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.