Hey guys. You MAY have noticed that this week’s comic diverges slightly (entirely?) from the normal (visual) style and (visual) content of the comic. That is because if is a GUEST POST from my dear friend Sam Martone. He came up with “Love Among the Lampshades” as a parody comic to introduce me at a literary reading, and of course I adored it. So, here we are. Sam is great, and you can buy his chapbook Methodology from Corgi Snorkel Press.

Why am I posting a guest post? Well, I spent the past week in northern California – for work at Google, and the wedding of two dear friends – and I am just tuckered out. I’ll be back with a regular post next week, though, animals and all.

In the meantime, these links will surely help the days fly by:
– Check out Psychopomp, a new literary journal designed to provide a platform for cross-genre writing. (I.e. fairytales meet literary fiction meet noir meet whatever you please, so long as it’s beautiful, funny, interesting, or heartbreaking.) Issue 1 is up now, and they’re taking submissions for Issue 2!
– Did you know the National Book Award finalists were announced?
– I cannot get enough of this poem by Diana Khoi Nguyen in Poetry Magazine.

These are the first days of fall, ladies and gents. Let’s all go out and learn how to like it. (Hint: it will be cooler, and things will taste like pumpkin spice.)