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the statues and the Gene Roddenberry action figures and the lunchboxes and the maquettes and the boobs and the guns and the mutants. He is all about the comics and the real comics are past all that other stuff. This month is as the past few and he finds he is only getting the trade paperbacks and the original graphic novels. As he gets older, he finds the comic books are eminently more satisfying with a discrete beginning and a middle and an end and as such he will be getting Mike Allred’s fourth volume of The Atomics , (DEC012083) as well as the collected Colonia (DEC012101). He takes a black Sharpie, his faithful Sharpie, the one that smells of licorice and dirt, and makes thick black marks across the alter nate gold foil number zeroes and the royal blue covers and the nude cheer leader covers and the bleached art covers as he goes along, for they offend his cranky albeit delicate sense of aesthetics. He gets a Through the Habitrails (DEC012261) for his brother-in-law, who will enjoy the surreality of the corporate drone in an ever-changing land scape of cubicles and man-sized hamster cages. This may be the tenth or fifteenth copy he’s bought, but this one speaks to many of his friends, his friends, dear friends, who, unlike him, who have to leave their homes by the sea and commute across the water to jobs within the city. He laughs, briefly, to see an advertisement for Super Dooper Groovy Space Chicks #0 (DEC012400); laughs his hot fudge sundae laugh because he has to admire the cheek of the title and of the art and of the ad copy which loudly proclaims that the book will ship in full color, monthly, and yet the ad is in black-and-white as is the zero issue itself. He may buy it anyway, just to put cash in the hands of folks who are so silly. "Don’t Miss This One Baby" the copy reads, without punctuation, hallowed, over-used and strict punctuation, missing.

He never liked punctuation that much, anyway.

Don’t Submit December 7, 2001

You would have thought that Frank Miller returning to the Dark Knight would have been the DC news that people’d been buzzing over this past week, what with the Entertainment Weekly cover blurb and the run on the book at stores all across the country…

…but it seems like the most volume from the Peanut Gallery was given over to DC officially announcing the end of their submissions policy.

I was sort of non-plussed by this, because, you know, no one was getting

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