* Last night, during my stint enjoying the hospitality of the Long Island Rail Road, I finished the first disc of Mad Men Season Two. With a little more than a full season under my belt, I find that I still don’t really relate to it on a competence-fantasy level — but what I do relate to is what Don Draper is so competent at. He’s a writer! A copywriter at that! I’ve now read and watched so many stories about people who murder other people for a living that watching people spend time trying to figure out the right turn of phrase for a headline feels bizarre. Bizarre, but good.

* The best part is that Mad Men nails the main pleasure of copywriting: Using creativity to solve a puzzle. Case in point: Don, Sal, and Peggy try to figure out the right tagline for their Mohawk Airlines ad. Don rejects the initial sexual-adventure angle he’d helped develop in their previous meeting, instead focusing on Sal’s background illustration of the traveler’s little daughter. On the spot, Peggy suggests a series of taglines reflecting this new direction, and she and Don tweak and reject them until she arrives at the magical “What did you bring me, Daddy?” She knows it’s right, Don knows it’s right, Sal knows it’s right. I know that sensation! I’ve gotten it myself during my dayjob writing copy for a bookseller, and during freelance gigs writing jacket copy for graphic novels, and in meetings at my old magazine jobs, coming up with coverlines. The thrill of recognition was palpable.

* Which leads to a surprising insight: Don’s work life is actually pretty good! I expected him to be embroiled in cutthroat office politics the entire time, but at least up until this point, his work-related problems are actually personal problems in work drag: his problematic relationship with his client Rachel Mencken; an unexpected intel coup by his envious underling Pete Campbell; a quickly avenged and forgotten pass at his wife by Roger Sterling. Those events aside, Don has a creatively and financially fulfilling job. He has the full support of his superiors; even the one time that Cooper gainsays him by insisting they keep Campbell, Sterling immediately steps into the breach to safeguard Don’s authority in Campbell’s eyes. He has the nearly worshipful admiration of everyone at the office, from his bosses (who are also his friends) to his employees (including Pete, his own protestations to the contrary). He’s good enough at his job to actually deserve that admiration, moreover. He wants a raise, he gets it. He wants to make partner, he gets it. In fact, hiring Duck Phillips and discovering that he disagrees with the decisions Duck’s making in his old job is the first time Don goes up against anything resembling a structural problem with his job. No wonder he’s sacrificed or marginalized so much outside of the office.

* Peggy’s arc is a lot more disheartening than Don’s, because it entails her becoming a worse person as a function of getting better at her job. I’d be lying if I told you that my own recent experiences with miscarriage, premature birth, and fatherhood didn’t color my perception of her decision to reject her baby. Simply put, that scene made me cry at my desk. (It’s been tempered somewhat by the revelation that she handled her I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant moment badly enough to be classified as mentally ill and/or maternally unfit by the state.) But it’s not just what she’s done about her baby. I watched in something approaching horror as she dismantled the pretty young voice actress she cast in the commercial for the weight-loss vibrator thingamajig, thinking that she was harping on a perceived lack of confidence to compensate for her own — but this blossomed into full-blown horror when I realized she did this on purpose so that she could ingratiate herself with the unctuously macho Kenneth Cosgrove by providing him with easy pickings, breaking the actress apart so he could sweep in and reassemble her around his dick. Peggy appears to have learned what it seems a lot of viewers don’t learn from Don and company’s behavior, which is that you can’t separate the competence fantasy from the competence nightmare.

* Don’s most profound violation of Betty’s trust was neither his many affairs, nor his lies about his name and background. It was his collusion with her psychotherapist. I’m not really sure if what I’m about to say truly squares with the reality of these situations, but I can’t help but feel that both his adultery and his identity are matters of withholding himself from Betty. These are areas of his life he has chosen not to share with her. But by violating her privacy in therapy, he’s actively invading those areas she chooses to keep from him in turn — socially sanctioned areas at that, unlike his own. It’s vile. And when I realized that his purloined phone bill would reveal not phone calls to mistresses (he was always pretty careful about that) but phone calls to the doctor, I gasped.

* Betty handled it differently than I thought she might, by the way. I think I expected a “press a button and she falls apart” physical collapse akin to — well, I won’t say, but another prominent drama involving a husband who cheated on his wife, when the wife was finally confronted with this in a way she couldn’t avoid. Instead, in true Draper fashion, she shrewdly uses her knowledge to voice her concerns and suspicions about Don’s infidelity, knowing that either a) the doctor wouldn’t dare tell Don about this, thus preserving her privacy, or b) the doctor would tell Don about this, thus starting a conversation she couldn’t bring herself to start on her own.

* But first she breaks down and cries and confides to a nine-year-old boy. I found her two interactions with her divorced neighbor’s sad little kid enormously affecting. The first, in which the kid busts in on her while she’s peeing and she subsequently gives him a lock of her hair, was like the fulfillment of every young boy’s first pre-sexual kindling of the erotic impulse. That’s a topic I don’t think I’ve ever seen addressed, except in cheesy Franco-Italian sexual-awakening movies about sultry brunettes who turn their little villages upside-down. But it was also enormously revealing of how desperate Betty was for sexual and romantic validation, and how little emotional sustenance her friends, husband, and work as a homemaker and mother were providing her. That second parking-lot interaction was all of that writ large, with the bonus violation of the era’s rigid insistence on the sacredness of childhood. She forced the kid to be an adult — in a tender and sad and empathetic way, so much so that even the kid realized this person needed taking care of, but yeah, that’s what she did. It was brilliantly written, and frankly January Jones, whatever her faults elsewhere, couldn’t be more ideal as this porcelain-doll wifebot who occasionally cracks in profound and dangerous ways.

* Back to Don for a moment: My favorite part of the slow-burning Dick Whitman reveal came before you even knew it was a reveal. It was the first time we ever heard the name “Dick Whitman,” when a fellow commuter bumped into Don on the train and used this unfamiliar name. For the entire conversation, I thought that this guy simply had it wrong, that it was a case of mistaken identity, that Don was rolling with it because doing so was easier than correcting him, that a point was being made about Don as an unperson, a meticulously constructed generic man-shaped void. And I think those last couple of points still stand, regardless. What an eerie, haunting little scene.

* Another detail I enjoyed: Don and Pete’s on-again, off-again, bonafide camaraderie — the camaraderie of enemies. In the course of my life, from grade school till now, I’ve had, I dunno, half a dozen dudes (always dudes) who’ve actively sought to hurt me and/or were out to get me in some way. In all cases this weird affinity develops with them in a way that doesn’t exist with more run-of-the-mill critics or unpleasant acquaintances. You get to know someone you hate, and when you get to know them, a closeness develops whether you want it to or not. In one case in my own life, a guy I almost came to blows with once in high school (unbeknownst to me — our mutual friends kept him away from me) literally did the look-back-on-it-and-laugh thing a year later, when we became friends in college. We wouldn’t have gotten there if we hadn’t started someplace else. So I totally buy the seemingly genuine concern, respect, and pleasantness that breaks out between Don and Pete every now and then. As Bert Cooper told Don, one never knows how loyalty is born.

* A couple of quick notes on two key supporting players. You’ll note that when I did a quick list of actors on this show who are easy on the eyes, I didn’t mention John Slattery as Roger Sterling. I dunno, there was something slightly avian and predatory in his sharp gray features. But Jesus can that guy talk. Hand me a mic and a phonebook, for real. What great casting, to make him the guy for whom bon mots are a way of life. He’s a juggernaut of verbal charm. The most troubling thing about his move on Betty Draper or his attempted twincest threeway on the night of his heart attack wasn’t the morality of the deeds, but how clumsy he was in suggesting them. That’s how you knew something was wrong. That’s sharp writing.

* Watching these DVDs was my first-ever glimpse of Christina Hendricks in a noncleavagecentric capacity. If you’ve only ever known of her in the context of your suspicion that Tumblr was developed as a slightly inefficient Christina Hendricks photo delivery mechanism, watching her act — specifically, watching her play Joan Holloway, who is herself a ruthlessly efficient Joan Holloway delivery mechanism — is a revelation. That’s a part that could be very one-note and very dull in someone else’s hands, but Hendricks brings the character to her own tenaciously curated form of life. Always you see the effort behind the effortlessness, but just a little of it, just enough to prevent her from lapsing into caricature on either side of the line. Hendricks makes “making ‘making it look easy’ look hard” look easy.

Matt Zoller Seitz explains what’s wrong with Terence Winter’s sumptuous but slightly shaky Boardwalk Empire, which returned last night. I appear to enjoy the series a lot more than Seitz does, although I agree with him that it hasn’t hit the heights of the likes of Deadwood or The Sopranos. But vanishingly few shows in the history of television have, after all. If Boardwalk Empire was the worst we could do, we’d be doing pretty damn great, which Seitz has no problem saying.

Seitz’s complaint is that despite being exquisitely dressed, shot, and acted, the show writes character in a comparatively perfunctory and haphazard way, especially compared to the evident glee it takes in delivering gangster genre goodies. In other words, his critique is the mirror image of my circa-Season-One-finale praise, which is that (unlike The Walking Dead) it takes genre stuff I’m predisposed to like (which The Walking Dead has) and surrounds it with lusciously pleasurable filmmaking on other levels (which The Walking Dead doesn’t have). That it has a hard time going further than that — that the writing is inconsistent enough (cf. my complaint about Margaret’s yo-yo morality) to prevent it from getting there — is Seitz’s beef.

The thing is, though, that I do think it has greatness in it. Richard Harrow’s explanation of why he doesn’t read anymore, for example, is maybe my favorite line in television history. “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” That is the most brutally bleak thing any TV character who isn’t Livia Soprano or BOB has ever said in my hearing. What makes it even more vicious is that it’s an indictment of the very enterprise its writer was engaged in at that moment. This is followed by a scene in which an unusually empathetic Jimmy Darmody takes Richard back to Johnny Torio’s brothel to relax, at which point some small talk about Jimmy’s piece gradually becomes, to the viewer’s dawning horror, a litany of the arsenal possessed by Harrow, a man who has just professed feeling no connection to the rest of humanity whatsoever. Here’s an example where not only is there brilliant, philosophically minded character work being done, but it actually enhances the bloody, scary gangster stuff in the process.

Harrow is, I think, the emblematic figure for what I believe to be the theme of the show, a theme Seitz hasn’t been able to put his finger on, which is that violence, in war and elsewhere, is just run-of-the-mill corruption and shittiness with its mask off. The Great War that made monsters of Harrow and Jimmy also provided Al Capone with a readymade backstory for why he’s the tough customer he’s made himself out to be, and is used by the Colonel as a justification for the sneak-attack slaughter of a warehouse full of black people, and is echoed in the sectarian strife of Ireland that pops up here and there among Nucky Thompson’s Hibernian politician pals, and on and on and on. If The Sopranos is about how people will choose to do the wrong thing if it’s easy enough, and Deadwood is about the price of doing the right thing anyway, Boardwalk Empire is about the pervasiveness of the wrong thing, so that you’re all but locked into supporting it in one way or another. In his essay, Seitz wonders what Jimmy Darmody’s motivation is — I think it’s your basic post-Great War Lost Generation nihilism. Why constantly bite the hand that feeds? Why not?

Again, Seitz is absolutely right to say that the inconsistent character work muddies the waters. The kindness in Nucky that Margaret saw in Season One and which separated him distinctly from Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen is a lot tougher to detect when he’s complicit in the Ku Klux Klan’s hatecrimes. And Harrow’s bracingly direct expression of human disconnect doesn’t jibe with his now apparent obsession with idealized family life. But somewhere in here there’s a statement about the enormity of man’s inhumanity to man that’s fixing to be made. As long as the show continues to be so pleasant to watch as it meanders its way in that direction, I’ll meander with it.

* Some lovely preview pages from Frank Miller’s Holy Terror are going around. (Via Marc-Oliver Frisch.)

* Chris Ware has a new iPad-only comic out. More about this anon.

* Here’s a nice piece by Zom of the Mindless Ones on the end of Twin Peaks.

* George R.R. Martin on early Marvel superhero comics — what made them different, how they influenced him.

* The comment threads for my recent Habibi and Mad Men posts are proving unusually fecund. Check ’em out and talk about Orientalism, competence fantasies, male beauty, and more!

* And hey, how about that Hellen Jo?

In a cosmic coincidence, just days before Netflix announced that it was doubling its rates and renaming itself “Poops Deluxe,” I finally started watching the Mad Men discs I’d had out probably for the duration of wife’s pregnancy and our child’s first six months of life. Guess what? It’s a good show! I have the following spoiler-free thoughts about it in particular after watching the first four episodes:

1. Whoever cast this thing deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor. Jon Hamm is an enormously pleasant man to look at for an hour at a time. He’s like the human equivalent of Craig Thompson’s drawing: No matter how daunting the size of the undertaking, on a visual level it’s just like, “Hey, this’ll be nice.” And supporting players from Christina Hendricks to Bryan Batt are similarly enjoyable to look at for various reasons.

2. There was a twist in one episode involving a firm decision Don made, the kind you really can’t back down from, being undone by forces beyond his control, and I sat there watching it unfold thinking “How is he going to recover from this mess?” Then another character swooped in and fixed it for him by doing something I never in a million years would have thought to do, either as the character or as the writer. That impressed the hell out of me. Writing that’s smarter than you are is a rare gift, frankly.

3. Tom Spurgeon has this thing about contemporary superhero comics being, basically, competence fantasies. The reason all the characters have gradually been powered up into unstoppable badasses is because that’s what the audience is identifying with. They don’t want to see challenges dealt with, they want to see challenges overcome. Nerd culture has a problem with this generally — I see it a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, where readers “stop liking” Character X when Character X fucks up or does something stupid or reckless or naive, as if doing so makes them less interesting or worth reading about. I watch a show like Mad Men — or The Sopranos, or Deadwood, or The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica, or even Lost, which as the nerd-culture-est of all those shows had to deal with this problem over and over again as they made Jack and Locke progressively less heroic/antiheroic and more unpleasant — and wonder how the fuck those kinds of people process someone like Don Draper. Do they just not watch? Or are these the sociopaths who watch this show and feel like it’s brought back early ’60s smart-haircuts-and-suits-and-cigarettes-and-scotch coolness again, ignoring that all those things are basically just the pointy tails and pitchforks adorning this particular hell on earth?

* My latest Say Hello! column is up at The Comics Journal. This time I interviewed Jumbly Junkery‘s L. Nichols.

* I’ve collected some powerful tributes to Dylan Williams over at Robot 6.

* I’m pretty bummed that I missed out on getting David Bowie sketches from Craig Thompson and Chester Brown at SPX this past weekend, so you can bet your ass I’m camping out days in advance to get ’em from next year’s guests of honor, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. The show’s expanding its floorspace next year, which is a good thing — with those two there, they’ll need it.

* Chris Mautner reports on his haul of comics from the show. I too was pleased to see a new Kevin Huizenga minicomic. Speaking frankly, I didn’t feel a lot of energy from that segment of the comics at the show. Most of the stuff I was excited to read, from Big Questions and Habibi to Forming and Pure Pajamas, came from the established publishers. Meanwhile, reliable makers of really good minis like the Closed Caption Comics and Partyka collectives were MIA, and I didn’t really make any discoveries that made up for their absence. It was the one flaw of an otherwise very successful show, I thought.

* Kevin Czapiewski’s con report was an uplifting read. SPX has a well-deserved reputation for being a fun show to hang out with your fellow comics people, but Kevin argues persuasively that this provides not just a pleasant weekend, but a form of creative/spiritual sustenance.

* The Descent director Neil Marshall is directing the pivotal “Blackwater” episode of Game of Thrones Season Two, from a teleplay by George R.R. Martin himself. That’s pretty damn exciting.

* Why did Gabrielle Bell take down her daily diary comics from July?

* Ron Regé Jr. is raising money to help support himself as he completes his next book, Fantagraphics’ The Cartoon Utopia. That’s a gorgeous…cover? Promo image? Gorgeous regardless.

* Lisa Hanawalt has a strange imagination.

* BREAKING: I love Jonny Negron.

* Tremendous interview with Anders Nilsen about Big Questions by Alex Dueben on CBR. “It’s my newest book, but it’s also my oldest.” Wow, can you imagine? Big Questions was the first comic Nilsen ever did, and it’s about to be released in its finished 600-page form.

* Some of the Harry Potter movie people are working on a deal to make a mult-movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand. That could certainly be very good, though in all likelihood it’ll be overwrought and mediocre with interesting moments like most big Hollywood versions of good ideas these days.

* The House Next Door’s Sumanth Prabhaker on Grant Morrison’s historicist reading of superhero comics, including his own, in Supergods.

* Filing this away for when I’ve read the book: Hayley Campbell reviews Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette for The Comics Journal.

* Apparently Julie Doucet’s cat carrier has sat at the bottom of the back stairs of the Fantagraphics office since 1993. This fits very well with my preexisting mental picture of the Fantagraphics office.

* Well this is certainly a great ad for The Beguiling that Michael DeForge drew. How many characters do you recognize? I got all but three or four, I think.

* Uno Moralez is creepy and sexy.

* Jonny Negron goddamn

* Yow–this new group sketchblog Ashcan All-Stars is doing Sin City and doing it well. In order: James Stokoe, Moritat, Sheldon Vella.

* No, seriously, it’s uncool how much I’m enjoying The Walking Dead‘s woes. They’ve all got mothers, you know?

* If there’s one thing HBO knows how to do, it’s make trailers that make their shows look like the baddest things ever. Boardwalk Empire is pretty great regardless, though.

* 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.)

* I’m impressed by DC’s response to the recent debate over the number of women creators it employs. Anyone who says “Well they had to say something, it was bad PR” has obviously not been following the comics industry very long. When you ask someone publicly to do something, and they say “You’re right, we’ll try to do better on that,” that’s a really good thing, especially on an issue like this. Good for DC.

* Grant Morrison in conversation with Neil Gaiman. A fun quote from Gaiman about Morrison: “Whenever I see you now, you are this glorious bird of paradise, but I remember, just as for you I will always be a nervous, hungry young journalist, I remember you as a kid in a black raincoat, incredibly shy. The thing that would get you animated was the point where you’d start talking about a story, and you would come to life.”

* There’s a Marvel/Gary Friedrich lawsuit going on over Ghost Rider right now as well.

* It’s always fun and informative to hear Tom Brevoort talk about how the sausage gets made.

* HBO execs talked about Game of Thrones in a reasonably interesting fashion recently: They’re standing very firm on the 10-episodes-per-season issue, which is unfortunate, but other than that they seem very supportive of a long run and not apt to try to cram too much material (i.e. the entirety of the fatter volumes) into a single season as opposed to spreading it out.

* RoboCop vs. Transformers vs. Hanawalt vs. Harbin.

* Uno Moralez is really one of the best.

* Funny stuff and sexy stuff from Michael DeForge.

* The Sylvester Stallone Character Name Generator made me laugh very hard. (Via Mike Barthel.)

* This report on the Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez spotlight panel at Comic-Con from CBR’s Sonia Harris makes for fascinating reading. All three brothers are really astute commentators on one another’s work.

* Kevin Czapiewski talks about one of my favorite things about Jordan Crane’s comics: his pictogram sound effects.

* Don’t let Nick Gazin’s short sell in the intro fool you: His interview with Jonny Negron for Vice is fun and informative, and contains a lot of Negron art I haven’t seen to boot.

* Hey, Vasilis Lolos is finally working on a second volume of Last Call! Now whatever happened to The Pirates of Coney Island?

* The more Walking Dead Season One staffers leave, the more I’m tempted to watch Walking Dead Season Two.

* I posted Tom Brevoort’s comments on fan entitlement on Robot 6, and to my surprise, the ensuing comment thread largely cosigned his statement, as well as similar recent sentiments from Grant Morrison and Bryan Lee O’Malley. I thought about all this stuff today while flipping through Morgan Spurlock and Alba Tull’s surprisingly delightful photo book Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. The vision of Comic-Con and nerd culture presented in that book is, I’m sure, baffling or even troubling to some comics readers — cosplay, not comics, is its centerpiece; at a glance I’d guess Hollywood personages outnumber comics creators and publishers; and Tull’s portraits of Moto Hagio share a page with her pictures of Gareb Shamus. That said, it’s a picture of Nerd Triumphalism that is, in fact, triumphant. It’s not a bunch of angry, snarky naysayers insulting people and poo-pooing books and movies that haven’t even come out yet — it’s a vibrant, diverse (lots of women, lots of non-white people, lots of kids, even people in wheelchairs) selection of weirdoes, geeks, and creative types, coming together because they’re all excited about the stuff they love. If the people-power aspect of Comic-Con were the public face of nerddom all year round, nerddom would be a lot easier to support, and the crasser, more exploitative mass-marketing aspects of the show would be easier to ignore.

* Frank Miller talks Holy Terror in long-war terms I now find as dispiriting as his increasingly untethered cartooning is invigorating.

* Paul Gravett reviews Grant Morrison’s Supergods, with a focus on whether Morrison’s love of the superhero concept has caused him to undervalue the regular humans responsible for it. (Via Tim Hodler.)

* Dan Conner and Omar are joining the cast of Community. My goodness!

* Wow, Colleen Doran’s concept art for a Wonder Woman costume redesign is lovely.

* “Turtle City” is a deeply cool commission by Theo Ellsworth.

* This assembly of 80 different fan covers of “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin is almost moving in how well it conveys the simultaneous playfulness and brute force of that almighty riff. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Nicole Rudick interviews Jim Woodring at glorious length for The Comics Journal:

RUDICK: Are [the apparitions you’ve seen] usually the same thing or similar things?

WOODRING: No, they’re always different. The last thing I saw was a guy standing upstairs in my hallway, standing bolt upright, with a leather harness on his face.

RUDICK: Does it frighten you to see those things?

WOODRING: That one was extremely frightening. At first, I thought it was my reflection in the mirror. Then I thought, There’s no mirror there. I saw this guy, just standing, wearing black pants and a white shirt, with his face in a leather harness with the number nine on leather tabs at every junction of the straps, and his mouth was open in a rictus. I could see his teeth, and his eyes were staring at me in this beseeching way. He left after a couple of seconds, but it was very vivid while it occurred.

Then a couple of years before that, I saw the Thompson Twins, Thomson and Thompson from Tintin. They were in black and white and were walking down the street with a full-color nine-foot streetwalker in fuchsia hot pants. That resolved into a woman and her two small children. Then the time before that, I was at the mall and my neighbor lady saw me and came up behind me and spoke my name, and when I turned around and looked at her, where her head should have been there was this eggshell of lint, which had the front pushed in, and there was a big gob of chewing gum or something sitting at the base of it. That was a frightening experience. I screamed when I saw that. That just scared the shit out of me.

The thing these all have in common is that they’re not at all vague, they’re very crisp, and I retain memories of them with extraordinary vividness. I’ve drawn all these things out. They’re very sharp, almost more sharp than real life, in the same way that when people meditate and they see the white light—it’s obviously not light, it’s not photons, it’s something else, more vivid than light. Because you’re not seeing with your eyes, you’re seeing with your mind when these things happen, they have sharpness and an intensity that regular visual things don’t.

That’s the juiciest part, but there’s stuff in there about the Surrealists, and horror as the sacred, and symmetry, and struggling with the presence of evil in a world that also contains wonderful things, and all manner of other stuff that hit me right in the gut. You must read this.

* Hey, it’s a new Emily Carroll comic! This contains one of her creepiest images yet.

* Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls will be adapting the Nine Inch Nails dystopian-future concept album Year Zero for Trent Reznor’s long-gestating HBO/BBC miniseries. That sounds fine.

* Too Much Coffee Man‘s Shannon Wheeler, of all people, nails the problem with Chester Brown’s Paying For It, as succinctly as anyone I’ve seen make the attempt. I think calling for a heavier editorial hand is a nonstarter, though, and for good reason. A heavier editorial hand would likely have preempted Chester Brown’s entire career.

* Curt Purcell salutes the proud wearer of Comics’ Greatest Jacket, Death Note‘s Naomi Misora.

* Paging Frank Santoro: Marcos Martin is really approaching page layout differently than anyone else in superhero comics, if this preview page from his and Mark Waid’s Daredevil #1 is any indication.

* I’m really not sure what Darryl Ayo’s comics call to arms is about — the problems, and the people, he’s addressing are described in terms too general to be useful. Mostly I find my enjoyment of comics increasing the less I worry about the state of comics, or more specifically the less I expose myself to the daily scrum of jawjaw about same. That said, he put together a gallery of lovely images to support the post, including these pieces by Al Columbia and Frank Quitely that I’d never seen before.

* Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains has posted a couple of killer galleries lately. First up is the cosmic horror of Anatoly Fomenko, with its wondrous and oppressive sense of scale:

* And next is the scabrous, texture-heavy creature portraiture of Hasama (warning: the image below is fine, but the rest are not for anyone who’s squeamish about facial disfiguration):

* Aled Lewis’s “Video Games vs. Real Life” is similar to a Star Wars-based photography project that made the rounds a while back, but even though I was familiar with the basic idea at play, I still found this Donkey Kong image kind of unnerving. Looking through the foliage and seeing something looking back at you is the great cryptozoological dream/nightmare image.

* If you can’t trust them to straighten their belts, how can you trust them to save us all from Despero???

* I’m pretty excited to discover a Broadway revival of Godspell is in the works for this October. Stephen Schwartz, the show’s creator, is involved, so that leaves me optimistic that they won’t just slap a coat of Rent paint on the thing. It’s my favorite show.

* My final Game of Thrones chat with Megan Morse is now up at The Cool Kids Table. I’d say this one’s most interesting for our talk of different approaches to season finales, and what was expected here versus what was delivered.

* Brian Chippendale is back writing about Marvel comics! Nobody does it better. He’s absolutely right that Uncanny X-Force is a really good book, by the way. Also, Brian Chippendale is on Twitter.

* Kim Thompson interviews himself about the new Jacques Tardi/Jean-Patrick Manchette book Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot. I really don’t like the sound of what he says about cat lovers beware.

* Over at Topless Robot, my pal Rob Bricken has some fun at Green Lantern‘s expense. As he and I have both said before, you can put up with almost any number of plot holes of whatever width provided the stuff those holes were poked in was worthwhile to begin with.

* John Porcellino’s King-Cat #69 is now up on What Things Do. I liked that issue.

* New Ben Katchor is always a delight.

* Uno Moralez is great update: Uno Moralez is great.

* I haven’t been following Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary; this page tells me I ought to get on that toot sweet.

* And how about that Moebius?

* Finally, I will miss Clarence Clemons, who helped make this.

Here are links to all of my Game of Thrones reviews. 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
Episode 01: Winter Is Coming
Episode 02: The Kingsroad
Episode 03: Lord Snow
Episode 04: Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things
Episode 05: The Wolf and the Lion
Episode 06: A Golden Crown
Episode 07: You Win or You Die
Episode 08: The Pointy End
Episode 09: Baelor
Episode 10: Fire and Blood
List: The Seven Most Awful Things People Did on Game of Thrones Season One

SEASON TWO
Episode 11: The North Remembers
Episode 12: The Night Lands
Episode 13: What Is Dead May Never Die
Episode 14: Garden of Bones
Episode 15: The Ghost of Harrenhal
Episode 16: The Old Gods and the New
Episode 17: A Man Without Honor
List: The 10 Biggest Differences Between Game of Thrones and the Books
Episode 18: The Prince of Winterfell
Episode 19: Blackwater
Episode 20: Valar Morghulis
* Follow-up 01
* Follow-up 02
List: The Best and Worst New Characters in Game of Thrones Season Two
List: Final Standings in the Game of Thrones After Season Two

SEASON THREE
Q&A: Bryan Cogman (Executive Story Editor)
Season Three Cheat Sheet
Season Three New Character Guide
Episode 21: “Valar Dohaeris”
Q&A: Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell)
Episode 22: “Dark Wings, Dark Words”
Q&A: Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark)
Episode 23: “Walk of Punishment”
Q&A: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister)
Episode 24: “And Now His Watch Is Ended”
Q&A: Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy)
Episode 25: “Kissed by Fire”
Q&A: Maisie Williams (Arya Stark)
Episode 26: “The Climb”
Q&A: Aiden Gillen (Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish)
Episode 27: “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”
Episode 28: “Second Sons”
Q&A: Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth)
Episode 29: “The Rains of Castamere”
Q&A: Richard Madden (Robb Stark)
Taking stock of Season Three: Bloggingheads.tv discussion with Alyssa Rosenberg
Episode 30: “Mhysa”

SEASON FOUR
The Top 40 Game of Thrones Characters, Ranked
Season Four Cheat Sheet
Q&A: Pedro Pascal (Prince Oberyn Martell)
Episode 31: “Two Swords”
Q&A: Rory McCann (Sandor Clegane/The Hound)
Episode 32: “The Lion and the Rose”
Episode 33: “Breaker of Chains”
Episode 33 extra: on “that scene”
Q&A: Aiden Gillen (Petyr Baelish/Littlefinger)
Episode 34: “Oathkeeper”
Episode 34 extra: more on “that scene” and its aftermath
Episode 35: “The First of His Name”
Episode 36: “The Laws of Gods and Men”
Episode 37: “Mockingbird”
Episode 38: “The Mountain and the Viper”
Episode 39: “The Watchers on the Wall”
Q&A: Neil Marshall (director, “The Watchers on the Wall,” “Blackwater”)
Episode 40: “The Children”
The Top 10 Greatest Moments from Game of Thrones Season Four

* 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.

I contributed an essay recommending A Song of Ice and Fire for the latest issue of The Lifted Brow, the fine Australian arts magazine. To put on my other nerd hat for a moment, there’s also comics and art from the likes of Blaise Larmee, Lane Milburn, Noel Freibert, Lisa Hanwalt, and Eddie Campbell. You should check it out.

Also, my weekly Game of Thrones chat with Megan Morse is up at The Cool Kids Table. This one ends on a high note.

* 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.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – if you haven’t read the books, you can still read this . Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* That was tough to watch. Who knew? Maybe months of anticipating what would happen in this episode were enough to recreate a week of wondering what would happen in this episode. By that final scene my pulse was racing, and I had that elevator-dropped-out feeling in my stomach I’d grown familiar with from The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, shows that at one point or another had me convinced that anyone, literally anyone, might not make it to the end of a given episode. Only this time, I knew, and still got that feeling.

* It was the show’s best scene as filmmaking, certainly. Sweeping camera movements to create a sense of immersion and environment, intelligent sound design that highlighted or dropped this or that element to hyperfocus our attention, terrific performances from Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams and Sean Bean. Even little details, like how Joffrey was framed when he ordered the execution, or the way Ser Ilyn Payne just materialized out of nowhere, slapped on his mask, and brought the sword down, delivered.

* You’re primed to think the big question is “Will Ned sacrifice his honor or die?”, not “Will Ned sacrifice his honor and die?” The misdirection goes well beyond “they’ll never kill the main character…will they?” and into how the whole back half of the season/book is constructed.

* Jeez, the Hound is huge. Did you see him holding Ned on the steps when Ned got beaned by the crowd? He towered over Sean Bean.

* And speaking of sound design, the sounds from Drogo’s tent…woof, that was good stuff. I actually think this was a more frightening way to approach it than the scary shadows of the book. It’s actually more of a challenge to make a tent feel like a mouth into hell in broad daylight, but those horrible bellows and screams were more than enough. I wouldn’t have gone in there.

* I’m glad to see Varys’s motives being revealed and treated as sincere. Even Ned seems to get that. Conleth Hill was especially good in that scene, every bit the practiced liar finally letting his guard down and delivering some real talk.

* Michelle Fairley continues to improve as Catelyn. Her anger and frustration with Walder Frey’s pettiness and her tears of joy upon seeing Robb return from battle were her two most human displays in the whole series. Catelyn’s our main character now, for all intents and purposes, and this episode made me a lot more optimistic about that prospect.

* Tyrion’s sleepover party with Bronn and Shae was a blast. You’ve got to hand it to Jerome Flynn and Sibel Kikelli, who took two characters we barely know, including one we just met, sat them alongside a main character played by a beloved actor, and made it feel like yeah, absolutely these three people would stay up into the wee hours drinking and goofing around together. I’m a softie, so I’m happy anytime characters in fiction about how hard the world is manage to respect and befriend one another.

* Just a lot of fine moments sprinkled throughout the whole episode, actually. Sticking Tyrion on the dolly for that shot as he comes to was inspired, just as discombobulating as you’d imagine it was for Tyrion. Maester Aemon comes out of nowhere to reveal that he’s one of the most important people in the world. Jon’s fellow grunts flip out over his sword like the teenage boys they are, while Rast and his fellow raper sit in the corner glowering. It was a really, really good hour of television, good enough to get me too keyed up to sleep properly.

* I’ve long said it’s a mug’s game for people like me to try to speak for viewers who’ve never read the books, but I do wonder what they made of this episode’s two major battles taking place off-screen. Since I’ve been following the production of the show from day one, I was aware that budget limitations constrained them from going too crazy in the battle department, but I did expect that they’d get at least one in before the season was over, and it stood to reason that Tyrion riding into battle at the front of a horde of screaming tribesmen was going to be the one. Instead he got clocked on the head and slept through the battle. While this was certainly true to the material’s penchant for puncturing the glory balloon and letting all the air seep out, it also felt like what it was — a way to save money. Ditto Robb’s victory in the Whispering Wood, despite it being presented in much the same off-screen way it was in the book. Since the show isn’t wedded to the book’s POV-character structure, it’s show itself to be perfectly capable of showing us what was going on when our POVs were elsewhere. Robb Stark’s direwolf-aided sneak attack on Jaime Lannister would be a logical choice in that regard, you’d think. It’s a testament to the filmmakers that this episode felt as epic and portentous as it did even though both battles were presented as a fait accompli.

* And boy, there’s nothing quite like feeling disappointed about the lack of battle scenes to make you question if you’ve truly internalized A Song of Ice and Fire’s anti-war message as much as you’d thought. I think I’m okay with my desire to see a good battle scene despite my growing (and ASoIaF-aided!) pacifism — after all, it is okay to enjoy things in art you’d never enjoy in real life. Certainly someone as apt to freak out over animal cruelty as I am had to come to grips with that fact if I were to watch the show at all. But more than that — and here I credit Maureen Ryan, who’s been something of a killjoy about the show, for the insight — A Song of Ice and Fire is a series about war, and it’s tough to be about war without showing war. I still think the message gets through thanks to all the other horrible killings we’ve seen, but seasons down the line, things like Septon Meribald’s monologue about broken men are going to have less of an impact if we’ve never seen why men might break. Or maybe I just want some exciting and thrilling carnage. Maybe it’s both.

Community is the only current sitcom I’m watching, and I really like it; it’s a show that feels like it’s constantly learning about itself and improving from that learning — like, noticeably so, from one episode to the next (with some stumbles) — because it finds itself to be fascinating and a rich subject of study. So it doesn’t surprise me that creator Dan Harmon, who no doubt has studied the show more than anyone, has a ton of insightful things to say about it, as he does in this massive Onion AV Club interview with Todd Van Der Werff, in which Harmon comments on every single episode from Community Season Two: part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nor does it come as a shock that there’s a fine line between insightful and insufferable. But somehow that just makes it even more entertaining and fascinating. It’s very funny and rewarding to imagine this interview as a continuous monologue issued by an prodigiously coked-up but actually really smart and creative dude who’s cornered you at a party after you simply asked him “So how’s the show going?”, where there’s no escape but you don’t really even want to escape, you just wanna hear where it’s all headed, and years later you still think about the four hours you spent listening to this guy. I think it’s making a lot of people uncomfortable, this interview — at times it made me uncomfortable — because we want artists to be Goldilocks and put just the right amount of care and effort and obsession and self-doubt into what they’re doing, or at least show us just the right amount. Harmon blows right past that like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. He goes way, way, way, way out there in this. Reading it is a truly singular experience.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* Goodness, but George R.R. Martin sure carved himself a big slice of cake by choosing (?) to handle this episode! He said on his blog that the material with Tyrion and Bronn and Shagga early on was a holdover from a previous episode written by the showrunners that was moved here during editing, but that aside, he still had to handle the massacre of all the Winterfell staff in King’s Landing; Syrio’s standoff and Arya’s escape; Sansa’s capture and attempts to ingratiate herself with/blackmail by the Lannisters; Barristan’s firing; the Dothraki raid on the Lamb People, Dany’s defense of their women, Drogo’s wounding, and the introduction of Mirri Maz Duur; Jon’s insubordination against Thorne, the wight attack, burning his hand while saving the Lord Commander, finding out about Robert and Ned; Tyrion’s arrival at Camp Lannister with the tribesmen and their subsequent arrangement with Tywin; the scenes with Varys and Ned; Catelyn’s rejection by Lysa; some Bran business; and Robb’s entire march to war. That is a lot of ground to cover. I don’t really wanna use the word seamless, but, well, there you have it.

* The bloody business at the beginning was quite effectively staged. After the on-screen gore of the initial sneak attack on unarmed Northmen by the Lannister goons, the rest is all implied, which somehow makes it even worse by making the viewer complicit with the deaths we don’t see — since we don’t see them, only infer them, we’re the ones cutting the throats of Syrio Forel and Septa Mordane. And the scene in which Arya flees from Syrio’s standoff only to stop short as she hears the screams and sees the shadows of the combat raging what had been her home that very morning was somehow the most brutal bit of all. You can’t go home again.

* Good for the show for giving Septa Mordane a moment of bravery. In the book she’s just a foolish old woman with a bug up her ass — you imagine this coming to her as a total shock to her conception of proper behavior, an affront to her sensibilities. Here she seems like someone who knows how the world works, knows what’s happening and what’s about to happen, and faces it anyway. I like this Septa Mordane better!

* I didn’t see this coming: The Stark daughters’ most unpleasant actions during the downfall of their father were both significantly altered. Arya’s killing of the stableboy was changed from a clumsy but still deliberate act to an accident, and Sansa didn’t narc on her father’s plans to send her back to Winterfell. I actually don’t think I have a problem with either of these. In Arya’s case, for both her and the stableboy I think the outcome is pretty much the same. In Sansa’s, I think the audience would have had a really, really hard time not just forgiving her, but even watching her scenes from then on out. (I worried about that before the show premiered.) But moreover, I couldn’t figure out how the timing would have worked out. The way it’s all conveyed in the show, it seems clear that Cersei springs into action the moment Ned tells her he knows about her and Jaime and warns her to leave before Robert returns. Sansa’s snitching would have been not just unnecessary but confusing unless the show took time it probably didn’t have to explain the precise timing. Heck, I just read through the relevant chapters and even in the book I can’t quite understand why the Lannisters saw Sansa spilling the beans as the just-in-the-nick-of-time intervention that saved their collective bacon, what with Ned going directly to Cersei and Littlefinger’s susbequent doublecross.

* Zombies need a pop-cultural season of rest worse than any other monster, so kudos to the show for figuring out a way to still make one unpleasant and uncanny and dangerous. I’m glad he was fast, and I’m glad that he moved a bit like an automaton, a terminator. Jon’s lamp toss was well-played as well.

* You’re going to lose some of the visual impact of the younger characters by aging them up, and that’s certainly true of Robb, who seems young but not a high-school sophomore suddenly placed in charge of a war. But his physical appearance still manages to work in his favor, with actor Richard Madden’s big brown eyes constantly widened with emotion — fear, anger, uncertainty, grief, whatever. He looks like someone who’s new to all this, doing his best but still very very new to it.

* Greatjon’s fingers — great stuff. That was the “What do you mean I’m funny?” of Game of Thrones.

* Every once in a while, the Monty Python-ness of it all hits me in an amusing way. The Greatjon sounds like one of John Cleese’s broader accents, while Shagga looks like Tim the Enchanter. And obviously, the Holy Grail rule of being able to tell who the King is because “he’s the only one who hasn’t got shit all over him” is very much in effect.

* It’s unfortunate that we haven’t seen enough of the Westerosi way of war yet to realize that the depredations of the Dothraki aren’t a mark of their intrinsic savagery, but a mark of everyone’s intrinsic savagery. Generally speaking, that’s a problem the show is going to have throughout due to its decision to sort of half-ass its depiction of Dothraki culture relative to Westerosi culture. These kids of comparisons are just gonna be harder to make when one of the two cultures being compared is more sketched than drawn.

* Michelle Fairley as Catelyn….aaallllllmost won me over in this episode. It had to be her turn for the hardass that did it, I guess. The performance is still too one-note and Catelyn’s still too mother-hen, but being a mother hen by urging your chicks to launch themselves at bigger meaner birds is finally the complicating character trait that TV-Catelyn needed.

* I didn’t doubt Varys’s sincerity about serving the realm because “someone has to.” That really sounds about right.

* I have to admit, I get a kick out of Tywin’s acceptance of the tribesmen. Even though I knew better, I still expected him to reject these savages out of hand, but one of the things that make Tywin such an effective leader is that he’ll act against type if the means are justified by the ends. In this case, as pathetic as he finds Tyrion and loathsome as he probably finds his low-born new friends, he also recognizes effective (and useful) warriors when he sees them, and I don’t doubt that his compliments to their prowess are sincere as well.

* This episode had some of the show’s strongest images so far. Winterfell’s entire flock of ravens being sent out to all the bannerman was beautifully done, and something I wouldn’t have thought to show at all, sort of like how the lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King went from a throwaway event to one of the most talked-about sequences in the whole series of films because Peter Jackson came up with an interesting way to shoot it — well, because he chose to shoot it at all. But I think my favorite image was of Sansa kneeling before the throne, her sleeves and gown pooling down around her like silk chains. She looked sad and little and deflated. And that was a nice little visual pun right at the end, closing an episode called “The Pointy End” by having one of the points of the Iron Throne slowly swallow the screen.

* Rickon’s scene was sad and creepy. It reminded me of Newt at the beginning of Aliens: “It won’t make any difference.”

* The rumors (which weren’t so much rumors as they were lots of people knowing exactly what was going to happen and talking about it privately but not being able to say so publicly just yet) are true: DC is scrapping, re-numbering, and relaunching its entire superhero line, launching fully 50 different #1 issues in September. What’s more, the entire line will go day-and-date digital, with digital versions of the books going on sale the same day as their print counterparts. Much more on this anon.

* The two Hobbit movies, subtitled An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again, will be released in December 14, 2012 and December 13, 2013 respectively. See you there opening night.

* Ed Brubaker on superheroes, violence, and closure — one of the most interesting things I’ve read about superhero comics in a long time, from Tom Spurgeon’s very interesting interview with the writer.

* Bruce Baugh on John Carpenter’s The Thing:

Third, there’s a useful lesson in plotting in this story. You absolutely don’t have to nail down everything for it to feel like a tight, connected whole if you give the audience—or players—enough solid points for them to stand on while speculating about the rest. In the case of the Thing’s subversion of the various station members, we can tell with great confidence when some happened, and even get to see some right on screen. Others we can only wonder about. And that’s fine. Players often like to chew over the unresolved questions, if it doesn’t all just feel like an exercise in futility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this sort of thing, about questions left unanswered by various genre fictions, and how sometimes those un-answers remain a huge part of the work’s appeal years later while other times they’re the reason we rarely return to it, all in the context of how Twin Peaks seems to be a case of the former while it’s still unknown what side Lost will eventually fall on. I think it has to do with…I guess I’d call it a matter of “full absences” versus “empty absences”? You want a given absence of information to feel like it’s full of information that for whatever reason you can’t see, rather than just a gaping hole where information should be, but I’m not sure if I can nail down what the difference would be other than “I know it when I (don’t) see it.” I need to hash that out some more.

* This is exactly why I keep Corey Blake in my RSS reader: Here he’s collected links to all of my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner’s “Comics College” columns, which offer advice to newcomers on where to begin with the work of the great cartoonists.

* I wish there were an apostrophe after the author’s last name–that would make the title of Michael Kupperman’s next book even funnier.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in fine form today. First he coined the phrase “the fiscally fantastic” to describe fiction about the extravagantly carefree wealthy. My wife and I were talking about this just this past weekend, in reference to how Frasier, despite being more consistent over the course of its however-many seasons than its predecessor Cheers and the similarly ubiquitous-in-syndication sitcom Roseanne, really doesn’t hold a candle to either one. In the end, stories about Roseanne‘s nuclear family of working poor and Cheers‘ adopted family of three-time losers feel more inherently…I dunno, worth telling than the travails of the Brothers Crane as they try to balance failed romances with getting time on the squash court, drinking aged scotch and fine wines, and snagging season tickets for Seattle’s most expensive cultural attractions. I know I’ve also gotten kind of tired of movies about billionaire vigilantes and rich young beautiful urban professionals who learn something about life and laughs and love.

* Then there’s this piece on why male readers should read women writers. Basically, Rooney Ruling yourself to account for gender opens you up to the output of over half of the human population, which can only redound to your benefit compared to sticking just to the Y-chromosome set:

This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.

I think it’s worth murdering your inner sexist pig, but yes. One thing that the “eat your vegetables” metaphor for doing less-than-immediately-easy things undervalues is that when you eat your vegetables it’s not that the only benefit is that you’ve satisfied your mom and dad, you’re also getting vital nutrients necessary to stay alive. Plus, broccoli is delicious. You know?

* It’s been great to see Brian Hibbs, Graeme McMillan, and Jeff Lester — the Big Three of the fractured Justice League that is The Savage Critic(s) — return to regular capsule-review writing. You should go and browse through the past several weeks of entries, but for now let me direct you to Jeff’s most recent contribution, which contains this beautiful bit of writing on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy:

By [the ’50s], it feels like every character has turned grotesque, and every object requires an arrowed caption to label it, a paranoid’s world where nothing can be dismissed.

Ooftah, that last bit is good.

* Though I think Nitsuh Abebe is being too hard on Lady Gaga, who’s a better pop star than we deserve, and that he ultimately stops short of where he could have gone with his argument that provocation and “being yourself” are value-neutral concepts — that’s as may be, but surely we could look at the actual form these things have taken with, say, Odd Future and Lady Gaga and evaluate their respective value, no? — the rest of his column on the message of Born This Way is so stuffed with great ideas, expertly delivered, that I hardly know where to begin excerpting it. But here’s a start: “Aren’t ‘be yourself’ and ‘be what you want to be’ totally different instructions?” That’s an underexplored aspect of Gaga’s persona. “Born This Way” — what if you weren’t? Her embrace of artifice is so complete that it’s odd to think of how she’s simultaneously arguing for the primacy of personal authenticity.

* Some sweet, He-Man-cartoon-reffing fanart for Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit by Marc Palm.

* This looks like sketches for a new Uno Moralez comic.

* Always good to see a new Ben Katchor strip.