[WEEKEND OPEN BAR: The one-stop ramble-about-anything weekend post at OL. Comment on the topic at hand. Tell us how drunk you are. Describe a comic you bought. This is your chance to bring the party.]

We are post-apocalyptic.

The Mayan Doomsday has come and gone, and we’re all still here. Don’t give me any guff about the prophecy actually being a misunderstanding of white colonials or a co-opting at the hands of New Age dolts or the exploitation of profiteers. Last night was the end of the world and we did our best to survive.

My woman and I braced for the end by eating sushi, drinking, and watching movies.

And it would’ve been a find end. But here I am, still breathin’ and shit-talkin’ on the afternoon after the Last Night on Earth. Looking out the bay window of my third floor apartment, there’re no zombies to stave off, asteroid fragments to avoid, or swirling plague winds to justify wearing my hazmat suit. The robots haven’t raped our dogs and the aliens’re finding a better species to share omnidimensional enlightenment with. The bogeymen that knocked on our doors last night have already hopped back on the bus to return to Doomsville.

The Mayan idiot-scholars were wrong. Roland Emmerich was wrong. Hell, even the X-Files was wrong.

We’ve all survived an apocalypse. Not the first, and certainly not the last. And it feels great! But it’d be a goddamn shame to let this conflagration of hope dwindle down to the last embers. Let’s make the most of it, let’s take this sense of opportunity – even if we don’t really deserve it – and do something with it.

What’re you going to do now that you’ve survived the apocalypse?

Summer 2012 has blown through the nerd universe with a thunderous fury, and OL rode the wave to its first major convention appearance.  We rocked FanExpo Canada in Toronto, home of yours truly, and generated some fantastic buzz on the show floor.

The essential blow-by-blow follows.  Brace yourselves.

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A big staple of my adolescence was playing endless hours of GoldenEye 007 with Rendar and our friends. Raging hardcore at bullshit tactics but loving every minute of it. I imagine this is a bit of a ubiquitous feeling across gamers of our generation. Low and behold some crazy shit! The generation-defining mode was a last minute addition that the powers that be didn’t even know about.

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I just ate an entire Domino’s deep dish pizza. I’m covered in crumbs. My asshole is already writhing in hate, preparing to shotgun out waste across a porcelain tomb. My girlfriend and I aren’t seeing eye to eye on serious life issues. My bank account shrinks with the same rapidity my doughy ass’d waist expands. If this isn’t the perfect time to escape through some funnies, I don’t know when will be. Comic books, please deliver me from mortality, ideological stances, caloric repercussions, dependence on foreign oil, the problematic desire to respect women’s issues and also rub seed on their butts, and other complicated things. Just fucking do it, okay?

This is Buy These Fucking Comics, the column where we chat about what you’re procuring this week in the world of sequential art and female objectification. If I don’t drop something you dig, for the love of Thanatos speak up. That’s the entire point of this fucking enterprise.

Don’t know what’s coming out? Check right hurr.

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