Real short items

My first piece for The Savage Critics:
A review of Black Hole, it's here. Sean Collins did indeed write a review earlier this week as well--your memory isn't playing tricks on you. Later in the week we'll have a final post reacting to each other's review, and maybe reacting to each other's reactions as well. Mark your calendars, fans of reactions.

My next review there:
Probably Kramers Ergot 7. Hopefully that's not what Sean had planned.

Why I will see the Watchmen movie:
I imagine that it will eventually be on basic cable (or satellite, in my case). I still haven't seen The Dark Knight; I'm starting to question if I'll ever bother.

Note #1 about recent Bookscan conversations:
I think the current debates reveal more about the rivalries and relationships between prominent comics bloggers than anything useful about the numbers themselves. This probably would have amused me more a few years ago.

Note #2 about recent Bookscan conversations:
As weary as I am of the phenomenon mentioned above, I'm always more annoyed by the interjections from the peanut gallery. Can anyone point out any instance where Alan Coil has ever added anything of value to any conversation whatsoever?

Note #3 about recent Bookscan conversations:
This is the sad, serious part. Last year I interviewed Andy Graves, the owner of an independent bookstore in Columbia, SC that stocked a lot of art/literary comics. It was the kind of store which I think accounts for some of the discrepancies in the Bookscan numbers. Unfortunately, the Happy Bookseller closed late last year. It's hardly a unique story, which makes it all the more tragic that the popularization of the graphic novel coincided with the steep decline of the independent bookstore. It could have been a vital symbiotic relationship. I mean, I guess it still is for those big, bad independents that are still going strong, but it would have been nice to know that you could go into any medium-sized town in the US, found the local independent bookstore, and known that you could find something like Love and Rockets on the shelf.

This year marks the 150th uh, 200th anniversary of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln:
In fact, the day passed a couple of weeks ago. You may have heard scintillating debate over which man was more important to history. This brings to mind other classic "which was more important to history" debates: Millard Fillmore or Ed Sullivan? Blackbeard or Henry Ford? Jesus Christ or the cultivation of rice? The debates rage.

If you didn't know that mixed martial arts had started to resemble Tekken, here is your visual evidence: That's Nate Marquardt finishing Wilson Gouveia at last weekend's UFC 95. The amazing thing is that nobody had previously considered Marquardt even one of the top 10 strikers in his division, but now he's pulling off the kind of chain attacks that would be considered too unrealistic for Virtua Fighter.