Zeus, In Passing, by John Ostrander
Having celebrated Christmas, we all now stagger towards the New Year. There’s no inherent meaning or importance to the fates of December 31 and January 1; nothing save what we invest in it. Part of the meaning is to look forward, to imagine what will be. The other is to look back and to remember what has happened in the past year especially if someone you know has died.I experienced that late this year. On Saturday, November 17th, I received word from Phillip Grant that his father, Paul, has suffered a major heart attack and was not expected to live. Paul Grant died the following Tuesday.
I’d gotten to know Paul in my early Internet days online at the old Compuserve Information Services site, in their Comics and Animation Forum. I knew him at the time by his handle, Zeus, and his were the first online reviews that I read – Notes from Olympus, if I recall correctly. Paul, as Zeus, covered a wide range of comics and, while economical in length, each review was well written and well thought out. Paul could write. He was also an early and vocal supporter of GrimJack, for which I was and am extremely grateful.
The first thing I should mention is that, although this book is credited to Jeff Smith, it doesn’t seem to have been written by him. I think the text in it – aside from a stilted introduction by Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of the Ohio State Cartoon Research Library – was actually written by the editor, Diana Schutz, but the book itself doesn’t actually say. The text talks about Smith in the third person, and doesn’t show any strong connection to his personal thoughts, so it certainly looks like it was written by someone else.
This is the time of year when people usually start to compile "best of" lists and recaps. But as 2007 has been more "the worst of times" for me than "the best of times," I prefer to look forward. After all, as Criswell once "predicted" in a hardly-memorable Ed Wood film, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!"
You can learn the damnedest things in the most unexpected places
Every Thanksgiving the media does reports on what makes people thankful. It’s always the same things. Husbands are thankful for their wives and kids. Wives are thankful for their husband and kids. Older people are thankful for good health. Kids are thankful for their Mom & Dad. Blah, blah, blah… 
Well, the film adaptation of the novel The Golden Compass hasn’t even opened yet and the Christian right-wing is already foaming at the mouth about it. The book is the first in a children’s fantasy trilogy called His Dark Materials by British author Phillip Pullman. Pullman is an agnostic/atheist (depending on the article that you read) and has said he is promoting his views through books to children, much as C.S. Lewis did promoting Christianity with The Chronicles of Narnia.
Generally speaking, I’m a guy. When I get dressed, I’m usually not worried about the ensemble, just about whether it’s relatively clean. I’m not concerned about my “looks,” considering that at my age I haven’t got many looks left to consider. My sweetie Mary likes how I look and that’s good enough for me.
This is another one of the periodic clean-up volumes to collect shorter 
