4thletter!

No, seriously. This can’t just be me.

I love outlines. I think that they’re an awesome storytelling trick. I am not a huge Superman fan, but one way to get me interested in a scene featuring him is to put him in all black with only his glowing red eyes or chest emblem visible. The chest emblem makes no sense on a lighting level, yes. I know. I was going to go to art school before I realized that I was good at words, not pictures.

But, isn’t it cool?

This spread is from Ed McGuinness, JLA Classified #2, I believe. The JLA are out in our world, the real world, and have been trying to maintain the status quo. They get info from the new Squire that things have gone bad on DC-Earth. What does the JLA do?

They use a boom tube to get back to their universe.

I love it.

I don’t know why Aquaman is back there, though. You can tell that Ed McG had an awesome scene in mind until he realized, “Oh, wait… Aquaman has to be in here, too! :argh:”

I am still crazy-go-nuts swamped with work. I’ll deliver you guys some content by the weekend, I promise. Tomorrow, all things being equal, we’ll have a guest article, or perhaps a guest reprint up from my old buddy Mark Poa. Stay tuned, true believers!

D-Man!

I’m currently swamped with paying work, which is why Gavok is carrying the site right now, but I’m not too tired to hit you with a copy/paste from Wikipedia!

[S]upercop John Spartan, aka “The Demolition Man”, is paroled from the cryoprison for the purpose of apprehending Phoenix. Spartan’s cryoprison sentence came from the fact that as he tried to apprehend Phoenix, he miscounted Phoenix’s cruelty in killing the passengers of a city bus which had somehow ended up in the area. Since he knew he’d done a thermocheck at the beginning of his mission, Spartan couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t detect the bodyheat of any of the passengers. He never thought at the time that they were dead, and therefore weren’t generating any heat whatsoever.

Hmm… that may not be the right Demolition Man.

Whatever! This one is way better and has an actual nemesis. Simon Phoenix is awesome.

A quickie!

David Mack, (very informative site here), is one of my most favorite creators. Kabuki: The Alchemy is hands down the best comic Marvel puts out and the second best comic being published after my beloved 100 Bullets. His Echo - Vision Quest arc on Daredevil was a high point for the series and for Wolverine in particular.

What I’m trying to say is that David Mack is the man and you would do well to read his works. If anything, pick up the first few issues of The Alchemy. They’re well worth your time and I guess are “deep” comics if you want your pretentious comic artsnob card.

I prefer to call them “good” comics, myself. Mack has a lot of interesting things to say about life and living. Check it out. Also his first name is awesome and that practically makes us brothers (see what i did there?).

(I kind of feel like I’m doing Mack a disservice by not mentioning the art on Kabuki or Echo, but, crap, man. I don’t think I could do him justice. His stuff just works and it all goes toward servicing the story. There is a reason why Kabuki forms her thoughts as a children’s book in a recent issue, and it isn’t because she’s writing one. It’s because children’s books are meant to teach.)

So, I’ve been asked certain questions more than once. “What’s your phone number?” is one. “What does ‘4thletter’ mean?” is another. “What’s it stand for?”

It gets kind of embarassing to go “Well, uh, my first name is David, which starts with D, the fourth letter, and I was feeling really uncreative when I need to come up with a gmail account, and then the web address just kind of followed, and I’m a hopeless narcissist who doesn’t want to give Gavok credit for anything, so…” all the time, so here we go!

Explanations! Collect them all, because this is definitely a series.

Fun fact for our readers: we are probably going to come in just 200 megs short of my bandwidth limit tomorrow, despite having less than half a gig of actual files stored on the site! Pretty impressive. Traffic is higher than it’s ever been, as well, so we’ll see how this goes in October.

Good times. Gavok’s got more What If coming for ya, and I’ll hopefully have a review of the recently-concluded The American Way out of Wildstorm. It did some interesting things with race and politics and was overall one of the best minis of the year.