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After a little smooth-talking, I convinced Mimi that maybe we could try let ting him out on supervised walks in the backyard and after a couple weeks of this, we were letting Willie roam about at will.

Last week, I was home having lunch, and I heard an awful mewling out side. "Uh-oh," I thought. "It’s kitty conflict."

And as I went outside, sure enough, in our neighbor’s back yard, I saw Willie in a stare-down with the neighbor’s cat. It’s a big orange thing, and it used to give our old cat Tom a bit of a problem every once in a while. But Willie’s not fifteen, and he’s as barrel-chested as this orange thing is. More of a fair fight, this. And so I went up to the fence separating the two yards to watch this feline face-off. I thought we were going to have the whole thing: scratches, swipes, tufts of fur surgically removed with swipe of paw and clench of jaw. Either that, or once Willie saw me, I figured he’d run back into the relative safety of our yard. One or the other. But the oddest thing happened, instead. Willie turned to look at me, slow ly. He was on his haunches about a foot and a half away from that orange cat. Just staring. His head swivelled slowly over his shoulder at me. The orange cat, facing me, also looked up.

Slowly.

Willie turned back to look at the orange cat; stood up. Stretched. The orange cat stood up and stretched. Willie turned and looked at me again, this time turning his body towards me. His left front leg advanced… extended out… slowly. The orange cat turned away from us, moving towards his house… cocked his front leg and moved… slowly.

Both cats doing the same thing, mirror image, one in response to the other.

Of course, this made me think about marketing comics.

Specifically, the proliferation of .pdf files as a new marketing tool for the funny books.

Now, I’m sure most of you reading have checked out Savant at one time or another; they’ve been offering their content in the Portable Document Format since its inception. And there’s the new Borderline , a very impres sive magazine distributed as a .pdf. It’s fifty-six pages of articles, features, news, reviews, previews, interviews ... like an Entertainment Weekly for comic books. I like that one a lot, so far.

Our pals Joe, Jamie, and James over at Oni Press have been offering free

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