Thursday, December 06, 2007

Brief Words About Recent Books And Upcoming Content

As you may have noticed, I upgraded to the current version of Blogger a week or so ago. It's made the site a little more functional, I think, although my StatCounter stats are screwed up. Either that or there are 90% fewer people visiting, which is entirely possible.

It's been a weird few weeks around here. The Best Wife Ever and I have been pretty busy with our real lives. My parents visited for Thanksgiving. The leaves need raking. We went to Grand Illumination, the kickoff of Colonial Williamsburg's Christmas season. That doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging about new comics.

Actually, I've been reading a lot outside the Wednesday hauls, and that's taken time away from the weekly roundups too. Last week it was The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier and I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!. I got Showcase Presents The Brave And The Bold Batman Team-Ups for my birthday last month, and Wednesday I got Showcase Presents Sgt. Rock. So far, all of them have been pretty entertaining, although Black Dossier was fairly self-indulgent.

Of course, I've been keeping my regular Thursday deadlines for Grumpy Old Fan, and as I mentioned in a comment on today's post, odds are good that I'll finish the magnum-opus Grand Unified Theory of DC Comics -- my own Black Dossier, probably, with all that implies -- before too long. I'm a little frightened by the thought of that, and you should be too.

I'm also interested in the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of DC's output, but I admit freely that it'll take more research than I have time for right now. Moreover, I'm not sure the answers are readily available. Just off the top of my head:

-- Are there still formal "ship weeks," i.e., where Batman ships reliably on, say, the second week of every month?
-- How does one calculate when a month has a fifth week? (I think it used to be the number of Tuesdays, but that might just have been back when the books shipped on Fridays.)
-- How late have DC's books been, really? How does that compare to Marvel, Dark Horse, and/or Image?
-- What should fill the slots all these Countdown miniseries will leave behind?
-- Is a variant cover a slot-filler? What about a second printing?

You get the idea. I still think a lot about comics, even if those thoughts don't make it to this blog. I just wanted you to know I haven't turned this space into a series of scans (although I like doing the scans too). It might not be this weekend, or next week, but before too long, I hope to be filling this space with long-winded tirades about superhero esoterica, just like old times.

As they used to say, "be here -- it'll be good!"

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