Am I still sponsored by Rococo Coffee? I have no idea. Oh God, why have you abandoned me?

CBS: Biden Campaign Calls A Lid … Until Thursday Night

This is getting ridiculous.  Obviously this has nothing to do with the debate, which I assume won't happen anyway because even though it's the "Foreign affairs" debate, they've suddenly changed it to have nothing to do with foreign affairs, what with Trump's Nobel Peace prize nominations and Biden getting all that money from China, Russia, elsewhere.  As this article points out, if Biden's not prepared to do a debate after all his decades in the Senate, preparation for the next few days isn't going to help.  This is just hiding out and hoping no one will notice him.  A dead dog could do that and would make fewer idiotic public comments.  And get as many Democrat votes.

It does seem to be coming out that Trump's victory is more assured.  Obviously there's no way to know for sure and, if Democrats have anything to do with it, we won't know ever again, but anyway, that seems to be an increasing sense of things.  As I've said, Trump would win easily if this were a normal year but it's becoming too obvious to everybody what Democrats will do to beat him.  The next Civil War is ready to start officially now, I just hope Trump remains in office when it starts.  After that, who knows what'll happen, but that's what I'm hoping for.

Facebook Suspends User Jamie Allman’s Account After He Posts Video of Hundreds of Black Trump Supporters Chanting “We Love Trump!” in Washington DC

It has been known for a while that if Democrats don't keep the black vote where they've always kept it, they have no chance of winning.  I'll also point out that I've ditched Facebook just in time.

I'm almost done with Secret Wars.  At the moment, I don't have any comments on the story itself but I've flipped through the latter pages of the collection and was interested in the original pencils by Mike Zeck for the first issue.  I gotta admit, I thought the art looked a lot better that way.  It obviously couldn't have been printed in Marvel's 1984 style, but you'd think inker John Beatty could have done a better job on it.  Yes, I know that inking is technically the most important part of the visuals since the pencils are just erased afterwards and the inker is the one making them but still...  The characters look different panel to panel and their facial expressions are barely comprehensible.

Anyway, Zeck did better pictures than what ended up being printed, sometimes completely different than the final version.  Better layouts, better panel designs, more detail.  That last is usually preferred by the audience although artistically many find *less* detail to be better, every line has to contribute to the picture as opposed to just cranking out a bunch of noodles.  Anyway, it looked nice in these pictures.  Then Shooter wanted changes.  One has to wonder if he thought those changes were any good or it was just that he's in charge and the way to prove that is to demand changes.

The other main detail was that Kitty Pride was present which I guess was amusing considering her absence from the finished story was a big deal, at least for Colossus.  I also wonder if that was Shooter's idea.  Or perhaps Zeck had just been told to include the X-Men and had no reason to think Kitty wouldn't be there.  It's not like most of the characters were required to do anything other than fill up the space.  Kitty appears in a few random panels and either erased or redrawn to be someone else.

There's a panel on page 15 where it must be her but the drawn character looks very little like Kitty, but I can't figure out who else it would be.  And the second to last page ends with a picture that showed Kitty holding Lockheed and started building up to the final page which was entirely redrawn in a much less creative manner.  Actually the whole page was redrawn.  One or two panels might have been copied but it's otherwise completely different, the heroes dealing with Dr. Doom who flies off and setting up the final page where the other villains attack.  Some of the other panels in the original version are somewhat different but that may be the work of the inker and/or Shooter demanding changes for whatever reason.  But this page is entirely redone and not for the better.

The heroes interact with Doom, he blasts them and flies off in the final panel with the group watching him, Kitty on the left holding Lockheed and the Thing in the center obviously making a snarky comment.  All that is gone.  See Doom, he fires a laser and "Moments later" they are recovering.  That's when he's flying off and the remaining two panels in the story prepare for the villains attack, 'to be continued.'

Obviously these comments are less about Kitty than just the bizarre changes.  I could understand it if the artist was creating the story and changed his ideas partway through, particularly if he was doing the inking, but this seems like an editorial decision to be as bland as possible, which was kept through the whole series.  I also wonder why Kitty wasn't included.  Shooter intended to break off her relationship with Colossus so that's a reason.  Claremont was developing the New Mutants and it would be easy to believe he had long intended to set up the storyline where she's kidnapped by the White Queen and the X-Men can't do anything because they're doing Secret Wars so the New Mutants have to rescue her.  It's even possible someone else contributed to this idea.  Yet somehow it didn't get down to Zeck before he drew the issue, although I would assume he did it months earlier than other artists working on regular series.  Shooter would want that much extra time to make all his changes.

It's odd that these are the things I think about, even after all this time and with other stuff going on in the world.  I'm still having problems trying to get Amazon to print my new book, I'm also trying to get used to the next step on my "History project."  In all this time, I've never had to do a lot of thinking about how I'd do the second step because there was so much work to be done before I get there, but now I need to work that out.  And I'm still getting used to not posting on Facebook but instead doing everything on this blog.  I'm generally doing just one post a day but I've feeling obligated to write stuff out for it.  I have to admit, I preferred posting many times a day on Facebook and writing as much or as little as I felt like on any detail, but that's not how they wanted to go.  So I'm here.  Why are you here?