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1. Upsetting phone call to the store yesterday:

Me: “How can I help you?”

Boy on phone (maybe 12 or 13): “How old do you have to be to go?”

Me: “Excuse me?”

BOP: “How old do you have to be to go to your store?”

Me: “Um…there’s no age requirement. Anyone can come in, whether you’re 5 or 55.”

BOP: “Okay, just checking…thanks!”

I make sure that the front of the store has family friendly merchandise…newspaper strip reprints, children’s comics (Disney, Archie, etc.), the giant Wall O’Manga, some boxes of bargain comics, no posters of large-breasted women wielding bloody swords*…and this is the thanks I get.

2. Commenter George came close to hitting it right on the head, as it were…the sole purpose of Batman’s terrifying statue was to be knocked over on top of the bad guys. Even better, the base of the statue was apparently made of a fast-melting wax, so that Batman was able to toss a heat-pellet at its base, causing it to immediately melt away and drop “Humpty Dumpty” right on top of the intruding alien creature (don’t ask). Whether the statue served the same purpose in that theoretical Storyville adventure mentioned on the plaque, as commenter George wonders, I have no idea…like commenter Bob, I wonder if any such Storyville story exists.

3. The latest Smallville brings us yet another head injury for Lex, probably leading to the true reason for his eventual villainy…brain damage. At any rate, since it appears that Lex’s pop Lionel has had an honest-to-goodness jail cell conversion (as a result of his “miraculous” healing caused by exchanging “life energies” with Clark in a previous episode*), that leaves Lex as the sole regular cast member in the “villain” role. Of course, he hasn’t really been much of a villain so far…he’s been a jerk at times, but nothing that would result in supposedly fated life-long conflict with Superman. Plus, most of rough patches between Lex and Clark have mostly been Clark’s fault, stemming from either Clark trying to keep his powers a secret, or from Clark just being outright unreasonable. That could play into the Silver Age comics’ origin of the Superman/Luthor enmity, with Clark having a hand in creating his own worst enemy, but I expect instead that we’ll see Lex do something completely evil and irredeemable on his own near the end of the series, and that’ll be that.

3a. While it was nice to see Jane Seymour in this episode, I’m not sure the cost of having her in the episode (an extension of the “Lana possessed by a witch” story I hoped we were done with last time) is worth it.

3b. According to the Kryptonsite rumors page, Smallville‘s Chloe Sullivan may be introduced into regular DC Comics continuity…perhaps in her own series.

* You should see some of the promo posters we receive…parents would burn me in effigy if I put some of these things on our walls.

** Sometimes there just aren’t enough quotation marks. Just picture me rolling my eyes as I wrote that entire parenthetical aside.

from Detective Comics #279 (May 1960) – art by Sheldon Moldoff & Charles Paris

So I’ve been writing an awful lot on this website lately, and I realize that’s a lot of huge chunks of text for you all to wade through. If you do willingly inflict my disjointed ramblings upon yourself, you have my appreciation.

Don’t worry…I’ll have another funny comic panel tomorrow to break up the monotony!

In other news:

Pete Von Sholly revives the John Stanley classic Melvin Monster with a full 32-page web-only comic book! Here’s the link to the press release, and from there you can read the whole darn thing. Fun stuff!

Peter David reprints an old “But I Digress” column in which he discusses writing movie novelizations. One of the books discussed: his rather liberal (and highly recommended by yours truly) adaptation of Return of the Swamp Thing.

Holy frijole – H kicks ass and takes names with his look at the Comic Buyers Guide Top 1,600 Comics list. Our store’s copies showed up today, and…hoo boy, H earned his merit badges if he waded through that whole thing. (Am I right in that there was no mention of Love & Rockets in that list? Wha-HUH?)

I have here in front of me a photocopied preview of the forthcoming AiT/Planetlar release Proof of Concept. It’s an anthology of short science fiction and/or fantasy/horror stories, all written by publisher Larry Young, and illustrated by several different artists. The stories run from the amusing (kids find a spatial anomaly in their backyard) to the compelling (a crew of time-travelers must pursue their insane former captain through time and space) to the downright bizarre (a future world populated entirely by clones of Abraham Lincoln). There are a variety of art styles at work here, ranging from Steven Sanders and Jeff Johns’ cartoony style in “Zombie Dinosaur,” to the rough-hewn, but still appealing, art of Paul Tucker in “The Camera.” All the artists are nicely matched to the mixture of tones Young presents in his stories.

Aside from being a collection of entertaining stories, Proof of Concept has an additional purpose: showing just how to sell a story to a reader and/or publisher. Don’t just go on and on describing every nuance of your new, terrific, and completely original idea: give us a hook, like, say, “zombie dinosaurs!” There you go; what’s more high concept than that? However, instead of explaining how to sell your idea (as Young had done previously in the excellent True Facts), he shows you, complete with interstitial sequences (illustrated by Kieron Dwyer) featuring Young pitching his various ideas to a friend over the phone. Each discussion begins with Young setting out the hook (“Anne Rice meets The Fugitive“), spends the next couple of panels adding details to the hook, and then following up the interstitial with the hook in action as one of the anthology’s stories. It’s a clever gimmick, and drives home the importance of having a direction to your story…all the pretty art and clever dialogue in the world can’t save your script unless there’s a strong idea at the core.

My only minor complaint about the book is that the stories are mostly just excerpts from longer works…once you really get into the story, it abruptly ends and goes on to the next. (The only story that appears in its entirety is “The Bod,” a previously-published work by Young and John Heebink.) It’s a whole lot of set-ups, and not a whole lot of payoffs. Ultimately, though, that really doesn’t count as a complaint, since it supports Young’s point that stories with a strong (or, at the very least, catchy) ideas will grab your attention and not let go. As it is, this is still one heck of a sampler book, and I wouldn’t mind seeing any of these stories in a fuller format. It’s entertaining and it’s educational, and a must-read for any aspiring writers, particularly those interested in the adventure genre. Keep an eye out for it in December.

EDIT: Pal Dorian has his own review…we’re twinsies!

I’ll probably have my usual “new comics day” post tomorrow morning, but I had to point this out to you…probably the most terrifying ad to run in Marvel Comics publications this month:

“Jackie Legs is hip-hoppin’ his way to the U.S.A.!” it says, and who am I to deny it? Also, one of the DVD bonuses is the We Keep It Jumpin’ rap, so you know this is a quality package.

1. Okay, fine, I wasn’t going to say anything more about the new DC solicitations, but I should say at least 1) “woo-hoo, Skizz!” and 2) this may be the single geekiest assortment of action figures I’ve seen in my entire life…and thus, I am tempted by all of them.

2. I also received DC’s list of forthcoming collections at the store yesterday (Christopher lists them all here). The Superman Vs. The Flash book sounds like fun…I actually have all the comics reprinted therein, but it’ll be nice to have them on better (well, marginally better) paper than the originals. These themed Silver and “Bronze” age reprints are always enjoyable, and I hope DC keeps it up.

3. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, I want to emphasize that I dislike the term “Bronze Age.” It just seems so transparent a method to make a bunch of lousy 1970s comics seem like they should be worth a lot more than they are. “Hey, this is a 1976 issue of The Joker” just isn’t as marketable as “Hey, this is a Bronze Age issue of The Joker!” I have yet to use the term “Bronze Age” in our store for any reason (other than to cast aspersions on it). Feh, I say.

4. Oh, and speaking of DC’s forthcoming books, I want everyone to buy that Batman Chronicles book, the one that’s reprinting every Batman story in chronological order, so that maybe DC will do the same with Superman (which is what I really want). Not that I have anything against Batman Chronicles…but I won’t really be interested in that series until they get to the “Batman’s Time Travel Crimes on Venus”-era of stories.

4a. What I wouldn’t give to see a Batman story like this in today’s comics. Hey, that could be the next big Batman Family crossover…”Batman’s Space Olympics!” Finally, a Batman crossover I’d actually be interested in!

5. Ever since I started this weblog, I’ve had friends (and two or three complete strangers) ask me to do a post about Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #106, the infamous “I Am Curious (Black)” story. It is one of my favorite comics in my collection (the best example you’ll probably ever find of “um…I’m sure they meant well”), but it’s been covered several times by various sites and I’m not sure what else I can add to the discussion. However, every few months someone new rediscovers this particular funnybook and holds it up for some well-deserved ridicule…the latest being Millionaire Playboy with its nicely-done overview. (via Neilalien, among others)

Commenter Bob was good enough to put up nice big and clean images of the “hidden images” from Cerebus I was talking about yesterday. You can find links to them in that very comment of his I linked to…they are fairly sizable, and to save him a little bandwidth I decided to post much smaller versions of the same images here so you can at least get an idea of what I was talking about:

I should also note that commenter Sean had that first image up on his office wall. I can only imagine what his non-comic fan coworkers thought of that!

Anyway, I’m sure the Promethea version of this same gimmick will be something to behold, given the usual excellent artistic standards of that funnybook. Mostly, my mind is just boggled that they managed to corral Alan Moore into actually signing copies of the limited variant edition…I don’t even think he signed that long-ago Graphitti Designs Watchmen hardcover, did he?

(Speaking of which, my research into the Watchmen hardcover matter turned up an interesting winner for said item on eBay….lucky guy!)

“What I have here is my collection of ‘Love Is…’ newspaper clippings from the Chicago Sun-Times

There are a total of 342

I have been collecting them for many years and I have no use for them anymore”

Good Lord. Featured in the auction description is a listing of all included Love Is strips, complete with publication dates.

From the Promethea #32 variant edition information in the newest DC solicitations:

“…The posters reveal two hidden images from the book that are only visible in poster format – something completely new to comics!”

…But didn’t Dave Sim do something similar in those “Mind Games” issues of Cerebus?

Don’t worry, I’m only going to nag you about this once more…if you haven’t told me what your ONE favorite currently-published comic book is, please let me know here. I’ll be discussing the results on Monday. (I used the word “tally” in a previous post, and that’s a little strong…it’s not a contest or anything, I’m just curious as to what titles most of you are enjoying.) I also know only a small portion of my daily visitors have left comments so far*…if you haven’t yet, please do! At the very least, I’d like to get that comments section up to 100, just for the fun of it.

In other news:

1. After all the shenanigans on the most recent episode of Smallville have been played out, the conclusion Clark comes to at the end of the episode (and the conclusion the viewer is apparently supposed to draw as well) is that “magic is real, and it can hurt [him].” However, all evidence in the episode suggests that the supposed “witchcraft” is in fact Kryptonian technology…given that the spellbook is embedded with Kryptonian symbols and all.** I suppose we can assume that Clark just didn’t know any better (though one would think that all the talk about the witches wanting the Kryptonian “power stones,” and all of them ending up in the caves with the Kryptonian symbols on the wall, would have been giveaways), but it appears that the intent of the episode was to show that Clark has a vunerability aside from Kryptonite…thus establishing that “magic” is a totally separate force that can affect him. Despite this apparent intention, all this episode really does is show that he can be manipulated by Krypton-tech, something already shown in several previous episodes.

But, hey, it was nice to see Erica Durance back as Lois…she’s a fun charcter, bringing a little edge to Clark’s female relationships in the show (which had primarily been people making weepy doe-eyes at each other).

2. Have you looked at Fred Hembeck’s links page? Holy crow.

3. I should have pointed to Yet Another Comics Blog‘s regular Sunday monkey-cover comics post prior to this, because doing it now just makes me look self-serving. But, really, you should check it out every Sunday…everyone loves monkey covers!

4. In much sadder news, Mark Evanier has posted an obit for Harry Lampert, the cocreator of the Golden Age Flash.

5. Chris has a nice selection of links regarding comics storage. Given that my own vast Mikester Comics Archives are getting a little out of hand, it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.

6. Your timely link for the day: Tips and cheats for the Atari 2600 Superman cartridge. Be sure to click on the Map link. (My fastest time on the game without cheating: 42 seconds. With cheating: 2 seconds. Yes, really.)

* Of course, there’s a percentage of my traffic that’s primarily people looking for naked pictures of actresses. Looking for porn on the internet…what folly!

** Yes, I know the Arthur C. Clarke quote about magic and technology.