Huh.

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It's kind of a given that any place on the Internet that text and a link can be applied or sent to will soon attract spam, and the Living Between Wednesdays comment section is no exception. Over the years we've been spammed by UNICEF, Playmobil and about a million dudes with off-brand boner drugs and knockoff handbags to sell.

Comment spam styles have changed over the years, from generic expressions of admiration to nonsense gobbledegook to straight-up sales-pitches. The current vogue is for making vague references to current techno-trends: "Hey brah, I just Googled this on my iPad. I put it up on Twitter for you, no need to thank me ; )"

And of course there is the ancient technique of pasting the same opinion comment to about a million places and hoping that it's relevant enough to stick to some of them. Logically and for maximum efficiency, these should all read "I agree wholeheartedly, [kittens/breasts/various political parties] ARE adorable! XD" but instead they tend to read like a crazy person has written them. Case in point, the spam I just deleted from a post about the Legion of Super-Heroes fighting aliens that look a bit like Eddie Munster:

"I may have a few screws loose, but for the longest time I have been thinking that perhaps the biggest favor we could do for the poor populace in Africa would be to kill off all the dangerous wild life. Africa is full of lions, elephants, hyenas, hippos, black mambas and many other dangerous animals. All of these animals must guard enormous amounts of resources as well as making life excedingly dangerous. How free can poor subsistence farmers invest more into their farm when even moving around the country is restricted by an open zoo? I would also knock off every crocodile on earth too (two legs good; four legs bad). They are a danger to children (probably not you) and cats that the farmers might own. Think of how much more coin you could make if domesticated herds could use the same vast natural resources used by useless to poor people's wild herds and their natural predators. I am completely serious about this even if I might be twisted, ill informed, or both."

I tried looking this up to see if it was copied from someone's blog or something but all I found was a whole lot more comment spam. I am also kind of unable to think of anything that I can say to top the crazy paragraph above, so maybe I'll just leave it at that.

John Buys Comics - A Sea of White

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DC Comics' theme cover month has had a somewhat jarring effect on me this week, in that it starkly outlines just how many of their books I'm buying. I guess I'm enjoying them all, but it's still weird. Especially as the only two books I feel like talking about this week are from other publishers.

First, from Dark Horse, it's BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods, the latest mini-series in the second mega-arc of the series. I think. Look, I don't have to fully understand the structure to love the books, okay?

As you might expect, this book continues the tale of the horrorfication of the Hellboy Earth, only instead of being told from the perspective of the folks on the front lines trying to stop bad things from happening, this series is focusing on the regular folks who are trying to live in a world in which several major cities have been destroyed by Lovecraftian abominations, where monsters haunt the darkness and civilization is starting to fray. Now, despite my love for these books it's been a long time since I've gotten terribly creeped out by them, so the visceral feeling of helplessness that can be conveyed by protagonists who don't have an army of researchers to tell them what's going on, who don't know much more than that everything is going to hell and that they are unable to do anything about it, is extermely compelling.

Meanwhile, Image released Infinite Vacation this week. It's not a new broad concept - regular Joe tries to discover just Who He Is in a crazy high-concept world - but that's not a bad thing when it's handled right. Good news: this one seems to be!

Main character Mark lives in a world/continuum of worlds in which travel to alternate dimensions has been perfected, and in which you can swap lives with other versions of yourself via a smartphone app and a chunk of change. Only now he seems to be the target of multiverse-wide murder, plus he's met a girl who doesn't subscribe to the life-hopping paradigm. 

So: murder, romance and intrigue across an infinity of realities. I can definitely get behind that, especially if Nick Spencer and Christian Ward keep up the quality writing and drawing, respectively.

If that just seemed to taper off there toward the end, well... it did. I left off finishing this until it got late and I got sleepy. Tragedy abounds. Good night!