How I got to be where I am at the moment.
¡Journalista! is a daily must-read during the week. Dirk Deppey regularly pulls together an entertaingly varied assortment of comics-industry and comics-related news items, with occasional flights into spot-on if cantankerous analysis; just the thing for someone too terribly lazy to keep himself on top of The Comics Journal boards and Comicon.com’s boards and the Pulse and Talkaboutcomics.com and Comixpedia and Sequential Tart and all the other sites I’m leaving out, God knows. (To say nothing of the ever-burgeoning comics blogosphere.) This morning, in addition to a great John Barber rant I’d missed the first time out, Dirk pointed out an article from my own backyard: the Portland Tribune profiled Craig Thompson, whose Blankets is not to be missed. In the profile, Thompson mentions in an off-hand fashion the three books his father has read: “a book by Jerry Falwell about the economy in the apocalypse; Rush Limbaugh’s autobiography, the first one; and the Promise Keepers manual.” Those last two didn’t really engage me—I mean, Rush, you know? And if you’ve seen one stadium full of men in Tommy Hellfighter T-shirts, you’ve seen them all. But the first: Jerry Falwell on economics during the Tribulation? Damn.That’s one of those must-haves for the library, you know?
Unfortunately, some desultory coffee-break Googling (and Amazoning, Powellsing, and aLibrising) failed to turn up a likely candidate. However: I did turn up this interesting-looking essay on the politics of Christian domination—to be dug into later; it seems to speak nicely to this post over at Body and Soul—and Frontline’s site for its show on apocalyptic belief in the Western world, which includes a page on Hal Lindsey and his coattail riders (among which is numbered, of course, good ol’ Jack Van Impe), as well as some much-need historical perspective: Cliff’s Notes backgrounders on the Millerites, the Great Disappointment, and John Darby’s dispensationalism—which features a scrummy-looking chart by Charles Larkin that bounced me through Making Light to the Planet Kolob, from which hasty retreat was beaten back to the Museum of Jurassic Technology—and would you look at the time? So I rounded it off with a dose of Apocamon, Patrick Farley’s manga-bright retelling of the Revelation of St. John the Devine. (Coming soon—Part 3: Attack of the Locusts.) Gotta get ’em all!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a little dizzy.
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