My pop-culture mojo is coming back, slowly.

Read some more comics this weekend; The Other Side, a dark Vietnam story; Samurai -- pirates, samurai, and gratuitous nudity, what more could a guy want?; Sandman Mystery Theater, unnecessarily complicated, gave up after the second issue; Casanova, just as complicated, but for a good reason, time-space travel type confusion that is intriguing; Midnighter, I love my Garth Ennis, he just seem to always be fun to read, outrageous sensibility, and great story telling; and Crossing Midnight, dark Japanese looking art and story. Criminal, a noir story that was pretty good, but I especially liked the essays in back where creators talked about their favorite noir movies; Out of the Past, Point Blank, and mentioned a bunch of times, one of my favorites, Charley Varrick.

This is the only way I'm going to review most comics, books, or movies by the way-- one liners. I'll let other folk put in all the deep thought.

Finished a Micheal Connelly novel, Echo Park. Reliably good Harry Bosch story.

Went to see Bridge to Teribethia, which made me tear up. The second fantasy movie in a row (after Pan's Labyrinth), that showed the strength of imagination and fantasy in dealing with the harshness of life.

Going to see the 300, this afternoon.

After telling us last week that there was plenty of the graphic novel in stock, supposedly 14,000 copies with 15,000 coming in this week, it was announced they were gone.

They let it happen again; I'll tell you exactly what happened; Borders ordered 15,000 and Barnes and Noble ordered the other 14,000. They'll have them over the next month, sell the hell out of them, and returned all the sticky coffee stained and crumb caked smeared copes for credit.

Luckily, I didn't trust them and have plenty of copies in stock. But the comic industry is really going to need to figure out a way to keep the mass market from wiping us out any time they feel like it. For heaven's sake, we are here buying this stuff week after week, not just the week the movie comes out!

Added: Forgot to mention, started watching a Japanese live action movie from1966; Tokyo Drifter last night, and instead of going to bed, watched to the end. Now I know where Tarentino got his ideas for Kill Bill. Very funky 60's music and colors. Not as dated as most movies from that era are. (Was highly disappointed by Superfly, for instance, which I remembered as amazing, but fell flat.) I'm almost afraid to watch movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Clockwork Orange, and Point Blank, which rocked my teenage world...What if they aren't as good? I know that when I recently watched the Wild Bunch, it was still a great movie, but not the world shifting movie I remember. So far, I've avoided putting it the test.