Dear Readers...

Four months since my last post without a word of explanation? That’s terrible!

What the heck happened?

Well, for one thing, I became a dad. Is there any more surprising or absorbing event than the birth of your first child? Probably not. No matter how much you try to anticipate it, there’s no way to predict the way it’s going to feel. Nor, as I’ve discovered, is there any way to predict how much fun it’s going to be. Did you know that babies were fun? I didn’t! Jim Roeg Jr. was born a happy and healthy 8 lbs. 4 oz. and he is, as you might expect me to say, utterly perfect, beautiful, and amazing...and very distracting! I can’t lay my prolonged silence entirely at his feet, but the family time I’ve been enjoying certainly does have a great deal to do with it.

Besides that, I’ve been increasingly bored by comics over the last few months and just haven’t felt like blogging them.

Sure, there are several books that I continue to enjoy. Justice Society of America is still the jewel in DC’s crown—one of the few truly special books on the stands. Checkmate is a superb espionage drama, month after month. Ostrander’s Suicide Squad gives old fans something to chew on. Booster Gold is an enjoyable romp. The Green Lantern portions of The Sinestro Corps War are reminding everyone of the virtues of more contained crossovers. Tony Bedard is proving that Birds of Prey A(fter).G(ail). still has legs. Across the way, Marvel’s Thunderbolts is still riveting—something that cannot be said of many of their team books. World War Hulk has also been good for a chuckle.

On the whole, though, the mainstream comic scene has been kind of a let down this Fall. DC’s Countdown has been abysmal—truly wretched. (How did they manage to come up with a multi-character weekly series that didn’t have a single compelling storyline?) Marvel’s Annihilation: Conquest is perhaps objectively better (at least there is a story), but not interesting enough to keep me reading. Brad Meltzer’s JLA underwhelmed and McDuffie’s is worse—a surprise, because I’d enjoyed his Fantastic Four. I imagine that there are some interesting things happening in the Superman books, but I’m not reading them as monthlies anymore. I’d like to get the Donner/Johns “Last Son” story as a collected edition…once its conclusion finally appears (!), but my days of buying Superman floppies are over. And is it just me, or is Grant Morrison’s Batman turning out to be just kind of…average?

Well, anyway: it’s easy to complain. Despite my gripes, there are still a number of things I’m looking forward to…cautiously. Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman is at the top of that list. Dixon’s Batman and the Outsiders is close behind. The various rumored “adult Titans” projects are too vague to get excited about yet, but I am foolishly hopeful. Nightwing by Tomasi and Rags sounds intriguing, as does Wolfman’s new Vigilante series. And what old school fan isn’t at least curious about DC’s plans for the Legion in the coming year? Whatever they do, I’m just hoping that their plans include finally reprinting the Levitz/Giffen Legion in a nifty format (Omnibus?).

In the meantime, I’m savoring some older fare. I finally caved in and bought the Brubaker/Epting Captain America Ominbus (chapters-indigo.ca had a fantastic deal) and am really enjoying that. In keeping with my more limited attention span, I’ve returned to reading newspaper strips, particularly the original volumes of For Better or For Worse (very topical in my household, and really funny) and the early Peanuts. I’ve also just begun David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, which I can already tell is going to be as good as everyone says.

As for Double Articulation? I don’t know. I’m not one to give up on things once I’ve started, but the days of painfully long and tortured pseudo-academic essays in which I project my fantasy life and romantic values onto contemporary comics and Marvel of the seventies are probably over—at least for the time being. If you’re still out there, dear readers, you can expect to see some changes around here. What those changes will entail, well... We’ll both find out soon.