Full of crime/mystery/noir + fantasy? Sure. Full of fantasy series that are explicitly mashed-up with prime-time CSI-clone TV procedurals? Not so much.

Sigh... Apparently, the alternate San Francisco is magically 7/8ths white (or 6.5/8ths if we count Kreuk...)

A lot of people forget this, but before Masters of the Universe became a crappy-if-fondly-recalled Filmation travesty, it was a kind of cool sword-and-planet franchise with pretty well-drawn mini-storybooks. He-Man was originally a beefcake barbarian, Skeletor was genuinely freaky-looking, Man-at-Arms didn't have a…

Thundarr is awesome but hardly obscure...

Also, worth noting that Ned hasn't 'compromised' to please his King.He's a good samurai. Duty is clearly his tragic flaw. Defying Robert to make his family happy would have been the compromise.

I don't think it's spoilery to say there's also a deep thematic/symbolic thing going on there - that Sansa, the least wolflike Stark, loses her wolf says something...

Fucking awesome.

That's such a heartbreaking moment in the book. But Martin makes great use of it in making you take a step back from all the royal wrangling to think about how dangerous royal power is.

Best thing ever.

Uhhuhhuhuhuhuhuh. You said "Tool." You said it, like, twenty times. Uhuhuhuhuhuhuh!

The list is, understandably enough, a bit Brit-heavy. Some books that shoulda been on there:

I wonder if the semi-racist smartass who made that has ever actually even read it themselves. A "Wire" type treatment of Dostoyevsky would actually be great.

I dunno. This is a little better, but it all still looks and sounds so...B-List. WW is one of DC's Big Three, but Bats and Supes get Hollywood's hottest director and she gets this? I call BS.

Actually, defining oneself by a lack of vices has been scientifically determined to be 10x as annoying.

Thank God that in these trying times — when average Americans are seeing their employment prospects and pay and benefits shrink while they struggle to pay medical bills, stay in their homes, and provide for their kids — the government is focused on the really important shit:spending hundreds of millions of dollars on…

As appealing as the idea of dragging in as many readers as possible is to me as a writer, I think it's fundamentally dishonest not to let people know that they're coming midstream into an established world/series/character arc. We writers love to claim that readers 'needn't have read previous books,' but I think…

Please! While you losers are fuckin' with those shits I'mma be over here on my sweet...er...convulsive dragon that...um...moves like...a drunk slow-motion epileptic dinosaur.

Recovering from my rage over the American Panther, the American Skull looks awesome - not that I think this is the intention, but he totally looks like he came from a subversive 60s underground comic...

That must be because Amurricuhns ain't afraid of NUTHIN! U-S-A! U-S-A!

THE AMERICAN PANTHER!?!?!?!? Of all the fuckheaded bumblenutted shitbrained character-raping nonsense I have ever seen, this takes the cake. Let me watch Wolverine re-join the Avengers 1,000 times in a row, or watch Galactus get turned into a stupid fucking space cloud again and again, or watch Robbie the robot being…