quarterly report from the martian underground

Tags

airplane, Cat, ellie, memoir, quarterly report

Even after twelve quarters, we still receive inquiries into the nature of the cryptic phrase ‘mars will send no more.’ A page dedicated to our secret origin illuminates all.

But in another sense, Mars is our virtual garden. Or maybe a plant in our garden, grown from a digital seed. We tend it, trim it, prune it, feed it, groom it, give it love, and even worry that someday Mike Baron will show up and make us take down the whole thing, since he invented the phrase. It’s scary, sometimes: having a digital pet someone could just turn off at any time.

Blogging is like writing a book you can never touch. Paper burns, but what do pixels do? Where is the page when you turn off your machine? When we were kids, we read books about magic. When we became adults, we lived in an electric world made of it.

And you know what? We love it. Why do 7000 people drop by every month to look at 7 or 8 pages in the Martian Archives? We don’t know. But we do get a kick out of being referred to by such notable sources as The Atlantic, who referenced our scans of America’s most famous comic book: The safety instructions found on every airplane! Interestingly, they don’t reference the exact post. Instead, they use a URL for our tag archives for the word airplane: https://marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/tag/airplane/

What if we posted something new tagged with airplane? It wouldn’t matter what the post was really about, as long as it had a tag for airplane. We could post propaganda for the Martian Underground Resistance, in hopes that Atlantic readers will someday join the revolution. Or, we could just leave them a greeting card with a cute cat and a cozy scarf on it.

LONG LIVE THE MARTIAN RESISTANCE! MOUNTAIN LIONS FOREVER!

In Case of Emergency Landing – Read Comics!

Tags

airplane, emergency landing

You may have heard the voices of doom and gloom proclaiming comic books as an art form are dead. It’s hard to take that stuff seriously when you can find a free comic book in the back of every airplane seat! It’s one of our favorite graphic novels called, “In Case of Emergency Landing!” Or, as George Carlin liked to remind us, in case of a crash!

Anyway, as long as people can tell stories and convey information with pictures, comic books will be alive and well. They’ve been around since the days our ancestors were painting on the walls of caves, and they’ve followed us into the atmosphere. Now if we could just get Alan Moore to do a deconstructionist tale of these airplane comics, that’d be great!

Collector’s Guide: From Southwest Airlines “In Case of Emergency Landing”.

2022 Update: Once upon a time, a well-known bastion of journalism tried to link to this post in one of their articles. But they used a more general “tag” URL instead of this post’s precise URL. I emailed them to let them know the correct URL, but when they didn’t change it, I trolled them a little by adding a ridiculous Quarterly Report to that tag archive. To this day, I have received zero complaints from readers of The Atlantic about that cute photo of me and Ellie Kitty.