Still working on The Caped Crusade: Batman & the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon. I also finished Hellboy in Mexico—fun, but inessential. It's probably going to be a library donation rather than something I keep on the shelf.

The story about Ashman, from his hospital bed, listening to Paige O'Hara record "Something There" by phone and giving her direction is heartbreakingly funny—to get her to hit the lyric "New, and a bit alarming" the way he wanted, he told her, "Paige… Streisand." But by that point he was apparently so ill that it was a…

I give "That's How You Know" points as a sequence rather than a song, mostly for stuff going on in the background—like Patrick Dempsey wandering around wondering why everyone else spontaneously knows the words, and (IIRC) many of the elderly dancers were retired Broadway performers, some of whom had been in the chorus…

If you find this at all discouraging, just remember that in other, better news, Gotham Academy is doing a crossover with Lumberjanes.

I thought the ray gun had miniaturized them and they were wandering past a series of paint swatches.

Ugh—yeah, that's disappointing. I knew I'd already read the lucha story, but I'd thought just from single issues, not the trades. I don't mind buying a story twice to have it collected, but it definitely sucks if it's already in one of the others.

Thanks for the rec! Gettysburg is the only Civil War site I've visited so far, but—but as with books—I keep meaning to hit places like Vicksburg and Antietam eventually. Maybe I can pair up the books and the battlefields and make that work.

Sounds like fun (aside from the getting sick part)! I spent an afternoon there in June of that year while passing through on my way to Pittsburgh, but there wasn't anything special going on that early. But it was still nice to see the new visitor's center (I remember the old electric map) with the Cyclorama and all.

Re: Gwenpool—very interesting. They were talking that book up at my shop but, although I'm almost always on-board for Gurihiru, I was leery of what seemed to be another Deadpool spin-off (despite the ad copy hinting otherwise). But based on your blurb here and the buzz at my store, that might be going on my list after…

Still working through my haul from yesterday, but I did belatedly pick up Black Panther and liked it a lot—it was just as good as Caitlin's review and the various comments here said. So far I've read A-Force and Black Canary, but as usual the standout for me was Gotham Academy, which—still the the midst of its…

They've got Doc Shaner exclusively now, and have him and Parker working on Future Quest—what are they waiting for?

I'll wholeheartedly echo all the praise for Thor: The Mighty Avenger, and while it's not a mainstream superhero book, Roger Langridge's subsequent Snarked! at KaBOOM is similarly great.

… ok that sounds intriguing.

Yeah, I remember glowing reviews of his work on Ultimate Spidey—particularly when introducing and then developing Miles as a character—that just did not jive at all with either my limited experience with him or the usual refrain from his detractors (many of whose opinions I still trust). That he actually cared about…

Comics-adjacent: I've been reading Glen Weldon's The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture since last week. It's similarly enjoyable as his comparable Superman: The Unauthorized Biography as a review of Batman's real-world and in-story history, but with a slightly broader scope of using the various…

That's good to know. I've tended to avoid Bendis outright, but maybe I ought to give those crime books a chance.

I once made the mistake of asking a guy I saw reading Powers on the train, "So does everybody talk like Spider-Man in that book, too?"

She's fairly magical.

Count me in the "deciding to pick this up" category—I'd forgotten it was out last week, but based on this review and the positive word-of-mouth (or text, in the case of the comics commentariat here), it's definitely going in my bag tomorrow.

Elan Sleazebaggano.