My motto's always been "when it's right, it's right."
ITEM! Chris Sims and Matthew Allen Smith reunite for The Chronicles of Solomon Stone #2! And yes, it is a locked-room mystery involving the titular half-vampire skateboard champion private detective who is also a wizard, and his archrival, the werewolf BMX champion private investigator. And it's got a Hitler punch on the cover.
Clearly, it's already in the running for "Raddest Comic of 2010!" Will it take the top prize? Is it radder than #1? U-Decide!
ITEM! Christopher Bird of Mightygodking fame answers a question our collective subconscious has been meaning to ask: what if Bertie Wooster was Batman?:
“I confess, I fail to understand the appeal of the cape.”
“It’s dramatic, Jeeves. Like a bat’s wings. Criminals fear it, I reckon.”
“Do criminals fear gentlemen in opera cloaks?”
“Ah, but this is cut differently from an opera cloak. It rupples.”
“Rupples, sir?”
“Yes. It ruffles and it ripples. Therefore, it rupples.”
“This ruppling of which you speak seems to have a great deal in common with tangling.”
“Enough talk about that, Jeeves. I think I’ve made it quite clear that the cape represents my bat-wings, for I am a child of the night, and so forth.”
“Could not some other form of abstraction suffice, sir?”
“Well, without the wings, I’m hardly a bat, am I? I’m sort of a black badger.”
“I understand badgers can be quite nasty in a pinch.”
“Yes, but it’s not like a great roaring badger came smashing through my window at Brinkley, is it? It was a bat. That’s an omen, Jeeves. Can’t mess about with omens, that’s bad luck.”
More at the link.
ITEM! Steve Bunche has started sharing some of the stranger submissions received by comics companies. This one takes the cake, though:
Now my old man has some of his goons watching me while I work because my new, and once ex employer and manager at work, a once close high school friend, have organized a lynching for me with the tomahawk hellbillies, but I've already rolled over on my old man and think he may not have my back.
It gets weirder.
HERBIE POPNECKER DEPT: So I just found out this exists, but the world is better for it: a catalog of recurring Herbie themes and motifs! How many times did women swoon over Herbie? A lot, that's how many. But not as often as there were butt gags.
NOT COMICS DEPT: In case you've missed it floating around the internet in the past week, Esquire put up an absolutely fantastic piece on Roger Ebert and his life post-surgery and loss of his lower jaw:
In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks. Here idle chatter doesn't exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning.
Even the simplest expressions take on higher power here. Now his thumbs have become more than a trademark; they're an essential means for Ebert to communicate.
Ebert provides his own followup over at his blog.