Doug: It's a melancholy feeling as I type a few notes here late Monday afternoon. Our family learned this morning, several hours ahead of the media outlets, that actor Michael Clarke Duncan passed away after suffering a heart attack seven weeks ago. He'll always be just Michael Duncan, or Duncan, or just Dunc to us. Way back in 1980 he played college basketball for my father-in-law; years later while on a trip to Los Angeles with a different school, my father-in-law arranged for Duncan to address his team. After the message, my oldest son, then a 9-year old, got to play one-on-one with Duncan on the floor of Pauley Pavilion. So it's a collective heavy heart around here.
Doug: But, since I don't want to leave you with too much "real life", I am passing on the following article
that is running on Yahoo today. It's about Venom relocating from Manhattan to Philadelphia. I swear, I did not know that Flash Thompson was now Venom, nor that Flash's backstory has been updated to have him losing both of his legs in the Iraq War. Wow... My Care-o-Meter seems to be malfunctioning, 'cause it ain't registering at all!
Doug: Lastly, I was in a new (to me) comic shop over the weekend while taking the boys to school. It's called Reader Copies and is in Anderson, Indiana if anyone ever passes through. Anyway, I was visiting with the proprietor and we were talking about the "good old days" of the Bronze Age, etc. He jumps off his chair, hustles over to the rack of recent Justice League books, and pulls one out (can't recall which issue). He holds it out for me and begins thumbing through it. No lie -- there were no words on the first five pages. I commented on that and he says, "Do you want to know how many words are in this book?" I look at him, thinking "No, I hate guessing games." but humoring him anyway. He can't take it, so shouts out "140! 140...!" No way... Bendis has ruined a generation of readers. And by the way, I got great deals on the first volume of the Spider-Man newspaper strips hardcover (whose bright idea was it to put comic strips in a regular-sized hardcover, rather than on short in height and long across??) as well as the first volume of the Thor: Eternals Saga tpbs. If you recall, I'd mentioned that I purchased the second volume in Chicago last month. I may do a review of the Spidey book sometime this fall.
