On 8 April 2024, Georgia got to see about 85 percent coverage of what was a total solar eclipse in some parts of the USA. Despite using a special cover for the lens of my phone’s camera, I did not get any good shots of the sun itself. But the tree in the front yard made lots of truly trippy shadows. And I got a plate of brownies!
I was outside about an hour before maximum coverage and noticed one of the neighbor ladies on her porch, shielding her eyes with one hand and squinting at the sky. I said, “Hey, neighbor. Don’t look at it without these.” I offered her the glasses I got for last October’s eclipse at the Athens public library. Then she went inside to get her mother. More neighbors saw us gawking directly at the sun, so they came over to join us and pass around the glasses. It was a fun way to meet three or four generations of mothers and daughters.
And right around the moment of maximum coverage, the little girl returned to our impromptu eclipse party with a plate of brownies for me — which I immediately began devouring before realizing the moment might be photo-worthy.
Now I know you barely glanced at the photo, so look again. In the center of the shadow, there is a tiny crescent of light. That’s the eclipse, baby! It might not be the best eclipse picture ever taken, but it’s definitely a contender for the tiniest. While my glasses were being borrowed, I’d whipped up a pinhole camera — more like a pinhole lens, really, as I didn’t build a whole contraption around the single piece of cardboard with the hole in it.
The portable lens allowed me to project the sun onto pretty much anything: the porch railings, the electric utility box in the yard, a plate of brownies, and even the palm of my hand. I have now held the sun in the palm of my hand and will add that to my list of noteworthy accomplishments — and maybe the nice lady next door will email me the photo she took of it.
By the way, did you notice the brownies have star-shaped sprinkles on them? Absolutely stellar.
From December 15 to January 1, hundreds of thousands of ebooks on Smashwords are available for free or at steeply discounted prices, including many of mine. This annual sale is a great way to stock up on reading material for the winter season, try out some new authors without spending a dime, or send a free gift copy of The Battle of Vesta 4 to everyone you know.
I admit I was worried last year about the merger of Smashwords with Draft2Digital, but it has been a painless and seamless transition clearly carried out by people who genuinely care about self-publishing authors. Everything I loved about the old Smashwords platform has been preserved, and all my experiences with helping other authors set up new books on the Draft2Digital platform have been positive, both in terms of the user experience for setting up a book and the additional distribution opportunities available to authors.
I’ve weathered countless changes in this industry in the past twelve years, and it can feel like a part-time unpaid job just to keep up with all of them, so it’s especially nice to see changes that keep the benefits to authors at the forefront rather than some corporate bottom-line.
In other news, I’m pleased to be working with a professional comic-book artist who is currently bringing one of my story ideas to life. We connected on the Reddit forum ComicBookCollabs, where I quickly got dozens of responses to my story pitch but one in particular that really stood out from all the others as being perfect for what I had in mind.
Speaking of collaborations, any long-time reader of this blog knows that one of the greatest contributors to its early success was author Paul O’Connor of Longbox Graveyard fame. Paul is closing down the Longbox at the end of this year, but he has moved on to writing crime fiction, recently got a story published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and is chronicling his latest writing adventures and noir obsessions at PaulRyanOConnor.com. I can’t thank Paul enough for his support and kind-hearted enthusiasm over the past decade, so please go check him out!
Long live the free and independent republic of Ceres.
The small Ohio town of Xenia was where both sets of my grandparents lived when I was a kid. Xenia is kind of famous for the massive tornado that almost wiped it out in 1974, a year after I was born. The storm destroyed the house where my father’s parents lived, and I’ve seen photos of that destruction in old family photo albums. In the 1980s, my class at school watched an educational film about tornadoes, and the Xenia disaster was included. That day lit the first spark in my young mind that I wasn’t merely learning history; I was a part of it.
Grammy and Grampop eventually rebuilt their house. My sister and I spent large parts of our summer vacations there. One of our favorite memories is making ice cream by hand with Pop every summer. We used an old hand-cranked device that seemed—from a child’s perspective—to take hours. But the result was always amazing, and even better because we had made it ourselves, together.
Grammy passed away in 2005, Dad in 2015, and Pop just a few days ago. Pop was a veteran of the Korean War, and although I remember the shrapnel scar on his leg that you could see whenever he wore shorts in the summer for his route as the local postman, he never talked about his wartime experiences.
Perhaps he was from a generation of men who did not openly discuss their emotional pain. Or perhaps telling your grandkids about the horrors of war isn’t the most natural thing in the world. But in later years, he connected with other vets and began giving presentations about his experiences and supporting and counseling other vets. Having read his typed memoir of being wounded, the subsequent airlift, and his hospitalization, I can only hope that talking about his experiences was part of a healing process.
Pop also did beautiful woodwork in his shop in the basement—the only part of the original house to survive the tornado, and a place where my sister and I often spent hours with the toys stored there from the childhoods of my dad and his sister, my aunt. Pop made a ton of frames and glass-fronted cases such as the one that still hangs in Mom’s kitchen to display her glassware collection. I remember how excited he was to recover old lumber in the form of oaken pews from a local church that was shutting its doors.
Though my grandparents disdained alcohol for religious reasons when I was very young, Pop eventually began brewing dandelion wine in that basement, and grape wine from grapes he grew himself in the backyard. It had nothing to do with the fact that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite novels, but that was one more reason to appreciate what Pop was creating.
This week, I requested that a tree be planted in Pop’s honor. I felt it was a fitting tribute to a woodworker, and doubly so since his grandson has printed so many books on paper. The tree will be planted in Michigan, where I spent so many of my most formative years as a writer, musician, and artist. Pop will always be with me in my creative endeavors. Whether they are paintings, books, drawings, comics, home-brewing experiments, or whatever, I learned something from Pop about the value of making things myself.
Cheers, Pop. Let’s make something awesome for them to remember us by.
I returned some library books on Sunday — including Kate Darling’s fascinating book about robots — and noticed the bushes were full of pretty, pink blossoms. I like to stop to smell the roses or, on my walks at night, stop to marvel at the planets. After a minute of admiring the flowers and touching their petals, I realized I was inches away from several colorful spiders.
At first, I thought they were garden spiders. But the telltale extra-thick zig-zag in the webs was missing. So I am guessing they are joro spiders, a species from southeast Asia that arrived in Georgia about ten years ago and started becoming common around 2019. The Internet tells me they are harmless to humans despite having a venomous bite because the venom is too weak to hurt us and their bite force is so weak that they usually can’t even penetrate human skin.
I’m not about to test that notion. But from a guy with a lifelong enthusiasm for Spider-man and twenty-four years of having a big black spider tattoo on his right forearm, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when I say that spiders are pretty awesome. No, I don’t want them crawling on me or my bed, but that’s true about a lot of things I find awesome.
In fact, one of my all-time favorite pieces of prose is a 2018 non-fiction article about the life and death of the world’s oldest known spider who lived forty-three years, as published in the Washington Post by Avi Selk. Avi’s article became a major influence on how I approach writing about animals, and it begins with my favorite first sentence:
She was born beneath an acacia tree in one of the few patches of wilderness left in the southwest Australian wheat belt, in an underground burrow lined with her mother’s perfect silk.
The article just gets better from there. You’d have to be Henry Beston or David Grann to compete on that level of amazing prose. So don’t mind me as I stop to admire the spiders at the library and get a couple photos even though my phone camera sucks at close-ups. We’re having a moment.
September Update: Every time I go out for a daytime walk, I drop in to check on the colorful spiders. This week, I noticed the biggest spider is no longer there. We had some heavy thunderstorms recently — possibly related to hurricane Idalia that swept over Florida and the southern regions of Georgia about an eight-hour drive from Athens. Maybe her web got wrecked. Maybe she ended up as a snack for a hungry bird. But there are still several smaller spiders in the bushes, some with their molted exoskeletons dangling in their webs, and some of the flowers are now blooming in red instead of pink. It’s a reminder that nature is brutal, yet life persists.
October Update: On my recent visit to Mom’s place, we took a little nature walk in a nearby park, and I was telling her about these critters. She said she’d never seen one. Minutes later, our stroll took us to a patch of trees connected by a sprawling, gargantuan web with multiple layers. Near the center of it all perched a brightly colored joro spider whose oustretched legs would have been wider than my hand. Then another. And another. It’s surprising how common they’ve become, and they are remarkably easy to spot!
In celebration of the summer solstice, I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning in the Martian Archives. Visit my eBay Shop to check out the amazing assortment of vintage comics, books, manga, rare compact discs, toys, textbooks, guitar gear, and other fun stuff I’ve enjoyed for the past twenty years but is ready for a new home. Everything is priced below market value to move quickly, and I rarely get through a day of new listings before they are already selling.
My biggest pet peeve about buying books, comics, and CDs online is when a seller just throws something in an envelope without any protection to keep it from getting bent and banged up in transit. I hate buying a comic or album in Near Mint condition only to have it show up bruised and battered by our admittedly overworked and underpaid postal service. So, I work extra hard to pack my stuff in such a way that it arrives in exactly the same condition as when I mailed it. My efforts have not gone unnoticed by my buyers, one of whom recently left feedback that my Daredevil books were “shipped in an adamantium container” with such great care that he would “trust this person to raise my kids”.
Childcare is not one of the services I offer, but it’s nice to be appreciated.
Anyway, this is a great time to own a piece of Mars Will Send No More as I make room for the future by clearing out some much-loved treasures from the past. Tomorrow, the world.
September 2023 Update: Selling off huge chunks of my library has been a big project with 85 lots sold so far, more than 30 currently active listings, and more to come. Customer feedback has been 100% positive. Although I sometimes feel a little sad about parting with a treasure I’ve held onto for ages, that feeling is outweighed by the satisfaction I find in sending something amazing to a person who will get to enjoy it like I did, and the pleasure of receiving five-star feedback that tells me the buyer is completely happy.
I also discovered that some things I thought would be painful to part with really were not, because I had read and re-read them a gazillion times, to the point where I’d basically memorized them and wasn’t getting anything new out of the experience. So, I gained both a sense of relief from knowing I wouldn’t need to carry them around any more (boxes of books are insanely heavy to move), and a quiet joy from knowing someone else would have a chance to experience their awesomeness from a fresh perspective — which is entirely in keeping with the original spirit of this blog I created long ago to share and spread the word about my favorite books, comics, and art.
And as I see my bookshelves open up with empty space, and break down a few short-boxes as they empty out, I feel a bit lighter and more open to the future. In my twenties, I traveled super-lean and had very few possessions. My life was so lean that I felt a constant sense of deprivation, and I might have over-compensated for that feeling in my thirties and forties by attempting to compile the awesomest library I could. And though I do not for a single second regret amassing treasure like a mythic dragon in his cave, it’s nice to re-connect with my younger self’s confidence that life is about more than just the things you own. It’s an ongoing adventure.
It’s the morning of my third full day as a resident of Athens, GA, so I am going to take a little break from unpacking and assembling shit, put on the kettle for a second coffee in my brand-new, one-of-a-kind Meteor Mags mug, and recap how I got here.
It begins with Fugazi. In 1996, I drove from Ann Arbor, MI to Georgia to catch as many concerts as I could by my favorite band: Fugazi from D.C. I’ve told the tale many times, and it now appears in the book Two Hundred, my published scrapbook of drawings, memoirs, poems, and song lyric from the 1990s and early 2000s. The first concert on that journey was at the Masquerade in Atlanta. So in January 2023, when I was staying at my sister’s house north of Atlanta and looking for a place of my own, I checked out the Masquerade’s concert schedule.
I was thrilled to see on the calendar one of my favorite heavy rock bands. King Buffalo has been rocking hard for a decade and recorded a trilogy of brilliant albums during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But despite appearing on the Masquerade’s calendar, the concert was actually at a smaller venue called Hendershot’s in Athens. I bought a ticket anyway. Compared to the absolutely bonkers road trips I took in the name of music in my twenties, renting a car for a 2.5-hour trek east seemed both like small potatoes and an opportunity to re-connect with the more adventurous guy I used to be before spending my forties mostly isolated indoors bashing out the world’s awesomest fiction series.
I left Arizona and moved to Georgia to be closer to my mother and sister, but I was having zero luck finding affordable housing in their neighborhoods or in any location where public transportation could get me there. My search began broadening in ever-widening circles. And I thought, “As long as I am not going to get the location I want, why don’t I consider Macon and Athens as possibilities?” They both have universities, which tends to make for a more progressive and artistic local vibe compared to other areas of any state. Macon must not be a total hillbilly hellhole if Adam Ragusea can enjoy living there, and Athens has a relatively hip reputation compared to the rest of Georgia. I’d been to Athens once before in the early 2000s but only for a couple of hours and wasn’t impressed, but times change and maybe it deserved a second look. I’d be there anyway for King frickin’ Buffaloooooo! So what the hell.
Mom graciously offered to pay for a rental car and hotel if I took the opportunity to scout for my own place to live, so I reserved a compact car through Enterprise. A compact is the smallest size you can get at Enterprise, even smaller than “economy” size. But on the day I picked it up, no compacts were ready for me. So for the same price, I got a goddamn beast.
The Toyota 4Runner SR5 is a bit too much car for my taste. I prefer something smaller that gets great mileage and can easily get in and out of tight spaces. And I certainly don’t need six bloody seats. But the beast ran great, rode smoothly, handled well, had serious pickup, and was overall pretty fun to drive. Plus, it was my favorite color and went with everything I wear, and its voluminous interior came in handy for moving my stuff. 9/10, would destroy civilization again with this gas-guzzling monster.
The King Buffalo concert was good. I was disappointed that I didn’t have much of a view of the band — just the tops of their heads, mostly — but I got the last available seat at the bar, enjoyed a pint of a great local ale and one of my old favorites from Michigan, and was blown away by how the band sounded even more awesome in person than on album. Hendershot’s clearly wasn’t built with the acoustics of a loud rock performance in mind, but the sound guy did an amazing job with the rhythm section. The bass guitar and bass drum were vibrating my barstool, and the snare-drum hits cracked like lightning. The audience and staff were friendly and mellow despite the place being fully packed, and everyone seemed to be having a groovy time. I’m sure I will be visiting Hendershot’s for more entertainment and hanging out.
I spent the rest of my days and nights that week scouting Athens and applying for apartments from the comfort of the Howard Johnson hotel, and on my final day got approved for a place within easy walking distance to the county library, public transportation for getting to downtown, and a Kroger to get food and supplies.
The stuff that looks like weed in the picture above is Urb, and it is legal in Georgia for two reasons. One, it has a mild chemical called Delta-8 THC, not the Delta-9 TetraHydroCannibinol responsible for the “high” of marijuana. Two, the THC content is 0.24 percent, well below the legal limit for Georgia. By comparison, in states such as Arizona that have legalized weed for both medical and recreational purposes, you can walk into a dispensary any day of the week and buy stuff that is one hundred times stronger at twenty-four percent THC. When I saw Urb for sale at the local Hop-In convenience store in Kennesaw, I figured what the hell. You could probably get just as much of a buzz from smoking cooking sage: a mild relaxation that goes great with a pint or two. You can read all about this wacky product and why it is legal in all fifty states in a 2021 RollingStone article.
While waiting for my move-in day, I returned to my sister’s place and spent the next two weeks taking nature walks. The walks were a confluence of many things. I had wheels and time. I needed exercise after medical problems rendered me mostly immobile for three months last year. I had just bought my first pair of prescription eyeglasses for distance viewing, which meant I could see mother nature in high definition again after several years of deteriorating eyesight. And much like my decision to travel 2.5 hours to see one of my favorite bands, I needed to reconnect with a sense of spontaneous adventure and exploration I kind of lost in my forties.
Now my second cup of coffee is done, and I guess I should get some more things sorted in my new place before my virtual storytime group meets this afternoon to begin celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. After three months, my scanner is now unpacked, and in its absence I’ve accumulated so many recent additions to the big box of comics to share with you in upcoming weeks. Plus, I need to call an author to wrap up my editing of his third novel and move forward with producing it for print and ebook.
Huge thanks to my mother and sister for all their love and support during this transition.
Spidey was my jam as a young Martian. I must have crafted this masterpiece near the end of the 1970s, when I was five to seven years old. Clearly, I had a lot to learn about architecture and anatomy. Feel free to mock me now for those ridiculous hands!
Well into my early adolescence, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said, “A comic-book artist.” I designed different characters and drew them poorly, no matter how many drawing tutorials I attempted to follow. Eventually, I became reasonably okay-ish in various visual, musical, and literary art forms, but I still can’t draw sequential art to save my life — unless it’s stick figures!
Someone on Reddit suggested this could be a super-rare variant cover, so I ordered a five-dollar copy of the blank version of Non-Stop Spider-man #1 using some of the store credit I earned at MyComicShop in the last couple of months thanks to this blog’s readers. I’ll see if I can get this image printed on it.
In other news, I finished drafting episode 34 in the ongoing Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches this week, and I had a blast writing it. It’s really two stories in one. In the “present day” of February 2032, the interspecies telepathic band Small Flowers performs their final concert in the asteroid belt. That story is spliced with flashbacks about the musical friendship between Mags and Alonso, who is the only human in Small Flowers and one of the people Mags loves most in all the solar system.
July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions.The ebook is also available on Smashwords and coming soon to other major retailers.
Bonus points to anyone who gets my silly Spider-man drawing printed on a t-shirt before I do. Until then, Cadet Stimpy and I remain stranded on the planet Ballknob. We had to eat what was left of the ship.
It’s the week of Mother’s Day, and I’m currently working on a new story about a couple of moms, so this seems like as good a time as any to tell you that Mom occasionally drops by this blog to see what I am up to.
No, she doesn’t much care about comic books, experimental poetry, or the violent, profane fiction I torment the rest of you with on a regular basis. But she does care about her boy who has long since outgrown boyhood and is rapidly approaching his 49th birthday. So, I’d like to give some credit where credit is due.
This blog wouldn’t exist without Mom. Besides the fact that I wouldn’t have been born without her, she helped me get a jumpstart on reading at a young age. I was way into superheroes and dinosaurs by the time I hit kindergarten, and if not for Mom’s infinite patience with reading dinosaur books with me when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been conversant about stegosaurs and pachycephalosaurs while I was still in pre-school.
As a result, my kindergarten teacher must have thought I was some kind of child prodigy, because I was enlisted into an advanced reading group that deciphered complexities of the English language such as “See Jane run” while the rest of the class had nap time. Let me assure you: I was no prodigy. I only had some advanced reading comprehension, and a decent memory of things I’d read—both of which eventually served me well in slacking my way through high school.
Besides dinosaur books and basically any book about animals, space, or history, I had a youthful passion for comic books. That love did not diminish in my teenage years! But by then, times had changed.
In the mid-1980s, comics experienced a cultural shift. No longer were they relegated to the magazine racks of convenience stores and drug stores. Shops dedicated entirely to comics appeared, and the publishing industry responded by creating “direct market” titles meant solely for distribution to those shops. You might take comic shops for granted now, but they were a pretty big deal at the time.
When I was old enough to legally have a job, I picked up a gig as a golf caddy on the weekends to make a few bucks. The work itself truly sucked on a Saturday morning, but some of the old golfer guys tipped me nicely, and I’d leave the place with cash in my pocket. I wasn’t old enough to drive, so Mom would pick me up.
Our first stop? The comic shop. While Mom patiently waited, I discovered series and back issues that to this day remain among my all-time favorites.
Those reading experiences undoubtedly shaped me and influenced my future as a writer, editor, and that apex (or possibly nadir) of human evolution we call a comic-book blogger.
Mom, if you’re stopping by today, thank you for putting up with learning how to pronounce all those dinosaur names back in the 70s, for making sure I always had plenty of books and comics to occupy my mind in the 80s, and for encouraging me to keep exploring my creativity all the way into the 2020s.
Doom endures. So does Mars Will Send No More. This blog’s interplanetary headquarters pulled up stakes on the last day of January 2021 and relocated to an alternate reality where time came to a standstill — a city encased in a null-zone bubble where years pass on the outside when only seconds transpire within.
Communications systems ground to a halt mere moments after impact. Robots worked overtime to restore connectivity. But despite delays, this blog is alive and kicking and, for the most part, enjoying the change of scenery. I’ll be back with some new entries for the Big Box of Comics series and some sweet Indie Comics this Spring.
Mars Will Send No More is approaching the end of its eighth year, so I’ve been doing maintenance on it, clearing out dead wood and tidying up a bit. With more than 1500 posts, this garden of artistic obsessions requires pruning now and then. But I don’t mind. It’s fun to take a trip down memory lane and re-experience the ramshackle madness and mayhem upon which this blog was founded.
It’s a strange time for comic book blogs. Lloyd Wright at Diversions of the Groovy Kind is celebrating ten years of bronze-age comics blogging with nearly 3000 posts, and he’s musing on how life has changed since he started. He’s returned to writing comic books after stoking the fires of his nostalgia, and he’s a grandfather now, so he plans to post less frequently. Lloyd was a big influence on Mars in its formative days, so visit Diversions to wish him well and check out his latest original creations.
Paul O’Connor at Longbox Graveyard was an early supporter of my blogging endeavors when Mars was getting off the ground, and he’s been through changes, too. His “graveyard” has long since been been pruned and organized into a collection of his bronze-age favorites. He’s survived Californian fires, moved to Canada and returned, and is doubtlessly pondering his next conquest in the wake of leaving Twitter and putting his blog on indefinite hiatus. Drop by the Longbox to explore his entertaining collection of personal musings and generous guest blogs by fellow comic-book fans, and let him know we’d love to see him back.
Here on the distant frontiers of my Martian outpost, I’ve got no plans to abandon these virtual fortifications any time soon. We can always find something to rap about, whether it’s poetry,writing, art, food, or cats. But in honor of Lloyd and Paul and all the comic book bloggers out there, I’ll share an update about the comic book posts that have been the most popular here. Some of them overlap with my twenty-two all-time favorite comics, which you can find on the Archives Page. Some of them are from the earliest days of this blog, and others have recently rocketed to the top.
Here they are, in descending order starting from the currently most-viewed. Thank you for indulging and sharing my obsessions and joys, and stay creative.
As you know, these quarterly reports are serious business, so for the love of all that’s holy, put on some decent socks.
In the past six months, your purchases at MyComicShop through the affiliate links on this site earned your humble martian moderator enough store credit to get two volumes of the Samurai Executioner Omnibus. THANK YOU, dear reader! These are books by the Lone Wolf & Cub creative team, full of poetic decapitations and deeply disturbing human behavior in Edo-period Japan.
I love omnibuses so much that I made my own this month. There will be an announcement about it here tomorrow. For now, here’s a shot of my first proof copy of the paperback edition. It’s 183,000 words, 588 pages, and weighs more than 2 pounds. It’s like heavy, man.
Hey! Wasn’t I supposed to graduate this month? Yes. But the forces of evil conspired against me, and the upside is that I have until November to turn in my final project. My sister wanted to send me a little graduation gift, which turned out to be a “sorry about the forces of evil” gift. It’s a plant that looks like an alien growing out of a Dimetrodon‘s back. Hell yeah!
It’s a lovely addition to the blogging station, especially because my venus flytrap bit the dust after I made the n00b mistake of letting its stalks grow. And yes, that’s a bloody stuffed puma in the photo, and I got him a friend this year. They read Villains of All Nations together.
Most people would think it odd that a grown-ass man takes a stuffed puma on visits to the dentist, but my dentist totally understands. He is my hero. He works on big cats like ocelots and tigers at the Phoenix Zoo, and he and his father saved the life of a jaguar that was illegally trapped in Mexico. The poor thing had tried to chew through the metal bars of its cage, damaging its teeth so badly that it couldn’t even eat. My dentist fixed up that awesome cat, and he and his staff take excellent care of me.
No, I don’t have him give pretend check-ups to my toy puma. But now that you mention it, I might ask for that next time! It would make a great photo.
Last but not least, my cell-phone pics of my old Godzilla toy got their fifteen minutes of fame this year. Some cable show about memorabilia found them and contacted me for permission to use them on an episode. No, I can’t remember the name of the show right now – This Bloody American Junkyard or something – but I signed a contract allowing them to unleash my late-night toy photos on the world. If a huge green monster destroys your city this year, I guess you know where to send the hate mail.
This is a different Godzilla toy who deserves his own gallery here someday.
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.
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.
Ultra Cosmic Bonus Points are yours if you identify the source comic book for the panel in the center which clearly states this collage is “Perfect! The Master Will be Well Pleased!”
200,000. That’s a big number. Did you know scientists believe the biggest number is 45,000,000,000? Some speculate that even larger numbers exist.
Okay, maybe that’s not true. But what do we know? We only got a 100.6% in our statistics class last semester, which should be statistically impossible.
Do you remember what you did before blog technology? No, we don’t either. Something involving this weird stuff known as nature, maybe. Or this place we read about called “the outside world.”
But we have evidence life existed before blogging. At least creationists and evolutionists can all agree on that. In fact, both sides agree that the age of the universe may date back as far as 1982. In 1982, we were working on a strange technology known as paper. Paper is a substance made out of old computer printouts and egg cartons run through a wood chipper, with essential vitamins and flavors added.
Our ancestors taught us how to form primitive letters from paper using analog cut-and-paste technology called scissors. The ancient ones hoped we would use this technology for the good of all humankind. We decided that was a dumb idea. Instead, we cut out the names of superheroes and comic books.
Thank you for dropping by and reading comic books with us! It’s a strange hobby, but someone’s got to do it. We have many more fun things to explore and share with you. So, put on your bathrobe, quit your day job, and click away!
It seems like only yesterday we were celebrating 100,000 page views. Actually, it was two months ago! Grab a beer and treat yourself, Martians! Thank you for dropping by and reading comic books with us. It’s always a pleasure when your space capsule docks at our mothership. Keep it cosmic, mutate yourself often, and watch out for rampaging dinosaurs!
“When we started this band, back in the day, it was merely a laugh.” -Motley Crue
We launched MarsWill Send No More on WordPress on January 8, 2011. That first month saw only 300 page views. Now it’s February 1, 2012, and our stat ticker just rolled over 100,000. That makes us feel like hulking out in some Hulk pajamas!
Thank you for dropping by and sharing the comic book love.