My day today...

I spent most of this morning (once I woke up) digging around for some final facts and figures for my book. I did a load of laundry in there somewhere since I didn't have any clean socks.

I had leftover pizza for lunch and watched the Firefly episode "Jaynestown."

I spent most of the afternoon writing. But, hey, awesome -- the bulk of the writing for my book is done! I just have three fan profiles to bang out... once I get some information from three comic fans. (Deb, Joe, Joel -- I'm talking to you!)

Around 5:45, I stopped into a nearby Panera for dinner. I sat and read Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe for about two hours and stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few odds and ends on the way home.

I've spent the rest of the evening doing some book editing and revisions.

What? No, I don't think I missed anything. Why do you ask?

So, I'm reading up on comics history outside the U.S. and I stumbled across this tidbit...

Apparently, superhero comics were banned in Hungary during its communist regime, in part because of Fredric Wetham's arguments in Seduction of the Innocent, which were echoed and expanded upon. The first superhero books weren't published in the country until 1989 when it was on the verge of becoming a democracy.

But here's the REALLY weird bit: the first superhero comic that was published in Hungary was...

Does it seem to be a really unusual choice to anyone besides me? I mean, I can see the potential appeal because it's got a lot of characters in it, which might mean something legally or could be used to test readers' reactions to different characters, but I think they could've picked other stories using those criteria that were better/more powerful. I'm not knocking Revenge of the Living Monolith -- it wasn't a bad story, and it holds a soft spot in my heart as the first "graphic novel" I ever got -- but it doesn't seem like a really great choice either. What about FF vs. the X-Men? Or Secret Wars? Contest of Champions? Or just about any story arc from Roger Stern's Avengers?

Again, Revenge of the Living Monolith wasn't bad, but I'm just saying it's not the story I would've led with.

Dan Thompson draws the Rip Haywire cast as members of the Fantastic Four. Sean Kleefeld still reacts in fanboyish manner.

<RANT>

you know, I've seen six or eight different web sites in the past few weeks who've updated their RSS and/or XML feeds, but NONE of them managed to mention it anywhere, as far as I can tell. Certainly not within the feeds that they were retiring! Which means that I missed maybe a month or so of updates because they weren't showing up in my feed readers. The old ones weren't turned off; they just became static.

Bad practice, people!

New Rule: Subscribe to your own RSS feed, so you can see if/when it encounters any problems. Because, unlike your web site, people using feed readers don't come back to your home page to check up repeatedly and they could easily just drop the feed instead of actively trying to seek out to see if a new one has been created.

</RANT>

So I'm working on the "final" (as in, the last one I haven't finished) chapter in Comic Book Fanthropology. It's just a basic history of comic fandom, and I saved it for last because it's kind of incidental to the rest of my book. And I'm going through my notes and reference material and realize that it's almost entirely U.S.-centric. I've got a few vague notes about Mexico, Canada and the UK, but that's it. All the other European and Asian material I thought I had was all focused expressly on science fiction fandom and not comic fandom.

Guess I need to expand my library. :\

On the plus side, the cover is just about done and looks FRICKIN' AWESOME in a sublime sort of way. Kudos to Colin Panetta's for doing a great job on it. I'll plug more about Colin and show you the cover later, though!

An old friend of mine pointed me to these Halloween decorations in a Clevelander's front lawn. The awesome is staggering...


(Faces obscured to preserve some anonymity.)

The Transformers here were made from car parts, wood and styrofoam. Bumblebee is 12 feet tall; Optimus Prime is 17. They're lit from 7-10 pm. The gent who built them is hoping to have 22 foot Decepticons next year.

UPDATE: Before the questions start, it's at 4807 Wichita Ave., Cleveland, OH 44144.

(Hat tip to my high school chum, DKFVP.)

You've likely seen Tom Spurgeon's post pointing to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Library's digital archive of comic books and comic-related material. If you haven't actually browsed the collection yet, you should, because there's lots of interesting things there. INCLUDING a copy of the interim report from the Senate subcommittee hearings on juvenile delinquency circa 1954. I've only had a chance to skim it so far, but I did catch this particular nugget on page 33...
Yup, somebody added their own commentary to the report, presumably more than a few years after this was first published. And it just amuses the heck out of me that the librarians who scanned this for their site opted to leave it in place.

My dad sometimes bemoans having to deal with not-entirely-all-there librarians a lot, but the ones I've met have all been pretty cool, and I think this scan does reinforce that, if only a little.