Eleven episodes deep into the season and with only two more to go, Daredevil’s plotlines are proliferating at an alarming rate. The Blacksmith, a sinister druglord I’d previously assumed to be just a McGuffin to keep the moving parts running, has now taken on central importance as both Daredevil and Punisher attempt to track him down. The Kingpin is in play, as is his old associate Madame Gao, who’s simultaneously battling the Blacksmith herself and issuing dire warnings about “the real threat” to the city. Said real threat is most likely the Hand, run by another former Fisk running buddy, Nobu, and his ninja army. They’re re-kidnapping brainwashed teens, murdering nurses, and fighting Daredevil, who is also busy fighting Gao’s men, the Blacksmith’s men, and the Punisher. Some mysterious person, likely the Blacksmith but yet to be confirmed as such, is murdering people and framing Frank Castle for it, including the district attorney and medical examiner who covered up the government’s involvement in the shootout between the Mexicans, the Irish, and the bikers, orchestrated by the Blacksmith and responsible for the deaths of Castle’s family. Karen Page is another of their would-be victims, though she’s now been saved twice by the Punisher. Matt’s other ex-girlfriend, Elektra, is similarly the survivor of a hit ordered by her and Matt’s old mentor Stick, who is also fighting the Hand. She’s now tracking him down to kill him, a confrontation Daredevil is racing to stop. Also Karen Page got a new job as an investigator for the Daily Bulletin, Claire Temple quit her job after the Hand bought off her hospital, and Foggy Nelson got a job offer at the law offices of Jeryn Hogarth from Jessica Jones from his sexy ex-girlfriend. Does that about cover it?

So it’s a testament to Daredevil and to this episode, “.380,” that the chaos feels planned — that it’s Daredevil’s world, not his show, spinning out of control.

I reviewed episode 11 of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

Mirror Mirror 2
an anthology

featuring new comics and drawings by

Lala Albert / Clive Barker / Heather Benjamin / Sean Christensen / Nicole Claveloux / Sean T. Collins / Al Columbia / Dame Darcy / Noel Freibert / Renee French / Meaghan Garvey / Julia Gfrörer / Simon Hanselmann / Hellen Jo / Hadrianus Junius / Aidan Koch / Laura Lannes / Céline Loup / Uno Moralez / Mou / Chloe Piene / Josh Simmons / Carol Swain

horror / pornography / the Gothic / the abject

edited by Sean T. Collins & Julia Gfrörer
published by 2dcloud
Q1 2017 | advance copies Fall 2016

“For darkness restores what light cannot repair”

teaser image by Clive Barker

Mirror Mirror 1 | available now for preorder

Julia Gfrörer and I will be editing volume two of Mirror Mirror, the flagship anthology of the alternative comics publisher 2dcloud. Much more on this soon, but suffice it to say we’re very excited about what we’re putting together.

In the meantime, the best way you can support our book is by supporting 2dcloud​ right now. If you order their current winter collection on their kickstarter, or simply pitch in, you’ll keep them in a healthy financial position for our book later in the year. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all committed to seeing this thing through no matter what, but every bit helps, and you’ll get some truly cutting-edge comics in the bargain (if you want). Please check it out!

When you talk about what makes a TV series succeed or fail, you typically want to avoid repeating the same points over and over. Who wants to sound like a broken record, right? Tell that to John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they made “Revolution 9” — and if repetition is good enough for the Beatles, it’s good enough for us, and for Ash vs. Evil Dead. The penultimate episode of the show’s first season — “Bound in the Flesh” — gets where it’s going by repeating the same trick it’s pulled since the pilot: taking the gore and nastiness as far as it can, then taking them one step beyond. Like that creepy voice saying “Number nine … number nine …” over and over, it works.

I reviewed this weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone.

The Walking Dead in Westeros

We’re comparing two of the biggest shows on television in this episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. One of them is an adaptation of a popular staple of nerd culture—a genre work that had only appeared in print before—which has translated its bleak themes, wide scope, and controversial use of violence into a modern-day ratings blockbuster. The other is Game of Thrones.

That’s right—the BLAH Boys are taking on The Walking Dead, and its current spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, by contrasting the shows and their source material to Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire. How does their treatment of violence in an unforgiving world of real and supernatural menace differ? What do the relationships between the original works by George R.R. Martin, Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard and their adaptations by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and AMC’s land of a thousand showrunners reveal about their respective ideas, ideals, aesthetics, and ethics? Which shows really deserve our moral outrage, and why? We’ll be examining all these questions and more. And one of us, at least, will be getting really freaking worked up. Enjoy!

Download Episode 41

Mirror.

Sean on the Fear the Walking Dead pilot.

Sean on the most recent Fear the Walking Dead episode.

Sean on The Walking Dead.

Stefan on The Walking Dead.

Previous episodes.

Podcast RSS feed.

iTunes page.

Sean’s blog.

Stefan’s blog.

Hiders and The Deep Ones, my two most recent comics with Julia Gfrörer, are now available for purchase as minicomics at Julia’s Etsy store.

Come see me and Julia Gfrörer at SPX in Bethesda this weekend! We will be at table M1 selling copies of our new minicomics The Deep Ones and Hiders, never before available as such, and we look like this. Julia is also selling prints and her usual assortment of excellent comics, some of them also written by me. (Unfortunately my remaining run of Flash Forward by me and Jonny Negron didn’t make the trip, but they’re still around!)

This is the cover for a minicomic edition of Hiders by me and Julia Gfrörer, previously available only in Study Group 3D, which we’ll be selling at SPX this weekend.

This is the cover illustration for a print version of The Deep Ones by me and Julia Gfrörer, which we’ll be selling at SPX next week.

“You Are A Bad Person!”
by Sean T. Collins & Colin Panetta (after Jack T. Chick)
originally published in Mutant #6 by Atomic Books

I’ve put together a list of my strongest work this year. I hope you enjoy it.

Comics

My partner, the artist and cartoonist Julia Gfrörer, and I made several comics together this year:

“Hiders,” a four-page short story about werewolves and secrets, available for purchase in Study Group Magazine #3D.

“The Deep Ones,” a four-page exploration of sea monsters, semiotics, and why we fear the ocean, published on The Nib and available for purchase in the “Deep Trouble” issue of Symbolia magazine.

The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil, a pornographic extrapolation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and the second in our ongoing “Poe porn” series, available for purchase from Julia.

Additionally, my two collaborations with cartoonist Jonny Negron now have new homes on the web:

Flash Forward, a horror comic about seeing and being seen, can now be read at StudyGroupComics.com.

No Way Out for a Family of Five, a horror comic about the revenge of the repressed, can now be read at The True Black, the dedicated tumblr for my comics.

Finally, the cartoonist Colin Panetta and I collaborated on “What Is Nigeria?”, a comic about punditry, empathy, and the American gaze based on the Vox.com article “9 Questions About Nigeria You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask” by Max Fisher.

TV Criticism

I wrote about TV regularly for Rolling Stone and the New York Observer this year, reviewing Boardwalk Empire, The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Game of Thrones, True Detective, and Downton Abbey for the former and The Comeback and The Wire for the latter. I also reviewed Mad Men for Wired. If you click on each title you’ll be linked to the piece I was happiest with for each show; spoiler alert, obviously. I included two links for Boardwalk Empire because I’m very proud of the work I did on that series, which in my estimation is one of the best ever to air.

I did plenty of TV writing outside the weekly review/recap format as well. My favorites:

Of everything I wrote about anything this year, this piece on Unedited Footage of a Bear, Too Many Cooks, Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories, and the new wave of Adult Swim horror is my favorite.

My lists of the Top 40 Game of Thrones characters, the Top 30 Twin Peaks characters, and the A-to-Z of Lost enabled me to express a great deal of what’s important to me about each show.

I wrote 14 of the 16 entries for Rolling Stones tournament of TV’s Most Shocking Moments — a real journey through the length and breadth of the New Golden Age and its immediate antecedents, with a variety of definitions for both “shocking” and “moments.”

I faced off against Eric Thurm in a he said/he said debate about The Affair, which I think was the best new series of the year.

I also debated Hazel Cills about the value of Don Draper to Mad Men for Netflix, and discussed Mad Men‘s deliberate self-destruction of its Rat Pack retro stylistic appeal for Esquire.

Also for Esquire, I talked about True Detective and how grand unified theories about TV-show mysteries miss the goddamn point.

I explained how Andy Daly’s Review is a satire of New Golden Age antihero dramas hiding in plain sight.

I wrote a defense of Twin Peaks when it was lumped in with other “dead girl shows” like True Detective.

I talked about a controversial episode of Game of Thrones as a failure of filmmaking rather than a failure of morals, ethics, or politics.

I kept on writing about Downton Abbey even after I stopped doing so for Rolling Stone.

Finally, I’m a founding and regular panelist on Spoiler Alert, HuffPost Live’s semiweekly television talk show. I recommend the episode where we beat the tar out of The Newsroom‘s penultimate installment.

Interviews

I spoke with many talented people this year about their work. Some favorites:

Anita Sarkeesian, feminist video game critic; I believe this was my most popular piece this year by an order of magnitude

Terence Winter, creator of Boardwalk Empire

Rory McCann, aka Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, from Game of Thrones

Neil Marshall, director of The Descent, Centurion, and the “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall” episodes of Game of Thrones

Meghan Turbitt and Leah Wishnia, cartoonists, for my recently revived Comics Journal up-and-comer interview column Say Hello

Comics Criticism

I resumed writing about comics regularly this summer after a lengthy hiatus, mostly at The Comics Journal. Again, some favorites:

Earthling by Aisha Franz

Gast by Carol Swain

Sex Fantasy by Sophia Foster-Dimino

July Diary 2014 by Gabrielle Bell

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

I also listed the five best comics of the year.

Finally, my review of How to Be Happy by Eleanor Davis was complimented by Gary Groth, a hero.

A Song of Ice and Fire

I am a tremendous admirer George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the basis for Game of Thrones. I write and talk about it a lot, so much so that it’s honestly hard for me to remember stand-outs. I suppose I’d just suggest you follow my dedicated blog for that material boiledleather.com, on tumblr if that sort of thing interests you.

That said, Stefan Sasse and I co-host a podcast on the series called The Boiled Leather Audio Hour. My favorite episodes this year include our reviews of  Game of Thrones Season Four;  The World of Ice and Fire , the in-world encyclopedia for the books; the Tales of Dunk and Egg, a series of prequel novellas; and “The Rogue Prince,” a faux-historical novella chronicling an earlier time period.

I listed the 12 craziest things we learned from The World of Ice and Fire for Rolling Stone.

Finally, I made $60, eventually.

…and the rest

I wrote about how sociopolitical analysis, source-text purism, theory-mongering, and shipping/stanning/bad-fan behavior are connected by a common desire to create a falsely objective approach to the inherently subjective fields of art and criticism.

I wrote about how Velvet Goldmine changed my life.

I wrote about the Mines of Moria sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring and what it taught me about action in visual narrative art.

I wrote about Ferguson.

I made a scary Halloween mix called BLACK FRIDAY.

Writer and musician Hether Fortune interviewed Julia Gfrörer and I about our first pornographic Poe adaptation, In Pace Requiescat, for Slutist.

Julia and I maintained several tumblrs together:

The Devil in Love: images of the infernal with undeniable erotic or aesthetic appeal.

The Deep Ones: sea monsters, real, extinct, and imaginary.

Homage to Catalonia: churches on fire or in ruins.

Comics Democracy: comics with over 10,000 notes on tumblr, reblogged without comment.

This happened.

This happened.

This and this happened.

I spent the first full year of my life as a full-time freelance writer, I fell deeper in love with an astonishing woman, I helped parent a marvelous child.

See you next year.

No Way Out for a Family of Five, a comic Jonny Negron and I made for Study Group, is now up on my comics tumblr, The True Black.

Going Rogue: Discussing “The Rogue Prince, or, A King’s Brother”

Another chapter from the GRRMArillion? You betcha! Rogues, the latest cross-genre anthology edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, is out, and you know what that means: another long short story/novella set in the world of Ice and Fire and written by Martin himself. As was the case with Dangerous Women‘s “The Princess and the Queen,” Martin’s contribution this time around is an excerpt from the larger history of the Targaryen dynasty eventually to be published in expanded form as Fire and Blood. And it turns out it’s a direct prequel to “The Princess and the Queen”‘s tale of internecine Targaryen civil war — like, it ends the moment “TPatQ” begins. As such, it casts many of the events and characters of that story in a whole new light. And like that story, it strrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrretches the boundaries of the rubric for its inclusion in the anthology in which it appears. Is it worth it? Listen and find out! (And try not to be perturbed by the sounds of chaos in revelry in the background, as Stefan’s native Germany defeats a rival in the World Cup whilst we record. Just imagine we’re discussing this over a bowl o’ brown in the stews of Flea Bottom. I know I always do!)

Stefan’s review of “The Rogue Prince” for Tower of the Hand

Mirror here.

Previous episodes here.

Podcast RSS feed here.

iTunes page here.

Sean’s blog here.

Stefan’s blog here.

Flash Forward, a minicomic I made with Jonny Negron, is once again for sale at Jonny’s bigcartel store for $5. We hope you enjoy it.

Colin Panetta and I made a comic called “What Is Nigeria?”, inspired by this vox.com article by Max Fisher.