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Thor, there’s no central someone at the major companies whom you could ask. And believe me, that’d be a full time job for somebody . Imagine: one phone number, one email… to the one person from a com pany who’s talking to all the editors, all the creators… the one guy with all the answers. It’d free up everyone else’s time, I can tell you that.I’d love to see an Office of Internet Communication for each of the major compa nies.

Because, personally, I’ve always wondered what kept OMAC’s hair up.

Uncle Slam November 9, 2001

Well, that’s it, then. It’s been a solid month of the U. S. military dropping bombs on Afghanistan, and from where I sit, wearing my "Brooklyn FDNY Squad 1" t-shirt hand-carried on an actual plane flight for me by the genius Brian Wood, brought past the security guards armed with M-16s straight out of JFK airport… it doesn’t really look to me like it’s really been all that effective. Sure, it’s gotten folks who normally wouldn’t give a thought to such things to address their new-found patriotism, but there are those who’ve always sort of had a thing for the ol’ red-white-and-blue. Ande Parks is one of those guys. Ande’s done a book that most people haven’t heard of, because he didn’t solicit his work through the direct market. You can only get his collected Uncle Slam stories from him, at a convention, or ordered from Ande’s website. But Uncle Slam and Fire Dog is definitely worth seeking out, especially now. Because who doesn’t need to read a comic book about America’s greatest hero, now living in hiding and hunted by the very country he’d sworn to protect? With a robot dog. And a hole in his head. And a bubble pipe. And his girlfriend, the former CIA agent. Here’s the introduction I wrote for the Uncle Slam and Fire Dog trade paperback collection; see if this doesn’t make you want to get a hold of a copy and forget what’s going on in the world for a day or so:

God bless America.

No; really.

Maybe it's the fact that my grandfather was one of the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free when he was a boy of eight years old, and sailed into this country with his sisters from the Ukraine.

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