The whole run of Plan B magazine has been released as a single 670Mb PDF. That’s 46 issues of some of the finest music writing of the decade. And a lot of posturing pretentiousness too. It’s like two of my favourite things for the price of one. Or none, as it’s a free PDF.

If you’ve any interest in music in the 00s, or music full stop, this is a great thing to just have on file. You’ll discover a new band every time you browse it.

Hell, it’s even worth getting if you’re one of the games journalist sorts. For the first 10-20 issues or so, I was doing games stuff for it. And Quinns and Mathew Kumar too, who I bullied into contributing. Very much written for the non-gamer about games which get pretty much no coverage, we had fun trying to decode the concept of Outsider Games.

Whole thing here. Go gets!

Just did a quick few paragraphs about what comics I’m reading at the moment over at Robot6. A lot of shame-and-excuse-making, frankly.

Five page preview. Last issue out next week. Wednesday in the US, Thursday in the UK. Features back-up strips from Becky Cloonan, Nikki Cook, Andy Bloor and Sean Azzopardi. Going out with a party of an issue, frankly. Hope you enjoy it.

Also, news broke last night over at IGN that Jamie McKelvie and myself would be doing the SIEGE: LOKI tie-in. I’m having Jamie bring all sorts of gleeful science to the Asgardians. Worth following the link if only to see the splendid 5-piece cover by Marko Djurdjevic, which is a thing of glory.

This is mainly for my twitter followers, but I’ll stick up here as it’s a bit more permanent than the general twitter churn.

Basically, since I’m dual-classed at the moment, I’m interested in seeing exactly what people’s interests are in terms of following me. At the moment, I have a healthy mix of comics, random game stuff and a high proportion of total nonsense. I want to know whether I should consider twisting it another way.

When pulling together Phonogram trade back-matter this weekend, I found myself rooting through my hard-drive. I found the JPGs of a comic Andy Bloor and myself did for Scar Comics’ Dead By Dawn anthology comic, which I’d pretty much completely forgotten about. It’s called The Goldfish and was inspired when I found myself drunkenly obsessed with some particular tatty looking aquarium fish in an Exeter Chinese Restaurant. Always with the booze and the staring. Reading it again, I found myself surprised that I quite liked it. It’s still far too obscure for its own good, of course, but what else is new, eh?

Anyway, I figured it was worth lobbing online, so Andy’s done that. Go read! Start the week with a piece of grim existentialist horror.

Myself and Jeff Parker are interviewed over at Marvel about what we’re getting up to with our Thor and Thunderbolts Siege-tie-in issues. I’m Thor, he’s Thunderbolts. We didn’t decide to swap or anything. It also includes some splendid new preview art from Billy Tan and Miguel Sepulveda for the said issues. That’s Billy on Thor and Miguel on Thunderbolts. They didn’t decide to swap or anything.

Anyway - go nose. I love Billy’s rendition of the Siege of Asgard. Totally what I wanted.

While we’re reading comics news malarkey, I direct you over to the Forbidden Planet blog where Sean Azzopardi and Merlin are being interviewed about the their forthcoming trade of Necessary Monsters. Also, Rob Clough reviews Solipistic Pop over at the Comics Journal.

Both are well worth getting. I like them so much I totally wrote intros for both of them, though - frankly - neither of them needed one.

SAT 30th Jan
THE SHUFFLE (7.30-9.30pm)
Covent Garden
Details to be found here.

Finally, free tonight? Well, the Lady is doing her longest ever poetry reading tonight. It’s the Shuffle at the Poetry Cafe tonight from 7:30, with readings will be over by 9:30, I’m told. Five quid cover, or three if you’re unwaged. Clearly, well worth going to, not least because the Lady has some splendid mini-micro-poetry-card-zine things for people who want them. The Poetry Cafe is in the Poetry Society, which is here. Do come!

Anyway - with that out of the way, back to finishing arranging the back matter for the Singles Club trade and doing a few more pages of a new comic Jamie and I are doing together.

Secrets!

Yes, Thor 606’s out today in the US, bringing my first arc - LATVERIAN PROMETHEUS - to a close. It’ll be out in the UK tomorrow. As linked to a few days ago, here’s a five page preview. First full review is over at Comics Bulletin, and extremely positive and spoiler free . Another pretty positive one over at CBR, which is more plot-centric, but still avoids explicit spoilers.

UPDATE: Just a couple more reviews. Here’s IGN and A Comic Book Blog.

In a further Thor update: I’m going through the art for THOR 607 - the first of the SIEGE Tie-in issues - and there’s some splendid stuff in there.

Just to see if something works or not…

(Don’t worry - this is so Alec has something hotlinked elsewhere for his experiments with blocking hotlinking)

Just a quick link to this. BIFFAGE SET FOR MAX.

Out next week, wrapping up the Latverian Prometheus arc.