Our Alter Ego #64 giveaway is officially over, having blown out 500 free copies in less than a single day. Our new server apparently handled the hugh influx of customers without a hitch (thanks, Rand!). So now all we’ve got  to do it get them all stuffed and mailed before it’s time to leave for the New York Con next week.

Please be patient waiting for your copy to arrive; we ship by Standard Mail, and while that generally gets there within a week, it can take up to three weeks in some of the less populated areas of the US. (And foreign customers, Surface Mail can take up to 6 weeks or more in some cases, so we really appreciate your patience!) Plus, it might take us a day or so to get them all put in envelopes and labeled.
If you missed getting your free copy, stay tuned; I suspect we’ll be having another giveaway right around Free Comic Book Day on May 5.

Our giveaway of 500 copies of Alter Ego #64 started at 10am today, and as I write this (just before 1pm), we’re at the halfway point, with 251 copies gone. So if you haven’t ordered yet, it looks like they’ll all be gone by around 5pm (but we’ll leave it going until they’re all gone).

If you noticed our site running kinda slow the last week or so, we were experiencing some weird computo glitches, but webmeister Rand Hoppe transferred our entire site to a new server yesterday, and things seem to be zippin’ along just fine. But let me know if you experience any bottlenecks, and we’ll do our best to correct the problem right away.

Don’t forget: starting at 10am EST on Valentine’s Day, we’ll be giving away 500 copies of Alter Ego #64! So if you’ve never tried Roy Thomas’ long-running magazine, be sure to order your free copy. Just click the banner at the top of our home page (www.twomorrows.com), add it to your shopping cart, and checkout. We’ll ship your copy asap.

If response has our server running a bit slowly, please try later in the day. Don’t worry, it’ll take all day to give away that many copies, based on our past giveaways. Enjoy, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

Our sample copies of Modern Masters Vol. 11: Charles Vess arrived today. (Our printer sends us a few hot-off-the-press copies, to make sure everything’s right before the big batch gets sent out to comics shops, and to us.) And it’s a good thing they got here when they did. Cause when the samples arrive, I usually go ahead and invoice the copies that stores ordered it from us. (Ahh, yes, part of my glamorous day-to-day existence.)
In doing so today, I spotted a really, really stupid error. On the list I’d previously sent the printer, I’d transposed one customer’s Purchase Order number with the number of copies they ordered, and had told the printer to ship them 521 copies instead of 10!

Luckily, the fine folks at Lebonfon Printing hadn’t quite gotten them all on the trucks yet, so we were able to stop our customer from getting 511 copies too many.

Anyway, the book looks great, and Mssrs. Eric Nolen-Weathington and Christopher Irving are to be commended for the fine job they did. (Oh yeah, that Vess guy probably deserves a little credit too.) We’ll have our copies to ship out next week, and it’ll be in stores on Wednesday, Feb. 28.

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.