The Super Bowl of comic book shows is going down in San Diego this weekend and we’re missing it. Being on the East Coast, we here at MLD normally stick to local events. Luckily there are a bunch of ways to keep tabs on all of the news and announcements coming out of this year’s San Diego Comic Con.

Comic Book Resources has excellent coverage including live updates from panels and presentations. Newsarama is another great option for staying informed and they’ve provided what has been the highlight for me so far from yesterday’s X-Men panel:

X-Men 2010 by Marko Djurdjevic

The show has already brought us some other fun stuff including new information on TRON: Legacy, True Blood, and Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. Saturday’s panels include a lot of comic book/movie topics like Scott Pilgrim, Green Lantern and Marvel’s upcoming Avengers film. It all begins today at 1PM EDT.

As 2009 speeds to its conclusion, the final Marvel’s 70th Anniversary variant covers have been revealed.  These are part of a set of monthly covers we’ve posted about previously in January and June.  While they’ve been difficult to find, I still think these are amazing images that Marvel should have made more readily available.

It’s been six months since our first post on MLD and I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the experiences we’ve had and milestones we’ve reached.

We’ve had hits from around the world, which is always incredible to me.  Seeing pageloads from all over North and South America, Europe and Asia is pretty cool.  Still waiting for Australia, Africa and Antarctica, along with 10 states.

While we haven’t gotten as many comments posted here as we’d like, there has certainly been a great response and great support from the people reading the site.  If you’re hesitant to post your reactions here, don’t be.  You’re among friends who would love to hear what you think.

Some of the feedback we have received has helped with a lot of our site updates and changes we’ve made to our navigation since we started out.  Hopefully, you can find anything you’re looking for when you’re on the site, and any suggestions are always welcome.

The searches that have been used to get here are probably the most fascinating part of the site to me.  Countless people have found us searching for “floories” along with “male nudity”, “tearjerkers“, “how to roast peppers for human consumption” and various spellings of “Djurjevic“.  Of course there’s always the odd search for “pocky” every now and then.

Thank you for the attention you’ve paid to MLD.  It’s great to know that there are people out there enjoying what we’re doing.

Another batch of great images for Marvel’s 70th Anniversary variant covers have been released over the past few months and I thought it was worth posting an update.  While these covers are really cool, I’ve come to discover that they are incredibly difficult to find since my last post.  At least this seems to be true in Philadelphia as I’ve come across only one shop that regularly has them in stock, Brave New Worlds on 2nd Street.  This is by no means the fault of local shop owners, that blame falls to Marvel for using their ridiculous order minimum system to allocate these books.

This week Marvel delivers something I find even more exciting than the prospect of Spider-Man vs. Rutherford B. Hayes.  2009 is being hailed as Marvel’s “70th Anniversary” and with that comes a series of commemorative variant covers beginning with January 28th’s Captain America #46.  One of these will ship each month on a series of selected titles, and from from what I’ve seen so far they’re beautiful.  Much of my interest comes from the fond memories I have of the covers from Marvel’s 25th Anniversary celebration in 1964…excuse me 1986.