And so we bid adieu to Dali and Tophattington. Something close to Stockholme Syndrome (but not quite that) occured when we fell in love with those crazy gators. I assure the gentle reader that all of our villains won't turn out to be quite so heroic.

Still, as tropes go, I loves me some hero/villain team-up to defeat something even worse. I am also a sucker for the video-game-inspired "but can you defeat the REAL villain?" ending.

Really, writing FtG is as simple as piling on layers of things I love. But without the grossness of whatever KFC calls those horrible bowl things. Famous Stackers? Stacker Snackers?

Something like that.

Stockholme Lockers?

I only got to spend a couple of hours at APE this year, but it was a dense two hours.

The great find of the day was Holmes, a brilliant reinventing of the Holmes legend with an emphasis on the heady undercurrent of wanton debauchery of Victorian England. It's hilarious on levels I can't even approximate through verbal analysis here, so just go out and find a copy by any means necessary.

It was also a distinct pleasure to meet Sean Seamus McWhinny of Diary of a Catering Whore fame. I've always regarded his comic as the sort of thing that Beaumarchais would be writing were he alive today- devastatingly precise observations of Those With Money by Those Who Must Serve Them.

- Count Dolby von Luckner

Rooster hoisters?