Q and A

Mark your calendars: Our next epic, the thrillingly-different-yet-comfortingly-familiar Sam and Fuzzy Volume 5, begins exactly one week from today! Are you excited? I am excited!

I've certainly been getting a lot of questions about it -- most of which, for obvious reasons, I can't actually answer. But it did get me thinking about something else. Would any of you be interested in me doing some sort of regular reader-submitted Q-and-A feature here on the website? And not just questions about Volume 5, but about the Sam and Fuzzy story in general, or the nitty-gritty of the comic's real-life production, or... whatever you want! I would hate to presume I know what you want to know. So let's conduct an experiment! Drop me an email with "Q and A" in the subject line and your question of choice in the body, and I'll do my best to answer one or two every couple of comic updates... from now until I wuss out and quit!

It's probably a sign of deficient business instinct for me to have made it so far into this Conscience Cat and Dr. Crab team-up without at least mentioning the Conscience Cat and Dr. Crab t-shirts I have on sale in the shop. Then again, I've never been known for my spectacular business decisions. (Decorating my merchandise with scowling crabs is probably evidence of that!) But either way... t-shirts! They exist, and are experiencing a rare moment of exciting relevancy.

Sam Logan

Produce

What is this counting down to? I mean, it looks like a Mario mushroom, but not exactly like Mario mushroom. It makes a sound like Mario mushroom, but not exactly like a Mario mushroom. It clearly evokes Mario, and yet it is not actually Mario. It is merely... Mario-esque.

My conclusion? It's an exciting new vibrating fungus simulator. Obviously.

-Sam Logan

Pay the piper

I've been listening to the Pillows' PIED PIPER a lot this week. You have to understand... when this album was first released last summer, I was mired in a pretty severe case of Pillows burnout. I love the band, but they have released a new album like clockwork almost every year since 1997. And their last three, while solid, had been so similar to one another that, well, I guess I just felt like I didn't need another one. So when PIED PIPER finally rolled around... I completely skipped over it.

A mistake, as it turns out, because it's the Pillow's best work in years. It's no more a departure from band's standard Pixies-esque rock stylings than any of their other last several albums, but this time around, the songs are all a little bit catchier, a little bit more ambitious, and a lot more interesting. I'm particularly fond of Tokyo Zombie, a brief but multi-part instrumental track in the middle of the album, but there's plenty of other fun stuff on there. If you're a fan of the band, it's definitely worth checking out... and if you've never heard of them before, it's a pretty solid introduction to their work.

- Sam Logan