ADMIN02: Happy Fourth

It's a holiday where I am, so there isn't a normal post prepared. The Fourth of July was the date when the U.S.A. officially began declaring independence. I say "began" because it was when the first signatures were put to the Declaration. People were still adding signatures to it about four years later. And it didn't genuinely became a united country until the Constitution was drawn up and ratified years after that. Still, it was easier than dealing with a condo association.

It's been a month since the first administrative post asking if cosmetic changes to the blog have caused anyone tech problems for people reading on mobile devices. Despite dozens of views there have been no responses, which either means (a) there are no problems, or (b) widening the screen has prevented them from reading the blog altogether. Either way, I'm going to live with it.

Fresher business involves a minor problem I had steering G+ announcements about the blog towards the G+ Comic Book Community. If enough time lapses between G+ posts, the audience to whom the post gets directed defaults to"Public", which means a (theoretically) larger potential audience, except for the fact it does not literally get delivered to every G+ user's feed, just that it can be. In reality, it gets sent to a random mixture, only some of whom are comics fans. The practical result is that a much smaller percentage of a larger number of readers means that the blog actually gets a smaller audience. Having learned that the target audience can be changed by software instead of me, I now know to manually direct it before composing the G+ post by clicking on the word "Public". I went back and made sure that everything posted to "Public" was also reposted to the CBC. Apologies to anybody who got duplicate notices.

Other than that, the blog will be more of the same for a little while. More yard-long ramblings about the minutiae of Silver Age Marvel reprints, the search for Mr.X continues and in between I hope to provide some more random surprises to prevent things from getting in a rut. For instance, I've noticed that I haven't done much involving DC lately, or many things less than 20 years old either. Recalling that the only previous Administrative post ended with a hastily thrown in scan of an Alf trading card (since I didn't have enough to say about it to make a post out of it), I'm thinking that I can kill two birds with one stone using the scans below:

The card fronts above correspond to the backs directly below each one.

These were three promotional cards issued by a comics distributor to remind retailers when the new Batman movie would be in theaters. The distributor wasn't selling tickets, but they were selling comics, books, toys and other merchandise tying into the movie. All of the art on the fronts of the cards were also used in movie posters. There were even more poster designs, but any retailer who needs more than three reminders that there's going to be a Batman feature film and should stock up before the release date is not running a business worth saving.

There'll be something new before the end of the week.