So I’d like to take a nice, relaxing vacation—should I go to Paradise Island or Dinosaur Island?: ProTraveller covers 11 comics settings, from Asteroid M all the way down to the Batcave.

How does DC kill Batman?: Let Bully count the ways

“Rams’ safety tries to play like Hulk”: Does that mean he shouts “Atogwe smash!” when making a tackle? Because  if so, I might find myself wanting to watch more football (Actually, do strong safety’s even tackle people? I don’t know anything about football).

The old gray lady makes old gray joke in headline: Fred Shapiro is looking for comic book quotes, which could be “not only one-time quotations, but also recurring catchphrases.” He’s apparently already got “Holy (blank), Batman!” covered.

The Most Trusted Name in Swamp Thing and Sluggo Fandom: Mike Sterling has been blogging daily—daily!—for five (5) years now. That’s a lot of wondering aloud what the Diamond Previews catalog means for civilization, a lot of contemplating of Sluggo, and a lot of looking for excuses to post images of Swamp Thing-shaped chalk. Congratulations Mike; the Internet would be a much, much lamer thing without you doing what you do to it. Er, on it. If you, dear Blog@Newsarama reader, are not a regular Progressiveruin.com reader, be sure to check out what your missing; if you are, well, um, carry on, I guess. Carry on.

Of course, if you like Warren Ellis, you probably already know this: New material from Ellis and Paul Duffield just went up.

Everything Is Cooler In Japan Example #923: Check out this great gallery of painted trains from Japan, featuring plenty of manga and anime characters (in addition to familiar masks like Spider-Man’s, and some not copyrighted character-related art as well).

Luckily, he has other skills to fall back on: Tom Spurgeon on a likely casualty of the shrinking newspaper market. And while I’m sending you over to Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter anyway, I really enjoyed his apparent free association about who he’d like to sit next to if he got invited to a DCU superhero wedding (It’s the last bulleted item in this post).

Re-linking to something a co-blogger linked to is the only thing worse than linkblogging: Sarah already linked to NPR’s best graphic novels of ’08 list, but I’m doing it again, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Nitpicking other people’s best-of lists and the criteria by which they assemble them is a pretty thankless (even pointless) thing, but, for discussion’s sake, does (or should) the year in which a book was originally created factor into such lists?  List-maker Laurel Maury acknowledges in the first sentence of her section on Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid that it’s a re-issue; in fact, the first issue of the miniseries was published almost a decade ago (October of ’99), and it was originally published in a trade collection seven years ago.

Are works immortal for the purposes of vying against other works for best of a particular year status? And, if so, does that mean E.C. Segar’s Popeye should be everyone’s number one book of every year until Fantagraphics quits publishing its reprints of it?

Like I said, I’m not trying to second-guess Maury; I’m just asking. And if I were going to second-guess someone for including a new reprint of a nine-year-old series on a best of this year list, I wouldn’t do it in this case because I think Pope deserves all the awards in the world, he’s so good. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can go ahead and give him the Oscar for Best Picture for his last Fantastic Four back-up or Lone Ranger work  and that would honestly be a-okay with me.

P.S. That’s a really solid list from Maury; if you haven’t already, you should totally read all those comics. Especially Skyscrapers.

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