I phone Zoe Watkins at the Ian Fleming Centre, the literary estate. She’s known within Bond circles for having an encyclopedic knowledge of the books.

“I want to recreate a great Bond journey,” I say. “I want to take a passage from one of the novels and assiduously match Bond car for car, road for road, meal for meal, drink for drink, hotel for hotel.”

“What a wonderful idea,” she says. “But which journey do you want to recreate?”

“I dunno,” I shrug. “One in Moonraker?”

“Moonraker is basically a drive from London to Margate,” Zoe says. “Fleming’s fans were disappointed by the absence of exotic locations.”

Since “The Walking Dead” debuted, zombies have become something of a cultural meme and have seen resurgence in virtually all forms of entertainment media, and Kirkman thinks they’re here to stay. “I think zombies have risen to the level of vampires and werewolves and will always be a staple of popular fiction — with highs and lows like vampires and werewolves experience — but I think they’ll always be around in some form or another and I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.”

’24th August, Thursday – My Taxi to Heathrow arrives driven by comics’s answer to Robert de Niro, Jamie Delano, who combines scripting ‘Nightraven’ and ‘Captain Britain’ with taxi work. Phyllis and the children Amber and Leah make a brave attempt at concealing the turbulent emotions aroused in them by my departure, but I can tell they are secretly heartbroken. My flight is a seven hour sneak preview of purgatory. I read Alexei Sayle’s ‘Train to Hell’ from cover to cover. I’m sitting in the central aisle and I can’t see out of the window. What’s the point of flying if you can’t see how many thousands of feet you’ve got to fall shrieking to your death?’

‘While I still have 1700 of you paying attention, I just wanted to say: Whatever you believe, respect others beliefs. It’s not wrong to be kind to people who don’t believe the same as you. You don’t have to be militant atheists. People who claim to be Christians can be hypocrites, but they’re just people, and all people make mistakes. Try to be good to one another. That is my message of peace to all of you. Love one another. It’s ok. Consider that being hostile towards others has never won any followers. Richard Dawkins is just an old man trying to leave behind a legacy. Just like I, a Chrisitan do not follow Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, don’t be mislead by someone just because they share your belief system. It’s easy to be against people who are different than you, but try not to be like that. Take the high road, unlike RD. Thanks for listening and following along. Have a nice day.’

‘The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.’

From the very beginning, Bill Dozier and I had seen millionaire Bruce Wayne and his Bat regalia as classy comedy, hopefully appealing to kids as an absurdly jolly action piece and to grown-ups for its deadpan satire, entirely nonfraught with psychological issues. I mean, golly gee! How else can one view a character who enters a nightclub in full Batgarb and mask, accompanied by a gorgeous chick, and when greeted by the maitre d’ with an obsequious “Good evening, Batman! A table for two?” gravely replies, “Yes, thank you. But please, not too near the music — I wouldn’t want to appear conspicuous.”

So should we tread warily, lest we are misunderstood? Of course we should. Cartoonists are some of the most painstaking, careful, shy and sensitive people on earth, yet we do play with fire, toying with other people’s (and of course our own) most deeply held beliefs and most cherished illusions. Is it possible to go too far? Of course it is? Should we go too far? Of course we should. That’s what makes our job so interesting. There’s no better feeling than, having taken a risk in a drawing, seeing the thing in print and knowing it works. The converse is also true, which is why I work in a bunker on the south coast.

A smart man inquired, “Do you know there’s a person under your train?” I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.

He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, “So, how long before we get on the move again?”

I was to look back on this exchange with amusement and also, strangely, comfort: in the midst of the horror, normality was briefly restored by a commuter asking for alternative travel arrangements.

At one point in the panel, just to clarify (or maybe rationalize) his language, Chaykin said, ‘anybody under 18 who would actually be interested in sitting and listening to me is obviously on drugs.’

When asked about illustrating the Star Wars comic adaptation: ‘If I’d known the movie was going to be so successful, I would have done a better job.’

Chaykin said he is at work on a ten-issue prequel to ‘Black Kiss’ for Dynamite Entertainment. ‘Each issue will be a decade of the 20th Century, with the filth appropriate to that decade.’

• Here are some things you can use on your favorite internet forum … from BeaucoupKevin(dot)com …
  
  
• IndestructoTank! … addictive side-scrolling flash game – use your tank as weapon! [via Blah Blah Flowers]
• A Tour of a Fictional Solar System … Matt Webb describes a science fictional solar system.
• From West Wing to the real thing … the similarities between the West Wing character Matthew Santos and Barack Obama … ‘For what those West Wing fans stunned by the similarity between the fictitious Matthew Santos and the real-life Barack Obama have not known is that the resemblance is no coincidence. When the West Wing scriptwriters first devised their fictitious presidential candidate in the late summer of 2004, they modelled him in part on a young Illinois politician – not yet even a US senator – by the name of Barack Obama…’
• Smokers of the Marvel Universe … cute illustrations remembering when comic characters smoked. [via Neilalien]
• BedPost … the Web 2.0 application for your sex-life. ‘Ever wonder how often you get busy?’ [via iamcal]

I remember Julie Schwarz telling me – who was a lovely man – he told me about Mort Weisinger’s funeral – and this was probably just an old Jewish joke that he’d adapted – for Mort Weisinger – but he said that apparently during Jewish funerals there’s a part where people can stand up and spontaneously will say a few words about the departed – personal tributes, things like that. So it’s Mort Weisinger’s funeral, and it gets to this bit in the funeral and there’s absolute dead silence, and the silence just goes on and on and on and nobody gets up and says anything and eventually this guy at the back of the synagogue gets up and says: “His brother was worse!” (laughter).