Comics!

Hooray, because I've got my new Order of the Stick book today - not reprints of the awesome webcomic, which has just passed its 800th episode and is still going strong, but reprints of the strips that appeared in Dragon magazine, plus a whole lot of never-seen-before unashamed-filler bonus material which is actually really brilliant. I laughed out loud four times, and really loudly too, which is well worth the price of the book. I'd say "go and buy it", but it was a limited edition and might actually not be available any more, I'm not sure. Go and acquire one somehow, anyway.

Also, the 2012 comic annuals are in the shops now - we seem to have given up on the in-time-for-Christmas release date and now be gradually inching towards a three-years-in-advance kind of thing. I was curious to see whether the Dandy annual would reflect the new look, or whether it would be a couple of years behind the weekly comic as usual, but actually it's sort of half-and-half, in an amalgam that's really quite interesting.

Ooh, Arsenal just scored after three minutes! Yes, it's also football season again, and I'm fully intending to waste a lot of time watching games (in addition to the time I spend reading comics) instead of memory training.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Dandy annual has a lot of characters who haven't been seen for quite some time, alongside some strips that came along with the latest relaunch. There's an old-fashioned art style on Desperate Dan and an all-new-looking Korky the Cat who's entirely unlike any previous incarnation. It's all very readable, too. Go and buy it. And the Beano, which is the same as it always is, and therefore worth reading.

One thing that's not out yet is the annual Broons and Oor Wullie classic-comic reprint book. But it's listed on Amazon, and ooh, look at that! No, not the cover (I know there are very few full-colour, high-quality pictures of the Broons drawn by Dudley Watkins, but they've already used that group pic on the covers of two previous reprint books, and it's getting silly now) but the page count! 144 pages, 32 more than last year, which makes me believe they've listened to the impassioned complaint in my blog post last year and brought the number of reprinted strips back up to what it used to be! Maybe it's also chock-full of racism, just like I demanded in my other blog post last year! I feel quite accomplished now.