We’re heading down to Comic-Con early Wednesday morning, and frantically getting ready tomorrow, so blog updates will be spotty at best starting tomorrow. Here are a few distractions in the meantime:

Merlin has a new hypercomic up, The Four Derangements. Gorgeous, inventive stuff as always.

Johanna Draper Carlson offers some in-depth thoughts on our recent Zot! Collection.

The gang at the Human Creativity Project sent along an adorable gift for our family in the mail, possibly in response to our recent discussion of see-through comics. (Thanks, HCP people!)

Our family’s in-depth review of 500 Days of Summer: We liked it. It was good.

Larry Marder has his own convention schedule up. Gotta see Larry!

And of course, for those of you going to Comic-Con you can find me Thursday at Noon interviewing Bryan Lee O’Malley on stage, and otherwise relaxing with the family this year. (Yay! Off years = no pressure). If anything else does come up, I’ll try to post it here, or for more timely updates, you can follow me on Twitter.

Chris Duffy presided over years of wonderful comics in the recently demised and dearly missed Nick Magazine. In the best of all possible worlds, he’d still be hard at work on that front, but if Chris and the great cartoonists who worked with him are saddled with a little spare time, at least they found a fun way to spend it last weekend creating the July 4th Project.

Here’s Chris’ call to arms (and here’s the post at the Beat that led me there).

I took the pictures, but Ivy has all the details.

Thank you to all who responded to Neil‘s Twitter shout-out for postcards to help Winter’s class win their competition!

Winter was very touched, excited and grateful to all of the writers from around the globe. It would take her all summer vacation to respond personally to each, so we’re going to have to opt for the less personal forum of the Web to convey her thoughts, but know that she enjoyed each one. Thank you from the whole class and the whole family.

…to everyone who disagreed with yesterday’s post (or with each other) for doing so with such energy, good-humor, wit and intelligence. It’s fun to rant once in a while, but it’s also healthy to have that rant thouroughly tested from every direction. You guys are the best.

Off to Toronto now with the whole family. More news after the weekend.