Douglas’s busy day

As I was waiting in line to buy my comics this week at Midtown Comics in Manhattan, the power went out for a moment, and a bunch of other customers pointed out the huge plume of smoke rising up from the explosion at Grand Central, three blocks away; I figured that whatever happened over the next few hours, I’d probably want something to read, so I paid for my comics and then went down to join the crowds of businesspeople running away from the explosion site. (It was just a steam pipe that had blown up, but we didn’t know that at the time.) Understandably, I didn’t really feel like turning immediately to a comic book about Manhattan getting smashed, or about a couple of characters trapped in rubble.

This is followed, a few pages later, by an ad for Marvel Heroes bottled water, “The Coolest Water in the Universe!” This is as good a juncture as any to point out that bottled water is almost by definition uncool (seriously, go read that story). In another ad, Wolverine is wearing boxers with his own image on them, and saying “bub.”