Visited the comics shop today -- where, lo and behold, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #4 awaited.

I'm thrilled with how this issue turned out -- it's quite my favorite one to date. Kudos to Brian Ching and Michael Atiyeh for their work on this one. 

Update: The "behind the scenes" page is now online here -- and your responses to the issue are welcome to this blog entry. I also can announce at that very comics shop in a week and a half I'll be doing a Free Comic Book Day event from 1-3 p.m., Saturday, May 6. That's at Galaxy Hobby, 2626 Post Rd., Plover, Wisconsin. See you there!

Readers familiar with my interest in comic-book circulation history (a lot of which is in the Standard Catalog of Comic Books) now have a place on the web to find more of my research. After months of clean-up work and posting, all of my estimates for comics sold by Diamond Comics Distributors since Marvel's return to Diamond in April 1997 are now online at the CBGXtra website.

Amounting to nine years of reports, preorders or final orders are available for more than 32,000 comic books and 4,200 trade paperbacks; also available are market shares and my estimates of average prices and overall market size. This amounts to the largest resource for circulation data ever online.

Topps Comics, Acclaim, Awesome, Marvel's "minus-one issues" - these names from the past and more can be found in the earliest sales charts posted.

All trade paperbacks for which Diamond has ever released indexed sales reports now appear. (The first indexed sales chart of any kind released by Diamond for TPBs was a Top 10 list in February 1998 simply labeled "Books," which also included a couple of price guides!) But even before then, CBG's reports include a rough estimate of trade paperback preorders based on a statistic Diamond did provide - the ratios of dollar preorders represented each month both by comics and by trade paperbacks.

All of Diamond's "Final Order" market shares appear now, going back to October 1997, when the distributor first released that calcluation. Prior to that point, CBG provides dollar market shares based on the Top 300 comics for which Diamond provided indexed sales figures.

The next mission ahead will be the posting of data from the period in which Heroes World was Marvel's exclusive distributor - a period that ended in March 1997. CBG has much of this data from the defunct distributor - it appears in the Standard Catalog of Comic Books but the reporting will be a little more complicated given that the data are from two different sources.

There are times you don't want life to imitate art -- especially when you're the passenger on a C-5 Galaxy, and the art is the climax of my "Best Defense" storyline, from Iron Man #78.

Readers of that issue may remember Iron Man's mid-air rescue of a C-5 Galaxy military transport, bringing it down it in one piece in the reflecting pool on the Mall in Washington, D.C. That scene seemed nearly unimaginable -- until yesterday, when a C-5 landed in three pieces in nearby Dover -- and everyone lived!

Check out the AP story here, where former pilots credit the design for the survival of the occupants. I came to agree with them as I dug into the design specs for the C-5 quite a bit in working out that arc -- the "Operation Babylift" disaster, mentioned in #77, was a real-life event worked into the background of the story. I knew the plane could take a lot of punishment -- just not quite this much!

At any rate, I'm glad everyone aboard yesterday's flight made it -- and props (no pun intended) to Lockheed. That's amazing...