At this point I wouldn't foist another interview on you, but looking through it, I appear to have slipped up and said things with actual content. Probably because Silver Bullet Comics owner Alan Davis started this with me a couple months ago, and Mitch Montgomery came in and finished it, and somewhere along the way I started writing as if we were just having an honest discussion, which I almost never do. That happened with the Comics Reporter piece too. Don't worry, I promise for the rest of the year to release only carefully-spun sound bites. For you Southerners, this starts off very North Carolina centric.

MM: Is there a danger of comics becoming too self-reflective, or is this a natural progression?

JP: There’s always a danger of comics becoming too self-reflective, and I think that hurt us, when stories from the 1970s and 80s fed upon their own histories too much. I think the key is keeping it cyclical instead of linear. Focus on good plots with characters that you plan to keep intact for decades, save drastic character changes for rare cases or for characters that aren’t meant to be archetypes.

I wish people would quit putting hundreds of spins on origins that have been done well already. Batman, I’ll pull out just because I mentioned him earlier. Worry about showing Batman solve a really confounding mystery; don’t show me the Waynes getting shot every week. I swear if I never see the Waynes die in Crime Alley again I’ll be just fine.

And that's not at Silver Bullet ComicBOOKS, it's at Silver Bullet COMICS, which are two different sites. I know, it's maddening.

Shannon Wheeler is the world's greatest promoter and this weekend the Too Much Coffee Man Opera opens. It must be seen.

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Sept. 22-23 and Sept. 29-30

Where: Portland Center for the Performing Arts,

1111 S.W. Broadway, Brunish Hall, 503-248-4335

Cost: $24.50-$30.25; also available though Ticketmaster (503-790-2787), subject to service charges

If Agents of Atlas gets behind, you can blame Leonard Kirk running around living it up with his Federation buddies. Yes, the two men who donated parts of their real and fictional names to create the man in the middle. You can get more details on this meeting at Leonard's blog. And special thanks to Photoshop for allowing me to desaturate Shatner's shirt some so it doesn't scorch your monitor with it's magenta field.

Proprietor and Comics Pimp James Sime sent me a link to this ISOTOPE page where some talented participants do podcast theatre for comic books. If you click on the Agents of Atlas link, you can hear them act the scene from the extremely pulpy flashback from issue one. It's hilarious. Here's the scene they're doing, for the full senses effect.

And I talked with Sam Moyerman over at BROKEN FRONTIER about it. The miniseries that starts Wednesday.

And thanks to Greg McElhatton, now I purchase extra freeze-dried fruit to kick in when Kellogg's Fruit Harvest decides to forego its name halfway down the box. But then Allie got into the strawberries yesterday and just ate them all, so it's back to the store later. Do they make peach bits too?

Another DRAGONCON in Atlanta has come and gone, and I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't link to Pat Sun's photo album of the show as if I'd spent the weekend collecting cosplayahs. Go enjoy!

NEWSARAMA has an interview with The Atlas Foundation's premiere artist Leonard Kirk today! This was done at the Toronto Comic Book Expo last week. Leonard comes off better than I do in live interviews. I'm now so chicken I email the answers while sitting at the table with the interviewer. He has some good stuff to say about our series that he spends so much time drawing in his underground lair.

Right-on. AGENTS OF ATLAS #2 made book of the week with the Wizard Round Table. I like the way they talk about it, and love Ryan Penagos' quote:

"That might be the first time that any writer handled the hot button issue of gorillas sh--ting in UFOs. And he nailed it. That scene is gold."

Just one note- Jimmy Woo is not a clone, he's had major cellular repair. Go read the discussion, they provide some panels that aren't in the preview images.

Y'all know that there AGENTS OF ATLAS #2 is out today! Now get on down there to the Piggly Wiggly or whereever they sell funnybooks and don'tcha pay no nevermind to them crossovers and such. The only one you want got my boy Gorilla Man on the cover, livin' hard! Go on, now!

N'gowa. For those of you who still turn on your computer on Labor Day, I subject you to two more articles prominently featuring ME. I know it seems like I barely make it through a day without mass media coverage, but from my perspective, it's a correction, a balance shift from a period of my career in which no one talked about me, a time that I call "the 90's."

First, my local paper The Oregonian talks about the Marvel Romance books where we do a Tiger Lily and redialogue already funny stories.

Then PDX Magazine briefly examines all of Portland trying to figure out why cartoonists keep coming here- what does it all mean? What can be done about it? It's a pdf document, so skip to page 38. Bendis opens with a good quote, Steve Lieber presents pure conjecture as fact, and I keep making statements that suggest I think everyone in the world is stupid. Good piece.

I just got up a while ago and heard on NPR that Steve Irwin died from a run-in with a Stingray. He'll be missed, he was very entertaining and informative. His gung-ho, hands-on approach to nature shows really revitalized them, and made things like Animal Planet possible. There's no getting around the fact that a huge draw was the audience wanting to see if one of the animal encounters would go wrong, and I'm sure there will be a bunch of gasbags saying he had it coming, making a living this way. Those people always pop out of the woodwork when somebody who's done something interesting dies. I think it's a shame for him to die as young as 44, but at least he died out in nature, doing what he did. He was an adventurer, and he was killed on an adventure.

If I had my way, the one-man hype machine that I am, my interviews would be spread out instead of posting on the same day. But, I think we've established long ago that I do not get my way. But Jen Contino and Dave Richards did ask me good questions about two different books, so I can't complain. Learn more about...


WHAT IF: AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED at COMIC BOOK RESOURCES!
AGENTS OF ATLAS at THE PULSE!