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§ Chris Butcher visits Japan 2009: Tezuka World Installation, Kyoto JR Station and sees many many wondrous things that make is drool.

§ In a Cup o’ Joe installment, Mark Waid recounts a classic tale of a store signing that….wasn’t what it seemed:

Several years ago, I had done an over-the-phone college radio interview with a couple of guys in Vermont. Chat went fine, I remembered to mention what a genius Alex Ross is the requisite nine times, and we probably moved some trade paperbacks in the process. So once the interview was done, one of them explained that they ran a store in one of Vermont’s largish towns and asked if I’d be interested in doing an in-person signing. “Sure,” I said. At the time, I was living in Brooklyn, so it would be a short flight, and I’d never been to Vermont before. Fly up late on a Saturday morning, home on Sunday morning, see the sights, meet some fans. “Great,” I said. Set me up.”


That is not what happened.

§ Tucker Stone interviews Dirk Deppey, something you don’t see enough of.

Deppey: …On the one hand, I love writing and can’t seem to keep from knocking out long essays when a short note would often do just as well. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) On the other hand, there’s always the danger of turning into a Keith Olbermann-style blowhard – or worse, a Dave Sim-style crank – if you feel obliged to keep churning out 14,000-word essays three or four times a week. This became clear to me through the course of that Mary Jane Statue fiasco a while back; the more I wrote, the more I found myself circling around to points that I’d already made. Now, in a certain sense this is inevitable in blogging. Since almost everything I write is a mildly edited first draft, I find myself narrowing in on cogent points over the course of several days, refining my arguments as I read responses and get the chance to think more about a given subject. Still, it’s a gateway to intellectual stratification as well, since the further you go in defending a point, the more you feel in your bones that You Are Inarguably Correct in whatever it is you’re talking about. The longer I do this, the less I trust in such positions.

1 COMMENT

  1. There’s also a great story involving waid and someone who called a store as ‘shredder’ and threatened to decapitate him with a samurai sword at an appearance.

  2. Mr. Waid, would you PLEASE write a comicbook of these stories? Vermont, your Justice League cover trivia challenge at San Diego with Mark Gruenwald…