Excuses, excuses

It's been quite the week for, um, not posting. Part of it is because I haven't bought comics since the convention, except maybe a trade or two. And I haven't read most of what I bought at or after con, so I haven't had much to talk about.

I've been settling back into another school year, and an awesome new job. Unfortunately, despite having a lot of free time at work, I don't yet have a laptop. Dell has decided to take some ridiculously large amount of time before sending me the one I ordered, and so I've been filling my free time mostly with prose reading.

Let's see...I picked up and read through Batgirl: Year One and Ex Machina vol. 5, both of which were quite good. I wish the art had been more consistent in Batgirl; it started out with something very clean and Darwyn Cooke-esque, but toward the middle just felt sloppy. I hope, whenever it comes out, that All-Star Batgirl is like this.

Ex Machina's great as usual, though it feels like it might be getting away from the politics and towards something a little more comic book-esque with the nefarious secret plot against the mayor, with moles and assassination/conversion plots, and whatnot, but I suppose given the source of that action, that's to be somewhat expected. Something tells me we're going to end up with a character fairly similar in motivation to Hunter "Zoom" Zolomon.

I'm about halfway through the Gaiman/Vess Stardust, which is quite a lot of fun. I'll be hitting the theater this weekend to see the film, and I hope it's as good as the book would suggest. I've heard mixed reviews in general, and almost nothing from the comic reading public, so I don't really know what to expect. Usually I'd imagine that Gaiman's stuff would lose a lot in translation to the screen, but the story is so cinematic and classical already that it seems less likely.

One other neat little hitch in the whole posting issue was that I caught a nasty computer virus a couple of days ago, which was really interfering with my ability to do things online. Firefox was sluggish, and a lot of pages (especially Google-based ones) would come up garbled, or without any formatting, or with a little bold end-quote symbol in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Blogger pages, when they had any formatting at all, would be missing that bar at the top with all the "Next Blog" and other buttons, and most of the websites were redirecting to or referencing ora.3168a.com and/or 67.19.116.188/n.js (the latter was inserted into scripts on the malfunctioning page sources). Norton, Ad-Aware, Spybot, and Counterspy all failed to recognize anything, and the only removal instructions I could find were on Japanese websites. Apparently some combination of repeated restarts, fiddling with translated removal instructions, and running a TrendMicro online Housecall, managed to take care of the problem, since everything seems to be working fine. Still, I think that's only the third time since 1997 that I've had any serious viral infection, and it's easily the most obnoxious of the three.

So, since I've been out of the loop, what's been happening in comics? Anything interesting? Does Countdown still blow?