Simply Everything

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LOS ANGELES, Calif., July 28th, 2009 – Top Cow Productions, Inc. proudly announced today that Mark Waid, the writer behind Top Cow’s new and exciting crossover event, Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer, will be hosting two signings to mark the release of the first issue in this hotly anticipated series.

On Wednesday, July 29th, Waid will appear at two Los Angeles area retail stores to mark the premiere of Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer #1.  From 11am to 1pm, Mark Waid will be signing comics at Collector’s Paradise, in Winnetka, CA.  And from 5pm to 7pm, he will be signing at Brave New World Comics, in Newhall, CA. Collector’s Paradise is located at 7131 Winnetka Ave., Winnetka, CA and can be reached at 818-999-9455 and found on the web at www.comicsandcards.net. Brave New World Comics is located at 22722 Lyons Ave., Newhall, CA and can be reached at 661-259-4745 and found on the web at www.bravenewworldcomics.com.

As an added bonus for fans attending the signings, a limited quantity of copies of issue #1 will be available pre-signed by artist Kenneth Rocafort.

Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer is the deadly new mini-series with consequences brought to you by Mark Waid (Amazing Spider-Man, Irredeemable) and artist Kenneth Rocafort (Madame Mirage, Astonishing Tales).   This is a series with non-stop action, intrigue, lies, and betrayal. Make sure to pick up the first issue of Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer and bring it to the Mark Waid signings on July 29th.

ART ATTACHED: Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer #1 covers A & B by Kenneth Rocafort.

Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer #1 (Cover A)

Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer #1 (Cover B)

Media contact:
Filip Sablik
Top Cow Productions, Inc.
(310) 282-8062
fsablik@topcowent.com

About Top Cow Productions Inc.
Top Cow Productions, Inc., a Los Angeles-based entertainment company, was founded in December of 1992 by artist Marc Silvestri, who also co-founded Image Comics earlier that same year. Top Cow currently publishes its line of comic books in 21 languages in over 55 different countries. The company has launched 20 franchises (18 original and two licensed) in the industry’s Top 10, seven at #1, a feat accomplished by no other publisher in the last two decades. Its flagship franchise, WITCHBLADE, was TNT’s #1 original film of 2000 and the subsequent TV series was released on DVD on July 29, 2008. A feature film, co-produced by Platinum Studios, Inc. and Arclight Films, is slated to begin production in Australia with director Michael Rymer. WITCHBLADE is also the first American property to be fully adapted in Japan as an original anime and manga by Studio GONZO in 2006. Top Cow’s other flagship property, THE DARKNESS, was developed into a major next-generation video game release by Starbreeze and 2K Games and achieved platinum sales status. WANTED, an Eisner-nominated miniseries published by Top Cow from 2003-2005, is now a major motion picture from Universal Pictures starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman. Virtually all of Top Cow’s other properties are in development as feature films, live-action television, animation or video games. Top Cow has also successfully licensed and merchandised its franchises into toys, statues, clothing, lithographs, puppets, posters, magnets, shot glasses, lighters, lunch pails, wall scrolls, mouse pads, die-cast cars, calendars, Christmas ornaments, Halloween masks, trading cards, standees, video games and roleplaying games.

By Peter K. Lam

Yahoo! 404 error

I get almost all of my news thru RSS feeds. I find it to be a lot easier to just subscribe to feeds and read the news briefs all in one place then click to read more on the stuff I really care about.  I often save clippings of my favorite stories because I would either write a new blog on it or maybe use an article as source material for a new story. Yesterday I was looking through my RSS aggregator, Newsgator, and started clicking on some clippings I saved only to find that the articles have “expired.” The good stuff I saved was from Yahoo! and the all have since been removed. So I wonder, why in the world would they “expire” their online content?

First of all, one of the main principles of internet marketing is that you never, EVER, delete, remove or expire your website content unless you absolutely need to. Website credibility is built upon how long a website has been up in addition to other factors like how many pages of creditable information is online. Following this model, nobody should be taking pages off the internet unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so. One instance that may warrant page deletion would be the presentation of inaccurate information or something to that extent. Personally I still wouldn’t remove the page in that instance. I would simply post an update to that page notifying readers that the information is outdated and that they are reading an old article or old news.

Social bookmarking and sharing of articles on the web continues to grow more and more popular everyday. People who find a story interesting or valuable will bookmark a page using a site, like Delicious which happens to be owned by Yahoo! no less, or on their RSS aggregator like I did. Using sites like Digg or Buzz Up! as a means to increase exposure of articles is also growing very popular but if pages people are saving with these new methods get removed, what is the point of saving them? People save the pages expecting that they would remain online till the end of time. Nobody expects to see an article removed. It really just doesn’t make much logical sense.

The story clipping I saved from Yahoo! was a simple story about a man who found a hidden room that was completely sealed off while he renovated his newly purchased home. I really like the article and thought it had great story potential. The article was in no way shape or form time sensitive nor did it have any information in it that may prove problematic if left online. It was just an interesting story so I’m really just confused as to why such a story would be removed.

I’m not sure if Yahoo! have recently picked up this practice but every clipping that I save from them, dating as far back as seven months, have all been removed from their site. All those articles came up as 404 errors. If they kept these pages, and all the other pages they may have deleted, they would have so many more pages online. Yahoo! has been around since the dawn of the internet. I expected that they would be one of the companies out there that are fully aware of the common good practices of maintaining data on the web. I guess I was mistaken. So from now on I may just need to print out the articles I really like and save them the old fashioned way or in a few months the story will just miraculously disappear from the internet.

By Peter K. Lam

New stuff on the site!

I’ve been working away all day yesterday and today filling up the site with content. I now have buttons for “Share This,” “Buzz Up!,” and “digg” in an effort to further expand the reach of my site. It looks pretty awesome! Took me a while to make everything look write but it’s all done and looks great. So now it’s just populating the site with stuff.

I wasn’t able to do an auto-transfer of my blog entries from Blogger so I just manually copied the stuff over myself. I wasn’t on that site for so long I had no idea that I actually got comments on my articles about Frosty, Heidi and Frank! So I pulled over the book/movie reviews I did and the FHF stuff so you can read it here now if you want. I guess at some point I need to delete the other blog off of Blogger so that there is no redundancy in my content across the net.

In addition to migrating content from my old blog, I’ve posted several of my written works on here as well. A lot of what’s up there are works from school. I didn’t do any re-editing on them since I want to preserve the authencity of the original piece. In looking over the fiction I wrote back in the day, I was pretty emo… LOL! Depressing and kinda disturbing but none the less still very interesting.

So there are quite a few things online now. That’s not all of it either. I still have a bunch of original pieces I have to look through not to mention the fan fiction and non-fiction works. I’ll probably get some of that up over the next week.

I originally intended to work on my other site HaloCityTribune.com this coming weekend but that might not happen. I still have a lot more to do on here. So enjoy what I’ve put up so far!