Comics

Hey, Kids! Comics!

During a recent road trip the kids and I stormed two geek stores: Lone Star Comics in Dallas and Cosmic Cat Comics in Tallahassee. This is a foolish thing to do, because I have poor impulse control and my sons have a serious Yu-Gi-Oh jones. The clerk at Lone Star was exceptionally friendly, digging up free comics for the kids and teaching them how to slam Pogs, which are undergoing an attempted revival. We did $80 damage at Lone Star on cards, comics, manga and a $13 box that contained three ... (read more)

Mark Evanier on Johnny Carson

The comic book and TV writer Mark Evanier writes News From Me, a great pop culture weblog that has been wall-to-wall Johnny Carson for days. He appears to have found every interesting retrospective and trivial tidbit about Carson in the pro and online media, adding some of his own observations: I met Carson three times, I think, plus he called me once on the phone after his retirement to thank me for some information I'd relayed to his secretary. He was always disarmingly gracious. People ... (read more)

Cease-and-Desist Letter about Dilbert Parody

After seven years publishing on the Web, I received my first cease-and-desist letter. It was sent by United Feature Syndicate this week because of a Dilbert parody that was linked by a user on the message board for Cruel Site of the Day. The message contained HTML IMG tags that linked to externally hosted graphics containing parody versions of the Dilbert comic strip. I didn't see the parodies -- the cartoonist apparently got one of these letters before I did and removed the graphics -- but ... (read more)