Westeros

HBO has just released the official season 7 promo for Game of Thrones. See it below:

The song, for those wondering, seems to be “Sit Down”, originally recorded by James; sounds like their version as well, but it may be a cover.

Artist Magali Villeneuve (of 2016 calendar fame) reminded us via a tweet that A Song of Ice and Fire is returning to comics form, with Dynamite Entertainment publishing the first issue in their A Clash of Kings adaptation on June 7 There’s a number of covers for that first issue, but we’ll share Magali’s alternate cover first, featuring her take on Stannis Baratheon and his daughter Princess Shireen:

According to the Previews solicitation, the comic is being adapted by writer Landry Quinn Walker with art by Mel Rubi.

Other covers are provided by Mike S. Miller (familiar to fans for his work on the Dunk & Egg adaptations), Marc Simonetti (well-known to ASoIaF fans thanks to his many covers for foreign editions, as well as his calendar and contributions to The World of Ice and Fire, and Rubi; we’ll show them below:

Miniature gaming fans will be excited by this: Game publisher CMON Limited and Dark Sword Miniatures have teamed up to produce an A Song of Ice and Fire tabletop miniatures game.

Per CMON Limited’s press release, the game will be funded in part through Kickstarter starting Q3, with retail expansions following the publication of the game. We’ll share the full press release below, but we did some digging around on gaming forums and came across two very useful videos from the GAMA trade show where enthusiasts learned more about the game directly from CMON Limited’s team… as well as getting some glimpses of some of the pretty great-looking artwork and sculptures that the game will include.

The Game of Thrones panel at SXSW, featuring producers Benioff and Weiss, as well as actresses Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, has revealed a few tidbits of news as reported by EW.

The most notable items, in my view, are that Benioff and Weiss have indicated that the final season of the series will be only 6 episodes long (although one wonders what odds one or more of those episodes will run long), and that they have no plans of being involved in any Game of Thrones spin-off or prequel project HBO may come up with. Also, this upcoming season will feature a cameo from musician Ed Sheeran, who happens to be a huge fan of the show as you can see in the video below.

While Linda and I were out speaking about The World of Ice and Fire at Gothenburg’s city library, HBO finally revealed the premiere date of season 7 of Game of Thrones: July 16th. And with that reveal, they also launched the first lengthy teaser, titled “Sigils” for its extensive use of the heraldic beasts and objects of the Seven Kingdoms.

This follows after the recent reveal of the Season 7 poster, via Entertainment Weekly. You can find the (brief) press release from HBO below!

Over at George R.R. Martin’s “Not A Blog”, faithful minion Raya revealed the artist behind this summer’s forthcoming the A Song of Ice and Fire 2018 Calendar, as well as an image of the cover of the calendar featuring Victarion Grejoy in his plate armor and kraken helm.

The artist, Eric Velhagen—do check out his personal site with its extensive gallery!—has been twice nominated for the Chesley Awards, the premiere awards for the SF&F genre, and has been published in the prestigious Spectrum series of art books.

We also have some hints of the subjects Velhagen will be depicting in the calendar, courtesy of Random House:

The A Song of Ice and Fire 2018 Calendar is due to be published July 18th.