, hey, fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing if I pass muster with the big Spider-fan sites.

* Oh hey, look, it’s four of the best people in the history of comics. From left: Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Groth, Phoebe Gloeckner. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog, I wrote about the role of social justice in the series, using the conclusion of the Harry Potter series as a counterexample. I elaborated on the point for the benefit of a naysayer, too. I realized yesterday just how important this is to me.

* Recently on Robot 6:

*Good god: Gary Groth interviews Robert Crumb at glorious length. I ran down some of the high points for Robot 6.

* Ng Suat Tong annotated all the flashback panels from Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” I added my two cents at R6 as well.

* Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” has wrapped up. Some lingeringly creepy images in here, as you’d expect.

* And here’s a quick little highlight reel for the Journal’s Habibi roundtable.

* Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books, Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics, and François Vigneult’s Family Style have formed a publishing collective called Press Gang. That’s promising.

* Jesus: The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo put a caricature of Muhammad on the issue that came out yesterday. Later that day, someone blew up their offices.

* The Minneapolis small press show MIX may be having its last hurrah this weekend.

* David Bordwell’s latest absolute killer of a film essay is on visual density, specifically the way leaving objects that previously played a role in the narrative within the frame charges that frame with memories. The relevance to comics is obvious. And in terms of Bordwell’s recurring themes, he argues that this technique has largely been lost with the primacy of the walk-and-talk/stand-and-deliver binary for shooting dialogue.

* Matt Seneca on recent releases from the great Yuichi Yokoyama. While as usual I disagree with many of his emotional and thematic conclusions — I don’t get pessimism from Garden at all; it seems beyond that to me — I enjoy a lot of his specific observations, like the kindly feeling of the book’s slideshow-style finale. Plus, the piece includes a bunch of gorgeous art from Yokoyama’s thus far untranslated Baby Boom.

* Joe McCulloch on pre-Code horror comics for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Local boy makes good!

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the increasingly obvious problem with the NYPD.

* Dan White’s latest Cindy & Biscuit story is an all-Biscuit affair. Such vibrant cartooning!

* Michael DeForge previews his next comic, Kid Mafia. I’m detecting a lot of Tim Hensley/Wally Gropius in this one.

* Oh hey, Jonny Negron decided to mint money by offering prints for sale of his Drive pin-up.

* Andrew White appears to be prepping to post a comic every day this month.

* Keep drawing the sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* More hot stuff from Ryan Cecil Smith. You know, it’s times like these when I wonder if I should put some kind of NSFW tag at the top of the blog, or if it goes without saying.

* Your must-read of the day: The Comics Journal’s excellent Habibi roundtable, featuring Charles Hatfield, Hayley Campbell, Chris Mautner, Tom Hart, Katie Haegele, and Joe McCulloch. Savor it.

* Tom Spurgeon sounds off on people who approach acclaimed comics angry about their acclaim. Comics has a near-terminal case of “You think you’re better than me???”-itis sometimes. I’ve been there!

* I pulled out the superhero-related quotes because they were the pithiest, but Alex Dueben’s interview with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden about the Best American Comics series was a top-to-bottom fascinating look at their process, particularly the thinking behind the “Notables” section at the back of the book. Abel and Madden are two of contemporary comics’ most stealthily influential figures.

* Legendary will be publishing a new edition of Paul Pope’s The One-Trick Ripoff that will also serve as an omnibus of his non-THB work from the bulk of the ’90s, including his lost manga for Kodansha.

* Ganges #4 is out! This is a great comic book.

* Closed Caption Comics news: Did you know that Ryan Cecil Smith has a blog (via Shit Comix), or that Conor Stechschulte came out with a new comic called Fountain at BCGF last year? Because I sure didn’t! CCC folks: You realize I’m your target audience, right???

* Frank Quitely talks shop. I feel like that’s a rare occurrence?

* Chris Mautner didn’t think much of DC’s New 52.

* Rub the Blood is a noisy-alt tribute to the Image Comics of the early ’90s. Could be a pip, could be a pip. I mean, surely you want to see Victor Cayro take on Shadowhawk or whatever the case may be.

* Joe McCulloch on Yuichi Yokoyam’s Color Engineering. I’ll admit that Yokoyama’s painted style leaves me cold compared to his line art, but he also rarely disappoints, so I’ll certainly be reading this.

* Hooray hooray, Tom Kaczynski’s drawing pretty girls again.

* It’s always good to see new work from Tom Neely.

* Meanwhile I think we should take all available opportunities to look at the art of David B.

* Ben Affleck is maybe directing a feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, and is definitely directing Matt Damon in a Whitey Bulger biopic written by Boardwalk Empire‘s Terrence Winter. And that is two more interesting Ben Affleck stories than I expected to read this week.

* I sure hope this means Kevin Huizenga will be drawing characters from every book in his unsorted pile.

* Yeesh, King Con.

* I’ve gotten an awful lot of enjoyment out of Nine Inch Nails’ cover of U2’s “Zoo Station.” It’s interesting to see how those two bands’ post-’90s activities have affected conventional wisdom about their (mutually excellent) ’90s activities.

* Speaking of: I’ve listened to the freshly reunited Orbital’s new song “Never” probably thirty times today. I haven’t been this delighted by the comeback of a band from my youth since I heard Portishead’s “Machine Gun.”

* So it was the side effects of the cocaine! (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* I remain completely amazed by how bad Netflix is at being Netflix. I really have never seen anything like it, this string of necessary changes handled as badly as possible coupled with unforced errors of spectacular proportion. Read the letter to shareholders excerpted at the end of the article at the link and marvel at the tone-deafness and inattention to detail (typos???).

* Real Life Horror: Heads on sticks. Greenwald is right: That line in Obama’s speech about killing Bin Laden that said it’s proof that America can do whatever we set our minds to weirded me out as deeply as anything in politics since the introduction of the previously unheard-of term “Homeland” as a descriptor of American territory. There was something very bad about each of these ideas, and I recognized the latter even in the depths of my unpleasantness.

* When it comes to the reason why you can never do a google image search for any of the Simpsons with the safe search filter turned off, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. Michael DeForge is now part of the problem.

* Alejandro Arbona and Jody LeHeup, two of Marvel’s best editors and the men responsible for Invincible Iron Man & Immortal Weapons and Uncanny X-Force & Strange Tales respectively, were laid off by Marvel yesterday, among many other employees of long standing. I’ve been pretty upset about this. Comic Book Resources provides the facts; Tom Spurgeon and Heidi MacDonald provide much-needed and highly infuriating context.

* “Dylan [Williams] said something once that really stuck with me. ‘Art isn’t bullshit and love isn’t bullshit.’”—Austin English

* Wow, speak of the devil: Andrew White has posted the complete Chapter Five of Sexbuzz.

* Vasilis Lolos is prepping a webcomic called Supersword, the goal of which, he says, is “Lord of the Rings for the Nintendo generation.” Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Well, it happened: Jonny Negron saw Drive. AND THE REST IS HISTORY.

* Tom Gauld’s doing a book for Drawn & Quarterly? Tom Gauld’s doing a book for Drawn & Quarterly!

* Dustin Harbin drew some dinosaurs, Sam Bosma and Kali Ciesemier colored them, and it was good.

* Whoa: Matt Zoller Seitz says the new Kelsey Grammer drama Boss is a great show.

* The great cartoonist Jason lists his five favorite giallo actresses and posts a picture of Edwige Fenech for emphasis. Paging Dr. Purcell, Dr. Curt Purcell!

* Happy birthday to Mike Baehr of Fantagraphics. Like so many Fanta employees, he’s one of the good ones.

* Real Life Horror: I guess we’re sending flying killer robots to execute American teenagers from the sky at will now, which is super-fucking-exciting, isn’t it.

* Wow, Uno Moralez has really outdone himself with this image gallery. It’s called “Horny Goblyns,” and it makes the abbreviation NSFW a comical understatement.

* Sex, synths, teen angst/lust, eldritch horrors: Is there anything about Jérémie Périn’s video for “Fantasy” by DyE that isn’t one of my favorite things? (Hat tip: Steven Wintle.)

* Recently on Robot 6: Everybody’s talking about “The Love Bunglers,” and everybody should be talking about Jim Woodring too.

* Dustin Harbin salutes Dylan Williams.

* Lisa Hanawalt draws J.G. Ballard and opens a spiffy new store.

* New comics from Jonny Negron! Not, perhaps, what you’d expect.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two has taken a turn.

* Grant Morrison’s long-discussed plans for a Wonder Woman series seem to be taking shape for sometime next year. Sounds kinky. I wonder if anyone will mutilate a horse, walk around a room naked, or dismember a guy in this one.

* David B. is working on a book on the history of U.S./Middle East relations?

* DC’s relaunch moved a lot of units. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the first time a Big Two publisher has ever brought forth its own set of actual sales figures since I’ve been following these things.

* Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy never seemed to find its way into Wizard’s hallowed halls when I worked there during its run, so I have yet to read any of it. I can’t tell if the NYCC announcement that the title’s moving to Dark Horse means they’ll also be reprinting the previous material in addition to the three new issues they’ve got planned. I hope it does. There couldn’t be a more influential artist than Darrow right now.

* The Sleeper/Criminal/Incognito team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are working on a Lovecraftian noir series called Fatale, surprisingly for Image rather than Marvel’s creator-owned Icon line.

* At Marvel proper, Rick Remender and Gabriel Hardman, one of their best writers and best artists respectively, will be taking over Secret Avengers. It’ll probably be pretty darn good. I read somewhere that Bettie Breitweiser, one of their best colorists, won’t be rejoining Hardman here, though, which is too bad. Also Jack Kirby deserved more credit and rights and money and so do his heirs, but you knew that.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort explains how nearly all of a given superhero franchise’s titles can end up dumped into stores on the same day. I do wonder how DC’s experiment with rigorous scheduling will affect this conventional wisdom.

* Worth noting: Zak Smith/Sabbath wrote an RPG manual for his fantasy city Vornheim.

* Real Life Horror: Wake me when Obama sends military advisors to take down the pope.

* They’re not making movie cameras anymore. My jaw dropped when I read this.

* Roger Corman, ladies and gentlemen.

* Scarlet Witch cosplayer at NYCC photographed by Judy Stephens. Sure, sure.

* Good new comics news #1: Benjamin Marra has released Gangsta Rap Posse #2! It looks like this:

* Good new comics news #2: Emily Carroll has started a new webcomic called “Margot’s Room.” The way it works is that you click the objects listed in the text at the top of the landing page to read it.

* Good not really new comics news: Frank Santoro’s interview with Forming author Jesse Moynihan for the Comics Journal contains, in its entirety, the Lost-inspired comic “Spiritual Dad” that Moynihan and Dash Shaw did for The Believer a while back. Just scroll down.

* Did you know Brian Chippendale has a prose science-fiction short story blog?

* Here’s a sentence I’m excited to write: Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Community creator Dan Harmon.

* David Allison (aka Illogical Volume) connects Darkseid to the inescapable gravitational maw of contemporary capitalism as part of The Mindless Ones’ month-long series of essays on bad guys. What I like about this essay is that it makes Darkseid a lot more dangerous an idea than if we regard him as simply a celestial fascist, one of “those guys,” the obviously evil goosesteppers no self-examination is required to oppose. As much as I enjoy Final Crisis, no one was ever likely to come down on the “oppression” side of “freedom vs. oppression.” The original Jack Kirby conception of Darkseid and Anti-Life as war itself, whereby any violent opposition to Darkseid is itself Anti-Life, is a much stickier proposition, as is Illogical Volume’s suggestion of a humanity-devaluing socioeconomic program so pervasive that opposition is all but literally unimaginable. That’s the hallmark of a good dystopia, after all: No chains required.

* The CBLDF puts the Comics Code’s head on a stick and mounts it on the city wall.

* Craig Thompson, Habibi, Arabian Nights, Orientalism.

* The end of the first paragraph in Graeme McMillan’s brutal drubbing of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror may be the most devastating line I’ve ever read in a comics review.

* Another wonderfully weird image/gif gallery from Uno Moralez.

* This is a sculpture of a creature from Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark illustrations, by Kezeff. It is marvelous.

* Real Life Horror: The President can have Americans killed without charge, trial, or conviction at any point around the globe now, apparently, so that’s pretty fucking exciting.

* Finally, start your October off right with TERROR STAIN, the latest in Chris Ward’s annual series of Halloween mixes.

Lightning struck near one of the main hubs of the Long Island Rail Road last night during rush hour, which means that a commute that usually lasts from about 5:15 to 6:30 desk-to-door took me until about 10:50 instead. I’m positive that LIRR decision-makers made a lot of awful decisions during this process and all year round, but it’s not them I’m really angry at, because they’re not responsible for the philosophical underpinnings of why they don’t have the money that would have been required to prevent this from happening in the first place, where individual bad decisions wouldn’t matter as much as they did and do because the whole operation would be better on a structural level. And here is my rant on this topic.

I’m actually a lot better off than most people because I work in One Penn Plaza, the skyscraper on top of the LIRR commuter destination Penn Station. I don’t even need to go outside to get to the trains — there’s an entrance to Penn right from my building. Thus I have a journey of about three minutes from desk to train platform, unlike people who have to worry about walking and subways and such from elsewhere in town. So I heard the train was suspended at about 5pm, where normally I’d leave my desk at about 5:15 to catch a 5:23 home. So I just hung out for a while. Around 6:10 a fellow stranded coworker told me that they’d announced on the LIRR website that service should be resuming in about 15 minutes, so I went downstairs to Penn to check out the big board of departure times over the police barricades (they weren’t letting anyone else into the LIRR area). It said the next train to my stop was at 6:53, which I figured could be a reasonable estimate rather than just some number that went up automatically. So I bought some baby stuff in the Duane Reade down there and came back out to wait. At about 6:25 or so they threw some trains up on the board, then took them down about five seconds later, then put a few back up again. AT 6:29 they announced a 6:21 train on which my stop was the second stop. I hopped on, got a great aisle seat right next to the bathroom, fired up my Mad Men Season Two Disc One DVD, and away we went…

Fast forward to TWO FUCKING HOURS LATER, spent mostly parked in various locations, when we FINALLY arrive in fucking JAMAICA, which is usually not even the fucking HALFWAY POINT of my commute. Our train can’t even fully platform, because the train ahead of us hasn’t fully left the platform yet. After another half an hour of sitting around, they open the doors to the cars that are on the platform so people can get out and walk around, at which point the platform PA announces that service has been suspended again. After about another half hour of hesitation and bathroom-line-waiting, I decide to take my chances with taking a cab home from Jamaica after hearing a new announcement that they’ve completely powered down the tracks because people have gotten out of trains stranded on them and are walking around down there, which is basically a sign that nothing will move for hours and hours. But when I get to the street I discover that about 10,000 other people had this same idea. Asking my wife to come pick me up would be stupid because she’d have to bring the baby, and I’m guessing it’d take her half an hour just to get NEAR Jamaica Station at that point, since all the streets around are crowded with stranded commuters, horrendously inconvenienced locals, cars, cops, cop cars, buses, ambulances, barricades, taxis and gypsy cabs trying to score fares, significant others and car services trying to pick people up, etc etc, and I can just imagine the baby deciding she doesn’t want to be in the car anymore at that point and spending the next hour or so screaming. So I’m debating what to do–do I take the E back to Penn and sleep at the office? Do I take it someplace else in Queens and try to get a cab from wherever that is? Do I call one of my city slicker friends and try to get a place to crash? Then I look up and see I’m about two feet away from a bus stop for a route that goes to Floral Park, about a five minute drive away from where my mom lives. So I get on the bus and give her a call, and once I reach the end of the line she picks me up and drives me home. I walked in the door approximately four and a half hours after I normally get home.

FUCK THE LONG ISLAND RAIL ROAD, but more pertinently, FUCK THE REPUBLICAN PARTY from Ronald Reagan onward for deliberately refusing to invest in this nation’s vital infrastructure, because their primary goal is to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, and the means to that end is to completely delegitimize government as a solution for social problems since solving social problems costs money that could otherwise be handed to rich people, and the best way to delegitimize government is to make sure everyone’s interaction with any government or quasi-government agency is unpleasant and failed so that people think “government is the problem,” and the best way to do that is to refuse to fund vital services from public education to mass transit and transportation infrastructure because they are most people’s main daily interface with government power.

* The Divine Invasion is the website put together to auction off art and comics to help pay for Dylan Williams’s cancer treatments, and it’s quite striking. It’s moving to see what a wide range of comic book people have contributed, from Periscope to PictureBox, from Matt Fraction to Michael DeForge. That money is still needed, so please bid if you see something you like.

* Here are your Ignatz Award winners.

* Top Shelf’s holding its annual $3 Sale as we speak. At the link you’ll find my recommendations for how to spend your money. Kolbeinn Karlsson’s The Troll King for $3 is basically the deal of the year.

* Tom Devlin spotlights Pure Pajamas, the new collection of comics from Marc Bell. Marc Bell comics are by far the best Marc Bell anythings, so I’m excited to read this. Tom reports that Bell may be working on a graphic novel for Spring 2013, too.

* Kiel Phegley interviews Jaime Hernandez in video form.

* Highly relevant to my interests: The Descent/Doomsday director Neil Marshall will be directing an episode of Game of Thrones Season Two. Oh, indeed.

* You can find all of Tucker Stone’s pieces on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s late, lamented Cable series Soldier X right here.

* Brian Chippendale reviews Justice League #1, Animal Man #1, and New Avengers Annual #1 as only he can. UPDATE: Brian says the post wasn’t finished and went up accidentally; expect a reboot sometime next week.

* My Robot 6 colleague J. Caleb Mozzocco reviews (among other things) Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions and Brian Ralph’s Daybreak.

* Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon column on Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead for the Onion AV Club is good, but the best part is this line about what Wright and Pegg do: “If you ever wonder what’s missing from a Kevin Smith film, watch one of theirs.”

* God, I love it when Dave Kiersh posts his old comics.

* I’m excited to (one day, probably years from now at this rate) see David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Kiera Knightley looks older and somewhat fleshier and kind of tired in this promotional picture, which as it turns out is a very good look for her.

* Drawn & Quarterly is debuting Adrian Tomine’s new Optic Nerve issue at SPX. It’s weird to me to think that there’s only 12 issues of that series, and that many of them came out in the ten years or so I’ve been following comics, because Tomine’s one of those guys I’d heard of forever. But he started hella young.

* ADDXSTC fave Jonny Negron is part of a new anthology series called Chameleon, debuting at October’s Alternative Press Expo.

* Speaking of Negron, and when aren’t we around here:

* And speaking of ADDXSTC faves, Uno Moralez has posted another of his nothing-else-out-there-like-’em image/gif galleries.

* AdHouse will be publishing American Barbarian, the Kirby-meets-’80s-B-movie-apocalypse action comic from Tom Scioli. It’s AdHouse, so you know the book’s going to be a thing of beauty.

* The good news: Taiyo Matsumoto’s No. 5 is now available to read in English on your iPad. The bad news: Said English was typeset in Comic Sans, apparently.

* Here’s a fine Douglas Wolk review of Anders Nilsen’s masterful Big Questions for the New York Times.

* Tucker Stone has begun a series of posts on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s Cable/Soldier X, one of my favorite superhero comics and one of the few uncollected treasures of the past decade or so of superhero comics.

* Saving this for when I can savor it: Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell interviews Craig Thompson about his staggeringly ambitious new graphic novel Habibi. I’ll be speaking to Craig about it in his spotlight panel at SPX this weekend, by the way. See you there?

* One of the many nice things about having Tom Spurgeon back in action is that he can do lengthy, gem-packed industry analysis pieces like this one on the DC Comics relaunch. You can chew on this sucker all afternoon.

* I’m also with Tom that publishers should release better sales figures than they currently do, which is to say they should release sales figures at all. The funny thing is that when confronted with the sales analyses that folks like ICv2 and John Jackson Miller and Marc-Oliver Frisch and Paul O’Brien put together, oftentimes publisher representatives will dismiss them and the conclusions drawn from them by saying those numbers aren’t nearly accurate and don’t provide the whole picture. Well, there’s a solution to that problem, and it ain’t “don’t talk about the numbers unless it’s to echo vague sellout announcements we make.”

* Finally, Tom rounds up publisher and creator reactions to the apparently imminent closure of Atlanta’s Criminal Records, an independent record store and alt-friendly comics shop of long standing, of the sort that was integral to the formation and self-conception of “alternative comics” back in the ’90s. Aside from being sad about the cost to the store’s employees, and to the labels and publishers and artists for whom it was a great partner, I’m also sad about the death of that scene. I feel like when I look around lately I see a lot of the energy that used to go into alternative comics as made by one-time Criminal Records visitors like Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, and Los Bros Hernandez diverted into an alternate comics universe where Heavy Metal‘s influence is stronger than RAW‘s. But that’s probably got as much to do with where I’m looking as anything else.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates’s long war against the bullshit notion of black Confederate soldiers rages on.

* This list of good and lousy cartoon-only He-Man/She-Ra/Masters of the Universe characters reminds me that that toy line and cartoon did more weird things before breakfast than most toy lines and cartoons did all day. This is an absolutely killer killer-robot design, by the way.

* Publisher Dylan Williams of Sparkplug Comic Books is battling cancer without medical insurance. Please help him out in the best possible way: Buy some Sparkplug comics. I posted some recommendations at Robot 6, along with some thoughts about just how unique and valuable a publisher Sparkplug really is. Meanwhile, Floating World is holding a two-day benefit sale, if you live in Portland and/or are a Phillip K. Dick fan (explanation at the link).

* What a horrifying story: Syrian security forces abducted, beat, and broke the hands of political cartoonist Ali Ferzat before dumping him on the side of the road. The mafia-like cruelty and chutzpah of Bashar al-Assad and his underlings on display in this attack really takes the breath away. I wonder if this is a case the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund can help out with in some way.

* Bummer: The great film scholar Kristin Thompson won’t be writing the Hobbit-centric sequel she’d planned to The Frodo Franchise, her book about the multimedia business of turning The Lord of the Rings from a book to a movie to a cross-platform empire. She’s also shuttering her ongoing blog on the subject.

* John Porcellino on the things he learned from redrawing one page of the Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four.

* Jason Adams on Trollhunter, which seems like a hoot and a half. After the unrelenting stream of insectoid aliens, J-horror knockoffs, and corroded/decrepit slasher/torture baddies, it’s just such a pleasure to see a monster that looks different from all of the other monsters.

* It’s like Nick Gazin reached into my head and pulled out the exact words I’d have used to describe the Smurfs movie.

* Guy Perez’s cover version of Al Plastino’s Superboy #6 cover is my favorite Covered contribution in a long time.

* I hereby invite you to read “Bongcheon-Dong Ghost” by Horang, one of the scariest webcomcs I’ve come across in a while. Leave your speakers on. More about the comic at Robot 6.

* Jim Hanley’s Universe is the best comic shop I’ve ever been to. Ten years ago, my adult life in comics began there, when I paid a visit to pick up Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men on a whim. It’s been my “local comic shop” for most of the rest of the decade. So I was stunned and sadden to hear that Hanley’s Staten Island branch was all but swept away by flooding this past weekend. All that they’re asking in terms of help is that you drop by either branch and buy something, so today I stopped in and picked up Jesse Moynihan’s Forming Vol. 1 from Nowbrow and Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #2—1969 from Top Shelf. Spending forty bucks on comics has rarely felt so good. If you’re in the city, please support this wonderful store.

* If you care about Beck or what used to be called alternative music at all, you definitely want to read Ryan Dombral’s career-spanning interview with Beck at Pitchfork. What a thoughtful, honest guy he seems like. I was heartbroken to read that he lost two years’ worth of Sea Change-style music — 35 songs in all — when he misplaced a suitcase full of recordings prior to shifting gears and recording Guero with leftover ideas from the Dust Brothers, but even more horrifying is that apparently he’s never heard anyone talk nicely about his masterpiece, Midnite Vultures, and thus is sitting on 25 songs recorded in the same period. This is a travesty. From now on, if you see Beck, tell him you loved Midnite Vultures.

* Clive Barker has a prose essay collection out? Or coming out soon? Called The Painter, the Creature, and the Father of Lies? Nice.

* Say, did I mention that ADDXSTC-fave bloggers Jim Henley and Bruce Baugh have a new RPG blog called 20 X 20 Room? Probably not, since despite one or the other of them telling me so, I only really realized it yesterday. Well, now you know. They’re two of the smartest and most humanistic writers on gaming and genre art around, and you’d be hard pressed to find two bloggers more influential on my non-blogging life than they.

* John Porcellino presents his personal Top Ten Comics. It’s a pleasure to hear the great cartoonist talk about some of the other great cartoonists (Clowes and Kirby get two books apiece), as well as some off-the-beaten-path choices.

* Kevin Czap of Comix Cube reports from the Philadelphia Alternative Comics Convention, a well-regarded newcomer on the regional alt/art show scene. I don’t think there’s any reason why every city with a decent-sized number of alternative cartoonists can’t put together something like this, even if the result doesn’t end up with the high profile of a BCGF or Stumptown or TCAF or whatever.

* Benjamin Marra crushes the competition with this New Gods tribute. Omega Effect annihilation. MARRA IS!

* Speaking of Ben, who I remind you I’ll bless him for digging this up. It’s like He-Man and Skeletor are fighting in the middle of an issue of Cold Heat.

* I don’t know who Steingrim Veum is, but he sure can draw orgies. This is wonderful stuff. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Aeron Alfrey has put together another astonishing art gallery for his site Monster Brains, this time starring pulp cover artist Hannes Bok. In addition to stippling that’d make Drew Friedman jealous, Bok makes his otherworld creatures and scenes truly otherworldly. If there’s one thing we’ve lost from decades of seeing monsters come to life on movie screens — and don’t get me wrong, I treasure a lot of those monsters — it’s their uncanniness. It’s very very rare to see a monster that makes you feel like you’ve endangered yourself simply by seeing it.

* Click here to find a list of my ten favorite comics, more or less.

* My friend and collaborator Matt Rota has an art show opening up on Saturday, August 13 at L.A.’s Copro Gallery. The art in it looks like this:

* Jeez it is a pleasure to witness Joe McCulloch’s return to writing about alternative comics, specifically one of my top three favorite cartoonists and one of the very best comics short stories of all time: Phoebe Gloeckner and “Minnie’s 3rd Love.”

* Meredith Gran on the importance of supporting women cartoonists buy paying them to draw comics.

* Ben Morse on the best of Ultimate Spider-Man, which has been a very good comic for more than a decade.

* The degree of schadenfreude I’m feeling from The Walking Dead TV show’s behind-the-scenes woes is unseemly.

* Six ancient things that were probably built by aliens. Nearly a decade and a half after I first read Illuminatus! and 20-25 years after I first heard of Stonehenge and Atlantis and Easter Island and so on, this kind of thing still gives me chills.

* There’s not a whole lot in comics right now more fun than the way Dan White draws Cindy & Biscuit launching themselves through the air at monsters they’re about to dispatch

* I can certainly support the idea of Miles Fisher as a male, American, horror/parody-video-making Robyn. (See also.) Bonus points for casting Steffi from The Bold and the Beautiful in the Kelly Kapowski role and the closing homage to Hellraiser III. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

* News of note from Saturday and Sunday at the San Diego Comic-Con:

* Fantagraphics is publishing the EC Comics Library, in a series of black-and-white volumes centered on individual creators rather than the famous EC titles. So instead of a big horror book with a bunch of dudes’ stuff from Tales from the Crypt or whatever, you’ll get a collection of Harvey Kurtzman’s war stories, Wally Wood’s suspense stories, Al Williamson’s science fiction stories, or Jack Davis and Al Feldstein’s horror stories. (That’s actually the initial line-up.) I’m excited about this project, not just because with Peanuts and Mickey Mouse and the Disney Ducks and Popeye and Krazy Kat and so on Fantagraphics has established itself as the best publisher of archival material, but because their approach here sounds like it’ll be more along the lines of what they’ve done for Jacques Tardi recently, or even the Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez Love and Rockets digests. They’re very good at that sort of thing, too. Anyway, Tom Spurgeon broke the news and interviewed Gary Groth about it.

* But wait, there’s more: Fantagraphics is publishing The Complete Zap Comix, collecting every issue of the seminal (and still ongoing!) underground comix anthology series in one giant slipcased collection. That link takes you to Robot 6, where my colleague Chris Mautner interviews Gary Groth about the project. Besides comics by R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Spain, Robert Williams, Rick Griffith, Victor Moscoso, Gilbert Shelton et al, the collection will also include an oral history of Zap. Groth pegs the size at about 550 pages, but in the comments, associate publisher Eric Reynolds says it’s actually closer to 800. And there you have it, the “News of the Con” one-two punch.

* Marvel announced some of its post-Fear Itself plans, several of which center on writer Matt Fraction. Fraction is writing a new Defenders series co-starring Iron Fist, a character he helped revive to great effect a few years back. He’s also co-writing a bi-weekly series called The Fearless, which sounds kinda like it has a Brightest Day vibe, with Cullen Bunn and Chris Yost, illustrated by Mark Bagley and Paul Pelletier. And the big Dark Reign/Heroic Age-style umbrella label for the post-Fear Itself world will be Battle Scars. Here’s a pretty thorough panel report on these and other announcements.

* Brian K. Vaughan is returning to comics with a new science-fiction series called Saga, illustrated by Fiona Staples and published by Image.

* Here are your 2011 Eisner Award winners. Congratulations to my colleagues at Comic Book Resources, and to the delightful Jim McCann. It’s also nice to see Jacques Tardi’s It Was the War of the Trenches earn some recognition.

* In other news…

* Clive Barker says Abarat III will be out at the end of September. Looking forward to it.

* The wonderful Norwegian cartoonist Jason tries and fails to come to terms with the horrible mass murder in Norway.

—outside the Town Clerk’s Office, Brookhaven, NY, March 5, 2004

Better late than never!

* Box Brown is starting a Kickstarter-funded line of pamphlet-format alternative comic books called Retrofit, by an array of names you’ll recognize. I increasingly feel that the real competition for this sort of work isn’t graphic novels but the Internet, but either way, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

* Matt Zoller Seitz proclaims Game of Thrones Season One one of the best first seasons of television of all time. As a fanboy of both entities, I was almost inappropriately delighted to read this. I think Seitz is likely right that the show will improve on repeat viewing once you’ve seen the whole run so far.

* I think that if you’ve read interviews with comparable figures from the superhero comics industry, you may have a better sense of why I appreciate Tom Brevoort’s interviews as much as I do. This one focuses on how Marvel goes about crafting new series: whether they stem from a niche that needs filling or an idea that grows organically, whether they’re generated from within by editorial, from outside by a writer with a pitch, or from some combination thereof.

* If you ever wanted to read Michael DeForge’s excellent comic Spotting Deer online for free, well, now you can.

* Kristy Valenti reviews Jess Fink’s sexy sex comic Chester 5000 XYV, which in addition to being fun was a comic I found surprisingly provocative in an unexpected way.

* Hey, Kate Beaton works blue!

* Speaking of naked lady drawings, I assure you you want to click through and see this entire Hellen Jo illustration. She’s a talent.

* The cover for Esperanza, the latest Jaime Hernandez Love and Rockets digest, is one of the series’ most appealing so far.

* Go buy some original art from Paul Pope! I’ll wait.

* The Beast of Busco has long been once of my favorite cryptids.

* JK Parkin’s summary of the creative changes behind DC’s relaunch is the most comprehensive you’ll find, I think.

* Tom Spurgeon’s annual guide to the San Diego Comic-Con is probably my single favorite thing on the comics internet every year. Take a long lunchbreak and just soak in it.

* I used Dan Harmon’s big AV Club interview as a springboard for a post on why diversity in comics is fun, easy, and profitable for everyone.

* Matt Maxwell and I think superhero movies lack a certain je ne sais quoi.

* Hey, Jim Woodring’s new Frank book Congress of the Animals is out! I bet it’s good.

* Hey, Tom Neely’s new book The Wolf is on its way! I know this one’s good, from experience.

* Fun interview with Batman Incorporated artist Chris Burnham over at the Mindless Ones.

* Dustin Harbin recommends some recent releases.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates unearths a lengthy and deeply awful series of interview responses from avuncular Civil War historian Shelby Foote that will pretty much break your heart if you watched and enjoyed Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary on the subject. The comments from Cynic are worth reading in the thread below, too.

* Pleasure will always be the enemy for some.

* I started a tumblr dedicated to (SPOILERY) thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, in case you missed it.

* I reviewed Thomas Ott’s best-of collection R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004 for The Comics Journal. I didn’t care for it.

* Over at Robot 6, I wrote about site stats for Wizard’s digital magazine.

* You’ve only got a couple more days to take advantage of an awesome sale on Lane Milburn comics. Go!

* Tom Tomorrow is Daily Kos’s new Comics Editor. Lots of intriguing possibilities there.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Chris Mautner wrote a terrific introduction to the work of Frank Miller, listing the books to read first, the ones to read next, and the ones to avoid. I don’t agree with him on all of it, but it’s a cogent and at times passionately argued piece.

* Groovy Age of Horror indeed: Curt Purcell reviews Gossip Girl! Sometimes I think I have too much influence. Anyway, Curt brings his usual eye for unusual, revealing detail and his attention to structure and expectation to the proceedings.

* Curt’s also up to A Clash of Kings in A Song of Ice and Fire.

* Michael DeForge has been posting remarkable material on the daily lately. Here’s a few pages from a graphic novel he actually destroyed rather than finish and publish.

* Geoff Johns is writing an Aquaman series. Hooray!

* I’m saving this for when I have more time and energy, but Sean Belcher reviews Dragon Age II at length. I really have no idea what Dragon Age is, other than a thing a lot of people get excited about when it comes out, but I link to this anyway because the mere existence of this sort of writing seems to put paid to the notion that video games can’t be art. (Cf. this idiocy.)

* Buy more stuff from Tom Neely!

* Reach for it! J.H. Williams III channels funk for a Static Shock cover. Wouldn’t it be rad if more superhero artists did things you hadn’t seen before with color?

* Wow, this is a great Seth Fisher piece. Thanks, Corey Blake.

* Fresh from his triumphant run of drawing sexy women, Tom Kaczynski is now drawing ’80s action figures. It’s like he’s reading my mind.

* Robert Goodin covers Johnny Ryan. Indeed.

* Anders Nilsen reveals the cover for the collected Big Questions…

* …and Anders Nilsen draws some covers for Richard Brautigan books.

* Really digging these promotional images for Strangeways‘ new online iteration.

* Well played, Iron Man 2.0.

* This Axe Cop kicker made me laugh and laugh.

* Uno Moralez, man. Uno Moralez. (Wait for it.)

* Sucker Punch as camp is one of the few reads of that film that could persuade me to see it. Nothing against Zack Snyder — until now he’s made three films, all of which I enjoyed, two of which I enjoyed immensely — but it occurred to me that lo and behold, I really don’t have any interest in schoolgirls fighting robot samurai. The fanservice failed to service me, in essence.

* Hey, congratulations to my old boss and friend Brian Cunningham on taking over the editorial reins for the Green Lantern line, DC’s biggest franchise.

* LOL: The Xorn retcon happened Grant Morrison didn’t write Magneto well enough. Well, they certainly showed him!

* It’s quite telling, but also strangely depressing given that he’s the person who introduced me to the phrase “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” that Andrew Sullivan believes he must formulate and articulate a position on literally every issue of import. That’s simply crazy. You’re not an expert on everything; you’ll be outright stupid on some things. So I learned to my eternal regret.

* Real Life Horror: This chart is hilariously awful, just on a “something is obviously wrong with this picture” level.

* Real Life Horror 2: War oughta be fun! People really think this way about the enterprise of killing large numbers of people to achieve a political goal, and feel no shame about saying so. Fuck those people.

* On the other hand, I do enjoy the Captain America trailer. Rob Bricken is right: The emphasis it places on Steve Rogers having been a bullied weakling until very recently reveals an element of the character too often forgotten. (I find Ultimate Captain America all but unreadable any time I come across him now for that very reason.)

* Another Game of Thrones trailer? Don’t mind as I do.

* Finally, George R.R. Martin has finished two more chapters in A Dance with Dragons. He says the end is truly nigh.

* The Comics Journal has relaunched its website under the auspices of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler. They run down its major features and contributors in this welcome letter. They say bid adieu to their old hangout, Comics Comics, in this farewell note. They speak about the changeover and their plans at length in this Tom Spurgeon interview. Spurgeon bids adieu to the old TCJ.com’s genuinely evil message board in this Comics Reporter post.

* I write at some length about the Journal’s past, present, and future in this Robot 6 post. I make my first contribution to the new site in this review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise. And I will be a regular contributor via my soon-to-launch interview column, Say Hello.

* Phew! I’m very excited about all of this. PS: I recommend tapping into the Journal’s soon-to-be-online-in-their-entirety archives with this Gary Groth interview with the great Phoebe Gloeckner, one of my all-time artistic heroes and one of the all-time great cartoonists.

* Artist Guy Davis is leaving B.P.R.D., one of the very very very best superhero(ish) comics of the past ten years thanks in large part to his contributions. Click the link for my take on Davis’s work on the title. What he and main writer John Arcudi and co-plotter/overseer Mike Mignola did on that book is a genuine achievement. And this is one of my all-time favorite comics pages.

* The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition is coming out in a Blu-Ray box set at last. It contains all three extended-edition films, all the bonus materials from the Extended Edition DVDs, and those weird behind-the-scenes docs from the Limited Edition releases. I don’t think it includes the theatrical editions, but that’s fine. I already preordered it.

* Jay Babcock is discontinuing Arthur magazine’s online incarnation. Even after the print version was shuttered, it continued to be an underrated source of good comics. Best of luck to Mr. Babcock.

* Carol Tyler on her series of memoirs You’ll Never Know and “the legacy of war.”

* Tom Cruise really is starring in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. I still think that this works remarkably well.

* Writer Nick Spencer is now Marvel exclusive, though his creator-owned Morning Glories will continue at Image and, remarkably, his T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents revival will continue at DC. That’s a big get for Marvel.

* The very good cartoonist Tom Kaczynski has launched a blog for his publishing imprint Uncivilized Books. Also, his comic in Mome Vol. 21 looks sick, and he drew a sexy woman.

* This is a beautiful spread from Amazing Spider-Man #655 by artist Marcos Martin (and writer Dan Slott). It also basically crushes any given similar image or sequence of images in Inception, by the by. (Via Agent M.)

* Topless Robot’s Chris Cummins lists the 20 Greatest Liquid Television Segments. Man, what a marvel that show was. I so vividly remember feeling like I was watching something genuinely strange and genuinely adult. I still remember the “Cut-Up Camera” and “Dog Boy” theme music, and those silent Aeon Flux shorts crush the property’s later iterations.

* For some reason I really like this very simple poster for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. (Via Agent M.)

* Michael DeForge remains very talented.

* Kevin Huizenga revisits the ongoing debate over the existence of Hell, the topic of one of his (or anybody’s) best comics, “Jeepers Jacobs.”

* Real Life Horror: Every day, the Obama Administration’s military agents force non-violent, non-suicide-risk Army whistleblower Bradley Manning to sleep and stand for inspection fully naked during his solitary confinement on charges for which he has yet to be convicted and for which he is eligible for the death penalty.

* Finally, sink your teeth into this meaty Tom Spurgeon interview with Renée French. It’s fascinating to see an artist of French’s caliber talk so frankly, and yet without hyperbole or self-pity, about her artistic struggles. Also, I really love the declaration “Fuck narrative.”

* Hip hip hooray, the latest Game of Thrones trailer is now available in hi-res! I really don’t know why you’d land an exclusive trailer and then not post it properly, but what do I know. Unsurprisingly the thing is a lot more impressive when you can actually see it clearly.

* Related: I started re-reading A Game of Thrones yesterday–before the news about A Dance with Dragons hit, no less!–and I’ve now had to put the book down twice in the first few chapters because I was literally too excited by everything to come in this volume and all the subsequent ones to concentrate properly on the page at hand.

* Ron Moore, Michael Rymer, Jamie Bamber, and now James Callis — whose Gaius Baltar was one of my favorite television performances of all time — are all part of the big Battlestar Galactica reunion that Moore’s new supernatural-cop show 17th Precinct is turning into.

* Here’s a typically thoughtful Tom Brevoort Q&A at Comic Book Resources, tackling issues of pricing, title cancellations, submissions and talent recruitment, the status of the X-Men/mutant franchise, character gluts, continuity glitches and more — the difference this time around being that the questions are from one selected message-board user. It’s interesting to see how these issues are approached, and what about them is prioritized, by someone with the perspective of pure fandom.

* Now that’s a good idea for a listicle: Steve Erickson presents the Top 10 Artsploitation Films. Worth the price of admission for the Fat Girl screencap alone. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I first discovered the art of Johnny Negron via Ryan Sands a few weeks ago and had been waiting for the right image to come along to send you his way as well. This was the one.

* Real Life Horror: “Nine Years of Nudity in American Detention.”

* Be a birther, be a racist dogwhistler, be an anti-Muslim bigot, be a homophobe if you must, Mike Huckabee. But what kind of idiot fuckface can’t get behind the idea of impregnating Natalie Portman?

* Golly gee willikers, today was a big day for Game of Thrones. In addition to the news about A Dance with Dragons‘ release date (and btw, you can preorder it now on Amazon), HBO debuted a full-fledged two-minute-plus trailer for the show. Right now it’s only available in a streaming, unembeddable, non-HD crappy version exclusively on EW.com, but hopefully we’ll get a better version soon that I can share.

* It looks as though the two Hobbit movies will be subtitled The Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again. (I’m just assuming they’ll use the definite article for the former.) I’d figured “There and Back Again” would be involved but wasn’t sure about the other one.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part one: Ron Regé Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #16: The Chronically Hallucinating Insomniac is being republished by him after a sold-out 100-copy limited edition from French publisher Kaugummi as an even more limited 15-copy edition for $25, with a free drawing from GR2’s latest Post-It note art show thrown in for good measure. Wish I could afford it these days.

* Today in self-publishing projects from brilliant cartoonists, part two: Tom Neely has completed his new graphic novel The Wolf.

* “Martha I’d Like to Fuck.” (I actually think I may have gotten there first.)

* Johnny Ryan draws Junji Ito’s Gyo, courtesy of Ryan Sands.

* Real Life Horror: Today was one of those days where the atavistic, sociopathic, autarchic, bigoted shittiness of our great nation really fucking got to me. Those are links to fully five separate instances of nightmarish heartlessness and idiocy, and I haven’t even gotten to union-busting or Mike Huckabee yet. The Others take it all.