Today's marketing buzzword is Infomediary. Coined by business theorist John Hagel, an infomediary is a person or business that collects user-preference information in order to match users with vendors' products or services while protecting that information from direct access by the vendors.

Randy Lander loves the Demo scriptbook.

Bad Mojo, not so much.

Also, Hollywood Space Actor Andy Milder let me know he's on the Fox Network this Tuesday on "House." It's on at 9 PM/8 Central and while it won't be a huge role, he does play a bus driver. Only in America!

Seth Godin is The Man. While comics people surf around comics sites and columns to see what everyone else is doing in comics, yielding an incestuous downward spiral of self-referential hoo-hah, I'm memorizing Godin's pronouncements every day. "2004 and 2005 are the years that the magazines of the future were/are born," Godin writes. "And those magazines are unlikely to be print publications that figured out how to make it online. Instead, the new winners will be publications that figured out how to do what this medium is good at, instead of trying to protect a dying medium instead." Words to live by. Every day.

Graeme McMillan, over at Fanboy Rampage, links to Josh Richardson's In the Trenches observations over at Millarworld. Astute readers will note the exclusive five page .pdf preview of Filler that Richardson somehow finagled out of me.

Mike Sterling (I should really start calling him "Pal Mike"), gives the Demo scriptbook a nice nod: "...an attractive package, as we've come to expect from AiT/Planet Lar."

...and in another in the seemingly endless my-mother-my-sister-my-mother-my-sister Chinatown moments that make up the experience of reading The Comics Journal nowadays: True Story Swear to God: Chances Are... (which had been called "practically the definition of a minor work" in issue #260 by Pal Spurge a mere five issues later gets a lovingly caressed two-page review by comics historian R. C. Harvey in which the quote "But the triumph of the uncluttered purity of Beland's style is achieved in the faces of his characters" is indicative of the rest of the review.

And people wonder why Tommy is so unhinged on the TCJ message boards.

BSJ at Khepri forwards the news that Proof of Concept was his top seller for the week of January 9:

05. Catwoman v3: Relentless TPB (DC Comics)
04. Tales of the Realm TPB (Image/MVC)
03. Birds of Prey: Sensei & Student TPB (DC Comics)
02. Wonder Woman: Bitter Rivals TPB (DC Comics)
01. Proof of Concept TPB (AiT/Planet Lar)

Now that we've got that straight, it's time to move on
I don't train for sprints, I train for marathons

Chris Arrant discovered some Moonshine artwork, by "For The Time Being" artist Jeff Johns.

The Siskel and Ebert of comics, Don MacPherson and Randy Lander, give all sorts of shout-outs to our stuff in their Best of 2004 column. Mentioned are Demo #10 and Tom Beland's True Story Swear to God #8 for Best Single Issue, Demo for Best Limited Series, True Story Swear to God for Best Ongoing Series, and Giant Robot Warriors and Hench for Best Original Graphic Novel.

Back from a long weekend, and lots of AiT-related stuff to report:

Augie De Blieck, Jr. reviews the Demo scriptbook in his latest Pipeline column. I knew ol' Aug would like it, as he's as much of a process junkie as I am; what I was surprised to see is that the scripts made him appreciate Becky's genius all the more: "Cloonan, the artist, turns out to be the real star of the series after reading the book of scripts by Wood, the writer."

Speaking of Becky, she was named "Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition" by the folks over at Ninth Art. Special thanks to Matt Craig, and to Tom Owen for pointing this out to me.

Just saw that Brian Domingos wrote about Proof of Concept's production values: "...it’s printed on glossy paper, which is Larry Young-awesome." Domingos also gave Best-of-year nods to 1000 Steps to World Domination, Hench, and Ursula.

Over on Kevin Smith's MoviePoopshoot.com, "Should it Be a Movie?" columnist Marc Mason thoroughly reads through Proof of Concept and answers his column's titular question. He likes "Hemogoblin" and "For the Time Being" for episodic television, and "Zombie Dinosaur" for theatrical release: "Zombie Dinosaur springs full-force from both script and graphic page. The idea is so ridiculously obvious you can’t help but wonder why no one has spent $120 million on getting it to the screen already."

Tom Spurgeon, Comics Reporter, gave us the nod as "Winner of the Week."

Johnny B comments on the complete and utter take-over of online comics sales by me and Kirkman and Bri Wood.

I always enjoy Bill Sherman's reviews of our work, because it seems he actually gets a kick out of our little confections, and this time his review of Proof of Concept doesn't disappoint: "'Emancipating Lincoln,' which posits a future world inhabited by Lincoln clones, is written in proto-hardboiled narration by its detective hero Henderson and has a wiggy enough premise (two Lincoln clones are inspired to uncover the secret behind their creation when one of them comes across a five dollar bill with the original's picture on it) that makes you go, 'How's Young gonna write himself out of this one?'"

...and Erin Schadt, The Comic Queen, rolls her royal visage along Proof of Concept and finds it "quite interesting." "I enjoyed this romp through Young’s imagination. It is, after all, quite an imagination." I don't think there is anyone who'd disagree with that.