Short and sweet: Now through May 31, all 12 issues of ROUGH STUFF magazine are available for 50% off cover price! This offer is only good for online orders, so stock up on any issues you missed at the best price we’ve ever offered–and stay tuned for an exciting upcoming announcement about the future of this fan-favorite magazine!

Several years ago, some crazy person decided that here in North Carolina (right in the middle of basketball country), we needed a hockey team. It sounded kinda crazy to me, until I actually went to my first game. Since then, I’ve followed our Carolina Hurricanes team whenever I could, especially during their big Stanley Cup victory season a couple of years ago.

This year, the ‘Canes are in the Stanley Cup playoffs again, having made it through two rounds (with exciting last-minute victories, which they’re known for), and start the conference finals tonight against the Pittsburgh Penguins. I’m amazed at how the Hurricanes manage to keep pulling out wins, against teams that, on paper, should be much better than they are. I just wish they’d stop taking it down to the last minute on every series; it’d be nice to win 4 games and move on for once!

I took my family to a fast food restaurant for lunch yesterday, and while I was waiting to order, I looked over and Eric Stohl and Scott Walker (two key Hurricanes, if you don’t follow hockey) were standing in line right in front of me. Real nice guys; I chatted with Walker briefly about their Game 7 win in overtime against the Boston Bruins the other night. Before we were done eating, six of the players had shown up there for lunch. One customer who happened to be eating there that day, was wearing his Hurricanes jersey and hat. I sat and watched to see if he’d notice; after a couple of minutes, he happened to look over to the table where the players were, and did a big double-take; it was really fun to watch. As the players were leaving, they ended up signing autographs for several of the customers.

If you’ve never been to a hockey game, go; I’m confident you’ll love it, and it’s an entirely different experience from watching it on TV. I never thought I’d be hooked on it, until I saw it in person. Give it a shot sometime!

Finally got our old number properly transferred to our new phone provider, so you can now reach us again at our usual phone number:

919-449-0344

Effective immediately, we’re offering readers one last chance to purchase formerly sold out items at www.twomorrows.com.

Our website now features a “Last Chance Sale” category, listing 18 items that have long been unavailable. We recently acquired a handful of copies of these key publications from a distributor, some with minor scuffs or dings, but all fully readable. We’re offering these items at 15% off the original cover price, and they include:

AGAINST THE GRAIN (a heavily-illustrated biography of artist Wallace Wood)

ALL-STAR COMPANION VOLUME 1 (Roy Thomas’ celebration of the Justice Society of America)

THE LEGION COMPANION (documenting the history of the Legion of Super-Heroes)

THE DARK AGE (a look at grim and gritty comics of the 1990s)

TRUE BRIT (George Khoury’s celebration of the great comic book artists of the UK)

COMIC BOOK & OTHER NECESSITIES OF LIFE and WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! (Mark Evanier’s first two collections of “POV” columns)

plus other books, and sold out issues of DRAW!, WRITE NOW, and COMIC BOOK ARTIST

For some items, there is only a single remaining copy, and all items are available on a first-come, first-served basis, with all items sold in “as-is” condition. Customers should look for the “Last Chance Sale” category in the upper left of TwoMorrows’ home page for the full listings. Purchases can be made with major credit card or Paypal by clicking the “Add To Cart” button on each item’s description page, then logging in and checking out. If an item is listed as “Sold Out”, all remaining copies have already been purchased.

So don’t delay; get ’em before they’re gone!

TwoMorrows is in the process of switching phone companies, and as you’d expect, one of them managed to screw up our number transfer. So if you’re trying to reach TwoMorrows over the next few days, you’ll get an “out of service” message if you call our usual number. (Don’t worry, we’re not going out of business–although I hope our old phone provider does!).

We hope to have it back working shortly, but in the meantime, if you need to reach us, please call this temporary number:

919-323-8561

E-mail, fax, and website are all working as normal. Sorry for the inconvenience!

It’s shipping! And Gemstone’s SCOOP newsletter has a review:

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/public/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=34&s=267&ai=82836

Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday, and while we’re not offering a special FCBD publication like we have the last two years, we will be giving away Digital Editions of COMICS GO HOLLYWOOD and COMICS 101, our last two FCBD books. Actually, they’ve been available for free downloading for some time at our website: www.twomorrows.com, but Saturday is a perfect time to get ’em if you haven’t already.

But from Friday through Sunday, to celebrate FCBD, we’ll also be giving away a free Digital Edition of each of our current mags: ALTER EGO, BACK ISSUE!, THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR, DRAW!, and BRICKJOURNAL (our new mag for Lego enthusiasts), plus PDFs of our recently departed ROUGH STUFF and WRITE NOW!, which are still available as back issues. Digital Editions normally retail for $2.95-$3.95 per download, but are free over the three-day Free Comic Book Day weekend, to encourage more readers to try them out, and consider ordering them at their local comic book shop. You just have to add it to your shopping cart, and after you checkout (with no cost), you’ll get the link(s) for the ones you ordered.

The idea is for you to try them out, and if you like them, get your local retailer to add them to your pull list, or convince them to stock an extra copy of your favorites. If retailers sell an extra copy, we sell an extra copy, and more people discover what we’ve been up to for the last 15 (!) years. But if they don’t or won’t carry our stuff, you can always get it (in print or digital form) from our website.

And if our server is running slow (which has happened the last three years, due to the overwhelming demand on it), please be patient, especially if you’re ordering on Saturday. Don’t worry, they’ll still be there Sunday till midnight, and beyond if it looks like a lot of people got shut out by the web traffic.

Hope you enjoy the freebies!

I’ve been alerted to several questionable alleged Kirby pencil drawings on eBay in the last few days. All are clearly forgeries to my eye. You might view them and think differently, but I’ve seen an awful lot of real Kirby drawings over the years, including the originals these were swiped/traced from. (One was printed in Steranko’s History of Comics Vol. 1; a Captain America sketch Jack did for Steranko, signed “To my pal, Jim” — on the fake, it just says, “To my pal”.) Several very knowledgeable original art collectors have also agreed they’re fakes.

So before you drop a ton of cash on eBay, look closely. Be careful. And ask around. Email me for an opinion if you like; I’m glad to help. (But with the volume of email I handle each day, I might not be able to get back to you quickly enough if the auction’s about to end, so email me early in the bidding.)

This doesn’t mean the seller is a forger; he/she may believe it’s a legitimate Kirby drawing, and may have purchased it under that belief themselves. But that doesn’t mean you should lose money perpetuating these forgeries.

My 7-year-old daughter Lily and I spent the weekend at Camp Seagull near New Bern, NC; it’s a camp owned by the YMCA, and we were there for the big Spring Outing for our Y-Princesses tribe. The YMCA has been offering the Princess (for girls) and Guides (for boys) program for decades, and our area has the largest group in the US. Our “tribe” consists of 8 dads and daughters Lily’s age.

It was a fantastic weekend. Our tribe shared a cabin, with bunk beds and communal bathrooms. There’s swimming (with water slides and rope swings), archery, tennis, a b-b gun range, fishing, canoeing, and a big gathering for all 1500+ dads and daughters, with a great fireworks display. They had scavenger hunts and other contests, and it’s a toss-up whether the girls had more fun, or the dads. Either way, the program is an incredible bonding experience for us. We have tribe meetings twice a month, and go on regular outings for fun stuff like roller and ice skating.

The photos here are from the most notorious activity at the camp; the Zipline. Basically, you strap on a harness, climb a 50-ft. tower, and jump off, zipping across the lake to splash down on the other side. I don’t do heights; I positively HATE being up high. And quite a few of the girls got up to the top of the tower, and decided they just couldn’t do it, and had to walk back down. But I am so proud of Lily; she was scared to death, but still managed to take that big leap off. And despite my trepidations, when I saw my daughter careening down the zip wire, I had no choice but to follow her. As Lily said afterward, it was a “lifetime experience.”

If you’ve got a young son or daughter, check out the program at your local YMCA. You don’t have to be a Y member to participate, and the rewards you get out of it are immeasurable.

We’re close to finished with George Khoury and Jason Hofius’ new book Age of TV Heroes (which documents all the live-action TV shows over the years that featured super-heroes, through behind-the-scenes accounts and interviews with the major stars, like Adam West, Lynda Carter, Jackson Bostwick, and more). We’d originally scheduled it for last Fall release, but we hit some delays in the approval processs, which are almost cleared up.

You can keep updated on the progress at this dedicated site:

http://www.theageoftvheroes.com/

Look for it in July, just in time for Comic-Con International!