Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinAlone, unmourned, and unloved since 1969

Odds & Ends.

§ August 17th, 2010 § Filed under retailing, sir-links-a-lot § 5 Comments

• To you folks out there who 1) visit my site directly instead of just pulling the RSS feed, and 2) use some form of Internet Explorer, I apologize for the font size problem yesterday. I had an HTML tag that I didn’t close, and I didn’t notice since I’m on Firefox and that seems to correct for display errors like that, but apparently the problem caused IE, at least in some cases, to go haywire.

  Anyway, I’m pretty sure it’s fixed now.

• I was discussing late comics with some pals the other day, because that’s the kind of thing I do after I get a couple of drinks* in me, and the topic of Batman: Widening Gyre popped up. So I went through the records, and here are the dates of release (well, actually, the date the invoices were generated, with the comic coming out the following Wednesday):

  #1 – 8/23

  #2 – 9/26/09

  #3 – 10/31/09

  #4 – 1/9/10

  #5 – 3/6/10

  #6 – 7/24/10

  So, eleven months or thereabouts, which averages out to about bimonthly, if one were to be charitable. Also noticed that this time around, I didn’t get the parade of complaints demanding the next issue during that extended delay between 5 and 6. Perhaps the reason is that, if one were again charitable, customers finally have learned to expect some comics to ship late.

  Hmm. When Batman and Robin is only a week late, I never hear the end of it. Funny.

• So I was looking at Scott McCloud’s site, and he snapped a pic of some cosplayers he spotted while at the theatre to see Scott Pilgrim…and lo and behold, at the bottom center of the pic, with the green hair and baseball bat, is pal Dana, she of cookies, cakes, and holiday cards. I guess she’s dressed as, I don’t know, Matilda or something. Hey, I didn’t read this “Scoot Pogom” comic.

  Anyway, our little pal Dana is moving away and going off to big person’s school up north at the end of the week, so she’s just going to have to mail us cookies and cupcakes from now on. She’s not getting away that easily. But good luck, Dana! We’ll miss having you around, but we’ll still be able to annoy you via the Internet! Thank God for technology!

• Reader JB sends along this link to a convention sketch of Swamp Thing by Bill Sienkiewicz. Pretty darn cool.
• I don’t even have the words for Andrew’s latest Nobody’s Favorites. It’s a little outside the realm of comics, but Andrew wouldn’t break the format if it wasn’t for good reason.
• Do nerds ruin everything? YOU MAKE THE CALL. (In this case, yes, but I’d totally buy one of these.)
• James Marsters is returning to Smallville for that show’s 200th episode, but not reprising his role as Brainiac. He’s coming back as Legion of Super-Heroes member Brainiac 5. This is…actually pretty clever, I think. Plus, maybe we’ll get him slathered in green body paint which, it goes without saying, is a fetish for someone, surely.

* Diet Cokes, mostly.