There was an envelope from Dark Horse with more of the gorgeous Michael Zulli pages from his adaptation of "The Price" in them. He's drawing the lead character as almost-me, which is fascinating -- he's more or less me, but with a Stephen King sort of beard.
Also waiting for me were some comics from Top Shelf -- Eddie Campbell's latest wonderful Alec collection (can it be an Alec collection if Eddie's no longer telling stories about Alec McGarry, an individual who looks exactly like, and shares the life of, Eddie Campbell, and is now telling the same stories about Alec McGarry lookalike Eddie Campbell?) After the Snooter and his new publication Egomania, [do you need me to tell you how good Eddie Campbell is? Or that After the Snooter is probably the best graphic novel about art and wine and midlife crises and families and friends and wine and love and art and saying goodbye and terror there is?] and Rich Koslowski's Three Fingers, at once naturalistic and absurdist, a film documentary in comics form that rips the lid off the abuse of and by Toons in movies and shorts to form a sort of alternative pop-culture history of the 20th century.
There were US Coraline posters as well, the ones Harper have just done for retailers. They are gorgeous. I hope they spend a while on the walls of bookshops before they start to show up on Ebay.
Just invited to Japan in the spring -- I need to see if I can do it. I'm already going to France for the Angouleme Festival and Coraline promotion in late January, Singapore in March and Italy and Spain (and possibly more Europe than that) in April.
Something (I suspect a groundhog, or a deer, or a gigantic mutant rabbit) has started chewing on a couple of the pumpkins in the garden pumpkin patch. I suspect it's time to start making some early pumpkin pies...