The other boiled-leather boot drops: I’m doing a weekly series of Game of Thrones video review/recaps for MTV News! It’s a roundtable with host Josh Wigler and the intimidatingly dapper Lucas Siegel of Newsarama.com, with weekly special-guest appearances by Elio & Linda from Westeros.org. I’m quite pleased with how this first episode came out, given that it was indeed our first episode. I’m also quite proud of my t-shirt. Take a look!

* Where do you come down on Fat Betty Francis versus Fat Peggy Olsen and Fat Lee Adama in the Fat Versions of Characters from the Great Post-Millennial Dramas? I actually think she ranks at the top, but we’ll see where things go from here.

* Heh, nice to see that the show’s not above a little DIRECT CONTRAST BETWEEN THE MRS. DRAPERS GETTING DRESSED. Megan could have turned to the camera and winked and it wouldn’t have been any less subtle. In fact, that was just the first of several moments that felt a bit too on-the-nose: Roger actually saying the words “When’s everything gonna get back to normal?”, about four quarts of sad string music poured all over all of Betty’s scenes, particularly the (otherwise beautiful) scene with the boys running around with sparklers on (I presume) the Fourth of July, and a death-dream that would otherwise have been creepy as hell. It’s okay, Mad Men, you can trust us!

* And then there’s Michael Ginsberg — excuse me, MICHAEL GINSBERG!!! I will say the following things about him here and then move on:

1) I find that schticky mid-century New York Jewish wiseacre accent fun to listen to.
2) The character is talented, and this show does good things with the idea of talent.
3) We went from his elderly European Jewish father blessing him in Hebrew to a showtune sung by a Nazi in under two minutes.
4) The jury is very much still out on this guy — however strong he came on in this episode, this is a show that hasn’t bellyflopped yet, not to a significant “new character developed over multiple episodes” degree anyway, and I’m willing to see where they take it. I mean, why would you watch a show if you weren’t?

* Is it just me, or are the scenes in Pete and Roger’s offices being shot in such a way as to complement their Kubrickian decor and color scheme of orange on black and white? Keeping everyone low in the frame so that the big fields of white can show?

* Dawn and Don, haha! I noticed that before it became a topic of discussion for the characters themselves, perhaps because I’m married to someone who isn’t from New York and for whom, therefore, the pronunciation actually would be confusing. (Where I’m from, Mary, marry, and merry are pronounced three different ways, which has blown many a non-tri-state-area mind.)

* In the Rolling Stones episode, Betty asks the doctor for a mother’s little helper. LOL

* If Director Jon Hamm’s primary visual contribution to Mad Men is the unusual use of fades between scenes, then put him in the director’s chair more often. I’m not sure what meaning we’re supposed to draw from, say, the fade between Betty in the bathroom and Betty in the clinic, and I’m glad of that. It feels gooey, somehow, like the link between the scenes isn’t neat and precise at all.

* Have we seen many, or really any, scenes with just Roger and Peggy before? They seem to have developed a rapport almost like Roger and Don.

* Something about Don in a public, dressed-down setting makes him seem menacing. Visually, he’s so different from the Rolling Stones fans at the concert it’s like he’s dangerous.

For my recap/review of Game of Thrones Episode 11, please visit Rolling Stone.

(Yes, the official numbering of the episode is “Episode 11,” picking up directly after the ten episodes of Season One. Kinda neat.)

My Game of Thrones Season Two premiere review will go up at Rolling Stone just after the episode finishes. See you there!

I’ve got a quick refresher course on the who what when where why and how from Game of Thrones Season One up at Rolling Stone, just in time for Season Two. Jog your memory with me, why don’t you?

Now it can be told: I’m covering Game of Thrones Season Two for Rolling Stone! My first piece just went up:

Get Medieval: The Seven Most Awful Things People Did on ‘Game of Thrones’ Season One

Starting off with a bang! The tone for this piece is black comedy, yeah (except for item #3 — there’s really nothing funny about it, as I was reminded while watching that scene traumatize my poor wife during her ill-fated attempt to watch the pilot the other week). But in all seriousness, these instances of truly abominable behavior set the tone for the show (and the books) in three ways:

1. It’s challenging to make memorable, moving art out of atrocities without it seeming exploitative or shallow. When you pull it off, you throw the talent of the cast and crew in even sharper relief.

2. In several cases, these incidents overturn our understanding of how this genre, or how heroic narratives, work. Much of Martin/Benioff/Weiss’s revisionist project rests in these moments.

3. And they have a thematic impact too, not just a narrative or generic one. They communicate the material’s view on war, the aristocratic system, and the unique plights of the poor and the young and the female in this system. It’s not shock for shock’s sake at all — it’s central.

So enjoy, if that’s the word for it, and watch this space for more exciting STC/GoT news!

* The nominees for the Doug Wright Awards, comics’ classiest award slate, have been announced. A strong selection of respectable choices, but no so strong that you won’t want to pick winners. And only three categories! A marvelous way to run a railroad.

* The Sopranos vs. The Wire, officiated by Matt Zoller Seitz. ‘Nuff said.

* Somehow it’d escaped my notice that the makers of The Art of Daniel Clowes have a Dan Clowes blog stuffed with rarely-seen Clowes goodies. Fixed! My eye naturally gravitated to this selection of Eightball t-shirts and this unpublished comic starring Vida from Eightball #22/Ice Haven. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* My collaborator Matt Rota has an art show opening up in the Last Rites Gallery Manhattan in a few weeks. It’ll be pretty.

* Benjamin Marra’s got a show coming up, too. It probably won’t be pretty, strictly speaking.

* Some strikingly cartooned Michael McMillan art in this brief profile by Dan Nadel.

* I often think to myself “Self, you should post more art by COOP.” Done and done.

* Renee French is a national treasure.

* Jillian Tamaki made a lovely-looking SuperMutant Magic Academy minicomic, but it’s all gone.

* Stunning use of flat color by Tom Scioli in American Barbarian, about which he is interviewed extensively by Tom Spurgeon at the link.

* Ryan Cecil Smith draws Nat King Cole.

* Michael DeForge is in an anthology with Kramers Ergot 8 space-age standout Robert Beatty called Rat Hex. I mean, Michael DeForge being in anthology isn’t the surprising part, he’s in every anthology (except that Kramers), him being together with Beatty’s a two great tastes deal is all.

* Ross Campbell draws Leonardo. It’s weird to say “gorgeous” about a drawing of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but there you have it.

* Fortunately, the Happiness Comix tumblr appears to have exaggerated rumors of its own demise, but it’s mainly posting a smattering of art from the unrelated Dimensions anthology. I am not complaining. (Below: Hiromi Ueyoshi, Tim Beckhardt, Tom Toye, Lincoln Bostian, Bethany Price.)

* Fanmaking Moebius art selections from Monster Brains and Same Hat.

* “If you ever see a one-armed bunny, you’ll know it used to be an evil wizard.”

* FIONA ÜBER ALLES

* Jason Adams loved The Hunger Games, which overcame his initial casting skepticism, as it appears to have done with virtually every human being. I’m gonna make an effort to see this one in the theater.

* Deadwood creator David Milch said he knew the show was ending when he wrote the finale for Season Three, which most people have long believed to have been a wholly inadvertent series finale regardless of how thematically appropriate a capstone to the whole show it would have been. I feel like this is something he might have let us know earlier!

* You can get loads more Game of Thrones stuff at the gettin’ place, including four excellent new preview/trailer/featurette things and George R.R. Martin reading a new preview chapter from The Winds of Winter.

* The Press Play blog did a series of video tributes to Mad Men in anticipation of the season premiere; the one below is my favorite.

SPOILER ALERT

* Mad Men Addresses Civil Rights (capitalized for the critics who wanted it to be addressed in capital letters like that, as if race’s liminal presence on the show wasn’t Matthew Weiner and company doing exactly that already) in the most Mad Men way possible: a bunch of happy asshole ad execs dropping water bombs on a picket line. This sets off a chain of events culminating in Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce integrating because of a prank that people who aren’t Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce actually took seriously. The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward Joan Harris.

* My first big laugh of the night — and there were many, many more; this show’s hilarious, and after a few weeks of immersion in Game of Thrones I really appreciate that — came when Roger explained schadenfreude to Pete while they discussed Young & Rubicam’s PR black eye: “They stole the Ponds account, and now they’re a laughing stock. Makes me feel better!” It’s telling that Roger derives such satisfaction from something with which he had nothing to do, given that he doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything anymore.

* Pete looks like hell — disheveled collar, ugly tie, puffy face. I feel like his receding hairline became much more noticeable about halfway through the episode — when someone cracked a joke about him going bald at Don’s surprise party, I had no idea what they were talking about, but at some point after that it was like “whoa!” Hausfrau is a good look for Trudy, I think, despite what Pete says to his train friend (surprise: Alison Brie looks good in almost anything!), but suburban fatherhood is wearing very poorly on Pete himself, in physical terms alone.

* Civil rights was not the only c-word to crop up in a newly noticeable way: I’m pretty sure that the ill-fated Heinz baked beans meeting was the first time a client has requested that SCDP make an ad “cool.” Actually it may be the first time anyone’s used that word on the show at all. That’s a sea change in itself.

* Sally Draper wanders around Don’s weird new apartment like it’s the hotel in The Shining, then goes home to a house that looks like the Bates Motel from Psycho. I wonder if Sally will continue to be one of the show’s main vectors for the Weird — from fearing that her baby brother is the reincarnated ghost of her dead grandfather to the masturbation storyline, she’s provided Mad Men with some of its by-TV-standards strangest material. A great way to use a great child actress. (Here’s where I admit to my moment of shock when she opened her mouth and Kathleen Turner’s voice came out.)

* Did Joan select the color of her apartment walls to complement her hair?

* Bert Cooper arguing Vietnam with Peggy’s beatnik boyfriend was a magnificently funny moment. Either one may as well have been speaking Klingon for all the other could understand him.

* The Roger/Jane exchange at Don’s party — “Why don’t you sing like that?”/”Why don’t you look like him?” — will get a lot of attention and deservedly so, but for my money the real killer laugh line was their brief conversation when Roger gets up early to go to Pete’s fake Staten Island rendez-vous with Coca Cola: “What time is it?” “Shut up.” Now there’s a couple that’s comfortable with their contempt.

* Watching Don’s party unfold, with its Austin Powers aesthetic and soundtrack, I realized I’m quite happy the Rat Pack shit’s dunzo. I like to think that contemporary audience members out to ape Mad Men‘s retro-cool style without considering, uh, pretty much anything else about the show, or indeed supplanting the show’s critique of its era with an implicit endorsement, will have a more difficult time of it now that the styles are a) more garish; b) more directly associated with a time of political movement toward the left.

* Lane Pryce and the gun moll! God I hope that was Paz de la Huerta on the other end of the phone. Also, kudos to commenter Collegeboy on Matt Zoller Seitz’s review for noting that the woman’s name was Delores, which perhaps accounted for Lane’s resulting Haze. I’d already thought Jared Harris was James Masoning the living shit out of that conversation, but I hadn’t made the direct Lolita connection.

* Speaking strictly as a longtime guide on Don’s Tour of the Great Brunettes of the ’60s, I take this episode as a thorough vindication of my early Megan support. And not just appearance-wise either, although jeez. Megan may be struggling with Don’s propensity to shut himself off behind a black curtain, and that may be a generational thing, even just by a few years: she lumps her nominal contemporary Peggy in with Don during their conversation about cynicism at the office the following Monday, after all. But in general, it seems like she can hang, don’t you think? She’s made his darkest secret into something they joke about in bed. She’s chosen to stand up to all the potential and actual opprobrium thrown her way by becoming both his wife and his colleague/employee on the agency’s creative end. Most strikingly, in this episode anyway, she’s integrated Don’s many many many hangups into their sex life with real lacerating heat. Her anger during the underwear/cleanup scene was real and everything that led up to it was real, but as her and Don’s language became more and more dom-sub, my jaw dropped: these were not words, and this was not a dynamic, arrived at by chance in this moment. This was sex born out of experience with the stuff that turns them both on, and dark stuff at that. In the past Don could only get that out of his more sordid assignations, including the prostitute he paid to hit him during sex this time last season. Now he’s sharing this with his wife, who also shares his home, his family, his office, his creative life. Neither Betty nor Faye nor any of Don’s affairs ever hit for the cycle like that. Megan’s a force to be reckoned with.

* Which is not to say that their argument wasn’t legit, or its fallout (again!) very funny. “Haveagoodday.” “‘Kay.” Been there, bro!

* Joan Harris, human gif.

* Game of Thrones Season Two starts next Sunday, April 1. I have one of my trademark secret Game of Thrones projects lined up and hope to share more about that with you soon, but in the meantime, as you might expect, I’ve been blogging up a storm at my dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. Here are some recent highlights. (I’ve linked to a handful of these before, but figured putting them all in one place could be useful.)

* First, a link that’s not to my blog at all: This piece in the Atlantic by James Parker is the single best piece of writing on A Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones I’ve ever read. It’s beautifully constructed, it nails the strengths and appeal of the series, and it approaches them from unexpected directions. Marvelously done.

* Next, there are a metric ton of preview and trailer videos available: Here’s a newish trailer and character profiles for Renly, Joffrey, Daenerys, and Jon; and here’s the best trailer of the bunch and character profiles for Robb and Stannis.

* George R.R. Martin and the Westeros.org team are prepping The Lands of Ice and Fire, a boxed set of maps that go into more detail than ever before. Quite excited about that.

* George Stroumboulopoulos interviews George R.R. Martin for Candian TV, the first interview I’ve come across that addresses Martin’s conscientious objector status during Vietnam, his thoughts on pacifism, and the way his beliefs about war influence his depiction of it in the books. Red meat to me, naturally.

* What I’m worried about, and not worried about, in Season Two, from the perspective of a reader of the books. Inspired by this excellent roundtable with various ASoIaF/GoT experts on that very topic. And here’s what concerns me most about the show’s storytelling in general, in any season; it’s probably not what you think.

* The most recent episode of my Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast with Stefan Sasse and special guest Amin from A Podcast of Ice and Fire focuses on A Song of Ice and Fire-related games; I provide the non-gamer perspective.

* A quick, kind of angry post on incoming Game of Thrones writer/producer Vanessa Taylor and the importance of hiring women writers.

* An ill-fated attempt to rewatch the first season with my wife, who has neither seen the show nor read the books, prompted some thoughts on the role and reception of cruelty in art. When you’re as familiar with the material as I now am, it can be helpful to see the series’ abuse of women and children and animals through fresh eyes. See also this post linking attacks on children by authority figures in Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead to the recent real-world massacre of sleeping children in Afghanistan — extend it to Trayvon Martin, too, because I think we should. A culture of violence will inevitably find a way to target the most defenseless among us, like water finding its level.

* I was impressed by Westeros.org’s interview with Catelyn Stark actress Michelle Fairley, historically not my favorite performance/writing combo on the show.

* Here’s a long post on John Carter and the perils of adapting a geek-friendly property from one medium to another.

* My spoiler policy, for life in general.

* Does prophecy negate free will? I’m pretty proud of the analogy I cooked up to explain why the answer is no.

* By the way, I’ve seen the first four episodes of the season. Do I know what will supplant “sexposition” as the Game of Thrones trope thinkpiece generator of choice this season? You bet I do.

* 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.

* I suppose now’s as good a time as any to let you know that I reluctantly retired from Robot 6 in mid-January due to time constraints. I miss everyone over there and hope you’ve still been reading them in the months since — I have and will continue to do so!

* With Game of Thrones Season Two set to debut on April 1, I’ve naturally been blogging up a storm at my dedicated GoT/A Song of Ice and Fire blog All Leather Must Be Boiled. I’ll probably do a separate best-of carnival post here this week. I’ve also got one of my trademark Secret ASoIaF Project Announcements coming up soon, with any luck, so stay tuned.

* Everything about the cover for Josh Simmons’s forthcoming Fantagraphics horror-comics collection The Furry Trap makes me uncomfortable.

* Drawn and Quarterly will be republishing Brian Ralph’s Highwater Books classic Cave-In for their children’s line. Smart thinking. That’s a terrific, eye-opening book — like all of Highwater’s Fort Thunder output it hit like a thunderclap at the time.

* In addition to today’s wonderful news about Jonny Negron’s debut book from PictureBox, he also appears to be cranking up the posting of art to his tumblr, which is great news OBVIOUSLY.

* Speaking of ramping it up, Gabrielle Bell is apparently forcing herself to produce more diary comics, as she announces in a post that’s far more self-effacing than it has any need to be.

* I’ve been meaning to say that Jesse Moynihan’s Forming has been really good lately.

* Kate Beaton’s sketches and diary comics are much less ruthlessly gag-oriented than her strips — they pretty much just capture moments, like this one.

* Frank Santoro profiles Zack Soto and his excellent Study Group webcomics site, with an emphasis on how Zack’s reformatted his Secret Voice comic from print to the web.

* Speaking of Study Group, Aidan Koch’s new strip for it, The Blonde Woman, is lovely.

* Press Play’s series of posts describing the plot of Breaking Bad based solely on the show’s opening pre-credits sequences continues to be delightful.

* When I saw that the Comics Journal had transcribed Tom Spurgeon’s panel interview with C.F. and Brian Ralph from Decembers BCGF, I quite literally stopped everything I was doing and read it from start to finish. Starting the panel with “Do you ever get tired of talking about Fort Thunder?” is perhaps the best first panel question I’ve ever seen.

* The Lands of Ice and Fire, an official box set of unprecedentedly detailed maps of Westeros and Essos based on the hand-drawn originals by George R.R. Martin and edited by Martin and the Westeros.org team? Oh, indeed.

* Speaking of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, for various reasons I’ll reveal sooner or later I’ve picked up the pace of blogging at my all-ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled, on everything from prophecy and free will to cruelty and empathy in art. (HEAVY SPOILERS at the links, as is always the case on Boiled Leather.)

* Extremely good news: The Voyeurs, a new collection of Lucky strips and brand-new comics by Gabrielle Bell, who at this point is one of the best in the biz, from Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books — the imprint’s first book-format release, if I’m not mistaken.

* Monster Brains unleashes the cover and a five-page preview of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Book Four.

* Kudos to Heidi MacDonald for this wondrous discovery: James Killian Spratt’s extremely faithful, extremely NSFW adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, the basis for this weekend’s much-anticipated/dreaded John Carter. If there were a way to print out an entire website and deliver it to Benjamin Marra by hand, that’s what I would do. Heidi provides context at the link — you’d be hard pressed not to see Fletcher Hanks and Basil Wolverton and Tim Vigil and any other weirdo Art Out of Time type you’d care to name in Spratt’s work, which is beautifully colored and features a nice rounded sense of line and character/creature/set design, however gonzo/outsidery it may otherwise be.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two continues in its magnificently morbid vein.

* Michael DeForge started hisself a tumblr.

* Links to every single Drawn and Quarterly cartoonist’s blog.

* The great critic Matt Zoller Seitz on the true appeal of Mad Men. He doesn’t mention them, but this is like a devastating rebuttal to those epically point-missing promos AMC’s running.

* Elsewhere, Seitz and Simon Abrams wonder why cinematic superheroes are such an artistic dud as a genre. I think Seitz sells the Iron Man movies short — no other superhero movies are based so completely on banter — but I think the point that the economics of these films mitigate against innovation or idiosyncracy is well-taken. The best superhero movie, in terms of success as art, remains Tim Burton’s Batman.

* Oh, this is just marvelous: At Press Play, Dave Bunting Jr. edited all the opening sequences from Breaking Bad Seasons One and Two together, then played them for film critic Sheila O’Malley, who’d never watched the show and was then asked to summarize what it was about based on only those introductions.

* Jonny Negron’s “Birthday Cake” > Rihanna & Chris Brown’s “Birthday Cake”

* Lauren Weinstein’s entire belief system = the Savage Dragon’s entire belief system

* New Renee French art is always a linkblogging gimme.

* Tom Neely, you rascal!

* Axe Cop is legitimately one of the most inventive and unpredictable and funny comics around, I don’t care if using a little kid to plot it is cheating.

* Here’s a list of things that are sexier than L’Avventura-era Monica Vitti:

* Real Life Horror: Our constitutional-lawyer president and his attorney general have determined that “the President says so” is sufficient due process to have an American citizen executed without charge or trial. That’s a load off!

* Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who provided much of the visual imagination behind George Lucas’s Star Wars films, has died. Aeron Alfrey at Monster Brains remembers him the best way anyone can: with a gallery of his fascinating creature designs.

* Chills from this Game of Thrones Season Two trailer.

* 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.

* I’m quite proud of myself for remaining almost entirely unspoiled about the entirety of Downton Abbey to date. What little I did happen across told me less than nothing. A TV Guide cover asking whether Mary and Matthew would marry only asked the question obvious to any viewer from the pilot on. And hey, when was the last time a PBS show ended up on the cover of a supermarket checkout-aisle magazine anyway? I was more happy for the show than irked at the TMI. More troubling was the season-finale review headline I saw in the sidebar at XOJane: “A Happy Ending No One Wanted,” it read, so at least to an extent, I knew where things were headed. (Once I figured out it wasn’t part of this Julieanne Smolinski piece on handjobs, that is.) But it was more cryptic than revelatory: Was it referring to an ostensibly positive outcome the characters nevertheless didn’t really want? Or did it mean the show had served us something it expected us to like, but we didn’t? I wasn’t spoiled, I was intrigued. (Having seen the ending, which was the happy ending I wanted thankyouverymuch, I still can’t figure out what they must have meant.)

* Rather, what I’d heard about the second season, from a comment here, a tweet there, was that it wasn’t as good at the first, and that this dimunition in quality was tied to an increase in the soapiness of the storylines. And indeed, as reported, Series Two was some sudsy shit. The evil ex returns! An imposter! Rejected by Father after marrying across the tracks! Pregnant after a night’s indiscretion! The climactic all-hands-on-deck natural disaster that threatens them all! Random and unexplained yet somehow reassuring flashes of the paranormal! The doctors say he’ll never walk again, for god’s sake! Each and every one of these plots was featured on The Young and the Restless over the past year, folks. Each and every one!

* But to be blunt — who cares? The show is a soap. It’s about romance and family among a huge cast in a fixed geographic location. Why not embrace, and enhance the production value, of as many soap tropes as possible? At any rate nothing here was more outlandish than Lady Mary’s first sexual encounter ending with the death of her lover in flagrante, for pete’s sake. All of it was handled with the wit and skill and beauty I’d come to expect from the show. (God was it beautiful to look at at times — the misty Christmas morning, the red afternoon light in the library as the family watches the touring war-hero general play a game, the swirling camera when Anna first spotted the secretly returned Bates down in the village.) And frankly, no one who watches Breaking Bad has any right to complain about any show being over the top or hard to swallow.

* For me, the show this season was notable as a showcase for a handful of the performers/characters, and for World War One.

* Rob James-Collier’s Thomas was certainly a grower this season. For starters his is the most underrated of the show’s Great Speaking Voices — the stentorian tones of Carson, the silken waveform of Lady Mary, the bedroom rasp of Lady Sybil, the posh perfection of Lord Grantham. Thomas’s voice sounds like it’s only slipping out of his mouth partway, like it’s hiding something in there somewhere. It sounds like it’s squinting.

* Aside from that, though, I think we got a lot more evidence that he’s more than just some Evil Queer stereotype. His homosexuality is treated with enormous, actually rather heartbreaking sensitivity this time around. (Granted, I thought so the first time, too — there was something crushing in watching him flail to get past that sleazy aristo played by Charlie Cox to get at the burning love letters that were to be his ticket to the top, crushing both in Thomas’s desperation and his lover/victim/victimizer’s swagger in physically overpowering him.) You can’t help but sympathize deeply with a man you’ve watched break down and cry over the suicide of the one person to whom he’s even come close to confiding the truth about himself over the entire course of the series. That that person was a badly wounded, blind, depressed stranger shows, I think, what Thomas truly thinks of himself. He’s a bully because he’s been bullied, overtly at times I’m sure, but also in a thousand ways large and small by the strictures of the heteronormative society to which he has no choice but to conform. Internalized oppression.

* But even his bullying was humanized. He unilaterally disarmed from his grudge match with Bates, and advised O’Brien to do the same. He was shown to display real fear and, I think, regret and shame over the results of his actions — when his attempt to become a black marketeer ended in ruin, say, or when he realized his dognapping had gone tits up. Like O’Brien when she looked in the mirror and saw a person who’d just attempted to injure a pregnant woman, I get the impression he wasn’t nuts about what he’d seen in himself, even if, in the end, his final scheme was rewarded.

* What’s more, his decision late in the season to be more cheerful, friendly, helpful, and productive may have been just an attempt to ingratiate himself with Carson and the Crawleys now that his prospects had dried up, but the fact of the matter is that, well, he became more cheerful, friendly, helpful, and productive. In the same way that his platonic folie a deux with Evil O’Brien in the first season helped incentivize bad behavior, I like to think that the new status quo, the new reactions and rewards he’ll receive for being a decent person, can’t help but steer him in that direction. The fact of the matter is he has a great smile, and he can be very charming and win people over just as easily by actually being decent as by faking it. Being a dreary, nasty fuck has very strong headwinds, and perhaps his new course of action will help him see there’s another, less unpleasant course he could set.

* In a similar vein, I came to internally refer to O’Brien this season as (to borrow a term from comics fandom, as I am wont to do) Nu’Brien. No, she wasn’t quite able to shed her old self — egging Thomas on with his black marketeering and shady attempts to get in Lord Robert’s good graces, making mischief with Mrs. Bates. But for the most part, she used her powers for good, not evil, even when her conception of “good” was as narrowly defined (PRESERVE AND PROTECT THE HONOR AND HAPPINESS OF LADY GRANTHAM) as possible. Like Thomas she had her moments of genuine regret — the atom bomb that was her realization that she’d essentially aborted Cora’s baby for nothing had its fallout, as did her poorly thought-through decision to alert the genuinely awful Mrs. Bates to Mr. Bates’ return to Yorkshire. And moreso than did Thomas, she was able to express concern and sympathy for the other servants, from William to Anna to, eventually, Bates himself. There are few things I value more in fiction than when characters overcome their differences to be kind to each other, so I found Nu’Brien rather moving.

* But even more than that, I just found her interesting. When you find out that in real life she’s pretty much a dime piece, you start not just to appreciate but to marvel at actress Siobhan Finneran’s physical comportment on the show. Unlike…well, every other character, I think, O’Brien reveals nothing with her face or voice. She’s like an automaton compared even to Thomas, let alone comparable women characters — Mrs. Hughes, say, or Mrs. Patmore, or Anna or Jane or Ethel or even Shore. That kind of control of one’s face and voice and body is admirable in an actor. She’s kind of the inverse of my beloved Mickey Doyle in Boardwalk Empire, her buttoned-up weirdness a contrast with his showy weirdness, but both of them every bit as watchable and pleasurable.

* So Lord Robert’s midlife crisis was provoked by an actual crisis! That’s smart writing, especially given how out-of-left-field his unfaithfulness to Cora would have felt were it not rooted in his deep disappointment in himself and in the system over his helplessness during the War. Of course there was the subtle and simultaneous strain of dissatisfaction with, even dislike of, Cora herself — her inability to meet his emotional needs or even recognize that he had any during Downton’s wartime period, her pragmatism-cum-coldness over the various interpersonal crises that developed during that time, particularly regarding Mary and Matthew. And his impotence over the War was echoed by his loss of control over the fates of Mary and Sybill, and even over Downton itself. All told, you had a guy who’d been raised all his life to be the center of his world suddenly discovering that a) he wasn’t, and b) in a lot of ways it wasn’t much of a world to begin with. He asked Jane, his ersatz paramour, if she ever wondered what it was all for. Can’t get more direct than that.

* But even before that, he had an exchange with Cora I wrote down verbatim: “I don’t think you’re a fool, isn’t that enough?” she asks him. “No,” he replies. “Maybe it should be, but it isn’t.” It struck me then as an astute take on how frustrating, even confusing, it can be to us when we find ourselves unable to take succor from our significant others and life partners despite the abiding satisfaction we receive from them in every other respect. But now I see it as the roots of a crisis of confidence, in himself and in the institutions that shored him up. Thus he went from a character I didn’t even mention in my discussion of Season One, during which his stalwart reliability rendered him a prop more than a player, to one of my favorite characters on the show. Hugh Bonneville rendered him utterly likeable throughout.

* The main “She’s Leaving Home”-type story here was Sybil’s, of course, and her runaway romance with the Bono of the motorpool. But I was more profoundly moved by Edith’s story, how she quietly came into full personhood as she took on the responsibility of providing for the wounded officers in Downton’s care. As everyone always said, there was little doubt that her sisters would find their place in the world, even if they never defied convention as Sybil did. By contrast, Edith is a prime example of the true cost of the sex and class system, which walls off potentially productive members of society on both sides of the divide from finding their true calling and making the contributions they’re truly capable of making. Only the apocalyptic upheaval of the Great War enabled Edith to do something other than wooing lower-upper-class suitors. When you think of Oscar Wilde imprisoned or Alan Turing killing himself, when you think of centuries of potential giants of politics or literature or science toiling unthanked on Mississippi plantations, when you think of half the population of Saudi Arabia forbidden even to drive cars, think of what these people could have done for the classes that oppressed them, of whatever stripe. The loss of the oppressed is far more grave, but it’s not just the oppressed’s loss, is what I’m saying.

* Am I the only one who started singing “How do you solve a problem like Lavinia?” to himself the moment she looked a little ill at the dinnertable? The show (I know, it’s all written by one dude, but “the show” is a hard habit to break) wrote itself into a corner with this lovely, pleasant, selfless lady — certainly more pleasant and selfless than Lady Mary even at the best of times! — and solved it in a manner I found rather crass, whatever its realism. It’s not as though she’d been allowed to develop into anything but the remotest corner of the Matthew/Mary/Carlisle/her love quadrangle, so while her loss illustrated both the reach and the caprice of the Spanish Influenza epidemic, we really only felt that loss through the other characters, not through Lavinia herself. This was the second time I thought the show grabbed real-world catastrophes and clumsily wielded them as two-bit storytelling tools — the other, and more egregious, being the time that both the Great War and the Troubles were reduced to farce in Branson’s wacky assassination/protest-by-prank mix-up.

* These were all the more striking in light of how well the show dealt with the War itself most every other time. Downton Abbey was never going to be an explicitly antiwar show — it’s just not a political beast, and at any rate a show that values loyalty and honor and courage as much as this one does is going to be fairly helpless in the face of the choice to depict cowardice as either a moral failing or an act of sanity against the insanity of the war itself. (Which I suppose is a political program, disguised as apolitical by centuries of morals established by the masters of war.) But that doesn’t mean that the show couldn’t use its focus on the complexities of familial and romantic relationships in the context of the old class system to shine a spotlight on war’s costs where those concerns intersected.

* I think my favorite example here is a simple, physical aspect of one actor’s performance: The black, angry, piercing depression in the eyes of Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley after he’s paralyzed. He displayed an intensity (and a handsomeness, not incidentally) he’d never been able to before, and the rupture in the presentation was sufficient to convey just how bad things really were for him, and by extension for everyone.

* But really I liked all the major war storylines: William’s slow death and its impact on Daisy, lingering even after he’d gone; the tale of two war widows with Robert’s beloved Jane and the shunned unmarried Ethel; Thomas’s million-dollar wound; Matthew and William’s painful goodbyes, and their bizarre it-was-all-but-a-dream returns from the front before inevitably heading back into the breach; even the craziness of the False Patrick, with his burns and bandages and Anthony Perkins voice.

* My one regret is that Molesley’s shirking never went anywhere. Between that, his doomed run at Anna (thwarted by Bates), his equally doomed run at becoming Lord Grantham’s valet (also thwarted by Bates), and his drinking at the Spanish Flu dinner, I thought he was headed for a full-fledged Character Arc, with said arc bending toward villainy, but the light comedic business with him getting drunk was the last we saw of him. He was the dog that didn’t bark.

* A few more observations:

* Good Lord did sleevelessness become Michelle Dockery. I found myself awfully glad Lady Mary was stuck with the one dress for the duration.

* What better time to cheat on your spouse or fiancée than when she’s laid up with a pandemic that’s killing millions worldwide?

* Just about the only thing that could make the Dowager Countess more entertaining was to have her start laughing at her own jokes, so thank goodness they did exactly that. “I do hope I’m interrupting something” and “I don’t expect you’ll see me again”/”Is that a promise?” are lines for the ages by the way. Also, any time I really look at Maggie Smith’s eyes, I think to myself that she’s got a truly great villain role in her somewhere, if the right part comes along. I mean a David Lynch-type villain, a villain who radiates menace. The Dowager Countess is a pussycat compared to what’s potentially in there.

* What a pleasure it is to watch a show during which the problem for the actors is that time moves fast rather than slow. I’ve been watching The Vampire Diaries (it’s fun! It’s like True Blood without the intentional camp factor, so it’s like this super-serious exploration of sexy young vampires and witches and werewolves taking their shirts off and literally ripping people’s hearts out on-camera), and at some point during its third and current season it hilariously revealed that not even a year had gone by since the pilot. Characters had gone from “la-di-da, cheerleaders, football players, popular girls, blah blah” to “my entire family and circle of friends has either been murdered by or turned into vampires” between the start of junior year and the Fourth of July. Lost is probably the best example of a show where each episode spanned a single day or so, at least for a while. Yet in comics like Love and Rockets, or in shows like Battlestar Galactica, we see just how rich for the storyteller and pleasurable for the audience taking advantage of the swift passage of time can be. I’m not 100% convinced that Downton Abbey has sufficiently aged its performers to account for, what, the passage of seven years of story time over the course of one year of real time, but it’s a challenge I find myself glad they’ve accepted.

* Most poignantly, I found myself pretty profoundly moved and disturbed by the scene in which the family and staff gather round the clock to honor the war’s end, because it reminded me of the now-quaint notion advanced by another of the Great Post-Millennial TV Dramas: “Wars end.” Ha, remember when that was true?

Here are links to all my Downton Abbey posts. Enjoy!

Season One
Season Two
Season Three Cheat Sheet
NOTE: All episode numbers are for the US version.
Season Three, Episode One
Season Three, Episode Two
Season Three, Episode Three
Season Three, Episode Four
Season Three, Episode Five
Season Three, Episode Six
Season Three, Episode Seven
The Best Dowager Countess Quotes from Season Three
Five Big Questions for Season Four
Season Four, Episode One
Season Four, Episode Two
Season Four, Episode Three

* 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?

More even than being good, Downton Abbey is endearing. That’s apparent by the end of the very first episode, when despite having been introduced to approximately forty thousand characters in the space of 90 minutes, I realized I could place names to faces to personalities in nearly every case. It’s apparent at the beginning of episode two, when I reacted to once again hearing John Lunn’s marvelous theme music — a heartrending swirl and swell of emotion of a sort that the show itself isn’t even aiming for — with pavlovian enthusiasm. It’s apparent every time I laugh at one of the Dowager Countess’s understated overstatements like I was watching Holy Grail for the first time. It’s apparent in my forgiving the show for using as its central sex scandal a plot device swiped from The Golden Girls; or for making its one gay character a conniving, gossiping, backstabbing, predatory, vindictive creep, albeit in such a way as to suggest that these traits predominate and would do whether he was gay or not; or for never delving deeper into the hideous and hidebound class system than presenting it as a sort of culture-wide Stockholm syndrome, mutually agreed to by the benevolent dictators of the ruling class and the loyal, stand-up guys and girls in the servants’ quarters, before time and tide and the inevitability of change softly sweep it away, no harm no foul. It’s a show that makes itself easy for you to watch, and to enjoy.

Given how I’ve spent the past few months, that’s good enough for me. The way everyone went on about Downton Abbey, I expected it to be a searing examination of the relationship between the aristocracy and their servants. I was almost (not quite, but almost) relieved that I wasn’t getting, I dunno, The Wire with tonier accents, or Mad Men with even nicer suits. Instead it’s a soap. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I never miss an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless, so soapiness doesn’t bother me even at its soapy soapiest.

And this wasn’t that, after all. It’s a magnificently shot show, for one thing, with a remarkably firm grip on itself — its fast-paced yet crystal-clear editing rhythm and deft steadicam shots were present from the first minute, no growing pains here. Downton’s richly appointed rooms are almost always shot in such a way as to establish both their presence and the presence of a human being or two within them, not just driving home the perceived indissolubility of that relationship, but suggesting the influence these lavish spaces must have on those who inhabit them day in and day out. And pretty much no matter where you are, indoors or out, you’re looking at something that’s been beautifully lit — the lovely, torchlit country fair scenes couldn’t have looked and felt more likely a nice summer evening with friends if that’s what they actually were, just for example.

It’s a well-cast show, too. I don’t know why I tend to think of ensemble television shows first as a matter of casting rather than acting itself, but I do…I suppose it’s because so much of it comes down to the nature of the actor’s instrument, the way they look and sound, in addition to what’s done with it. Here you need look no further than Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess. She looks like Large Marge post-wreck, or like some evil anthropomorphized insect; indeed her visual and aural resemblance to Lokar, Potentate of Thug Locusts is uncanny. But beyond the show’s Omar Little figure, you’ve got Carson’s Asterios Polyp profile, or Matthew Crawley’s astonishingly blue eyes, or Lady Sybill’s luscious lips and raspy voice, or Mrs. Padmore’s central-casting cookishness, or Mr. Bates’s stoic half-smile, or Lady Cora’s well-practiced beatific smile, or Lady Mary’s dark eyes that can sparkle with warmth or wit or cruelty depending on the needs of the moment, or the way Lady Edith smiles like someone who’s always vainly hoping to be something more than an also-ran, or Anna’s plain prettiness, and on and on and on.

All these details matter, I think. They’re a big part of what invests you in these lives, since nothing particularly earth-shaking is going on most of the time. They’re what make the behind-closed-doors meetings between Carson and Mrs. Hughes, a butler and a head housekeeper, feel less like middle managament and more like Commander Adama and President Roslin bonding on the Galactica. They made that pretty goofy sex scene between the handsome, horny Turk and mean-girl porcelain princess Lady Mary actually sexy, despite the silliness of it all. I’m pretty sure the hateful visages of Thomas and O’Brien — his smirk, her unsmilingness — are at least as responsible for our antipathy toward them as anything they actually did. (Thomas and O’Brien are the best character work on the whole show, by the way — a masterful depiction of how much worse two bad apples can be for the bunch than just one, how two malcontents or hatemongers can support one another and egg each other on until they become a nexus of poison at the heart of it all; I guarantee you you’ve seen this happen somewhere yourself.) They’re the reason that when Mary and Matthew finally kissed, I started clapping as I sat there watching it on the train. To reach a sum greater than the whole, you need the parts.

Here are links to all my Breaking Bad posts. I’ve added the special features I’ve written for Rolling Stone to the list chronologically, so that once you’ve read the preceding review post, it’s safe to read that feature as well. I hope you enjoy them!

* Season One
* Season Two, Episodes 1-3
* Season Two, Episodes 4-6
* Season Two, Episodes 7-12
* Season Two, Episode 13
* Season Three, Episodes 1-3
* Season Three, Episodes 4-7
* Season Three, Episodes 8-13
* Season Four, Episodes 1-6
* Season Four, Episodes 7-10
* Season Four, Episode 11
* Season Four, Episodes 12-13
* Season Five, Episode 1: “Live Free or Die”
* Season Five, Episode 2: “Madrigal”
* Season Five, Episode 3: “Hazard Pay”
* Q&A: Anna Gunn
* Season Five, Episode 4: “Fifty-One”
* Q&A: Laura Fraser
* Season Five, Episode 5: “Dead Freight”
* Q&A: Dean Norris
* Season Five, Episode 6: “Buyout”
* Q&A: Jesse Plemons
* Season Five, Episode 7: “Say My Name”
* Season Five, Episode 8: “Gliding Over All”
* Walter White’s 10 Lowest Lows
* Breaking Bad’s 10 Most Memorable Murders
* Season Five, Episode 9: “Blood Money”
* Q&A: Dean Norris
* Season Five, Episode 10: “Buried”
* Q&A: Betsy Brandt
* Season Five, Episode 11: “Confessions”
* Q&A: Bob Odenkirk
* Season Five, Episode 12: “Rabid Dog”
* Q&A: Steven Michael Quezada
* Season Five, Episode 13: “To’hajiilee”
* Q&A: Lavell Crawford
* Season Five, Episode 14: “Ozymandias”
* Q&A: R.J. Mitte
* Season Five, Episode 15: “Granite State”
* “Granite State” bonus thoughts
* Season Five, Episode 16: “Felina”
* “Felina” bonus: Bloggingheads.tv discussion with Alyssa Rosenberg

* I finished Season Four and am all caught up with the show. LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS BELOW.

* All I know is I’m glad I never googled “Gus gif” for any reason prior to finishing this season. (I just want to note that that final episode was called “Face Off.” Rimshot!)

* I’ll admit it: When that drug dog (hilariously!) popped out of Steve Gomez’s partner’s SUV at the laundry when they went to check it out in deference to Hank’s hunch, I was positive he had ’em. I didn’t count on Gus, Walt, and Jesse’s prideful fastidiousness, however. Then again, I also didn’t count on Hank’s after-the-fact deductive genius. Goddammit, the guy found probably the one tell-tale detail in all the photos Gomie took, the extra electricity running into the laundry. He had ’em dead to rights! One day he’ll get his reward, I hope…though I suspect that the final season will be Walt vs. Hank to the death. That seems like the only way it can go.

* I wish the brief scene between Skyler and Hank when she was checking to see if he’d spotted anything unusual in Gomie’s photos wasn’t brief. Have those two ever been one on one before in the whole history of the show?

* Jesse’s race to get the information about ricin to Andrea in time to save Brock’s life was the most “gasping/squirming/covering my gaping mouth with my hand on the train”-worthy moment the show’s served up in a long time, and as I seem to always be saying, that’s saying something. Heartpounding.

* The whole bomb sequence with Walt and Gus in the hospital parking lot — heartpounding as well. Not that I wanted Walt to blow Gus up, mind you! Gus’s conversation with Jesse in the hospital chapel — expressing ignorance as to how Brock could have been poisoned, backing down and giving Jesse a full week off to deal with his young friend’s medical crisis — made it pretty clear to me that Gus wasn’t involved in Brock’s poisoning after all, though at that point I hadn’t sussed out who was. It just didn’t square with the man’s respectful and trusting treatment of Jesse all throughout their Mexican odyssey, either. So no, I didn’t want Walt to blow him up. But nor did I want him to spot Walt on the roof across the way, which a single telltale gleam from his glasses or binoculars or (I thought the poetry would be fitting here) his bald head would have ensured. In the end, you just can’t root for the death of your protagonist. Or, y’know, so I thought.

* Anyway. I sure enjoyed my little private eureka moment when I realized that if you can ring a bell, you can press a button on a detonator, too.

* I enjoyed the cameo from Peggy Olsen’s mom as well.

* And I enjoyed our brief glimpses of the old, funnier, in-over-his-head Walt — the Walt who’d look like he was about to threaten or even attack Saul’s put-upon receptionist, only to pause and finally say “…I’ll be right back.”

* But then Jesse said “Lilly of the Valley—it’s some kind of flower,” and I wrote, in all caps, just like this:

OH

MY

GOD

WALT

POISONED

BROCK

I’ve done some googling since finishing the season, and discovered that the plot Walt related to Jesse in the second-to-last episode, the (bogus, as we come to find out) idea that Gus poisoned Brock knowing Jesse would blame Walt and kill him for it, was poorly received by many in the audience. They thought that required way too many coincidences, way too many instances of things going exactly the one way they had to go for it all to work, for a man like Gus to feel comfortable relying on. And of course, they were right. (This guy in particular, who figured out what was going on even before the finale made it clear, which is pretty amazing.) This wasn’t some master plan by Walt, it was a last-ditch plan by Walt. Like stripping naked in a supermarket, it was the only thing he could think of that could possibly save his hide. And it was so crazy it just might work. And it did! The horrible, horrible man won.

* I call him horrible despite my belief that however it was that he administered the poison to Brock, he did so in a way he knew would ultimately not kill him. It’s still horrible to inflict suffering on a child, and his family, whose suffering and fear is just as real as Walt and his family’s.

* But mostly, I call him horrible because I now realize why he spat Gus’s offer of clemency back in his face in the desert. Walt himself may not have even truly realized it. Perhaps not until he cracked in that crawlspace, letting forth an insane man’s peals of laughter, did Walt himself realize it. He has to protect his family, yes. But he has to win while doing it. Walter White has to be the smartest guy in the room at all times. Even more than wanting to remove the threat Gus posed to himself and his family (and Jesse — I do think he still would prefer Jesse not be killed, or he’d have killed him when they destroyed the lab) once and for all, I think it was wanting to beat Gus that drove Walt to do what he did. Not for Jesse, not for his family, but for him. That makes Walt worse than Gus. Gus’s hatred of the cartel and his desire to defeat them was born from the love he felt for his friend that they killed. Walt’s desire to kill Gus, to put himself and everyone he nominally cares about in harm’s way if that was the only way to do it, was born from Walt’s love for himself. That’s what makes him so easy to hate, now.

* More google treasure: Creator Vince Gilligan says part of the impetus behind doing Breaking Bad was doing a show where the protagonist slowly became the antagonist. Explains a lot. (That link comes via this Chuck Klosterman/Grantland piece, and you probably have feelings about that sort of thing, but note that Klosterman also sums up the ultimate limitation of The Wire (a show of politics rather than philosophy) as well as anyone I’ve ever read.)

* So what happens next season? Walt and Jesse have no real antagonist at the moment. Oh, I’m sure they can stumble their way into a new one in pretty short order — the whole history of the show, from the pilot onward, is the story of Walt and Jesse making life-or-death enemies at the drop of a hat. But the deaths of Gus, Tyrus, Hector Salamanca, and the entire leadership class of the cartel leave a massive, massive vacuum. I assume Gus’s mysterious past as some kind of untouchable big shot in Chile will play a role. I assume Mike will play a role. The great critic Matthew Zoller Seitz (whose reviews of shows like these I look forward to reading after I finish a series almost as much as I look forward to the actual act of finishing the series) points out that the mysterious German conglomerate that bankrolled the laundry and the air filtration system (I couldn’t help but notice some kind of HVAC was involved in the “guy who can disappear you and your family” service Saul tried to connect Walt with) will likely play a role, too. Seitz also notes that there’s a laptop full of surveillance footage sitting in Gus’s office at Los Pollos Hermanos, just waiting to be decrypted. We’re not done hearing about the death of Ted Beneke either, I’m sure. Saul and his goons could crack about that, or about their involvement in Walt’s poisoning of Brock. As I said, I think Hank will be the Final Boss. And in the end, there’s Walt vs. Jesse, which is just another way of saying Walt vs. Walt.