Fifteen years after MAD ABOUT YOU, Paul Reiser returns to the NBC comedy line-up with a different twist on reality – his reality. Paul explains it all plus we get news in Bradley Cooper as The Crow and Batman on stage!

Have you seen Paul’s new show?   Drop us a comment below!

 THE FAMILY MYSTERY-PART TWO

First, I shared the story of the world of THE FAMILY MYSTERY….If you missed that, go back a post or two and read the ILB before this.   Now, let’s meet the family, shall we?

DOCTOR DILLON ‘DOC’ DENTSON-A shy retiring research scientist who works in his home laboratory for an up and coming scientific facility, Doc Dentson enjoys watering his lawn and barbecuing steaks on the weekends and has enjoyed that since the end of World War Two, a war that he participated in in some mysterious capacity.  Anyone who knows Doc would say that he’s quiet, cheerful, and is happier nowhere than in his own home.

Those people don’t know Doc very well. 

Over at Making Light, former Valiant Comics editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden started a thread on trying to explain marketing categories in publishing, and how they’re not solely determined by the content:

Say your book features a strange and powerful device, the Transnistrian Infundibulator:

If the storyline is about the inception, interim difficulties, and eventual happy resolution of the relationship between the inventor of the Transnistrian Infundibulator and some nice young woman, it’s a romance.

If he’s a scholar studying the Transnistrian Infundibulator, she’s a governess, and his best fossil specimen of T. infundibulator falls out of his pocket during a reception at Almack’s, it’s a regency.

If one or both of them is not 100% human, they meet cute while fighting off spooky badguys, and the Transnistrian Infundibulator is an ancient magical artifact they use to defeat said badguys, it’s a paranormal romance.

If she’s his lab assistant, he thinks she looks hot in goggles and a tool belt, and the Transnistrian Infundibulator is a huge rivet-intensive steam-driven mechanical wombat, it’s steampunk.

If the Transnistrian Infundibulator is magic, but instead of working like a handheld appliance, it generates profound and numinous changes that affect the world as a whole, it’s probably fantasy.

And the discussion took off from there.

Farther down the list of comments, I added:

If you actually see what the Transnistrian Infundibulator looks like in the book twice, it’s comics.

If it also has a spine, it’s a graphic novel.

But it occurs to me that we should be much more precise in trying to decide comics categories. For starters:

If the Transnistrian Infundibulator awakens a long sleeping creature the size of an elementary school that speaks perfect if grandiose English, it’s a Marvel monster comic from the late 50s.

And so I throw the floor open to you. Have at it.