If It's Monday, We Must Be In The Gutters

I'm on my last day of a short vacation. We had intended to spend this weekend getting in one last visit with Pastor Derek and his wife, known around these parts as Homeschooler, before their newest children (yes, plural) were born and their lives became an unrelenting cycle of "feed-change-try to sleep for ten minutes then do it all again".

However, the kids decided to throw those plans into disarray by coming out earlier than expected. See this post over on Pastor Derek's blog for the details. Congratulations are certainly in order, but our visit got derailed for the time being.

That left me with a couple of days booked off work and nowhere to go. I spent the time sleeping, reading, preparing material for the Bible study I've been leading, and playing computer games. I had already intended to go a few days without posting, and so I did.

Now I'm back, at least for today, and thought I'd revisit (and finish) an old series. A looong time ago, I wrote about my number one and two reasons for liking Mondays on the Internet; today I present number three.

I've been out of the comics business for a long time (longer than I was in it). However, I still read a few comics news sites on a regular basis. My favourite comics column is Lying In The Gutters (LitG), an industry "gossip" column written by Rich Johnston. It's hosted on Comic Book Resources, whose main page is usually worth at least a a daily skim.

LitG is usually posted each Monday. It's not unusual for it show up late in the day, so I often wind up reading it on Tuesday, but its official regular schedule gets it into my "reasons Mondays aren't so bad" category without being too much of a cheat.

Some of the stories are a bit Anglocentric (Johnston lives in the U.K.), and you can usually count on a gratuitous-but-charming plug for at least one of Mr. Johnston's own published works somewhere along the line. However, the column is well worth reading if you have any interest in the behind-the-scenes workings of the comics industry.

The "gossip" isn't lurid tabloid nonsense about personal lives, but information about projects both proposed and cancelled and all sorts of insider information about the comics industry (the kind of stuff that doesn't get reported in Wizard magazine). The LitG forums are interesting, too, but I find that far more questions get asked than answers proposed over there. It's worth a look, but I don't bother checking in with the forum more than once a month or so.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son harassing Spider-Man in the Orlando airport.