Well, I was talking in my previous post about recent monkey covers, so I thought I'd take a stroll down memory lane and pull out some monkey covers I have in my collection. (I limited it to one cover per title, so there aren't scads of appearances by the Red Ghost and Gorilla Grodd.) But let me tell you, in all honesty, some of these were purchased SOLELY because of the monkey on the cover...


For the record, I have most of the issues I noted earlier and didn't want to bore you with seeing the same stuff again.

You know, there used to be a sales gimmick that publishers used to try to boost sales: monkeys. Put a monkey or an ape or a gorilla on the cover, and sales were bound to go up for that issue. I mean, who doesn't love monkeys, right?

I thought I'd take a quick gander to see how often publishers are still using the monkey motif, so here's some books that have come out in 2006 that feature a primate on the cover...
Hmm... I couldn't find nearly as many as I would've thought. Maybe that's the biggest problem in the industry today: not enough monkeys!

The first thing I do when I power up my computer in the morning is to get online and hit several of the comic book news sites, message boards and blogs.

When I checked this morning, there was a new post on the official Marvel blog area from editor Tom Brevoort in which he responded to claims that he used to be a good editor and a stand-up guy but now he's just online playing clean-up for all the bad stories that come out of his office. I hadn't seen where that claim was posted originally, nor did Tom include a link pointing to such a claim. (Understandable, if you asked me.) He defended himself by saying that he works hard to put out books that are as good as they can be and, while he likes to hear criticism, he'll defend the stories if the critiques don't seem justified.

Sounded perfectly reasonable to me. Especially in lieu of the implication that he took some of the original comments rather personally.

I checked back after lunch, though, to find that the aforementioned entry was gone! I thought of two explanations: 1) One of the legals at Marvel felt it was a bit "iffy" in terms of content and had it removed to avoid potential problems or 2) -- and this strikes me as more likely -- Tom thought about it overnight and decided that the entry wasn't the best way to address the situation, so he removed it himself.

Now, either way, I'm not saying it that either posting the response or later removing was wrong. Perfectly legitimate all ways around, as far as I'm concerned. But I think this is one of those intriguing, little behind-the-scenes moments in the creation of comic books that I generally find more interesting than the comics themselves.

(On a side note, the entry wasn't actually deleted; the link to it was just removed. A clever individual with a little knowledge of how HTML and/or blogs work can figure out how to get to it fairly easily.)

Ha! I've managed to worm my way into becoming a character in the Marvel Universe!

As I noted earlier, I participated in Marvel's online "game" surrounding the release of Agents of Atlas. My big claim to fame in the game itself was being the first one to find/uncover the Temple of Atlas blog. It was kind of fun and, I suspect, a useful experiment for Marvel.

But the semi-cool bit was that in this week's issue, there's a two-page "transcript" of SHIELD agent Derek Khanata reporting back to Dum-Dum Dugan. In the report, they list a number of suspected online agents for this mysterious Atlas Foundation and, lo and behold, one of those listed is one "S. Kleefeld"!

Wohoo!

Have you ever wanted to quickly and easily send a note to your friends/family with a list of whatever comics you're looking for? ComicBookDB.com has your solution... although they're not really advertising it yet.

So, by way of a test, let me put MY wishlist out there to see if this works. And, hey... if you want to go ahead and send me some of those issues, I certainly won't complain! :)

Anyway, here's the link...
http://www.comicbookdb.com/wishlist.php?ID=339

A few years back, I added a bit of code to FFPlaza.com so that, every October, the home page would display a short message about how long the site's been around. That way, I could have the site announce it's own anniversary without me having to remember to do anything or make sure I get something posted exactly on October 1.

With everything that's been going in my life for the past several months, the anniversary completely slipped my mind until I happened to hit the site looking up some information. I was surprised to find, staring me in the face, the phrase "Celebrating 10 years of providing the internet's best Fantastic Four info!"

Ten years? When the heck did that happen? Good grief! I remember building the site and hiding it in an obscure corner of my employer's server so I wouldn't have to pay for hosting. When my Issue Library was a HUGE javascript file that took forever to download and was impossible to read. I used to have these rollover effects that brought up animated GIF files for my main navigation that were a terrible drain on bandwidth. Oh, geez, I used to use frames!

You know, though, I am impressed with myself for sticking with this for so long. For a lot of things, I go through phases of interest and can't maintain any sort of long-term dedication to it. My interest in the Fantastic Four, though, has been going on for over two decades now, and I'm approaching a point where I will have had a web site running about them for half as long as I've been reading them!

So, my essay that compares/contrasts the traumas of Dr. Doom's and the Thing's lives was actually due about a month ago. Since I was JUST starting a new job, I wrote to my editor and asked for an extension, which she kindly granted. So I was trying to finish the thing up last night and I was just having the damnest time working through it.

I know the material backwards and forewards. I know generally what I'm trying to get at with the piece overall, and I think I'm actually getting that aspect done at a basic level. But I just really have NOT been happy with anything I've written for it so far. It's not bad, I think, so much as just... flat. The transitions seem rough and choppy, the imagry is sketchy, not to mention that I can't really get a "hook" for the whole piece.

In short, I haven't been this frustrated over a piece of writing in a long time.

I went ahead and sent my editor what I had written so far. (Well, a third of what I've written. I've actually scrapped the whole thing twice to start over.) Maybe she'll have some advice/suggestions that will help rope the whole thing together more cohesively.