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I was never a really big fan of the Fantastic Four during my comics-reading days*, but they are one of the iconic comics team, featuring characters nearly as foundational as Superman himself. And now, Marvel is apparently canceling The Fantastic Four, for reasons that are…give me a minute, I’m struggling to come up with an apt descriptor for them…umm…F***ING STUPID. Sorry, but that’s really all I can think of to describe this nonsense. (Original link via Roger.) * When I say “my comics-reading days”, I refer to that period when I was buying individual issues of comics on a monthly basis.Down the rabbit hole….

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The other day I speculated on who might be drawing the substitute art on the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. Today, the Internets are afire as Pearls creator Stephan Pastis has confirmed my hypothesis, with details as to how it came to be. Go read Pastis’s post — it’s great. Meanwhile, I’ll sit here basking in my air of smug self-satisfaction! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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One of the recurrent storylines in Funky Winkerbean of late has been the quest of Holly, the wife of the strip’s title character, as she seeks to complete her son’s collection of the entire run of a comic book called Starbuck Jones. Her son, Cory, is serving in Afghanistan, see, so it would be the neatest thing if he could come home to his collection being complete. So, every few weeks we return to this tale (amidst the usual glum and depressing stuff that goes on ’round Funkyville), and I always find it oddly amusing. In one segment, Holly got wordDown the rabbit hole….

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One of my favorite comic strips is Pearls Before Swine, which this week is running one of its “breaking the fourth wall” storylines. Stephan Pastis, the creator, does this frequently, by including a smoking, pot-bellied version of himself in the strip, often being mocked by the other characters who have to play out his tales, which are often egregiously complex set-ups for awful puns. This week’s storyline has a little girl in Pastis’s neighborhood telling him that he sucks at drawing, and Pastis challenging her to do better, which she may well be doing: But…my eye got caught by thatDown the rabbit hole….

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The last two days, Pearls Before Swine (one of my favorite newspaper comic strips) ran these two installments: They’re OK, not all that funny, really. But these characters — the polar bear and the penguins — have never been seen before. Since Pearls often abounds in meta-style humor and the breaking of the fourth wall (creator Stephan Pastis often includes himself as one of his own characters, with the characters commenting on the quality of his work), I figured that something was up. Meanwhile, each day, there were people in the comments section offering the complaint that “Polar bears areDown the rabbit hole….

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John Seavey, one of the regular posters at MightyGodKing, writes at length about Norman Osborn, the human alter-ego of Spider-Man villain Green Goblin. I don’t much have a dog in that fight, but I did like two different side points Seavey made along the way. First: I have gone on record multiple times as saying that if contrived resurrections cheapen deaths, the answer is to stop killing off characters so frequently and not to have fewer resurrections. Killing off a character in a shared universe is generally an act of colossal arrogance and short-sightedness, a statement along the lines of,Down the rabbit hole….