Monty Python - Airplane Pilots - watch more funny videos
Despite the title, the above video is not actually Monty Python, but comes from a television special called How To Irritate People starring three future Pythons and produced by David Frost. Though I didn't know it until recently, I was watching when it aired in the States back in January 1969. Funny thing: this very sketch was a huge joke in my family for many years after this brief exposure…but for all this time none of us could remember where we had seen it. Every once in a while, something like this gets stuck in our memory and become a huge part of our personal mythology. Who can say why, or what significance it may come to have later on?
So, yes, six months. No cause for alarm. I'm not quite ready to start blogging again, but there's some news I've been sitting on for way too long and I've been dying to share it with everybody. You may already have read about it here or here or here, but the official word is here.
The book is Minutes To Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen. 184 pages, $19.95 cover price, a dozen genuinely terrific essays about Watchmen in print and on screen inside, and my name slapped on the cover purely for being in the right place at the right time. Available this October from fine vendors of printed graphic storytelling everywhere, as well as through Amazon and Lulu.
A couple of the contributors may be folks you know by different names; a couple of them are just on the verge of becoming prominent; and a couple of them are such big names you'll be asking yourself "What kind of dirt does Richard have on these people that they'd be willing to write for him?" I can't figure it out myself. But they all did an outstanding job. Unbelievably, all of them found something worth saying about Watchmen 25 years after it was published. You'd have thought there was nothing new left to say. I did too. We were wrong.
Minutes To Midnight will be launching at NYCC this year -- as will the documentary film Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods directed by one of our contributors -- so it promises to be a wild ride in October. If anyone reading this is going to be at NYCC, let me know in comments or via e-mail so I can pencil you into my timetable...!
I'm also more than happy to answer any questions you may have about the book. Or anything else, really!
