Well, this is embarrassing.

I try very hard never to miss a week here. Sure, I sometimes get backed up with Real Life stuff, especially when things happen like an upcoming field trip for the Cartooning Class-- such as next week's trip to the Olympia Comics Festival, do come and see us-- or the upcoming end of the school year that requires me to frantically put together the final student books for both Young Authors and the aforementioned Cartooning classes, a deadline which is also bearing down on me like a freight train. For those occasions I usually try to pocket a column in advance that I can set to time in and post automatically while I'm busy working on all these other things.

However, without getting into all the nauseating details, Real Life just plain kicked our asses in the Hatcher household this week. Work hassles, banking hassles, college stuff with Julie, and well... this time I just didn't manage it.

I've got one lined up for NEXT week, while we're in Olympia... but this week, I just don't have a lot. In the past I have done quickie book reviews or shown you some cool links, but honestly Mr. Burgas just did links earlier today, and I don't really have any capsule reviews either.

So what I DO have is a recommendation. I'm working on a project I can't really talk about yet but it led me to two very cool things.

The first is that Adventure House is having a sale on back issues of their wonderful pulp reprint book High Adventure.

Most of the issues go for $7.95, which is already a deal since most pulp reprints start at $14.95.

But! Here's the cool part. If you go to the second page of listings here, you will see, from issue #95 on down, that the price has dropped to a mere $3.00. That's the same price as a standard comic book-- less in many cases-- and you get an entire hundred-plus pages of pulp awesome.

The second thing is that High Adventure's sister publication, the reprint series of G-8 and His Battle Aces, is ALSO having a back issue sale-- now an issue goes for a mere four dollars, down from the usual $9.95, from issue #14 on back.

If you aren't familiar with the adventures of G-8, he and his posse are a group of daring fighter pilots that are a lot like the Blackhawks, except it's World War I with biplanes, and they fight more giant bats.

Anyway. I've been pretty much immersed in those this week, at least when I wasn't dealing with school or field trip registrations or a thousand other petty annoyances. As Julie said a couple of days ago, "I really hate being a grownup sometimes."

And that's really all I've got. See you next week with a real column, and here's hoping it's a better week.