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!

The fine folks at Gemstone’s SCOOP newsletter are helping get the word out about our updated version of Captain Action: The Original Super-Hero Action Figure. Check it out:

http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/public/default.asp?t=1&m=1&c=34&s=262&ai=82144

Ahh, that word makes me hearken back to my 1980s college days at Auburn University, with the Go-Gos on the radio while I sat at my between-classes job, drawing designs at the local t-shirt shop.

Speaking of vacation, I just got back from taking Pam and the girls to my mom’s house near the Gulf Coast in southern Alabama. My 4-year-old Hannah Rose caught her first fish, as did Pam (Pam wasn’t nearly as excited as HR), and both our daughters got to drive grandma’s boat on the river by themselves (I was sweating it out nervously, but neither daughter hit anyone or anything).

It was a nice bit of R&R after a busy few months—and before the next couple of months, where we’ll have a boatload of new stuff shipping. Here’s what’s about to ship in the next 3 weeks:

Jack Kirby Collector #52
Grailpages
Batcave Companion
Modern Masters Vol. 20: Kyle Baker
Rough Stuff #12
Draw #17
Alter Ego #85
Back Issue #34

Some of those books are shipping way later than scheduled, for various reasons, but we’re getting back on schedule, and heading into the big Summer Crunch (with Comic-Con International just 3 months from now).

We’ve also got a “Last Chance Sale” coming shortly, offering newly found copies of a bunch of long sold-out books, if I can get time to add them to the webstore this week. More on that shortly.

And if you were on Spring Break the last couple of weeks, I hope you had as nice of a time as we did!

After way too many weeks of struggling with it, the new Jack Kirby Collector (#52) is off to press, and the Digital Edition is already posted for downloading. This was one of the hardest to produce yet, due mainly to one article in it about an unused Thor story by Jack. I spent countless hours working on it, which is why blog posts have been missing here the last few weeks. But I’m back in the saddle again, and looking forward to a couple of Kirby-less weeks to recover, before it’s on to #53.

And see that awesome cover image by Kirby? I’ve been searching for that one since about 1995, when I first saw it in the background of a photo of Jack appearing at a comic convention. It finally turned up (compliments of Jack’s grandson Jeremy Kirby; thanks, Jeremy!), and I’m especially proud to be able to finally present it as a cover.

That image was one of two Kirby art items that I swore I’d have to track down before I could stop doing the Kirby Collector (or die, whichever came first). The other? Any page from Jack’s original version of Spider-Man, which Stan Lee rejected before turning the project over to Steve Ditko to draw. If you happen to be in possession of a copy or scan of any of that, make my dream come true and send it in, okay? I’ll give a lifetime subscription to ALL our mags, to anyone who sends it!

Our bud Randy “Sarge” Sargent clued me in that he was watching TV last night, and came across this segment of “Surfin’ with Kirk” on local station WTAP in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Kirk Greenfield, the news anchor, is apparently a big fan of the Jack Kirby Collector, and gave a nice shout-out about TwoMorrows and showed our home page. The video’s here:

http://www.wtap.com/surfinwithkirk/headlines/41844902.html

The piece is preceded by a short commercial and a spotlight on another website that helps you locate a restroom when you travel (which I hope isn’t an indicator of the quality of our books 🙂 ), but the TwoMorrows piece starts about halfway through, in case you want to fast-forward it.

Thanks, Kirk; we appreciate the plug!