"There’s no beer here."
I was poking through some ’70s and ’80s DCs at work on Saturday, and I realized that I really miss Bob Rozakis’ old “Ask The Answer Man” columns from the editorial pages. Here’s a good example from March 1979, with a bunch of really short, to-the-point, and only occasionally slightly-evasive – yet still true! – answers:
Now that I get questions like this at the shop all the time, I have as much empathy as I do nostalgia for those columns.
‘Course, I get questions like this, too:
Eventually poor Bob got so many value questions that they were spun off into a second Answer Man column. The values always seemed to be in the under-a-dollar range. I don’t think I ever saw a response that read “Holy crap! That’s worth $3,560!”
In other news:
- Pal Dorian sent along a quote from DC’s Dan Didio in this interview which seems to confirm at least half of my supposition regarding events in the Death of the New Gods series:
“…But the New Gods’ story…they’re gods. They’re [sic] story’s not even close to over. It’s the advent of the Fifth World, and what’s the point of a Fifth World if we don’t have New Gods in it?
“It’s funny for us – I think we’ve telegraphed so much that the New Gods are coming upon a rebirth, and the story that we’re telling with them now is a continuation of the story that was established when Kirby first conceived the concept. Talk about death – Kirby blew up worlds at the start of the series. The story started with, ‘The Old Gods Died!’ which made room for the New Gods – we’re picking up that thread and launching the DCU into the future.”
Okay, they’re not dying, a point made almost explicitly clear in the series itself…the Source isn’t reacting to their deaths, so either the Source is having problems, or whatever is happening to the New Gods isn’t death. My guess was that they’re undergoing a transformative experience, which appears to be what Didio is saying…that they’re being reborn.
Unless of course it’s a whole new batch of Newer Gods popping up, replacing the previous, and dead, New Gods entirely, then never mind.
Still think Shiloh Norman is responsible, though. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
- As I noted in the Twitter, a bunch of drunken folks dressed as Santa Claus were walking through town, carrying on and having a good ol’ time. One woman was shouting incoherently in her megaphone.
They ventured into our store for just a moment, long enough for one guy to exclaim “There’s no beer here,” followed by their mass exodus.
Ha! Little did they know.
- Speaking of dress-up, we had a guy in the shop that looked like a gothity-goth version of Serifan from the Forever People:
Honestly, the thought that went through my head was exactly “Why does that guy look like Serifan?”That I was able to immediately pull up the name “Serifan” out of the memory banks to describe another person and his manner of dress is a bit on the upsetting side.
