Within the last hour, Sara and I have experienced two major events.

We just ordered our Morrissey tickets!! I haven’t seen Morrissey live since December of 1997 at the Battersea Power Station in London. A friend and I wandered over there from across the Thames in hopes that there were still tickets available. It was one of only two concerts he held in England that year. That was the year Maladjusted came out, and most of his tour dates had been in America.

Now, almost 10 full years later, I’m going to see him again! Sara has never seen him and she’s very excited, because, as she put it, “Morrissey’s weird.” It was a much different situation this time around - the show is in Omaha, not London - and rather than walking to the show hoping tickets were still available, I called as soon as tickets went on sale at 5 and got through at 5:11 after a bunch of busy signals.

We also put in an offer on a house.

AND WE’RE GOING TO MORRISSEY!!!

Wow…although I disagree with a lot of cartoon-syndicate man Daryl Cagle’s decisions, I agreed with his recent analysis of the front page of the LA Times. While I didn’t care to take the time to see if his font count is correct, I agreed that the front page looked like a mess, or as I’d like to put it, like a font book threw up on some newsprint.

Today, Cagle linked to a blogger’s dissection of his LA Times analysis (actually, Cagle claims he linked to it on March 20, even though what he’s linking to wasn’t even written until the evening of March 21). The blogger concluded that, while he agrees with the spirit of Cagle’s argument, Cagle was just flat-out using some incorrect information to make his case. And quite significantly, the blogger says

Given the snarky, nit-picky nature of the original critique, I feel it’s not out of line to examine these supposed 22 different fonts with the same diligence.

Well guess how the classy ambassador of his syndicate responded to that.

I’ve gotten reaction to my “Ransom Note” piece on the LA Times (below) from some of our more anal readers (my emphasis) who are graphic artists; they point out that some of the fonts that I have counted are not actually different fonts, but are different members of font families, such as: italic, extra bold, or condensed siblings with the same font surname. Here’s a link to some guy who thinks this is a very important distinction. I say, tell it to the pastor’s sister-in-law with the new Macintosh.

That’s right - in Cagle’s world, depending on things like facts means you’re anal. Pointing out that he’s wrong makes you anal.

I love that he called him anal. Because, you know, Cagle’s not. It’s not like he scanned in a front page, labeled 22 points on that page, wrote a couple hundred words about it and posted it. What the blogger did was so completely different and anal compared to what Cagle did.

And as the blogger so beautifully points out, maybe a guy who’s going to claim that the LA Times is a visual mess resembling a random note…

…shouldn’t run a site that looks like this.

Sometimes it’s just better to admit when you’re wrong.

I overhauled nealo.com (my cartoon site) tonight. I replaced its outdated CuteNews core with WordPress, which I’ve been debating doing for about a year now. The best way I could find to transfer the CuteNews data to WordPress was to do an RSS-import, which doesn’t transfer all of the info, so I still need to go through about another 400 cartoons to recategorize them and fix their broken links.

It should make the site a bit more versatile, and it’s a lot easier to find someone to make a Wordpress site pretty for you than it is to depend on yourself to make a CuteNews site worth looking at (I adapted the equiX theme for nealo.com).

Next big project - moving this cheeksofgod.com blog from blogger to WordPress…

From editorial cartoonist Andy Singer, posted at the Cagle Web Log:

Q: What’s the difference between a professional cartoonist and a large pizza?
A: A large pizza can feed a family of four.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here before, but cheeksofgod.com is also home to The Legion of Doom comic blog, where six contributors (four of them regular) review comics and opine on the industry. The blog was started more than a year ago, but it really only hit its stride in the past six months or so. Not to say it wasn’t a good read before, but everyone has been contributing so much content lately that it’s probably averaging 2-3 new posts a day and racking up around 170 unique visitors per day as well.

Wednesdays are new comic book days, and so each Wednesday includes a review of the weekly DC series 52 by contributor Doom Delouise. Thursdays are home to Jean-Claude Van Doom’s Worst to First weekly review. Saturday is when the Book of Doom review is posted. Each week a rotating member of the Legion will choose a new comic (with the selection usually posted Tuesday or Wednesday) and the team reviews it. Mondays are Fin Fang Doom’s Meaningless Awards of the Week and Tuesdays are Jim Doom’s The Doomino Effect.

Scattered throughout that weekly schedule are graphic novel reviews (the Library of Doom), movie reviews (Doom and Doomer) and other commentary on news and trends in comic books. We’ve been getting more attention in the oversaturated comic blog realm, which is hard to do considering pretty much any geek with a comic book and a computer can run a comic blog. And even if you’re not big into comics, it’s usually an entertaining read.