May 22st, 2008: Guys I will be at Anime North this weekend! I'll be there this Saturday, all day, at the Beguiling table. I will be selling my books and shirts and generally being AS HANDSOME AS I CAN MANAGE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF MY BIRTH AND GENETICS.

Also: new Wigu comics! This is most excellent.

May 21st, 2008: Thanks to everyone who emailed me about yesterday's comic, wondering if I'd read The Dark Knight Returns (I have: it's great! Highly recommended) or its sequel (not so much) or Kingdom Come (yay!) or seen Batman Beyond (it certainly had its moments!).

What I was going for with T-Rex in the comic was that these are all out-of-continuity stories (or at the most generous, out-of-chronological orders stories in continuity, though I don't know how you could reconcile all four). It's certainly possible to tell good "Batman's old and this is his last mission" stories, but it's not possible to tell a "Batman's old and this is his last mission" and for it to be actually BE his last mission. There's always going to be a new Batman comic next month, and eventually he's going to be in his prime again. And since readers have a choice of "Batman's last mission" stories to choose from, there isn't a solid ending for the character: you can decide how you want to tell the story.

That's actually one of the things I like best about storytelling with Batman: when you're doing a one-shot, you get to decide what Batman you want: is he just starting out? Older? Is he all serious about being Batman, or maybe not so much? Does he have a Robin? Which one? Does the Joker show up all the time or not at all? You can answer these questions however you want, and the audience will still buy that it's Batman: it may not mesh up with the Batman they have in their head, but they'll still buy it because they've seen all these different versions. I think it's neat that the character is so mutable!

And tangentally, Robin actually gets closest to what T-Rex was talking about with soaps, wherein there's been several different people called Robin, all acting the same role but in different ways. It's not quite the same thing, but it does allow characters arcs to progress, if never conclude.

So anyway, comics: what's the deal there, am I right

May 13th, 2008: Here's an experiment which could be pretty rad! I'm going to link to the Flickr images tagged "haylookit" here for the next few days, and maybe INDEFINITELY. If you have something you want thousands and thousands of like-minded strangers to see, try uploading it to Flickr and tagging it with "haylookit"! And if you want to see something that some stranger on the internet thought you'd like, click here!

AWESOME IMAGES ONLY, PLZ

UPDATE: Guys this is awesome.

CURING AIDS AND CANCER: We've got over over a thousand members on the Dino Comics distributed computing team, which makes us the 10th biggest team on the network, and we've done over 200 years of worth of disease-curing computing. That is pretty incredible! If you'd like to join AND let your computer do useful work for humanity in its spare time, you can do so here. SOUNDS GOOD TO ME!