Yeah, I think I'm going to start rereading Hogfather a little earlier than usual this year.

"No one considers casting Orson Welles in a Marvel movie!"
"Then it pleases me to be the first."

If it's any consolation, I just got here.

They were going to include the Red King, but somehow a narcissistic, psychotically capricious, Day-Glo-skinned petty tyrant of a character struck a little too close to home this year.

No great loss. These days in Philly you can't murder a well-intentioned globetrotting robot without stumbling across a decent local craft brew.

He's got like a knockoff of Dennis Hopper's look from Super Mario Bros.—similarly reptilian, but with less ambition.

Only been making gradual headway through my TBR pile by reading stuff from all over the calendar, some recent but mostly weeks older, but in brief: I'm really going to miss X-Men '92—and if I'm the only one, so be it; it's everyone else's loss—and Lake of Fire is everything I didn't know was missing from my life and I…

What, really? I am 100% willing to accept these rumors and proceed directly into wild speculation because I do so love the Enforcers.

And thus my dreams of this show establishing some version of the Serpent Society in the MCU were brutally bludgeoned to death with a mic stand.

So with Dapper Dan appearing in this episode, can Fancy Dan be far behind?

Sorry to hear all that, and best of luck in the days to come.

Dynamite's The Shadow: Over Innsmouth one-shot wasted one of the greatest crossover/title synergy opportunities of this—or, dare I say, any—century.

For a narrow but exceptionally literal definition of "retelling," I'll mention Hercules' sarcastic commentary on Thor's origin story—with his fourth-wall breaking notes written directly over the original Kirby panels from Journey Into Mystery #83—in one of the recap pages during the "Thorcules" arc of Incredible…

Die-cast construction… It's a lost art.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Thor the Mighty Avenger.

Unfortunately, I haven't read much O'Brian to compare the two and give you a better frame of reference.

Currently reading Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary from the Tolkien Estate. I'm through the translation, but it's been a while since I've read Heaney or any other translation of the poem and it's hard to compare without that frame of reference—might have to do a reread of Heaney for that reason. I'm into the…

Still not loving that my work's site-blocker keeps me from checking these posts and joining in on the commentary as it happens, but such is life. Or at least such is work.

I bought up the Absolute Sandman editions every couple of months over about two years, always in the ~$60-$80 range, so all-told that's the most I've spent on a collection. But the whopper for a single purchase is still the Walt Simonson Thor omnibus I got for myself as a birthday present for $125.

While I don't think either of them are the best, apparently I'm the one person still reading and enjoying A-Force and X-Men '92.