The Mindless Ones are continuing the interblog circle jerk by interviewing pillock. Choice quote

Kirby saved Marvel from drowning by pulling it out of the lake, the Seventies boys kept its heart beating, Claremont and Byrne took over when they got tired, the Nineties stabbed its heart with adrenaline and figured that’d be good enough, so call the paramedics and tell them we don’t require their services…and then it died, but the paramedics arrived anyway just in time, but then…I don’t know, the corporate masters decided it was good enough just to have a guy they hired off the street dress as a paramedic, and stand nearby, and everything would be fine?

I think those interviews they’ve been doing are fascinating (and not just because they chose me to interview first). I’ve noticed that since they started there seems to be more of a shared sense of community or purpose or… something… among a subset of comics blogs that includes Mindless Ones, Trout In The Milk, my own blog, Vibrational Match, The Factual Opinion and a handful of others. Not that I’d say that all those blogs are in any way alike, and nor would I compare mine in quality to the others, but we all seem to be trying for and sometimes achieving something a little different to what other comics bloggers do, and we seem to be recognising the commonalities a little more since these interviews started. Or maybe that’s just me?

Either way, this is another fascinating interview about the state of comics – and comics criticism – today, and also goes into some of the stuff about seeing one’s own culture with alien eyes that we talked about in my interview, though from a completely different direction…

(And they’re right, it is odd that all the people they’ve interviewed so far use wordpress, as they do themselves…)

Alex is continuing his “Int Doctor Who brilliant?!” series with “Why 1977 was brilliant”.

A good conversation is going on in this post and its comments at Liberal Conspiracy, on the tension between green and left-wing views. I particularly like the suggestion (which I would have made myself had Lee Griffin not made it first) that rather than bail-out failing car companies, it would make far more sense both economically and environmentally just to spend that bail-out money on giving the workers a couple of years’ salary to go off and get retrained… not a perfect solution but, I suspect, a better one than the alternatives that are being discussed…

David at Vibrational Match continues his look at Grant Morrison’s The Filth.

And Scholars And Rogues have a post on something that must – surely – be a joke? Outsourcing of local journalism to India…

ETA Chicken Yoghurt has a post on something that escaped me as I’ve been out of the country – bailiffs are now going to be allowed to break into people’s houses and assault them… this is the most evil thing this government has yet done, and it’s done a lot of them…