Two mentions over the holiday weekend filled the Blackberry with email and kept the servers humming.
One saw Pow! cited by the omnipotent Mitch Joel as one of his "Five Blogs That Move The Needle" (and as complimentary as that was, even more so was seeing the other four I was grouped with). Click here to check out the entire post...and the other four.
The other was 12 years in the making, but a truly great Surprise. In 1996, when I was still CEO of the Just For Laughs Festival, I invited cartoonist Lynn Johnston to the event. We had great success with animators like Chuck Jones, Joseph Barbera (the second half of Hanna-Barbera) and Jay Ward (of Rocky & Bullwinkle fame), and since her comic strip "For Better or For Worse" was the most popular in North America, we figured she'd be a natural progression for our up-close-and-personal talk/Q&A sessions at the Gesu Theater.
Well, we were right. Crowds jammed the place in droves, and bestowed upon the quite flabbergasted Ms. Johnston with the type of treatment usually reserved for our mega-star Gala hosts of the era, like David Schwimmer, John Candy, Lily Tomlin or Kelsey Grammer.
Given the fact that I was producing a Showtime TV show for the event the night of her performances, I missed seeing her live, but couldn't miss her radiant aura when we met at the Delta Hotel later that evening. In appreciation for her Festival experience, she gave me a signed original strip, which hangs above the desk where I compose most Pow! posts.
But that's not all. It appears that Lynn's appreciation lasts long, as I witnessed on Sunday, with the panel at right...part of her "Farewell" wrap-up strip, which you can see in its entirety here.