Buffy, Season Eight just keeps getting better…

And issue #16 is due out in July—just in time for my birthday!

(click pic for details)

Oh, Joss, you shouldn’t have! But I’m so glad you did.

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I missed this announcement, but I’m so happy about it! The brilliant Minx title, P.L.A.I.N. Janes will have a sequel published next year by the same team, titled Janes in Love. Many of the other ‘08 titles sound wonderful, too, especially Poseur but mostly that’s because Rick Mays, one of my super-fave but little-seen artists will be doing the pictures.

More details at ComicBookResources.com.

(Yes, this is reposted due to my server migration of canarynoir.com during which this post got misplaced.

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Excuse me while I wipe the drool from my mouth: 

TERRY MOORE/HUMBERTO RAMOS NEXT RUNAWAYS TEAM 

First Brian K Vaughan (comic-book god); then Joss Whedon (genre god), and now Terry and Humberto, two of my very favorite creators... YAY!

I have historically enjoyed Miller's over-the-top style and all that, but I know he infuriates most sane people of my gender.  Part of me thinks he's just so over the top into meta-parody that I'm not sure he's even worth talking about or that he is in any way serious about what he seems to be saying--after all, his male characters are as gender-offensive as his female characters.  This may be my English major background going into analytic overdrive, though, so I generally stay out of the way of the Frank Miller bashing.  I find so much more of the everyday comics stuff out there worth bashing--there is so much puerile, frat-boy crap deserving of the smacking-down.

That being said (and, yes, I am extremely late to this party), I came across this Shortpacked! strip today, and it made me LOL.  I LOL'd a lot.

I just placed my order for June’s comics which I have shipped by my old comic shop, Discount Comic Book Service.  They do an awesome job of packing things up and sending them safely.  I sometimes think they go a little overboard, but I guess that’s better than the opposite.  What follows is what I ordered.  I seem to be evenly split between monthly comics and manga collections.  I resisted the siren call of tchotchkes and t-shirts this month, though it was a near thing

Originally published at Sequential Noir. Please leave any comments there.

I edit the Top5 Comics list, and I get NO feedback. Is it funny? I hope so. Mostly, I think it is. And I think if people hated it, they'd tell me, so I'm hoping silence is good. But it would be nice to know if they were enjoying it...

More info on her LiveJournal (divalea) and also over at the You'll All Be Sorry forum at ComicBookResources.com. Very sad. Family all safe and sound, but they lost six pets -- four cats and two dogs -- and the house is half-gone, along with a great deal of Lea's art. Donations are welcome, and info for how to donate is available on Lea's LJ.

What is the sound of hair being pulled out? 'Cause I've been balancing my checking account (technically -- who writes checks anymore?!) and it's always these little typos/write-os that one then has to track down to get everything to add up. So instead of taking a half hour or so, it's taken an hour and a half! GAH!!! But, in the end, it all balanced. Yay hooray!

( FMA 59 musings below the cut )

Several people on the f'list have gone quiet... is it end of winter blues? Spring fever? St. Patrick's Day Green Rash? REAL LIFE?!

Anyway, thought I should post something. Here 'tis:

The plan is to go to V is for Vendetta this weekend. I keep making movie plans, and then we talk ourselves out of them. Late winter is the dead time for good movies, so that's usually why. Either we don't want to be depressed by the "serious" movies or we get scared off by the appalling reviews. Fortunately, V seems to be both not entirely bumming and well-reviewed. Sure, Alan Moore's having a big hissy-fit about it, but I think the dude just needs to chill. If he doesn't want Hollywood mucking up his stories, he should stop selling the rights! It isn't as if Hollywood just suddenly got bad at adapting things (and by "bad" I don't mean really bad. I mean bad in the opinion of people who prefer filmed transcripts of source material -- not that adaptations aren't sometimes, even frequently, not good, but... my parenthetical is taking over. I'll stop now).

Anyway, it looks good. I'm even giving the Wachkowski "We Threw Away a Golden Opportunity to RULE by Making a Philosophical Mish-Mash Slash Stupid Live-Action Mecha Anime Instead of the Film We Actually Set Up in the Previous Two Installments!" Brothers another shot, thanks to the generally positive reviews.

Plus Indian food. That's always good.

It's ON! The Crazy Sale Returns! Want cheap comics? I GOT cheap comics for sale. Cheap.

I love this comic. I discovered it on ucomics.com to which I have a subscription. I also found Boondocks and Big Top (my absolute favorite comic strip ever) via that subscription. It's great as I pay about $10 a year and get all the comics I want (that they offer -- which is a lot) emailed to me daily and full access to the archives of all the strips.

Anyway, except for the whole being-ultra-skinny and being-French aspects of C'est La Vie, Mona is ME! Oui, Mona, c'est moi.

Ran into Drew Geraci (friend and former Birds of Prey inker) at Shooting Stars booth and a bunch of us went out to dinner and talked comics and geeked out and had a great time.

Jim Lee was in my hotel. I walked RIGHT BY Jim Lee in the lobby of my hotel. I was *this*close* to Jim Lee! (me: GEEEEEEK!!!!)

I stood in a criminally short line to meet Jill Thompson (artist: Sandman; artist/writer: At Death's Door, Dead Boy Detectives, Scary Godmother) who was really cool, signed everything for everyone and did sketches. She did a sketch of Black Canary for me which I'll eventually scan in and put in the gallery.

I didn't realize they were listening (as I thought they were talking to each other) but she and Brian Azzarello (Batman: Broken City) overheard me telling a couple of the guys in line about my nightmare two-hour wait to meet John Cassady in a Marvel line the prior year... two hours I waited before I was kicked out because they suddenly realized John was sitting next to you-need-a-ticket-to-meet Joss Whedon so those of us who JUST WANTED to meet JOHN got the boot. THANKS MARVEL! When I got to the part where I was booted from the line, Jill said, "God, for two hours, they should have let you KISS John Cassady!" Which I would be totally okay with as John Cassady is hot.

So that was fun.

I got to see the angry Canary figure close up and it's actually kind of cool. She just looks realllly ticked off. The classic-style Alex Ross Canary figure is frickin' GORGEOUS.

The V IS FOR VENDETTA trailer is terrific

Pocky comes in many wonderful flavors. My favorite is strawberry and I really like to say "Pocky." For some reason, you can't buy Pocky at AnimeCentral, a big ol' anime convention held annually in the SAME CONVENTION CENTER but you can get Pocky at WizardWorld... this is a very strange thing

DC's booth has taken over and sort of spreads into two other, related booths with the animated properties and their paraphernalia. DCs booths rocked. DCs tchotchkes are far cooler than anyone else's tchotchkes.

Marvel's booth sucked like a vacuum cleaner (not that I'm bitter)

Smaller publishers were well-represented and many had very nice booths and strong presences. I have high hopes for Speakeasy as a new, strong Dark Horse-level smaller publisher. They're doing really good work and have a lot of enthusiasm

There were a lot of really talented people putting out indy comics and doing neat work. Got a lovely Black Canary sketch from one of them who's also a friend of a friend. That will also go in the gallery one of these days.

The floors at the Rosemont are hard and my back hurts from all the walking upon them for hours.

The Rosemont neeeeeds a Starbucks. Badly. For that matter, the Rosemont needs a McDonalds. The Rosemont is a corrupt, closed dictatorship of overpriced foodstuffs, and it wouldn't kill them to put in a Starbucks.

The most commonly agreed upon name for the skywalk system connecting the Rosemont and its bazillion offshoot hotels is "the habitrail."

You could, feasibly, spend your entire weekend trying to figure out where all the habitrail goes to and then trying to remember how to get back to where you started on the habitrail.

"Habitrail" is almost as fun to say as "Pocky."

You can't see everything in the dealer's room at WizardWorld in a day. At least you can't see everything properly in a day. I tried and I couldn't do it. It's too frickin' big.

I love WizardWorld.