Hello, Whatnauts! As you can perhaps glean from the title of the post and the image and/or the tag, and/or the tracks of my tears, there won't be a podcast this week due to the most heinous of failures--hard drive failure. I tried to back up my external hard drive *for the first time ever* after recording what was a truly great podcast with Graeme.

Believe me, when I tell you: it was quite a thing. Part of it was the fact we took some controversial stands. We compared Sandman: Overture to Pretty Deadly, with Pretty Deadly being preferred in some matters. We talked about the Fantagraphics Kickstarter -- about which I was especially vexed -- and I think finally nailed our discomfort with crowdfunding.

Since it was November and I was letting myself read Marvel books from the library, we discussed the oddness that is Guardians of Galaxy: The Power of Starhawk, with much bending of the knee at the work of Mr. Steve Gerber an an analysis of how aspects of the work are oddly prescient about fan culture today. Graeme, who'd actually read a lot of books in prep (including a ton of Green Hornet issues we never got around to discussing), listened to me rave about Akira Toriyama's Cowa!, Four Color Fear, and other titles. We discussed DC's move to New York; Marvel's TV four-fer with Netflix; Jeph Loeb: Threat or Menace? with regards to the TV shows he's worked on; and there was a long discussion of the beautifully written, gorgeously drawn Bad Houses by Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil that Jeff both loved and had a lot of things to wring his hands over. And Graeme and I had a fight about Supergirl statues and DC promotional DVDs that was both heated and hilarious.

In short, it was a pretty darn good podcast that I am going insist--for now and forevermore--was out very, very best podcast and now it is lost to us forever. It's like Hemingway's Suitcase, except I also lost what would've been the entirety of the Wait, What podcast if they weren't all uploaded to our server. As it is, the chance of me putting together a mega-edit of Graeme saying "Spectacular!" are even closer to zero than they were before.

So I am sorry, listeners -- we did our duty and tech failed us. Maybe one day we can do a Kickstarter to get the data recovered -- the estimate I got from this one service was that it would cost between $500 and $1400 -- but for now all we can do is apologize. (And in my case, buy a new hard drive. And rebuild my iTunes music library (which may not be that hard since I have iTunes Match, maybe?)

We will record this week so there will be an ep next week...unless something goes desperately wrong AGAIN.

As always, thank you for your patience in these matters, and Graeme and I hope you are doing well.