How The Batman Saved My Life...Again!

So there I was yesterday afternoon, on my way out the door to head over to my local Citibank, when I notice my mail has arrived and, with it, the lovely letter from DC Comics informing me of the honor the National Parks Department has bestowed upon my mini-series, Batman: Nevermore. I am so thrilled by the news that I feel I have to share it immediately and rush back inside to promptly post the letter to this here blog (see previous post). As a result, I arrive at my bank fully an hour later than I had originally intended to, only to find the local Police there, in the process of taking down a lot of yellow crime scene tape that had been blocking access to the bank's entrance. When I asked one of the officers what was going on, he calmly informed me that the bank had been robbed during the past hour and they were just finishing their investigation. Fortunately, though, no one had been hurt.

And there you have it. Near as I can tell, had I not stopped to blog about the Batman, I would have instead found myself smack in the middle of a bank robbery where, knowing my big mouth, I might very well have changed the outcome to the negative. The Batman saved my life...again.

Clearly, somebody is trying to tell me I should be blogging more often.

Quoth The Raven...

Hey, I just received the following letter from Jack Mahan, Executive Director, Editorial Administration, over at DC Comics, and thought I'd share it with all of you. The letter reads as follows:

Hello, Len -

In a move that surely signals the comics industry's growing dominance over -- and eventual eradication of -- traditional prose literature, the National Parks Service has added the cover of your Batman: Nevermore "Elseworlds" special to the permanent collection at the Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, PA, which is located at Poe's only surviving home in the city. We're quite pleased with its inclusion and we hope you will be, too! If you're interested in visiting some time to see it for yourself, you can check all the information for the site at http://www.nps.gov/edal/.

Sincerely,
Jack Mahan

Of course, I'd be interested, and I hope some of you will be as well. Of all the things I've written over the past decade, this Batman/Poe mini-series is arguably the work of which I'm most proud. I thank the National Parks Service for this honor and I hope you'll get around to checking out both the site and the story some time soon. Now all it takes is for DC to finally collect Batman: Nevermore in a trade paperback.

If you've got nothing better to do this afternoon, why not write to DC and suggest it?

The Sixty-Four Cent Question

So I'm sitting at my desk this afternoon, writing the introduction for the first Un-Men trade paperback, due out from DC/Vertigo this April and featuring those wonderfully bizarre creatures created by Bernie Wrightson and myself way back in the second issue of Swamp Thing, when the phone rings. On the other end is my dear old friend, longtime Superman scribe and current Democratic candidate for Congress in California's 24th District, Elliot S! Maggin (and, yes, the exclamation point is intentional).

"Can you do me a favor?" asks Elliot. "If it's possible," I reply. "What's up?"

"I need you to settle an argument I've been having with one of my co-workers for almost two years now," says Elliot, "Just answer me this one simple question."

"I'll try," I say, "I'm no political pundit by any means, but I'll do the best I can. What's the question?"

Elliot pauses for a moment, then in all sincerity asks, "In a fight between Superman and Batman, who would win?"

This, Gentle Readers, what what my life has been reduced to. Apparently, I am now the final arbiter of the ultimate fan geek argument. >sigh< And I used to have such potential.

By the way, for those of you desperate to know the answer, and Elliot completely agrees with me on this, the winner would always be the Batman.