What’s your favorite current TV show? I don’t mean the one you think is the best, necessarily, but the one you can just let go and enjoy most, whether that feeling comes from pulse-pounding action, total investment in the characters, or laugh-out-loud comedy — or all three.
Mine’s Supernatural.
I’m still not writing enough about my lifelong passion for comics.
Convenience stores, newsagents, and 5-&-10s in South Jersey fed my early habit,
as I shared last year. Only so much history could be gleaned from comic-book reprints and editorial pages, however. Luckily, a bevy of books on comics awaited at the Cape May County Library, where surveys of my favorite four-color fantasies and their forebears could be found in (mostly) cold, hard black and white.
The one I checked out most often was a 1973 tome aptly titled The Comic-Book Book, edited by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
I’m looking to get rid of most of my thousands of comic books, but Hellboy ranks among the keepers. The series is pretty much my all-time favorite, certainly when you discount nostalgia; Mike Mignola long ago proved that he’s as accomplished and unique a writer as he is an illustrator. While I think the absolute best Hellboy stories are short, self-contained tales, the mythology woven by Mignola and his collaborators in the family of Dark Horse’s Hellboy, BPRD, Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, and Witchfinder one-shots and miniseries rivals any other from graphic novels, television, film, or prose in recent decades.
Yet I come here not to praise Hellboy, but to barter him.
My grandfather always had a dictionary on his night table. I have one on my Apple laptop. His was a so-called “pocket” book almost as thick as it was wide; mine is virtual, an application represented by the icon below in the dock of programs and folders at the right of my computer screen.
The lure of Dictionary is strong. Enter a word, and it not only returns a definition
and usage from The New Oxford American Dictionary but synonyms from The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus and, if you’re connected to the Internet, a Wikipedia entry (or disambiguation page) as well. It’s a ridiculously quick and comprehensive research tool — as well as a microcosm of the paragon of potential procrastination that is the Web itself, since hyperlinks abound and the results list for any given word is often fascinating. I’m pretty disciplined about not following flights of fancy too far, although I admit to indulging spontaneous bouts of “Hey, I wonder...” entirely unrelated to what I’m working on, because suddenly the answer seems gravely important and if I don’t at least type the relevant word or phrase into Dictionary’s search field to read up on later then I might forget. Other people for whom frivolous research is considered fun will be able to relate. For the rest of you, well, I can’t really explain it if you don’t already understand.
Examples:
The can of Campbell’s soup is in the sidebar, due to connection problems as well as projects that aren’t being dealt with as efficiently as I’d like. For those who’ve not seen it before, I should point out that the can is a mysterious “ancient Internet tradition” begun by Mark Evanier, as explained and in fact recently invoked by Evanier on his blog, News from ME, which if your interests are anything like mine offers a variety of fine, funny, and fascinating material by the bushel.
I hope to have a volley of posts up soon (yeah, When don’t I?), but meantime here’s another batch of Blogger word-verification definitions.
abendsl — n. #2 graphite stick, when you’re congested.
betoofsr — Father of Betoof Jr.
boophala — n. A shout-out from Ms. Betty.
