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Loads of links to critical pieces on comics, film, etc., as well as some investigative reporting I thought was worth linking out to. Get readin'.COMICS/GRAPHIC NOVELSCultural Weekly on Art Spiegelman's "other" masterpiece.The Absence from Martin Stiff looks horrifying. Jason Sacks reviews it at Comics Bulletin. [I tried to get a hold of this book in February via a Titan Books contact to no avail. Sad face.]Broken Frontier on the "spectacularly effective images" in the new comic from Oliver East.At Hooded Utilitarian, a look at suggestion and sci-fi comics: "How do you depict the unimaginable?"The Comics Journal reviewed Mimi Pond's Over Easy and Frederik Peeters' Pachyderme.Graphixia on Ed Piskor's 'Hip Hop Family Tree' comics.I liked comics writer and artist Dean Haspiel's new one-pager for Live Mint.In case you missed it, The Guardian ran collaborative efforts between comics creators and authors. Critic Damon Herd reviewed those at The Comics Grid.Nonfiction comics "can make difficult histories approachable and unforgettable," writes comics scholar Paul Gravett for The Independent.NEWS/REPORTINGFascinating narrative in this New Yorker longread on the mysteries of extreme caving, "a game played in the dark on an invisible field."

When I first met Covington, late one night, he’d just slouched back into camp after five days underground. His eyes were bloodshot, his blond hair clumped and matted, his skin as blanched and fuzzy as moldy yogurt. He was so tired that he could barely stand, and his clothes reeked of cave funk. Yet he seemed fairly content. “A good caver is one who forgets how bad it really is,” he said. There was more to it than that, though. Covington didn’t feel claustrophobic underground; he felt at home. The rock walls, to him, offered a kind of embrace. As a boy, he told me, he used to flop around so much in his sleep that he often fell on the floor. Rather than climb back up, he’d crawl under the bed and stay till morning. He felt better there, beneath the springs, than he did looking up at the ceiling in his big empty room.

"(W)ith Italy awash in debt and struggling to recover, organized crime groups are sitting on mountains of cash."Important piece from Jessica Valenti at The Guardian: "How can we stop rape if we're not even willing to call it what it is?"Will Potter writes for Foreign Policy that global "violence against environmentalists has now escalated to an all-time high."FILMOh man: A 'You Can Count on Me' reference as well as 'Blood Simple' from The Dissolve? Sold.Excellent, from NPR: On 'The Other Woman,' "the most grotesque pantomime of girl power."MUSICNice: Those Ben Klock, Steffi, etc. from Ostgut Ton will be released starting in July as free downloads."Cut down on your pork life, mate!" NME's oral history of Blur's Parklife.Pitchfork talks to music writer Marc Weidenbaum about Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, the subject of Weidenbaum's 33 1/3 book.