January 16th, 2161...Save the date!

Don't look now, but it's time to pick another random book from the longboxes to review. As always, now that I have your undivided attention, let me have my few moments on the soapbox. No lectures this week, just some fun with numbers.

As some of the eagle-eyed readers of this blog may have noticed, The Randomizer sits on the right-hand sidebar of this blog. That's what I use several times a week to pick the next book to review. Currently, it is set to generate a random number from between 1 and 12,922. That is how many comics are in my longbox that have a cover date before 2007.

This blog has been going on for just about 6 months now, and in that time I have reviewed 42 books. That means that it's taking me, on average, about 4.3 days between reviews.

If you then take that average and multiply it by how many books are in my longbox, that gives you 55,380 days (or not quite 152 years). So if I eventually want to review every book in my collection, that means that I'm less than four tenths of one percent of my way through.

I guess I better pick up the pace, eh? Just in case, I'd hold the date of January 16th, 2161 open. It's a Friday, so when I post the last review you know there's going to be one helluva party.

Enough future talk, what random book is next on the review chopping block?

...it's The Fury Of Firestorm #45 from March 1985, published by DC Comics!

So this makes about 5 picks in a row where I remember virtually nothing from my original read through. Why the hell do I read these books if I never retain anything?

Give it time. One of these days we're going to stumble across a book like Avengers #57, Sandman #21, or Superman #75. Those I could write a thesis on without ever having to take the book out of my longbox. Hell, I could probably draw a reasonable facsimile of the cover for you too (the Sandman one would probably be a tad on the difficult side, but I'd give it the old college try).

Today, however, we're blessed with going in cold turkey on Firestorm. Now "fury" is not a word I instantly associate with Firestorm, so I'm kind of intrigued to see how Samuel L. Jackson he gets with all of those villains on the cover. Join me in a day or two (or 4.3) for the review.