Hot Enough For You?, by Elayne Riggs
With any luck, this morning the heat wave that has gripped New York since last weekend will have finally broken.
I’ve never cared for extremes of temperature, but all in all I’m much better equipped to deal with winter than with summer. Winter has its hazards — for instance, our apartment is situated among a row of houses recessed from the main street with a long U-shaped gravel driveway between our stairs and the street itself, and when it ices over there’s never a clear pathway to walk to the street, so unless I drive I’m pretty much trapped in the house. But that generally happens for only a few days, and most of the time I’m more concerned with layering. Which seems to be a lot easier for a person like me with, shall we say, natural padding.
Summer’s a whole different ballgame, though. It’s pretty easy to layer on clothing when you’re cold; it’s a lot harder to strip it off when you’re warm. Leaving aside societal proprieties and whether or not it’s fair or just for topless men to be acceptable but topless women to be verboten (my opinion: as long as women taking off their tops elicits a reaction of "look, boobies!" from the minds of most onlookers, I continue to agree with the status quo here), the fact remains that most of us can’t strip past our skin, y’know? And it’s more and more dangerous to leave skin exposed for long periods of time. SPF one thousand, anyone?
By the way, you do know that once you get past SPF 30 your additional so-called protection from UV rays is negligible at best? And that there are tons of assertions that sunscreen is actually bad for you and even carcinogenic? (Oh, the fun things you find out about when you set out to write about heat waves! That’s at least two articles I now wish I’d never read!) (more…)
Next January, E.C. Segar’s cartoon creation Popeye turns 80. That’s a good run, especially for a character who still wasn’t showing many signs of his age in the 2004 TV special 
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Earlier this year, publisher 
With the release of The Incredible Hulk looming, there have been a few items of note hitting the ‘Net that might be worth, well… noting. While I could probably re-write that sentence to make it read a little better, I think it fits in well with the overall Hulk vibe, which seems to go something like this:
In today’s brand-new episode of 
Todd McFarlane recently announced that he’s returning to Spawn, the comic that helped build his empire. In a few months he, along with Image co-founder Whilce Portacio, return to the series and we’ve got the details, plus:
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