With convention season getting underway in a couple of weeks in the Big Apple, I thought I’d post some mug shots of our editors, so when you’re wandering by our booth, you’ll know who to walk up and talk to (or avoid, depending on your past history, and what we all had for lunch that day).

In order, there’s me, Publisher John Morrow (cause hey, it’s my blog, so I go first). Next is Rascally Roy Thomas, editor of Alter Ego (and comics legend). Also, there’s Michael Eury, editor of Back Issue and writer of our best “Companion” books. Then comes Bob McLeod, famed inker and editor of Rough Stuff. After Bob is Mike Manley, artist extraordinaire and editor of Draw! magazine. And last is Danny Fingeroth, comics writer and editor of Write Now magazine. (He’s in black-and-white because he still hasn’t sent me the color photo I asked for a month ago. And they say artists are the ones who miss deadlines!)

Yes, ladies, these are the kind of men your mom warned you about (assuming she really didn’t want you getting hitched to someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes comics 24/7). All of them (except me) are longtime comics professionals, which is what I think really helps distinguish our mags from others. (Oh, and they’re all really great guys to work with, except that guy in black-and-white; he’ll be great to work with again when I finally get his color photo.)

As I type this, a very large truck just left TwoMorrows HQ, after dropping off beau coup boxes of our new, handy-dandy, full-color catalog! It’s printed on lucious, glossy stock, with not one, but two—count ’em, two!—shiny new staples holding together all 24 pages of four-color goodness! And what do we charge for all this wonderfulness, you ask? Not $29.95. Not $19.95. Not even $9.95. No, for a limited time only (meaning, until we run out of them), it can be yours for only $0.00.

Yes, you heard right folks, it’s free, free, FREE! And if you order within the next 216,482 minutes (which is about when we’ll be releasing our next catalog), we’ll throw in a mailing envelope, and postage, for no additional cost!
You want more, you say? Well, how about if we throw in a honkin’ big PDF file of it, available for downloading at our website?! Take that, Ron Popeil!
So don’t delay! Order or download it at this link:

ORDER NOW! OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY!

Spider-Man TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc.

Check it out:

http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/busted/

A hearty THANKS to the magnificent Beau Smith, who took time to sing our praises, and to especially laud Back Issue #19. The man has great taste, obviously(!), cause BI #19 is one of the best issues we’ve ever published of anything. Editor Michael Eury and designer Rich Fowlks (and cover designer Robert Clark) all deserve the special attention, as do our regular contributors. It’s hard, hard, hard work putting out a mag like this on any schedule. To do it bi-monthly (without missing a deadline yet, in 20 issues) is even more challenging. And to keep it as entertaining and quality-oriented as you have to in order to get people of Beau’s stature raving about it, is just amazing. Thanks to all you guys for making TwoMorrows look so good!

If you’re planning to go to Comicon International: San Diego this July (known as the San Diego Comicon to us relics who’ve been going there over a decade), I hope you logged on to the Comicon Housing site today at Noon EST (9am San Diego time) to reserve a hotel room. Well, actually, I sorta hope you didn’t, cause if you did, you were one of the untold thousands (millions? billions?) who were keeping me from getting one of the relatively few hotel room reservations available that week. I know I logged in right on time, and when the overloaded website finally took me to the page that actually listed the hotels, it was 12 minutes later, and there were only three hotels with rooms left (all far from the convention center).

I think Comicon does an absolutely fantastic job putting on that enormous convention; the con itself runs remarkable smoothly, especially since they’ll probably have upwards of 125,000 there this year. But they’re a victim of their own success, and they have got to come up with a better hotel and commuting solution. There’s been all kinds of talk about moving it to Anaheim (which would be great for me, cause I take our kids to Disneyland every trip out to California anyway), but I’d really miss San Diego, which is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful cities I’ve ever been to.

The other problem is getting around and eating. With that many people there for the con, the waits for food are ridiculous. And exhibitors like us pretty much have to stay at one of the (very expensive) hotels really close to the convention, or we can’t get to our booths in time to open up, due to traffic. The con runs a great shuttle bus system that stops at all the major hotels, but the last couple of years, the buses get full at their first or second stop, and even if you get a seat on the bus, the traffic makes a 20-block ride last over an hour during peak times.

I don’t mean to be spouting sour grapes here; the huge attendence makes it feasible for us to spend the big bucks it costs for booth space, airfare, and hotels, cause we know we’ll sell enough stuff to cover our expenses if we plan carefully. It’s a boon for the industry as a whole, and I hope it gets even bigger, and lasts a whole week! But if it grows much more, where o’ where are they gonna put everybody?

I’ve even considered trying to buy a downtown San Diego condo, and rent it out 51 weeks of the year, so we’ll have a place to stay. But with those puppies going upwards of $1.5 million these days, I think we better sell a whole lot more magazines before we go that route.

On a personal note today, I encourage anyone reading this to avoid products by the company VTech, at all costs (and believe me, it’ll cost you if you don’t!). The web is littered with stories similar to mine, and I only wish I’d seen them before I bought a rather expensive phone system from them. We got ours about a year-and-a-half ago, based on a great review in Consumer Reports. Of course, the one-year warranty is up, and now the buttons on all our extensions are sticking, to the point where you can’t dial (it’s worst on the number 2, which is consistently stuck on all our extension phones), and you have to nearly break the bones in your finger just to hang the thing up after a call. It appears this is a design flaw in many of their phone styles, based on the disgruntled responses I’ve seen posted on various websites. Everybody’s phone buttons are sticking.

VTech’s support line is fully automated, with no way to speak to an actual human about it. Their web support is a few pat answers on a FAQ page, including a dumb one telling us to use alcohol on the buttons if they stick (of course, it doesn’t work).

So basically what I’m saying is, VTech blows. Don’t do business with them.

Yep, you read right! For Valentine’s Day, we’re doing our fourth giveaway, this time with copies of ALTER EGO #64! We’ll be mailing out a free copy to the first 500 people who request it on February 14, so don’t miss out! It features Roy Thomas’ blow-by-blow of the original Golden Age “Monster Society Of Evil” Captain Marvel saga, just in time for the release of BONE artist Jeff Smith’s new rendition of the Big Red Cheese, debuting this month from DC Comics! As as a special bonus, the TwoMorrows Tune-In podcast for Feb. 7 will feature an interview with Jeff, talking about his work on the new comic.

If you own any of our books, let me encourage you to take a few minutes to write a review of them on Amazon.com. It’s easy, you get to show the whole world how intelligent you are, and you’ll be doing us a big favor by helping other people learn what our stuff is like! When you log into Amazon.com’s site, do a search for the book, scroll down to the “write a review” section, and let ‘er rip! We particularly need reviews of these books:

How To Create Comics, From Script To Print
I Have To Live With This Guy!
Wertham Was Right
Modern Masters Volume 1, 2, and 4 (Davis, Pérez, and Nowlan)
Best of Draw, Volume 1 and Volume 2
Heroes & Villains: The Wm. Messner-Loebs Benefit Sketchbook
Hero Gets Girl! The Life & Art of Kurt Schaffenberger
Thunder Agents Companion
Superheroes In My Pants
G-Force: Animated
Comic Book Artist Collection, Volume 3
True Brit
Comics Above Ground
Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Volume 2

And be sure to e-mail us once you’ve posted one, so we can thank you personally!

Hulk TM & ©2007 Marvel Characters, Inc., Flash TM & ©2007 DC Comics.