Meanwhile…

I have just today nabbed a couple of what you proles refer to as “novels.” First up is The Etched City by K. J. Bishop, which was recommended to me by Goodreads after it caught me making googly eyes at China Mieville.

Next is Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother. All the cool kids seem to know who he is, so I thought I’d check it out.

(I also note that Master and Commander has been on the nightstand since June. I check in on it occasionally to make sure nothing happened while I was away.)

I have a couple of articles I’m intending to write for the Flash Fiction Chronicles, one about superheroes, and another about small apocalypses. Stay tuned!

So not too long ago, I nabbed this from a local comic shop out of their clearance bin for practically nothing (it’s $50 there on Amazon, I got it for maybe five or six dollars). It’s an incredible deal, a collection of nearly every issue of Fantastic Four and The Silver Surfer up to just a few years ago.

It’s hard to argue against the Fantastic Four’s boast of being “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.” It’s high concept science fiction that perfectly represents the attitudes of the ’60s, and the book revolutionized superhero books at the time. It’s likely the superhero would have faded out long before now if not for Reed Richards’s ill-conceived plan to take his girlfriend into space and get laid beat the Russians into space.

As I’m reading this first issue (November, 1961), a lot of things jump out at me, and I was having too much fun not to share. To the jump!

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