Happy Birthday Mary Joan Schwartz

Just sayin'--this is really a catch-all post, but it is my sister's birthday. I don't think anyone in my family reads my blog anyway, for which I should probably be grateful. But just in case, there you go, Mare. My little sister is turning 30! Freaky.

Also freaky is this video; footage from a car commercial shoot with a possible spirit capture. You'll need to watch closely to see it, though; I didn't get what the fuss was about until the third viewing.

Thirdly, Walter Mosley gives me another reason to love him: a giant-sized (seriously) tribute to the Fantastic Four:

Walter Mosley is a comic book geek. From the time he discovered The Fantastic Four, the groundbreaking 1961 super-hero comic book created for Marvel Comics by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Mosley has been fascinated by Kirby and Lee's art and storytelling, and how their historic collaboration not only stoked his own young imagination, but transformed the American super-hero comic book.

Now, more than four decades later, Mosley has teamed up with Marvel Comics to produce Maximum Fantastic Four, an oversized (8"×11 7/8") $50 hardcover re-creation of the first issue of The Fantastic Four that reprints that seminal issue with a powerful graphic twist. In the new book, due in November, each of Kirby's dynamic panels is enlarged and designed for an entire page—or several pages—turning the original 32-page pulp comic into a 224-page visual deconstruction of Kirby and Lee's pioneering creation. It is at once a tribute to the art of Jack Kirby, a visual analysis of his style and a work of art itself. (Via Publisher's Weekly, but they are meanies who require registration and subscription and stuff so it helps to have an agent who knows your obsessions well enough to email you this sort of thing.)

WANT.

Speaking of the agent, it's always good news when she writes to tell you she read your new novel manuscript and loved it. Yay!