#28: Addicted to Stress

That's The Way That I Get Things Done

There’s a lyric from Jim’s Big Ego’s song Stress that really sums up this week for me:

I’m addicted to stress, that’s the way that I get things done.

If I’m not under pressure, then I sleep too long

And I hang around like a bum.

So as I mentioned previously, I decided to take this week off from work, thanks to the fact that we double-shipped books last week (sending two weeks’ worth of comics to print in the same week) so as to clear the decks for New York Comic Con, which started on Thursday (or, as I write these words, “today.”) I literally haven’t taken a day off all year until now, but I figured that with what was promising to be a mostly dead week—I’m likely not going to Comic Con, both because of the distance and the difficulty (work is being done on the railways in my area, requiring me to take a bus to take a train to take another train) and because I’m still within a high-risk category for contracting Covid, vaccinations and safety measures notwithstanding. So in practical terms, I didn’t really have anything going on this week, nothing to do. I figured that I’d read a great deal, and indeed, I did go through a frightening number of books, which didn’t really make a dent in the enormous accumulation of stuff waiting to be read (a fact that wasn’t helped by having two more books get delivered by midweek.) But I’ve also spent a bunch of time at loose ends—”nuthin’ to do, nowhere to go-oo” as the Ramones sang. It feels in some way like a preview of what retirement will one day feel like. And it involves a lot of sleeping and a lot of feeling aimless punctuated by bouts of obsessively checking the work e-mail but trying not to actually do anything with it apart from deleting any communication that doesn’t need saving. And I know, this sure is a lot of privilege talking—poor Tom, with all of this time off and nothing to fill it, boo-hoo. And sure, there’s a certain restfulness. But I know that it will only last until the moment I’m back in the office and faced with the mountain of work that will have built up in my absence. So the whole endeavor is slightly pointless. It’s a problem entirely of my own making, but one that I seldom seem to be able to work my way clear of. This is why it’s a good thing that I have a wife, who occasionally wanted to do something (although she is largely as sedentary as I am, which means I’m as often dragging her out to some event that she’d probably rather just skip.)

Anyway, enough about my non-problems, let’s turn things over to a batch of our regular visitors who have further questions that I can answer, and so make my life seem more fulfilled. Starting with JV:

Talking about Avengers Forever (a fave of mine) made me think about the reference pages in the back ("This sequence happened in Avengers 8") that i found was less obtrusive than in panel editor notes (that also got tiresome when they tried to be too funny) and informative as it led me to dig up other stories, trades, back issues.

I remember them in series like Hobgoblin Lives, Untold tales of Spidey and Marvel Universe. I think the recent Marvels series by Busiek and Cinar (which i loved) would have benefited from this back matter. What are your thoughts Tom? Is it from a bygone age or could be useful in some series like Avengers Forever?

I think that comes down almost entirely to the story and the preference of the creative team. I don’t know that we’re doing so many stories these days that deep dive into past continuity in the manner that those projects did, so it’s not as though there is a pressing need. But as a way of approaching a bibliography so that it’s less obtrusive on the story proper, it’s definitely a way to go. I’m not sure that the recent THE MARVELS series necessarily needed a page like this—there were past references, but typically not so many in a given issue as to require sourcing of this nature. The same thing is true of the current AVENGERS FOREVER.

Nacho Teso asks:

All this brings me to ask, could we expect more dedicated OGNs in the future? To my eyes, the current Marvel Arts might be the start of a new line of Graphic Novels. But I read your paragraph about the cost of such a line and I'm not that optimist after that. But books like Family Business or Rage of Ultron were special and pretty cool. That's always fun to have.

I don’t think that you’ll see a line of OGNs directly from Marvel any time soon, Nacho—the finances of producing such books simply don’t work for our fiscal needs. However, as you say, there will be instances like the MARVEL ARTS line where we’ll license the rights to produce OGNs to other publishers, in that case Abrams.

And finally, Colin McKenzie:

I finally got hold of Devil's Reign TPB and it brought a question to mind. Kingpin and maaaaybe Norman Osborn, are the only two heavies at Marvel who could conceivably be considered "white-collar". I've lost track of how many street-punks and petty robbers Spider-Man, Daredevil, et al have faced, but in this age when the headlines read of millionaire football stars ripping off Welfare, and governors kidnapping immigrants (not to get political, mind you) as well as crooked judges and even election officials, why are there so few white-collar criminals in comics, given that their crimes are blaring from the papers and arguably, do a lot more damage, both to individuals and society? DC of course, changed Lex Luthor from a Science Gangster to an Evil Industrialist back in the 80's, but other than the two villains I mentioned, superheroes at Marvel mostly fight street punks (except in the 80's, when they were all beating up punk rockers, for some reason). Howcome?

As others pointed out within that comment thread, Colin, there are a number of additional white collar villains in the Marvel pantheon than the two that you mention. Many of them are Tony Stark foes; Zeke Stane, Justin Hammer, etc. But I think the real reason for what you’re talking about is that, when it comes to white collar crime, there really isn’t a whole lot that super heroes can do directly against it. In simpler terms, there’s nobody to punch. You could maybe expose a plot, you could gather evidence, you could build a case—but I don’t know how exciting that would be to the readership time after time. Villains in general are difficult in the 21st century in general, especially as finances become more and more electronic (so there’s not as much tangible to steal) and many of the bad actors in the real world, particularly the affluent ones, seem to be able to skate away from any wrongdoing without facing a comeuppance, and they’re far less overt about their villainy. Our picture of what a villain looks like has changed since many of these series were started—mad scientists and costumed bank robbers feel somehow a bit passé, a bit cheesy in a 21st century context, a relic of an earlier time and sensibility. I tend to think this is why a lot of super hero series have evolved into soap operas about super heroes with their super hero problems and their super hero friends having super hero conflicts, with nary a real person involved. Certainly, the number of regular human being supporting characters has gone way down over the years, and many of the ones that remain feel like legacy actors, like they’re still around because they’ve always been around.

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Behind the Curtain

.Here’s an interesting piece. I came across it in John Romita’s art files when I was assembling the ART OF JOHN ROMITA book back around 1996. It’s an unfinished image intended as a pin-up or a T-Shirt or an M.M.M.S. advertisement something, penciled by Jack Kirby with extensive revision and additions by Marie Severin. And it was never completed and just lay there in John’s files all of those years.

So there are at least two hands at work here, and a third (Stan’s) making notes in the margin. Kirby, I believe, penciled the Thing, The Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Angel, Mr. Fantastic, the Beast, Spider-Man, Cyclops, Iceman and the Invisible Girl. He also drew somebody at the base of the human pyramid, but it’s difficult to make out who that might have been. They seem to have had puffy sleeves like Doctor Strange, and they are both levitating off of the platform held up by the two monsters as well as levitating all of the characters above them. In any event, Stan’s note in the margin asks for the figure to be altered into that of the Sub-Mariner, and for the piece to be repositioned so that Subby is sitting on the edge of that long platform with his legs dangling over the side, rather than floating above it. I would guess that Marie Severin roughed in the Sub-Mariner figure there. She also added the Human Torch, Hawkeye, Captain America, Doctor Strange (floating on his back for some reason), Daredevil and Sgt. Fury. From the penciling style and the characters present, I would guess that this piece dates from around 1965—Kirby is still working in his stripped-down style, which he’d maintain until he got enough of a page rate increase where he could afford to slow down a little bit and put more effort into each individual page.

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Pimp My Wednesday

Another big week in terms of releases coming at you from the Marvel Heroes office!

To begin with, America’s fastest-moving comic series releases its second issue, in which the heroic Doctor Doom joins forces with the Avengers to face off against a foreboding threat—a threat so dire that Doom comes equipped with Thor’s hammer and Captain America’ shield. As with last issue, the story hits the ground running from the first page and doesn’t let up until the end. It’s another effort from writer Derek Landy and artists Greg Land, Jay Leisten and Frank D’Armata, and it’s paced with the greatest amount of excitement we could bring you permitted by law.

Next up, AXE JUDGMENT DAY continues to careen towards its impending conclusion, with this final issue of AXE: DEATH TO THE MUTANTS #3 once again showcasing the Eternals’ perspective on the conflict. It’s produced by Kieron Gillen and Alex Guimaraes, who make it another key piece in the entire AXE experience.

Also written by Kieron Gillen and also focusing on the Eternals is the third of our three one-shots bridging the gap between AXE JUDGMENT DAY #5 and #6. AXE ETERNALS #1 is illustrated beautifully by Pasqual Ferry and focuses primarily on Ajak, who has a key role to play in the finale to come. Like the prior AXE AVENGERS #1 and AXE X-MEN #1, it’s a pretty important book to read if you’re following the spine of the AXE series. All three of these one-shots will be collected along with AXE JUDGMENT DAY #1-6 in the eventual collected edition.

And adjacent to the world of AXE is FANTASTIC FOUR #48, which concludes its two-part tie-in adventure featuring Sue Richards in a Die Hard-esque battle through the Baxter Building in order to stop the nefarious plans of Oubliette Midas. It’s another strong outing from writer David Pepose and artist Juann Cabal.

This book is something just a little bit special. NAMOR THE SUB-MARINER: CONQUERED SHORES was pitched to me by writer Christopher Cantwell, and it’s a kind of Dark Knight Returns for Marvel’s aquatic monarch, set years in the future, at a time when the ice caps have melted, the seas have risen, and humanity is facing extinction while Namor’s undersea kingdom flourished. So it’s hopefully not your typical Sub-Mariner book, and hopefully it’ll be something that viewers of the upcoming WAKANDA FOREVER film will be able to sink their teeth into after encountering Namor in that movie. The wonderful cinematic artwork is being provided by Pasqual Ferry, who has two different releases coming out from my office this week—Pasqual has been working really hard for a good long while, so it’ll be nice for him to see the fruits of his labor as these books finally drop.

And from associate editor Annalise Bissa comes another PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL one-shot, giving the main series a month off to stay ahead of deadlines. This second release, BROTHER, concerns a bounty put on the Punisher’s head and the return of a major antagonist from Frank Castle’s past. It’s by Torunn Gronbekk and Rafael Pimentel, and it’s as unrelenting as you might expect.

Over in the world of the digital domain, Quicksilver gets his fight on as he faces down mutant martial artist Mister X in a winner-take-all confrontation in the vertically-scrolling pages of AVENGERS UNLIMITED #16. This one was written by Jim Zub and illustrated by Enid Balal.

And while you’re checking out MARVEL UNLIMITED, you also want to pay attention to Annalise Bissa’s innovation, MILLE THE SPY, which wraps up its first adventure this week. As before, it’s the work of Stephanie Phillips and Nick Roche, and it sees Millie’s first exploit as a super-spy come to an explosive finale. I’ve mentioned before how this series came as something of an unexpected surprise, so don’t be the only one on your block to miss out on it!

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A Comic Book On Sale 80 Years Ago Today, October 9, 1942

For much of the Golden Age of Comics, it was unusual to find much in the way of super-villains, bad guys who could stand toe-to-toe with the heroes and who possessed similarly outlandish special powers. There were always a few, but it would take until the end of the decade for editors and writers to begin introducing them more regularly. Which seems weird, especially when you consider how the monumental popularity of characters such as the Joker, the Penguin and Catwoman helped to drive sales on BATMAN for years. But it was simply seldom done. And when done, it was rare for such a character to come back, to make a second appearance. Our subject today is one of those also-rans who went on to have a second life much later.

The Flash story in FLASH COMICS #36 put the scarlet speedster up against a criminal known as Rag Doll. He was a contortionist with a triple-jointed body who could fold himself up in bizarre ways as though he possessed no skeleton. Still, against a guy who can run around at mach speed, those attributes weren’t much of an equalizer. The one thing that Rag Doll perhaps had going for him was his bizarre costume. He looked like a literal rag doll, albeit a malevolent one. That was something that I expect inspired a few nightmares after the book came out, as many kids of that era would have had rag dolls of their own that they could imagine coming to life and doing them harm. The story was written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Lou Ferstadt (who also did the cover), though the byline credited E.E. Hibbard as it always did during these days. And that was all she wrote for Rag Doll for thirty years. At that point, looking for a classic Jay Garrick villain to use in a double-Flash adventure in FLASH #229, Cary Bates dusted the obscure character off and brought him back. But he wasn’t even the main villain in that story, that honor went to the better-established Jay-Flash foe, the Thinker. From there, Rag Doll made one or two more appearances throughout the Bronze Age—he was in a JLA/JSA crossover at one point. But he never quite hit the big time. That is, until years later, when James Robinson turned him into a pivotal character in his STARMAN run. In Robinson’s story, Rag Doll transitioned into becoming a Charles Manson-like cult leader whose followers obeyed him without question. Starman was unable to put an end to the villain’s reign of terror across Opal City, so he asked for assistance from his fellow Justice Society heroes. While the JSA team was able to capture Rag Doll, the malevolent contortionist threatened to unleash his worshippers against the families of the Justice Society crusaders. There was a struggle adn Rag Doll wound up seemingly dead, killed by a JSA member (Starman, though this was never conclusively stated.) But even that wasn’t the end for Rag Doll, who was somehow revived by his followers and who became a modern day problem for the Jack Knight Starman after his youth and vigor were restored by the demon Neron. He went on to rejoin the Injustice Society and to cross swords with the JSA on multiple occasions, and even appeared on THE FLASH television show in live action. Which is a pretty good showing for a character who made one appearance in thirty years. This issue of FLASH COMICS also included stories featuring the Ghost Patrol, Johnny Thunder, The King, The Whip, Minute Movies and Hawkman—you got a lot for your dime in those days. Unfortunately, the quality of the title was beginning to decline, largely due to the fact that many of the better artists were enlisting or being drafted for military service in World War II. This was a difficulty that All-American Comics, which published FLASH COMICS, faced with pretty much all of its line of books.

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A Comic Book On Sale 60 Years Ago Today, October 9, 1962

Yes, I can see that the cover of this particular copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #10 carries a hand-stamp indicating that it arrived on October 8, 1962 rather than October 9—such were the ways of nationwide distribution in those days. We’re going to continue to observe the designated street date for these books as entered into the Library of Congress. Anyway—this early issue of FANTASTIC FOUR represents the point at which editor and scripter Stan Lee began to develop and refine what would become the Marvel style of communicating with his audience. The book had carried a letters page beginning with issue #3, but things were still just a bit impersonal. As in most other comics, it was an anonymous editor who was answering the letters, even though he was relatively forthcoming about the fact that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were the guys working on the stories. But this issue saw a change in that department—Lee kicked off this issue’s letters page with a request of his readers to hereafter address all of their letters to Stan and Jack, and he changed all of the salutations on the letters on this page to show how much more friendly and engaging that was. In part, this was all prompted by the fact that Lee and Kirby were characters in this story—though both men’s faces were concealed throughout it for some reason. Stan had only instituted formal credits the issue before, #9. (The company didn’t officially even have a name yet—this issue of FANTASTIC FOUR is listed in the indicia as being published by Canam Publishers Sales Corp.) Before that, each splash page had been signed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but no formal acknowledgement of their work had been made. But here, only an issue later, Stan acts as though everybody knows who they are and is familiar with them. Much of the story’s opening feels like something that might have been cooked up in the Simon and Kirby Studios—Joe Simon and Jack Kirby drew themselves in as characters in their strips on a couple of occasions—though, in fairness, including himself and his collaborators as characters was also a trope that Lee liked to use as well. The plot revolves around Doctor Doom (not yet revealed as the ruler of Latveria, just a dangerous guy) reappearing after his supposed demise at the offices of Lee and Kirby, where he orders them to lure Reed Richards into a trap. When Reed responds to their summons (they publish the official Fantastic Four comic book, getting all of the story details directly from a member of the FF so that the events showcased are correct and real) Doom uses the new mind-swapping power he’s gained from the alien Ovoids to put his mentality into Reed’s ducile body, and trapping Mister Fantastic in his scarred form. The rest of the issue involves Reed-as-Doom trying to convince his three partners of his real identity while Doom-as-Reed schemes to destroy the others with a shrink ray—one that he ends up getting zapped with himself by the story’s end. So Lee and Kirby are out of the picture after five or six pages—but that didn’t stop them from being plastered on the cover and called out in a blurb. This was all the beginning of the process that would come to make minor celebrities out of the craftsmen working on Marvel Comics, at least among the dedicated readership. It was also the beginning of Stan setting himself up as the ringleader of the greatest imaginary three-ring circus in the field, efforts that eventually made him a household name after Marvel hit the big time.

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A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date

This X-MEN ANIMATION SPECIAL in the Marvel Graphic Novel format came out on October 9, 1990, a solid two or three years after the X-MEN animated pilot in question had been filmed and released, and a year or so before the better known X-MEN series debuted on Fox Kids. For those who may be interested in seeing this pilot, it can be found here. The book had been kicking around in editor Bob Budiansky’s files for much of that time, half-started but never completed. I suspect that it was seen as an easy way of making the company a few dollars since most of the work had been done and paid for in making the actual animated pilot. But it wasn’t quite that easy—and believe me, I put in a lot of work on this crazy thing. We had been sent a huge array of materials from the animation studio, including boxes and boxes of original cels, many with the pencil drawings still attached to them, as well as a complete film copy of the episode and copies of the original storyboards. From all of this, Danny Fingeroth had been hired to write a script for the book, which was to take that material and translate it into 62 comic book pages. By necessity, every page had to contain 6 panels since that was the aspect-ratio of the original footage. From there, the film needed to be gone through and each individual image that was needed sourced and indicated. The job was lettered by I believe Janice Chiang, who was provided with xerox copies of the animation images, dark though they were, that had been pasted up into mock pages. She did the lettering on vellum, since it would eventually be combined with the film images at the printer. Once that was done and the lettering had been proofread and corrected, the entire project became a huge jigsaw puzzle of putting the mechanicals together. I believe that it was Cindy Emmert in the Bullpen who did much of this work, though it’s been long enough that I may be off-base in this remembrance. But assuming it was, Cindy would set up boards indicating which image went where and where the lettering was to be placed against each image—something that was occasionally tricky when it came to sound effects and the like. We also had to attach a small folder to each mechanical board containing the film frames in question, which were effectively the original art. Finally, we need to figure out how to do a cover for this book given the limitations that we couldn’t blow up the film shots without them losing their sharpness. As you can see, Cindy came up with the above filmstrip concept which seemed to work well.

Now, the reason this book is so well remembered by me is due to a contentious outcome that I wasn’t very happy about at the time. All of the above work past getting the script done was undertaken and supervised by me—when Bob was told that the book was being put back on the schedule and needed to get done, he handed me the responsibility for getting it there. Apart from checking over stuff at the end of the process when it was scheduled to go to press, he didn’t do any particular lifting on the project. Which wouldn’t have been bothersome on its own, in fact it would have been welcome, as every assistant editor wants to get projects that they can oversee on their own. The problem was a Marvel policy. In those days, assistant editors didn’t get credit in the books that they worked on, apart from on the letters page if there happened to be one. I don’t know why this was, but it was a hard-and-fast rule that nobody seemed to want to deviate from for…reasons. But what this meant is that, after having poured a lot of blood and sweat into wrangling this project, I didn’t get a credit on the final book at all. Bob did try to go to bat for me on it, but the powers-that-be didn’t want to upset the apple cart by crediting one assistant editor on one project, for fear that they’d have to start crediting them all, and that would cost them…no money whatsoever. So this became an object lesson for me, and I swore that I’d see the people who worked on a given project credited for it going forward—even in instances where the people had left the company, or where it had gone through multiple editorial hands before eventually winding up with me. I’ve tried to follow through on that promise ever since. Oh, that prohibition against crediting assistant editors? Joe Quesada did away with that about five minutes after taking over the Editor in Chief job.

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Monofocus

As this has been a vacation week, I read an absolute mountain of books and comics, far more than I can intelligently talk about here at length. But Kate Beaton’s DUCKS was great, as was the first volume of Brian Michael Bendis and Andre Araujo’s PHENOMENA.

The one book that caught me by surprise and that I want to call out here a little bit was RISING SUN RERUNS by Jim Beard. Like the previous volumes he put together about G.I.JOE and DARK SHADOWS, RISING SUN RERUNS is a collection of personal essays from a wide variety of writers all talking about the impact that was made upon their developing psyche by assorted Japanese import shows of varying types, both live action and animated. Honestly, I was a little bit sad not to have been asked by Jim to contribute to the book, as I could have written a few thousand words on watching STAR BLAZERS and its ilk in my sleep. Like its two predecessors and like the three volume analyses of the 1966 BATMAN television show that he’d put together before that, RISING SUN RERUNS is a lot of fun, especially if you remember watching ULTRAMAN, SPEED RACER, ASTRO BOY, SPACE GIANTS, BATLE OF THE PLANETS, GIGANTOR or ROBOTECH back in the day. if that includes you, here’s a link to the book's ordering page on Amazon.

And speaking of Japanese imports, the arrival of fall means that a new season of anime is about to commence. Accordingly, I watched the first episode of MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY, which I am happy to say is a series about colonists in space and political drama rather than young model aficionados building plastic models and having them fight in competition, as the last five or six GUNDAM series have been. It’s a bit too early to make any pronouncements just yet, but so far, so good. Notably, WITCH is the first GUNDAM series to star a female protagonist, Suletta Mercury. You’d think that wouldn’t be possible after all this time, but Japan remains more regimented in terms of gender stereotypes than other places in the world. And she’s so far a likeable lead, utterly shy and trepidatious when arriving at a new school but utterly confident when you put her behind the controls of a giant fighting robot, in this case Gundam Aerial. The story hasn’t entirely gotten moving yet, but the design work on the show is nice and feels modern.

I also caught the opening episode of the latest season of MY HERO ACADEMIA, a show and a manga that I only began watching/reading well after it had been around for a long while. This new season is picking up at about the point in the story where I began to feel like the characters were getting a bit lost in the crowd and the build-up to a climax. In the manga, we’ve been involved in the same extended fight sequence for what seems like months and hundreds of pages—so much so that I’ve kind of lost track of the specific stakes. I’m sure it reads better in a single volume rather than on a weekly basis, but I’m that guy. Anyway, the first episode was fine, though most of the main characters that we’ve become invested in have been sidelined for the moment in favor of their mentors, which meant that I felt a bit distanced from the episode as well. At its best, Kohei Horikoshi’s MY HERO is a love letter to American super hero comics and works really well as a synthesis of the eastern and western approaches to storytelling. But at its worst, it’s a story with too many characters and too much going on without enough of an emotional tether to keep me invested. We’ll see if it can stick its landing.

Slightly closer to home, I watched the first episode of the Korean drama VINCENZO on Netflix, and found it a strange amalgamation of hard-boiled Godfather-style crime drama and broad, slapsticky K-Drama comedy. It’s about a Korean lawyer who was adopted as a child by a Don in the Italian Mafia, becoming over time the old man’s consiglieri. But after the Don passes, the lawyer, now named Vincenzo Cassano, has to flee back to Korea or face being rubbed out by his adoptive brother, who is the new boss. In Korea, Vincenzo arranged for several tons of gold to have been hidden in a vault in the basement of a particular building, money that he intends to use to set himself up with a new life. The problem is, the building has now been seized by a Triad-controlled company, unaware of the hidden wealth. So Vincenzo has to ally himself with the wacky tenants of the building and wage war against the rival gangsters so that he can get control of the building back long enough to get the gold out of it. The opening episode was pretty good, but with a running length per episode of 75 minutes, it’s a bit of a commitment from a viewership standpoint. Still, my intention is to keep going with it.

I also caught EMILY THE CRIMINAL starring Audrey Plaza, which was pretty engaging while also being decidedly low budget. It’s about the titular Emily, who having quit college to take care of an ailing parent now has a dead end minimum wage job and thousands of dollars in student loan debt. There seems to be no way for her to dig herself out of the hole she’s in until a co-worker makes here aware of an opportunity: a group running credit card scams are looking for people willing to buy merchandise with stolen card numbers and dash, turning it over to the operators for a set fee. Seduced by both the easy payday for relatively simple work and the excitement and adrenaline high of getting away with something, of putting one over on the system that crushed her dreams and reduced her to poverty, Emily becomes more and more involved in the operation, taking on greater and greater personal risks until everything begins to fly apart, and suddenly the stakes are a lot more life-or-death. It was an engaging film with a definite point of view, and while I don’t know that I’d want a steady diet of it, it was engaging for the entirety of its run time. In part that’s due to Audrey Plaza’s charisma, and her ability to keep the audience rooting for her even when she’s doing something deplorable.

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And so, another journey comes to its eventual finale. Next week things will be back to normal, with a regular cycle of work providing better life-balance, and so hopefully less pitiful whining from me. In the meantime, be good, have fun, and I’ll see you back here in seven days.

Tom B