Friends of friends
The more years we all spend involved in comics, the less able we are to escape our past, especially in the Web 2.0 age. And that’s actually A Good Thing. For instance, check out cartoonist Howard Cruse’s blog post where he effusively and rightly pays tribute to ComicMix’s own Martha Thomases, whose family he and his partner Ed Sedarbaum have known for a good long time. I’m a sucker for "then and now" photos. Of course, Howard’s not above posting possibly incriminating photos of himself, as you can see by the lovely Esther-and-Vashti ensembles which he and Ed chose to don for their local Purimspiel.
Speaking of past Friends, Leigh Dragoon reports that there will be a forthcoming press release from Friends of Lulu (an organization with which Martha and I both spent many years) regarding their ill-fated Empowerment Fund. From what she writes, it seems the organization is intent upon correcting past wrongs, which bodes well for its future. Considering the long journey women in comics still have to undergo before the industry’s playing field is truly level, the continued vitality of organizations dedicated toward that goal is more important than ever.
Tomorrow marks the start of 
Perhaps it’s a sign of aging when you’re more attuned to what came before than what’s going on now, especially in entertainment. Oh, I’m up on what’s going on with movies and TV (less so in music) and I certainly have my faves in those areas. Recently, however, I’ve been re-discovering some music I’d had before, some TV I had seen when I was a boy, and have found that some of my favorite movies were created before I was born. This column is a grab-bag (hence "scattershot" — it’ll be our code for columns that have a variety of topics) of some of those. Given the age of the material, these are probably less reviews than post-mortems.
