A cute idea hung over from April Fool’s Day: iCopulate.

“Tabbytabby” has posted a pdf excerpt from the Namak premiere.

I am seriously contemplating creating a real Consultimo comic book. Only two people have been completely privy to the fumetti incarnation of Consultimo (in part because the Libel Comics Group could never, ever get the clearances for the composite art). In a completely ideal situation I would team up with a likeminded artist equally willing to waste massive amounts of time rekindling the post-Silver Age days of Marvel Comics.

I can’t shake the ideas, however. They haunt me daily.

I am obsessed with Marvel Value Stamps. Marvel Value Stamps appeared in Marvel Comics when I started reading them, right at the beginning of what is considered the Bronze Age (e.g. the rot was setting in. The “Marvel Universe” was really over, I think, when Stan quit Spider-Man. You had occasional bursts of excellence afterward, like Starlin’s work on Warlock and Captain Marvel and the Jim Lee days of X-Men, the Miller books, the Waid Captain Americas and, I think, the Romita Jr. Spider-Man book that strongly evoked the Gil Kane era (before they reset the counters), but most of the rest was so disconnected from the 1960s that it saddened me.) The idea was to clip these “stamps” from the comics (thereby gutting their collectibility) in order to complete a stamp book that could be presented at the first Marvel Con to receive a discount on admission (and some other very tentative promises that turned out to be not very lucrative). However, they happened at a time when Marvel was still excited about what they were doing creatively. They could justify being proud. In about a year or two almost all of it had completely vanished.

I’m so fixated on the design of the Stamps that I want to recreate it.

Another set of Japanese mini-LP sleeve Apple Records CDs is coming:

James Taylor: James Taylor

Jackie Lomax: Is This What You Want

George Harrison: Wonderwall Music

George Harrison: Electronic Sound

Billy Preston: That’s The Way God Planned It

Billy Preston: Encouraging Words

Doris Troy: Doris Troy

Tony Visconti says that there aren’t any unreleased Mary Hopkin tracks at Apple but there were 40 completed songs for his Good Earth label, most of which have yet to see the light of day. Apple weren’t nearly as comprehensive with the Iveys; they have to be in possession of at least an LP’s worth of unreleased material.

RPM promised a 2004 release date for their followup to their Apple Publishing compilation 94 Baker Street, an Iveys collection provisionally entitled How Much Is The Sky, but it hasn’t happened yet.