The Johnny Bacardi Show

Good morning! Four things:

1. Chris Arrant has done an interesting interview with Brian (Demo) Wood over at Newsarama, about design as it applies to comics and graphic novels. It's a lot more interesting than I just made it sound, so go check it!

2. Tom Spurgeon recently mentioned, over at Comics Reporter, the closing of a comics shop that he occasionally visited in New Mexico. Alan David Charles Foster Doane, and others, have written thought-provoking responses. I found this noteworthy mostly because of my own recent decision to stop getting the majority of my comics at my local comics shop, due to my issues with the difficulty they have in getting the books I want to read, and the decision several years ago to stop offering a discount to their holds customers. My shop is certainly better than many I've heard about from others- they do get a fair amount of indie and small press publications. Manga, not so much. But then again, comics aren't the sole focus of the chain of stores- they also offer music, DVDs and gaming supplies so as long as they make sure they have enough copies of X-this or Infinite-that, they're satisfied. Or that's the way it seems, anyway.

3. Trivia time. Like, I daresay, most kids of my generation, I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo almost every weekday morning. Once in a while, in between the Grandfather Clock and Mr. Moose skits and the Tom Terrific cartoons, they'd have a musical number, with someone from the cast acting in costume. One such skit involved a kindly old puppeteer whose puppets came to life by magic and performed for him one time. The song that they were enacting had a beautiful, wistful melody, with vaguely Oriental flavor (even though the puppeteer, if I recall correctly, looked like the typical Gepetto-Italian type) and marchlike tempo. I don't remember the lyrics specifically, but I do recall a line in the chorus that went something like "My name ____(?), My name ___(?)...come and see us play." The melody of this song gets stuck in my head all the time, and I'd love to know if any of you out there remember this, and might even know what the tune is called and who performed it, or if anyone ever recorded and released it! Paging Mark Evanier! Anybody? Bueller?

4. Something has happened to Ping-O-Matic, or at least on my prehistoric browsers it has- it no longer lets me put in those clever little custom titles anymore that show up and look so witty on Chipper. A few weeks ago, I noticed that the fields in which you put your blog title and the URL of same looked different/bigger. But ever since then, no mater what I put in the title field, it always shows up on the ol' Comics Weblog Update-a-tron 5000 as "The Johnny Bacardi Show". It's still pinging like it should, but I can no longer post the link in French and silly stuff like that! What is the fugging deal?