Hey - dot is verra gud coffee

Here's to the year's first cup of coffee.

I prefer the term "survivor"

So what would really happen after the world ends? Peter Bagge's answer in Apocalypse Nerd isn't very different from anyone else's: The survivors of North Korea's nuclear attack on Seattle would remain civilized until their first missed meal, and then turn on each other like starved animals. So maybe in real life they wouldn't turn so quickly into desperate killers as Perry and Gordo does here, but then again I've never gone to bed hungry, so what do I know? The style is very Bagge: Down-to-earth slapstick with bitter humor - much more bitter than in his Hate comics. The survivors are not actually forced by circumstance to become barbarians, it's more like they've been given an excuse to think they have no choice, and eagerly take it, (bemoaning what they've become while they rob the houses of their victims). It's almost funny. Almost.

Btw, go read Peter Bagge's political strips at Reason.

All the books in the world except one

A story for book lovers.

Is this rehash really necessary? Yes it is

The Sandbaggers is one of the most brilliant television series I've seen, so it was something of an experience to open up Queen & Country, a comic book bought on random, and find an exact replica of the premise for Ian Mackintosh's 1978-1980 series. The homage is deliberate, and although I am tempted to reprimand Greg Rucka for stealing The Sandbaggers, merely filling it with different characters and moving it up to our own time, I am so in love with The Sandbaggers that I am really just happy to have it all back. Mackintosh's brilliance was to create a realistic spy series with emphasis on the bureaucratic infighting back home, (which shouldn't work but it did), and Greg Rucka has updated this beautifully, replacing the Cold War-plots with similarly styled stories of his own, (interestingly, terrorism is a major factor in both versions). Rucka follows, and never surpasses the old master, (who disappeared and supposedly died in an airplane accident in 1979, but personally I believe he was taken by aliens), but he breathes enough fresh air into it to make it worthwile. And Queen & Country is far better than the third season of The Sandbaggers, which was filmed after Mackintosh's death and partly written by others, (the fact that the he managed to write four episodes after his own "death" certainly lends credibility to my alien abduction theory, now doesn't it?)