And Now the News: Welcome to Death Island

Oops. Sorry about that. I poked back in on Friday only to disappear for another three days. Parties and other busyness caught up with me. Here are some odds and ends to help get back in the groove.

Valley of the Dinosaurs



I wish this was real news about some rebirth of Valley of the Dinosaurs. Instead, it's just me getting my memory jogged that it ever existed. I'd forgotten all about this show until Comics Comics posted about the comics version of it. Their commentary is far more thoughtful than "Hey! Dinosaurs!" but I'm just glad it helped me remember to look for some of these comics next time I'm at the store. Or, better yet, DVD episodes.

Charles Christopher tells it like it is



Skottie Young did a guest strip for The Abominable Charles Christopher recently and it was awesome. Of course, the strip is always awesome, but this one was especially good because I got to laugh at rich people.

Alpha Flight Collector



I luh-hu-huuuuuv Alpha Flight. Maybe that's not a secret. In fact, I love them so much that in my more-obsessive youth I toyed with the idea of starting some sort of site or blog to catalog and discuss all their appearances. Fortunately, I don't have to do that anymore because it's been done for me. The Alpha Flight Collector is a brilliant resource and I'm thankful it exists.

I also dig the Collector's justification about not including Wolverine appearances in his project. He has a fine rationale, but as far as I'm concerned all he had to say was the part about, "Wolverine, what can I say, I love ya. Uh, if you love him too, email me a list of every single one of his appearances in html format."

Cold City

I wish I could find some art for Anthony Johnston's (Wasteland) new spy series about Cold War-era Berlin, but I can't. Hopefully, the story description will be as exciting to you as it was to me.

November 1989. Communism is collapsing, and soon the Berlin Wall will be torn down by both the East and West.

But before that happens there is one last situation for MI6, Britain’s intelligence services, to resolve. Two weeks ago, an undercover MI6 officer was killed in Berlin. He was carrying information from a source in the East — a list that allegedly contains the name of every espionage agent working in Berlin, on all sides.

No list was found on his body.

MI6 sent in Lorraine Broughton, an experienced spy with no pre-existing ties to Berlin, to root out the list. But she walked into a powderkeg of social unrest, counter-espionage, defections gone bad and secret assassinations. Then, on the night the Wall came down, her superior — MI6’s chief officer in Berlin — was shot and killed in the street.

Now Lorraine has returned to tell her story. And nothing is quite what it seems.