Google Images has been kind, FUBAR v.2 cover, stats and more!

- Blogger is kind enough to save viewing statistics for this blog, and I am obsessive enough to check them all the time; the stats tell me nothing other than how many views specific posts have in a given time period and what countries the views come from, which is juuuust unintrusive enough for me to be okay with.  These page views, for the most part, seem to follow a predictable trend, with new posts getting the majority share (but fading away after a week or so) with a few time-tested posts continually getting hits.  Sometimes, though, a post from three months ago will all of a sudden pop back up on the radar and top the list in a given week.  This is thoroughly confusing.

Case in point: I've had, what, seven different posts with art from my Thing sketchbook; one entry (the third, I think?) keeps getting more hits than any other.  I think the big reason for this is because, as someone else pointed out to me, some of the sketches show up pretty early on in Google Images searches, which I think is extra cool.  The wording is sometimes tricky, but I've found that searching for images of the Thing with the keyword "cigar" somewhere in there brings a bundle of familiar sketches, like the one above from Chuck BB.  I've seen images from the sketchbook as high as on the sixth page of results, which, when considering how many thousands of images of the Thing there are out there, is fairly surprising.

- Speaking of statistics (YOUR FAVORITE SUBJECT!), the month of June still has a few days left in it, and it already is my most-viewed month since Blogger started keeping record of such things (according to this graph, it looks like a total of zero people viewed it in May of 2009).  November, 2010, directly after the New York Comic Con, held the previous high, but woo!  No more.  Thanks, everyone, for reading my stupid ramblings!

- One of the big reasons for this jump is because of the "Accordion Theory" comic strip, which has quickly become one of my most-viewed posts.  It seems that Yahoo! Images is bringing the strip up very early when people search for "Weird Al" Yankovic, which is great - especially since the man is getting a lot of publicity lately for his brand new album, "Alpocalypse", which came out on Tuesday.  It's a tremendous album, and you should totally buy several copies of it.  My goodness, look at the cover!

And holy crap, buy it buy it buy it!  And marvel and how incredible it is.

- You know what other cover is cool?  The just-released cover to the much-anticipated FUBAR volume 2, due out this fall.  Danilo Beyruth drew this one just as he did the cover for volume 1, and as with that one he knocked this out of the park.  Really, how awesome is this cover?  Very awesome.  That's the answer.  It is.

- Your friend (and mine) Paul Tucker is hard at work on a new story featuring John Watkins, Phantom for Hire!  Here's some thumbnails...see if you can guess what's happening!  I can, but...I wrote the script.

- Lastly, happy birthday to friend and Franks and Beans co-creator Larry, whose exact date of birth I always manage to forget, but hey, it's around here some time.  I hope he enjoys the Dukes of Hazzard parody porno DVD that I bought for him, which is sure to bring laughs and laughs.  And boobs.

Oh, hey, we (and I think eight other people) went to Kennywood amusement park last week, and I filmed the Thunderbolt roller coaster while riding it.  Watch it, and hold your hands up when the car goes down the hill.