Comic book hilarity

Click the link for superheroes’ Facebook status updates. Great, great stuff:

Two new members! Count ‘em: two!

Our family here at Groin Central just keeps getting bigger!  Say hello to Rob (hypergraffic) and Lia (dillonmania), the latest to join the ranks of the proud! The brave! The Grointastic! Both Rob and Lia are old friends who know a thing or two about awesome. Rob’s commented on our blog before as “robthesolarman,” “volcanorob” and “#1 Jeff Fan,” while Lia’s commented as… well, “Lia.”

Now, we at this here blog take new members very seriously, so I thought you might like a sneak peek at how we approached our latest contributors:

Gokitalo (7:26:07 PM): Rob! I will now bestow upon you the Mighty Powers of Grointasticness!

Gokitalo (7:27:32 PM): Hold my Enchanted Groin aloft and let the Power of Groinskull surge through you!

Volcano R o b (7:27:42 PM): uhhhhh

So everyone give us a nice, warm welcome to the new guys!

Twitter puts my favorite creators in my pants

I’m hooked on Twitter.  I’ve written about it, used it and abused it.  After joining it I quickly followed all of my fellow internet dorks in Vancouver Canada, and then once I got the local tech / blogging community good and followed I turned my attention to my hobbies.  I quickly found that the comic book community had embraced Twitter in the wonderful geeky fashion that we’re known for.

With a lot of top comic professionals on the Twitter, it’s now easier than ever to reach out and touch someone.  Well reach out and @ them at least.  Plus having the latest thoughts of my favorite writers accessible on my iPhone at anytime is pretty cool.

Whose worth following on Twitter?  Here are a few of my favorites:

@BRIANMBENDIS / Brian Michael Bendis – writer New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Secret Invasion, Ultimate Spider-Man and others: by far my favorite comic creator, Bendis rarely Tweets.  However like catching a fairy under a glass, it’s the scarcity of the event that makes it special.  He also swears, which is like… cool man.

@brubaker / Ed Brubaker – writer Captain America, Criminal, Daredevil: though he claims to have received temporally unsubstantiated information that Kurt Vonnegut invented Twitter, Brubaker is a clever tweeter just like you’d expect of a guy from Seattle in a nifty hat.

@warrenellis / Warren Ellis – writer Astonishing X-Men and a bunch of stuff I don’t read: while I don’t think I’ve ever liked a Warren Ellis book, he’s a great follow on Twitter.  More so than most everyone else his caustic personality shines through even in the 140 character format.

@BrianReed / Brian Reed – writer Ms. Marvel and others: Reed is probably the best at Twitter of any of the creators I follow.  He’s fun to read and he’s generally eager to interact with everyone else, so he’s the genesis of a lot of cross-tweets between creators.  He’s also responsible for the very funny fake Bendis account that forced Bendis to sign up for Twitter to protect his identity.

@JefferySimpson / Jeffery Simpson – writer this blog post: what?  I can’t self-promote?  Bah.  Right I’ll probably never be let near a comic book writing job with a ten foot pole, though I do have a great pitch for a Scarlet Witch mini-series, my mother tells me I’m interesting and you’re not calling my mom a liar are you?

Introducing our newest collaborator…

… Jeff! This is a guy I know from a message board I frequent. He likes comics just like we do, especially comics that feature jailbait and barely legal teenage girls fighting crime (Batgirl, Mary Marvel, Arisia). I’m sure he can tell you more about himself than we can, so I’ll let him take the floor!

Neil Gaiman reads

While I’m sure you’re all waiting with baited breath for the comic review I talked about in Spiffy’s Weekly Recommendations, enjoy this video of Neil Gaiman reading his latest book aloud:

http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx?VideoID=1

Thanks to Steven Grant for linking to this video in the latest edition of his weekly column, Permanent Damage.