Errata

1. I’ve been told by my e-mail host, Fastmail, that there’s a catastrophic disk outage that’s playing havoc on their site, and I’ll be unable to access the ray@raycornwall.com email for at least a day. So I’ll be slow to respond to emails this weekend.

2. I’ve changed some of the tags around on the sidebar.

3. I owe everyone articles on Luke Cage, a few Masterworks, and Iron Wok Jan. I should make some headway this weekend. The Iron Wok Jan reread came out of the last attempts to revive 35-30, which I’ve decided is just not feasible anymore. One thing I’ve definitely picked up on the second time around is the extent of Jan’s physical abuse at the hands of his grandfather; it changes the whole tone of the story. It’s still a fantastic story, but it’s a little disturbing.

4. Comics shopping goodness: If you shop at Buy.com until 10/31 and check out using Google Checkout, you’ll save $10 off a $30 order. The discount can be used repeatedly, so you could buy, say, $210 worth of books for $140 by doing 7 orders. The deal doesn’t work on pre-orders, and they seem to be slow on updating new books; I noticed Ode to Kirihito and the Ivan Brunetti anthology were not in their warehouses even though I saw the books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble last weekend. And if you’re meticulous about the condition of your books, I don’t recommend the service; they don’t pack books anywhere near as good as, say, Mailordercomics.com. But if you’re just looking for a few graphic novels to read, you can’t go wrong.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams regains voice

Adams has lost his voice due to a bout with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition where the brain forgets how to speak in a normal voice. You can sing, shout, and speak in public, but normal talking is impossible. There are no documented cases of recovery.

Until now.

This is an amazing story. Rather than gloat about his recovery, Adams asked his readers to share their greatest moments. It’s a fantastic blog post, and it shouldn’t be missed.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for clueing me in to this.)

KA-BLAMM! And Other Sound Effects

We blew up the blog real good, didn’t we? I’d like to thank Omer Kakarca for designing the theme. There is still some work to be done (the logo’s pretty hideous), but I like the new layout, and I hope you do too. Drop a comment if you see any bugs.

NEXTWAVE cancelled by Marvel, but limited series will come out

From Warren Ellis’s Bad Signal, with his permission:


Okay.  I just this second got the go-ahead from Nick Lowe to talk about
this.  So here we go:

Sales on the singles are okay, if not great. Sales on the first collection
have apparently been terrific.  

We were on such a roll with NEXTWAVE that I was actually into the
idea of doing a second year, which is highly unusual for me and
work-for-hire properties. So Marvel sat down and looked at the numbers,
as they wanted to do a second year too.

What they found was that, at our current sales levels, they could afford
for me to write it, but not for Stuart to draw it.  Stuart, as a
Marvel-exclusive artist, commands a fee commensurate with his
astonishing talent.  I'm WFH-exclusive too, but they just send me
whisky and loose women and I'm fine. So, basically, I could continue
to write NEXTWAVE, but we'd need to find another artist.  This, to me,
was just wrong. I mean, Stuart would obviously be given a far better
job that had actual readers attached to it, but it still seemed a bit like
the numbers were conspiring to fire him for doing his job too well.  
Everyone at Marvel pitched in to try and make it work, but the
numbers were just against us.

So NEXTWAVE #12 will be the final issue of the ongoing series.

(To clear up a common misconception: NEXTWAVE was always
pitched as an ongoing series. However, my original intent was to
do 12 and then pass it on to someone else. This got garbled,
somewhere down the chain of communication, and so the first
issue or two got solicited as "part xxx of 12".)

However. The numbers game changes when you posit things in
terms of limited series.

NEXTWAVE #12 will be the last issue of the ongoing series: but
there will be more NEXTWAVE to come, presented as a sequence
of limited series.

This was all worked out some months ago, so I had plenty of time
to work the final NEXTWAVE sequence into a conclusion of sorts.  
#11 even features a twelve-page spread that you'll have to buy six
copies of the comic to assemble into its full splendour. Everyone
wishes I'd thought of that eight or nine months ago.

That was the news. Return to your duties.


Call me a nut, but I think this series deserves the oversized HC treatment. I held off on the first hardcover collection hoping we’ll get the big book soon. I think I regret that decision.

35 Books in 30 Days: Hexidecimal?

I could take that copout, you know. 30 in Hexidecimal would work out to 48 in base ten, and I’d have a few extra days, and I could pretend it all worked out.

But I’d be denying one truth that I don’t want to deny- 35/30 worked for me in the most important ways. Sure, I only wrote reviews for half the books, and I got sidetracked the last week and a half with the Essential Luke Cage and the webcomic Narbonic. But I wrote a lot more about comics than I ever have in my life, set up a website to do it, and established a level of self-discipline that every writer needs. And I learned a few weaknesses, and I’m happy about that, because I can’t get better as a writer without that awareness.

I’m going to still review the two Masterworks and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls, and a few of the other books may get a longer review as time goes by. And I’ll do a summary of the other books soon. The summary will come sooner than the rest. And I want to finish everything soon; just because I’m past 30 days doesn’t mean I want this program hanging over my head 30 days from now. Call it 35/60, if you wish.