I’ve got a plane to catch in a couple of hours, so we’re keeping this brief (yet, as always, meaningful).

• John Allison, as all right-thinking folk know, writes fabulous stories. The Tackleverse that started with Bobbins and continues through Bad Machinery (all found via ScaryGoRound.com, with a branching off into Giant Days (found in your local comics shop) are exquisitely written. Whether drawing himself or paired up with the right collaborator, Allison’s mastery of character and farcical situations is second to none. So what to do when you’ve gone office comedy, bizarre slice of life, mystery kids, and college years stories?

  How about branching off into a new, unrelated setting for new characters and a new story type?

  Coming in June, Allison will write — and Christine Larsen will draw — By Night, a 12-issue miniseries (then again, Giant Days started as a miniseries as well), which he describes as combin[ing] my love of Fringe, The X-Files, Jon Ronson documentaries and long reads about the collapse of post-industrial Western society over at CBR. I’m going to preemptively call this one a must-buy, and we’ll all find out exactly how good it is on the 13th of June.

• Gotta go back most of a year for this one: Los Angeles resident Dave Kellett gifted us with a copy of the hardcover of Drive volume 1, which I had already purchased via Kickstarter. Having a spare copy, I decided to give it away to one lucky reader, who turned out to be Mario, from Lisboa, Portugal. Off I mailed it, with the obligatory joke (ho, ho!) about it disappearing into the depths of Customs.

  I think you know what happens next. The book made it to Portugal in a matter of days, sat around in Customs waiting for Mario to come claim it (who was supposed to intuit this fact through the aether), and was then returned to me some five months later. Mario and I corresponded and I offered to try again, but he very graciously suggested he look into the relevant postal policies before resubmitting the book to the tender mercies of systems beyond the ken of mere mortals. Having been at that for some time, he’s come a conclusion:

  It’s not worth another attempt. He suggested I try to sell it to try to recover some of the money you have lost with the shipping or maybe gift it to someone else, or donate it to a library, whatever you feel is the best option, which I find to be pretty generous on his part.

  I’m not going to sell it, and I’m not going to run another giveaway on this particular book — it’s got the scent of my home now, and it will undoubtedly try to return, like one of those dog-and-cat pairings you see in the movies about returning home after great journeys. But I will be donating it to my local library (under Mario’s name, naturally), so that it can be seen by many people and they can grow to love the story as much as we do.

  So do me a favor, everybody — give Mario a quick nod of appreciation, maybe a hat-tip in the general direction of Portugal, and be glad that webcomics breeds such kind-hearted people. Take that, Universal Postal Union! And read Drive, it’s really good.

Spam of the day:

Toenail Fungus Code

Of all the emails I’ve ever received — spam or otherwise — where I NOPEd on clicking the link that says Display images below, this is the very NOPEiest. Nope, nope, nope, nnnnnoooope.