Our new fancy blog is nearing completion, thanks in part to the timely assistance of Phillip Duncan over at Superheroes-R-Us, who apparently is a CSS master among his other skills. We’ll be getting that live pretty soon, possibly even as soon as tomorrow. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you–

Over the last few weeks we’ve been moving our site from one service to another, fancier one–one that we will hopefully be reaping some sweet functionality rewards from in the coming months. So far the biggest reward has been like 500% more junkmail, but as rewards go it’s kinda lame, honestly. BUT that’s surely just a speedbump.

But, check it out, two big changes for right now:

1) SITE NAVIGATION HAS CHANGED

The site still looks the same more or less, but now the New Releases page has moved from “http://www.heroesonline.com/new-releases.html” to just plain old “…new-releases”. Ditto across the site; for instance, the HeroesCon Guest List is now at “http://www.heroesonline.com/heroescon/guests”. A small thing, but a change I’ve been wanting to make for awhile, and I thought I might as well get it done while stuff was shifting around anyway. Makes for cleaner navigation and easier to describe links to things.

SO: update your bookmarks accordingly. I’ve created a fancy error message page that you’ll get if you type in a file that doesn’t exist any longer, and all the new links are there for reference. The main site navigation is still more or less the same, so you can use the existing navbars to navigate to pages you’re looking for as well. If you have any problems or find any glaring errors, feel free to email me at dharbin[at]heroesonline[dot]com

2) While our e-mail addresses have not changed, some webmail-based addresses you may have been using will change before too long. So if you’ve been using an email like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]” or pretty much anything that doesn’t end in “…heroesonline.com”, now is the time to update your address books. Those emails will still find their way to us eventually for a little while, but better safe than sorry, right?

Okay so new blog soon, plus more new stuff to come. ONWARD TO ADVENTURE!

The latest issue of Marvel’s lone — to my knowledge — espionage comic, starring the long-running spy Nick Fury (former director of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and his band of superhuman secret agents, hit the stands last week.

I’ve been loving this book and acting as an evangelist for it since the first issue. Five more issues in, the comic is still great. So great, in fact, it’s hard to even remember that, not too long ago, Nick Fury was one of those Dr. Strange-type characters — good for a cameo appearance, but not interesting enough to hold down his own book. Well, those days seem done.

This version of Nick Fury works by shrinking the cast of characters to a manageable size and throwing a healthy dose of superheroics on top of the spy stuff. So, instead of faceless agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fighting faceless hordes of Hydra, we’ve got a small, fleshed-out group of superpowered “secret warriors” fighting big-time bad guys like Gorgon (from that cool Wolverine story arc). Add a splash of great dialogue and several really cool-as-hell character moments (like when Dum Dum Dugan says to Nick Fury, “You give me a month and I’ll deliver the baddest bunch of evil bastards this world has ever seen.”), and you’ve got one hell of a comic book.

Now, I will say that it took me a moment to get into the art by Stefano Caselli (it seemed a tad too cartoony for a shadowy, spy book), but now I’m lovin’ it.

Bottom line? Buy it.

Carlton Hargro is Editor-In-Chief of Creative Loafing. You can read more of his writing at the magazine’s Comic Proportions blog.

Jumping off a point made by my colleague (the delightful) Phil Southern, that this year is gonna be remembered as one of those banner years like 1986 or 1982 or some other year that was great, but I’d have trouble pinpointing…

Anyway, in an attempt to spur discussion and some pos-sit-tiv-it-ee in general, tell us what you’ve liked this year, why you’ve liked it and what you’re looking forward to, in the comments section below!