The time has come once again for Chris Sims to take a week off, and so once again he has initiated his annual contest!
Accordingly, this:
And that's that.
Whoops, some of the images got a bit squished - click the wide ones for full size.
Oh. what the hell - might as well ride Chris' coattails a bit and mention my own super-cool micro-contest. Only 25 days left!
Why, hello. Happy New Year, LBWteers, and welcome to the start of an all-new era of super nerdy excellence. Oh, what a time to be alive!
But enough of that sort of thing. You fine folks were promised a contest and a contest ye shall have. A tiny little contest!
See, I've been using the Internet for a long, long time. I remember watching a .jpg of Captain Picard resolve onscreen one line of pixels per minute, all the while wondering just what facial expression he was using - his eyebrows look neutral, but by damn he could be smiling under there and I'll find out if I have to stay up all night!
As a result of all of this healthy staying inside and typing, I have developed a slight... seething hatred for, well, these guys:
Well, various iterations of these guys over the years. These are the Firefox versions of my hated foes, loading-image (page with INEXPLICABLE SHAPES on it) and broken-image (sad little torn piece of paper) and I do not dispute their status as fine little examples of faviconery but my god I have stared at them for so many hours of my life and I now want to set them on fire. Only recently did it occur to me that I have the power to change this.
And so:
Bruce Banner loading-image now gazes serenely out at me and is all like, "Oh, hello. I see you're loading an image. How splendid, I can't wait to see how it turns out."
But as soon as something goes wrong, I know that tiny favicon Hulk will have my back. "RAR! HULK SMASH PUNY HUMANS NOT MAINTAIN WEBSITE PROPERLY! OR MAYBE SMASH MODEM, IT NOT TOO GOOD AND HULK THINK MAYBE IMAGE TIME OUT! YOU RELOAD IMAGE, HULK CAN WAIT!"
So what's the contest, you ask? Well, I reckon that some day I'll get tired of those to jokers - delightful as they are - and want to replace them. So I'm asking YOU to submit ideas for new duos to accurately represent the micro-drama that plays out in our browsers daily (or hourly). Something like, I don't know, Johnny Blaze to Ghost Rider, you get the idea. I'll arbitrarily pick an arbitrary number of winners and painstakingly pixel-craft their submissions to life, to be posted here.
RULES:
1. Contest ends in one month (2 Feb 2009)
2. Entries should be something that can reasonably depicted in a 16 x 16 pixel image, i.e., nothing like "loading-image Cybertron becomes broken-image Unicron devouring Cybertron while fighting all of the Autobots."
3. Okay, that was kind of cool. Submit whatever you want.
4. Enter as often as you like, either through the comments section or via email (found in my bio).
And that's that. Feel free to help yourself to the Banner/Hulk images - just replace the standard images in Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/res for Firefox. I have no idea what you folks with other browsers need to do, but I'm sure you'll figure it out.
2010!
I am going to apologize here for my almost complete absence from posting on this blog lately. The last few weeks have been completely nuts.
I want to announce our contest winner! Based on a random draw, ScottyQuick is the winner of our Third Anniversary Contest! Scotty will receive autographed copies of Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke and The War at Ellsmere by Faith Erin Hicks, a fantastic two-pack of comics by Nova Scotia-based comic book stars. Congratulations Scotty! Be sure to send me an email with your mailing info to rachellegoguen at gmail dot com.
To everyone else, I think in a week or so things will have settled down enough for me to get back to blogging regularly. In the meantime, of course, Tiina, Dave and Johnathan are throwing down some awesome posts.
It's Living Between Wednesdays' Third Anniversary!!! To celebrate we are looking back at our favourite LBW posts of all time.
AND...we are also having a contest! All you have to do to enter is leave a comment at the end of this post with a link to your favourite comic blog post(s). It can be your own blog, it can be someone else's blog! We are celebrating the comic blog community here! The winner will get a SIGNED copy of Dawyn Cooke's new book, Parker: The Hunter, and a SIGNED copy of Faith Erin Hicks' awesome book, The War At Ellsmere! Probably some other goodies too!
Big thanks to everyone for reading this blog, and leaving comments, and thanks to all the comic creators who have allowed us to interview them. Extra big thanks to Paul Pettipas for building and maintaining this site for us for zero dollars, and to Matt for designing the logo. And a special shout-out to the guys at The Dollar Bin for being so supportive, the Newsarama bloggers for linking to us pretty regularly, Chris Sims' at the Invincible Super Blog for sending a lot of traffic our way, and especially Calum Johnston at Strange Adventures comic shop for being awesome all the time.
So here we go with our favourite posts. I have "remastered" some of the older ones to include alt-text on the images! Enjoy!
FROM RACHELLE:
This stands as the most viewed post in LBW history. It got linked on a lot of sites, including a lot of sex and erotica sites, and still gets lots of hits every week (mostly on the old site). It also gets a lot of traffic from people searching for "superman porn."
Can We Talk About Something Else?
This was one of the first big deal posts that I did, in that it got linked from a lot of places and it brought a lot of traffic to my site. For that reason, I will always be fond of it.
Rating The Super Hunks: Daredevil and Rating The Super Hunks: Namor
The Rating The Super Hunks feature is one of my favourite things to write, but these posts also take me a really long time (mostly because of all the image hunting). These two are my favourites. And the Daredevil one took me hours and hours and hours because I was obsessed with having a perfect cross-section of images from different eras.
The Prop Comedy Stylings of Superman
The DC Showcase Presents books are obviously very inspiring to the humour-based comic book blogger. Of all the posts I did that used panels from the Showcase books, these are probably my favourites.
Superman and Batman Quit Earth, Not Each Other
Gigantic Fun With the Super Sons!
I really can't say enough about how awesome Bob Haney is or how thankful I am that he wrote comics and that I can blog about them. Bob Haney makes my job easy. I've done a lot of posts about Bob Haney comics, but these two are my favourites.
Superman Gives Batman His Heart
The Bride of Batman
World's Finest #71: Teaming Up to Confuse Lois
I would be pretty content just writing a blog about Superman/Batman team-ups. I have done a ton of posts about the World's Finest duo, so it took awhile to find my favourites, but I would say these three stand out.
This post did not seem to get a lot of attention or views, but I really like it. I wrote it from the computer lab at school.
Captain America #33 in 30 Seconds
This was an entry I did for Chris Sims' annual contest in 2008. I am especially proud of it because it earned comments from both Steve Epting AND Ed Brubaker!
The Supergirl From Krypton Meets Her Asshole Cousin
I am surprised that it took me so long to do a post about this comic because it is one of my favourite all-time stories (to make fun of).
I want to acknowledge this one because Dave did such an awesome job on the fake Marvel variant covers. Unfortunately, we ended up posting this the same week that Chris Sims posted his own version of Marvel Hobos. Because he spies on me.
I also want to acknowledge my favourite Johnathan posts (which is really hard because they are all so good. I think these three certainly merit special mention:
Thinking Hypothetically: The JSA (Part 1)
Thinking Hypothetically: The JSA (Part 2)
And Tiina's recent post on Heart Throbs #119 was definitely great:
Fun With Romance Comics: Two Awful Girls for Every Dumbass Boy!
FROM DAVE (VIA RACHELLE):
YOU THINK YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?!
Dave told me that this is his favourite LBW post because it's about the greatest thing that ever happened to him (he may not have said exactly that). I still love this commercial, though, and a brush with a local celebrity is always exciting.
FROM TIINA:
Happy three year anniversary, Living Between Wednesdays! Our blog is a toddler! Although in blog years, it's probably in its early 30s, makes a comfortable salary at its graphic design job, just bought a house, but still parties pretty hard on the weekends.
Since the early days of LBW, I've always loved Rachelle's Archie posts. Archie Sunday: Rockin' With Dilton has everything you'd expect in an Archie comic: the Riverdale kids being sociopaths, tired cliches and totally unbelievable plot lines, and Dilton being rad.
My favourite thing I've posted since I joined the LBW team is the post about the New Kids on the Block and Richie Rich team-up. Because it's as awesome as it is nonsensical.
FROM JOHNATHAN:
Sheesh, three years? I've been flailing around on the Internet for that long? Makes a guy feel... venerable. And speaking of flailing, here are some posts that I especially liked that I found while haphazardly trawling through the archives:
Review of Future Current Events - Mostly I like how the graphic on this one turned out - narcissism! Geoff Johns' Legion of Super-Rejects under a microscope!
The Forbidden Loves of Superman - It's only shame that keeps him in check, so heap it on.
Review of Something Very Perplexing - Old ads make for many questions.
A Look at the Nineteen-Nineties - See how Captain Atom chairs a budget meeting! All the thrills of the 90s, today!
Review of Burial Customs - What do you do with a dead Legionnaire? Shoot them into space, of course.
Review of the Legion of Super Heroes - Epically long, so I have to make sure that it gets read.
Future Zoo: Review of the Parakat - Superboy used to run into a lot of variations on the tiger, for some reason. Here's one from the super-fun first appearance of Star Boy.
Review of Juvenile Humour - I can't always be highb
Review of Some Robots - Part three in a series that asks, "how much can Johnathan talk about robots that appear in a single panel each?"
Make Dragons History (Ed. - Hey, that's one of my posts! Thanks Johnathan!) No problem! I liked it!
Review of the (Best Ever)s - They really were.
Super Human Detritus of the Thirtieth Century: Alaktor and his Marvel Belt - I like Alaktor because he's not even very good at being a villain.
Most of these, you'll notice, are mine, from back in the "Paul and John Review" days of yore. This is mostly because I am disorganized and had to go with what I remembered. Rachelle has some damn fine posts out there that I just didn't get to go through in time to single out, while Tiina and Dave have been delivering solid stuff from day one. I think that Dave has basically managed to sell me something with every other post, in fact. Go team!
And of course our greatest adventure was when we unmasked the Phantom that was haunting Old Man Johnston's Comic Shoppe.
I have randomly drawn a winner from all who entered the Scott Pilgrim contest. The winner is Andrew Townsend, and I swear it was random and had nothing to do with the fact that The Stolen Minks are on his ultimate Scott Pilgrim playlist.
Here is his list:
Young Leaves--Attack in Black
Super Soaked--Be Your Own Pet
Little Garcon, Little Fille--Born Ruffians
Hot Tips--The D'urbervilles
Burn 2 Ash-- Chad VanGaalen
Sugar Laced Soul--The Diableros
She Don't Use Jelly--The Flaming Lips
I Know a Place--Jay Reatard
Lay Your Head Down--Keren Ann
Secrets Aren't So Bad--Magneta Land
I'm Easy--The Meligrove Band
Shake It Off--Ninja High School
Bring It--The Stolen Minks
I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart--The White Stripes
Congrats Andrew! Send me an email with your contact info so I can get that Scott Pilgrim special to you (rachellegoguen at gmail dot com). Thanks for entering everyone! I enjoyed reading your lists!
In other news...
I am working hard on getting the new and improved Living Between Wednesdays up and running. I can't post too much here because I am out of room. The plan is to have the new site up by the end of the month. I hope you will all follow me over there. Daily posts are the plan for the new site! For reals this time!
Living Between Wednesdays is a place for people who love comic books and superheroes.
