St. Paddy's Day
Today is the feast day of Saint Patrick, venerated in Roman Catholicism as the Patron Saint of Ireland (the whole island, not just Eire a.k.a. the Republic of Ireland and not just Northern Ireland, the whole kit'n'kaboodle). Can someone please explain to me what dyed-green Budsweiser and cheap plastic hats have to do with an Irish nationalistic/religious festival? By Lucifer's beard, I hate St. Patrick's Day!... as it is celebrated in America.

If you wore green today, you can go to hell. And I say this knowing full well that my sweet mother, whose heritage is 50% Irish, wore a green sweater today. I love my mother dearly, but in so many very ways I will never understand her or the way she thinks.

The Magic of Shazam!
During the year-long story of "The Red and the Black," "The Revenge of Theo Adam," and "From Here to the Rock of Eternity," I will be introducing a character named Xia Timur. A direct descendant of an ancient coupling between the Wizard Shazam (long before he took that name) and a sorceress named Xia Wei, Timur will style himself as the Scion of Shazam, the rightful heir to the Wizard's power. First, he tries to destroy Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, and Kid Marvel, and evict the Wizard from the Rock of Eternity, obviously meeting with defeat (Billy, Mary, and Freddy are the stars, after all). Later, the Scion returns to the secluded monastery where he was raised and sets out to create an "empire of justice" in Central Asia, based around the city of Samarkand, capital of the medieval quasi-Mongolian Timuric Empire and home to Tamerlane's tomb (Tamerlane a.k.a. Timur the Lame). My dilemma is this: both "Tamerlane" and "The Great Khan" are good names for the story, but a part of me really really wants to call it "The Wrath of Khan."