employee aaron

A giant mosquito on top of a tiny elephant.

filed under Categories employee aaron, question time 45 Comments

It’s like a ready-made symbolic representation of something:


Like the mosquito could be labeled “DC/MARVEL” and the elephant can be, I don’t know, “THE DIRECT MARKET.” Whee, instant editorial cartoon of…dubious meaning, I guess. It came about when, at the end of the day, Employee Aaron got his hands on a piece of paper and asked if I wanted him to draw anything, and I told the very thing that’s in the subject line of this post. So there you go. And yes, maybe it’s a regular-sized elephant and a really freakin’ huge mosquito, or a regular-sized mosquito and a very tiny elephant. But whatever.

Anyway, I didn’t ask you here to show you that. I asked you all to meet me here today for you to ask me questions. Yes, it’s been about a year since the last time I did this (though that “question time” tag brings up a post from 2007, and I know I did it more recently than that), but I think it’s been long enough. So, you, my internet pals, know the routine…please drop a question in the comments section for this post, and, in a few days (let’s say, Monday) I’ll start answering them. As usual, try to keep ’em clean and friendly and not too terribly nosy, and at least kinda related to things on this site. And as before, I reserve the right to reject questions, but I haven’t so far. (Don’t take that as a challenge, by the way!)

If you have any questions, please drop ’em in the comment box down there. I always enjoy doing this and I hope you folks get something out of it, too. (And, since it happened the last couple of times I did this…please don’t answer my questions for me by responding to them in the comments. Thank you!)

If only life were like that.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, employee aaron, sir-links-a-lot 5 Comments

from World’s Finest #183 (March 1969) by Leo Dorfman, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito


Hey, I didn’t even realize when I pulled this comic aside that its cover date is the very month and year of my birth! (Its actual release date was likely a month or two previous, I think.) Huh, neat. To think my birth coincided with the raising of the Superman and Batman flags at the United Nations…where they fly even today.

Anyway, you guys had some comments on the redesign from yesterday, so let me respond to a couple:

Just Some Guy sez:

“Oh god! Searing pain in my retinas! The glare… too bright!”

Yeah, it is very…white, isn’t it? I’d been dead set on duplicating the exact look of the old site, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to upgrade…I kept fiddling around with WordPress templates and getting frustrated and giving up. But I think this layout is a lot more open, and a lot less, I don’t know, 2003. I think I can live with it.

Plus, I finally changed the banner. Having some old friends staring back at me from across the top of my site helps ease the transition.

Walaka wonders

“Um, isn’t the apostrophe in your title backwards/upside down? What’s up with that?”

What, indeed? That’s just how the apostrophe is in this particular font used by this theme (Hanami, if you were wondering and if you hadn’t yet peeked at the link at the very bottom of the page). To tell the truth, it kind of bothered me at first, but just a little, and I kind of like it now. Just a little bit of weirdness in an otherwise stately design.

Plus, when I looked at the site on my work computer, it just had the standard straight-line computer apostrophe, so I guess whatever font that is isn’t installed in the shop’s computer. I just used “computer” three times in that sentence.

Pal Andres asks, in regards to my old comments:

“If I read the Blogger update correctly your old site will still be accessible, right?”

Well, it could be, if I go through the trouble of setting it up, but then I’d have two copies of my site on the internet and that could be confusing and screw up Googlers and Bingers and such. I mean, I could adjust settings so that Google wouldn’t index the other site or whatever, but one of the reasons I made the transition over to WordPress in the first place is to kind of keep things simple and in one place. Google’s new set-up would have required fiddling with subdomains and redirects to where Google would be hosting my actual posts, while all the media would still be served up by my hoster, and feh on that.

Employee Aaron declares

“The whiteness of your site will burn my retinas every morning from now on! Soon we will have progressive ruin the social networking site so we can compare Swampthing embroidered doilies!”

You’re fired.

C. Elam gives me more gray hair by suggesting

“I am sure you will be working on fixing links on a prodigious number of your entries, because that is the sort of thing that bothers folks like us. Good luck getting things back to ‘normal.'”

I do plan on fixing some of the internal links to other posts, but it’ll be a slow process since I’m gettin’ near to 3000 entries on this site, and I’d like to be able to sleep sometime. I’ll probably focus on the most recent year’s worth of posts, and work backwards from there.

Former employee Ray (and, in fact, the guy I replaced here at the shop!) pleads

“But you have to get the 1969 thing going. I MUST KNOW what you have done since 1969.”

I think instead of the rotating banner I used to have, that would display a new “since 1969” phrase every time you reloaded the site, I may instead be changing the phrase manually in my banner up there. Not quite as dynamic, I realize, but not everything can make the transition, I’m afraid!

I don’t have the rotating “what people are saying about PROGRESSIVE RUIN” thingie anymore, either, but I do plan on throwing those quotes onto my mostly-empty “About” page. Yes, even the one Dirk wrote about me six years ago about being “one of the better new comic bloggers to emerge so far this year.” I’m hanging onto that quote for dear life.

Ed queries

“Any plans to expand the blogroll to something approaching its former glory?”

Oh, yes, absolutely. But it’ll be a separate page, accessible via a button next to “HOME” and “ABOUT” up there by the banner. Assuming I can do that, that is. In fact, I would have done that today, except I spent all my blogging time doing that swank new banner image. (Who’s not a Photoshop expert? THIS GUY.)

One of the things that bothered me most about the other site is the sheer number of links in the sidebar. It looks cluttered and cramped, but I didn’t want to drop a bunch of links, either. By putting the links on a separate page, that’ll likely encourage me to add lots more of them, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. The links I do have in the sidebar were just kind of put up there to have a blogroll, and are mostly my closest internet pals, the folks with whom I do Fake AP Stylebook, and the mighty Neilalien, the first and most powerful of all comic webloggers.

Anyway, I hope that answered some of your questions about the site. It’s still a work in progress, and again, thank you for your patience and your readership. (And a reminder: you’ll probably need to resubscribe to the syndication feed for your RSS readers…just flip that little chromium switch there at the top of the page.)

In other news:

  • Employee Aaron’s girlfriend Mel had a drawing of hers printed in Tank Girl: Skidmarks #3, out this week in a funnybook store near you. Well, okay, we sold out already, but it’s available for reorder and I’ve got more coming! Here’s a little snippet of it:


    Pick up the issue and check out the whole pic! Oh, and read the rest of the comic, too. After you pay for it. With money.

    You can also visit her Deviantart site and take a gander at her pictures…which, um, may include that same Tank Girl drawing, BUT GO TO SHOP AND PAY MONEY FOR COMIC. Thank you.

  • This gentleman is putting together a list of the “100 Best Comic Book Covers” from 1980 to present, and I’m sure he’s going to get a lot of “um, you forgot” and “wow, really?” responses that these lists always get, but hey, a lot of those are nice images. So anyway, go check it out. Tell him he forgot this cover.

He’s getting the stitches out today, by the way.

filed under Categories employee aaron

I didn’t mention this earlier, because I wasn’t sure if Employee Aaron wanted me to say anything about it…but he’s finally come back to work, and after checking with him, I’ll go ahead and clue you all in. Late last week, while driving to work, Aaron was run off the road by another driver (who, by the way, didn’t bother stopping). Aaron’s car was totaled, with both air bags deploying, and Aaron himself took a nasty knock to the head which required stitches. From his phone call to me minutes after the accident: “Yeah, uh, I was told that I hit the rear view mirror with my head.” If you gotta be told that, chances are you’ve been knocked for a pretty good loop.

Anyway, after taking a couple of days off to recover, Aaron is more or less good as new, save for the seven metal stitches embedded in his scalp. At the very least, he doesn’t appear any goofier than usual. But he’s in good spirits, and he’s otherwise in about Fine to Very Fine condition, with some light cover scuffing and minor wear at the staples, so we’re all thankful for that. And special thanks to former employee Kid Chris for filling in for Aaron while he recovered.

Pal Dorian bought Aaron some “Get Well Soon” gifts, including a hat with which Aaron may, quote, “cover his hideous disfigurement.” Actually, it’s quite the snappy hat. It makes Aaron look like Andy Capp.

Unfortunately, Aaron forgot to e-mail me the photos of his stitching that he took with his cell phone camera, so I’ll have to gross you all out later.

EDIT: Here is a picture of Employee Aaron’s frowny face just prior to getting the staples removed:


And here is a shot of the staples themselves…no blood, but may not be for the squeamish or people who hate slightly blurry photos.

In other news:

  • Virgin Comics has shut down its New York offices, though perhaps there’s a chance for some form of revival in the Los Angeles area. Now, this company never sold incredibly well for us, but it had a small following at our store and we always managed to move a few copies of each title.

    Ah, well. They didn’t publish anything I was particularly interested in, but Virgin generally had good production values and published an attractive product…and its always a shame when a few of my customers find themselves suddenly without some of the comics they enjoyed reading. I always worry about the impact of publishing failures like this, making my customers more cautious about investing their time, money, and interest in new titles from new publishers.

  • Yesterday was Jack Kirby’s birthday. He would have been 91 years old.

    Tom Spurgeon assembled an epic sampling of the King’s work, which is certainly worth your attention. And former Kirby cohort Mark Evanier says this in his tribute to the man’s birthday:

    “…If you had his phone number — and everyone did — you could call up, talk to him and maybe even get an invite to drop by the house for coffee.”

    Not an exaggeration. Kirby lived out his later years in Thousand Oaks, which is just over the hill from where I’m at…well, okay, it’s about a half hour drive, but still, pretty close. And more than a couple of times I’ve flipped open the phone book, looked at the listing for “KIRBY Jack” and looked at that phone number.

    I never called that number, but I’ve heard stories at the store from folks who did…who chatted with him on the phone, or even got to visit him at his house. I never felt comfortable enough to do either of those things…but I did at least get to meet Kirby at a local convention, shake his hand, and chat with him and his wife Roz for a minute or two.

    “Shake his hand.” I say that like I just shook the hand of a mere mortal, of just any ordinary person.

    I got to shake the hand that created and drew Captain America, the Hulk, Darkseid and the New Gods, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Captain Victory, the Boy Commandos, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Challengers of the Unknown, Devil Dinosaur, the Demon, the Fighting Fetus, and countless others. (And I’m not kidding about the Fighting Fetus…you can read my support of that character at the link.)

    The hand that drew the first romance comic book. The hand that drew Popeye in some of the original Fleischer cartoons.

    I got to shake that hand. In my memory, I see myself suddenly becoming enveloped in the Kirby Krackle upon contact. Obviously that didn’t happen, but it should have.

    Happy birthday, Jack.

Other people having fun.

filed under Categories employee aaron, watchmen

So do you ever find yourself flipping channels, and you happen upon a movie you happen to like, and even though you have no intention of watching it, even though you’ve got other stuff you need to be doing, and even though you may even have a copy of it on DVD…you end up sitting there and watching it anyway, with commercials and pan ‘n’ scan an’ all.

Watchmen is kind of like that. (Well, except for the “having on DVD” part, at least for now.) I pulled out my copy of Absolute Watchmen just to check something and ended up reading half the book. And now I don’t even remember what it was I wanted to check in the first place. Oh brother.

Speaking of Watchmen, Employee Aaron text-messaged me from the San Diego Comic Con to tell me:

“Late scoop! San Diego sold out of the Watchmen!”

…so apparently everyone ran out of the trades down there, too. Or, at least, they’re getting scarce. I wonder what kind of crazy panic-pricing is going on for the single issues down there. Anyone got any reports on that?

A few other text messages from Employee Aaron:

“Alright! Just met Ryan Claytor then Edgar Wright followed by Wil Wheaton”

“There is a guy dressed as the Spirit…mask, hat, tie, gloves…Watchmen t-shirt. WTF?”

“Already want to strangle fan behind me. He just called Doc Manhattan ‘Mr. Universe.’ This is going to be tough.”

Also, following up on yesterday…here’s a report on just what the hell was going on at the Eric Powell panel, where Aaron got to join Mr. Powell onstage.

In other news:


Don’t forget to keep up with Bully the Little Stuffed Bull’s San Diego reports! It’s the cutest con report you’ll read this year! BONUS: At long last, Bully meets his favorite member of the Go-Go’s!

You can see the full photo stream here.

And now…a few words with Satan.

filed under Categories employee aaron, scans

A blank, for your infernal convenience:

original image from Adventures into Darkness #14 (April 1954)

EDIT: Here’s a list of folks putting words into Ol’ Scratch’s mouth…if I missed you, let me know:

Armagideon Time

Blog THIS, Pal!

Bully

Chaosmonkey’s Abysmal Pit

Chris “Lefty” Brown 2

The Comic Rack

Cullen M. M. Waters

Eddie-torial Comments

Golfwidow’s Ministry of Silly Walks

Jeff’s Gameblog

Jimmy Olsen’s Blues

Letters to Myself

Mr. Dan Kelly (and the Mr. Dan Kelly Dancers)

namtab

Need Coffee

Noetic Concordance 2

On My Mind

Roger Green

Ryan

Sleestak

So Employee Aaron came up with Crypt of Daylight, and I countered with Pantry of Terror, and then, suddenly, I’m trying to come up with a list of less-than-compelling horror comic titles. Here are a few:

Vault of Home Mortgages

Chamber of Stories (ahem) ‘Borrowed’ from EC Comics

Adventures into the Quite Well-Known, Actually

The Three Bedroom, Two and a Half Bath, Spacious Backyard, Close to a School and a Shopping Center, Newly Constructed Home of Horror

Richie Rich Vaults of Mystery — oh, wait, that one’s real

Weird Tales of Your Mom

All The Stories End with Ironic Twist Endings Monthly

A few quickie linkies: