So I'm hanging with my 2.5 year old son, Jackson, the other night, and I'm wearing my Beavis and Butthead Do America t-shirt. And he points at the huge Butthead on the left and asks me, "What that?"

"Butthead," I reply.

Then he points to the huge Beavis on the right and asks, "What that?"

"Beavis."

Then, for the next two minutes, back and forth, over and over:

"What that?"

"Butthead."

"What that?"

"Beavis."

And all the while, I'm thinking two concurrent thoughts: (1), how cool it is to be teaching my son to identify Beavis and Butthead, and (2) how very strange and un-fatherlike of me it is to be teaching my son to identify Beavis and Butthead.

* * *

Continuing on with the "things that toddlers probably shouldn't be exposed to" front, I've been on a real Avenged Sevenfold kick lately. The incendiary guitar, locomotive drums and soaring harmonies on songs like "Beast and the Harlot" are like a defibrillator for my soul, shocking away 20+ years of growing up and leaving me feeling like I'm 17 years old all over again.

Which is great and all, but not so much what I want to play when driving my son somewhere. So, on our way out this evening, I grabbed what I thought was one of his favorite CDs, aptly titled Children's Favorite Songs. But when I got in the car and ejected Avenged Sevenfold's City of Evil disc and tried to play it, I discovered it was actually the DVD of Children's Favorite Songs, not the CD, and thus would not play.

For a second or two, I toyed with the notion of popping Avenged Sevenfold back in. But it just didn't seem right. So I flipped through the other CDs in the car and what to my wondering eyes should appear but Johnny Mathis's 1958 classic, Merry Christmas.

I think Jackson's early exposure to one of the greatest Christmas albums of all time, as we drove to and from the Little Gym this evening, just might counterbalance the Beavis and Butthead.

I got a lot of grief from the Postcards crew I was hanging with in San Diego for sporting a Cardinals cap night and day.

What they didn't realize is that, for me, it's a family thing. My dad raised me to be a Cards fan and that's how I'm raising my son.

Here's a pic I'm really proud of -- got my dad his first-ever authentic, on-field Cards cap for Father's Day this year. My son, of course, has been outfitted in Cards gear since practically the day he was born. He's already on his second cap!



There were maybe 3 people the entire con who gave me thumbs up on the cap. One of them was this guy, DJ Lance Rock from Nick Jr's upcoming show, Yo Gabba Gabba!



So, that was pretty cool!

So I went to my LCS¹ last week, all excited and eager to check out two long-awaited comics: Archenemies #1 and Warren Ellis Black Gas #2.

They weren't there. Oh, it would've been fine if they somehow hadn't been set back for me by mistake. I was more than happy to just buy a copy off the shelf. No problem there, no sir.

But they weren't there. And I don't mean, they weren't there because they were all sold out. No, what I'm here to tell you is, they weren't there because my LCS didn't order a single copy for the shelves.

Now, I should point out before I go any further, that this is not a diatribe against my LCS owner, because he's a great guy and he's got a business to run, and I'm fairly certain that if he believed he might sell a few copies of Archenemies or Black Gas, he would've ordered them.

Diatribe, no. Lonely voice crying for help in the wilderness, yes.

A new book from a major publisher (Dark Horse) gets not a single copy ordered for the shelf. That just seems wrong. "But hey," you're probably saying right about now -- or possibly, now instead of the first time I said now -- "maybe you live in Podunk, Iowa, and it's just too small a market for anything outside of Marvel and DC. "

"There you go again," I would say in response. "I knew Joe Kennedy, and you, sir, are no Joe Kennedy."

And then I'd remember what we were actually talking about and say, "But I live in Little Rock, which I refuse to refer to in print as Little Rock, Arkansas, because after having eight years of Bill Clinton as President, I think the world should have a pretty good idea of where Little Rock is by now."

And then you'd say, "So? "

And I'd say, "Please, somebody, anybody -- help me get out of this tangential BS loop and back on topic..." And a couple of minutes later, I'd say this:

The greater Little Rock area has a population probably close to 300,000. So while it's not a New York or LA or Chicago, it's not exactly Podunk, either. And yet, of all those 300,000 people, evidently not one can be expected to walk into my LCS and buy a copy of Archenemies or Black Gas off the shelf. And because they can't be expected to, they won't get the chance to, because there won't be any copies on the shelf to buy.

Not ordering any copies of Archenemies doesn't entirely surprise me, because even though it is Dark Horse, it is a new title by a relatively unknown creative team. But Black Gas? Come on, we're talking Warren Ellis here. That's Mister Ellis to you and me. The guy has written more brilliant comic books in the last ten years than (pause as I search for a meaningful metaphor and come up empty) some really big number. Seriously. Here's the guy who pushes and pulls and prods and pokes to keep us just on the edge of our comfort level with what to expect from our monthly funnybooks, who invents decompression and then, after it's become de rigeur to write for the 6-issue trade, he hits us with Fell, where we get 16-page, complete stories every month. And he's got his name in the title of this book: it's not Black Gas, it's Warren Ellis Black Gas.

And a guy who probably knows better than anyone else what will sell in Little Rock and what won't, doesn't think he can sell one single copy of Warren Ellis Black Gas off the shelf.

The story in Black Gas is scary. But this little slice of cold reality pie is much, much scarier.