Um… pass.

I'd somehow completely missed any announcements of her departure, so when last month's issue hit I thought it was just going to be a stint by a guest artist/team. Having since learned about it, yeah… I've got to admit to some reduced enthusiasm for the book going forward, but I also want to give them a chance to win…

… the devil you say.

Thanks, Mark Millar!

Yeah, if the story didn't do it for you to start, it really hasn't changed that much to justify picking it back up. I'm enjoying it, but honestly I like the concept more than the execution so far and the art is the major draw.

Been too busy to read any, but this week I picked up: Black Canary, Gotham Academy, Lumberjanes (plus last week's "Beyond Bay Leaf" issue), and in the Secret Wars corner, 1872, Weirdworld, and Agents of Atlas.

The Muppets. I have a large, extremely close-knit extended family full of aspiring comedians, drama queens (and kings), budding performance artists, professional hecklers, chefs, musicians, uptight patriots, and whatevers… Where every get-together turns into a production and everyone is secretly convinced they're the…

Give that guy a parka and he's the poster for The Thing.

Face front, true believers! The House of Ideas has heard your cries for an appropriately be-pouched superhero!

Loath though I am to speak ill of the deleted… It wasn't much of an argument.

In for Double Draculas.

DuJour means you're wrong.

Oh, thank god.

Did we just witness the spambot singularity?

I did that once for my annual reread, but have consistently forgotten since then. The real challenge was in maintaining the discipline to not just tear through the whole thing beyond each day's chapter.

'Tis the Season: I finished David Skal's Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween last week, and Lesley Bannatyne's Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History the week before that. Both interesting and very readable pop scholarship, plus the section on backyard haunts in Death Makes a Holiday…

Are points to be awarded or deducted for Scooby-Doo crossovers?

Oh, I was all in for the Excelsior spinoff. When those characters showed up in Runaways I'd vaguely known about but hadn't read any of them, so BKV's take on them was a great first introduction. So I was doubly disappointed, really, when they never reappeared in Runaways and the Loners series didn't take off.

This issue has been sitting in my TBR pile for too long. Glad to hear it's worthy of the hype.

There we disagree—I think there was plenty of wheat still left among the chaff. But no, it's not something I lose sleep over.