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1 May 2026
[comics] The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books … Reduce anxiety by reading comics. ‘Instead of reaching for my phone in the evenings, I picked up a comic instead. Reading them as an adult restored a sense of childlike wonder that transcended my anxieties. I found my quality of sleep started to improve. My dreams were more fanciful and less marked by the banal terrors of day-to-day life. I began to wake up feeling revitalised, free of the residual negativity from the previous night’s miserable doomscrolling. Inspired by the colourful imagery and ideas I found in comic books, I was able to channel a newfound sense of creativity into my own work as a journalist.’
30 April 2026
[comics] The Complete 2000 AD By Alan Moore: Future Shocks & Other Stories … Review of Alan Moore’s early work … ‘“The Reservable Man” is clever, which is more than could be said for other Future Shock stories at time, but “The Time Machine” is genuinely smart. In the difference between these two tales of unusual time lies the whole of The Complete Alan Moore, a writer who could be so in love with the notion of doing something unusual simply for the sake of doing it, and at the same time a man who could actually marry that technical skill with emotional depth that was, and is, rare in his field.’
20 April 2026
[comics] The Oral History of the Scrapped 'Swamp Thing' Story 40 Years in the Making … The creators of Swamp Thing #88 get to tell the story of how it was cancelled and resurrected. It’s a shame we don’t get to hear from Karen Berger or Jenette Kahn. ‘According to Veitch, one early red flag emerged shortly after he took over as writer of Swamp Thing. “[DC] brought me down [to New York] and wined and dined me and took me to a Broadway play, and I got to meet with [DC President and Publisher] Jenette [Kahn]. This was right at the time when [DC] had tried to institute [their] standards and practices. They were trying to put the brakes on the violence and the sexuality that had been such a success with Dark Knight and Watchmen.” A year into Veitch’s run on the title, it was clear that something would have to give. “I think Jenette Kahn realized that the whole thing had blown up in her face. She wasn’t willing at that point to just get rid of [DC’s content standards], but she was telling people like me that it was not going to be a problem.”’
5 April 2026
[comics] Simon Bisley’s Jesus … This was a surprise – Bisley has done a range of Bible illustrations — Happy Easter to those that celebrate. (via) <
23 March 2026
[comics] Wizards of Leroy (And Wrico) Lettering … Todd Klein writes about a mechanical lettering technique found in 1940s and 50s comics and some of the letterers who utilized it. ‘It’s a slow and time-consuming method of lettering. You hold the T-square firmly in place with one hand while keeping the template against the top edge and sliding it to the right position with the other to ink each letter. Correct spacing comes by trial and error while watching the ink pen. It took me at least four times as long as regular freehand lettering. I lettered one story with it, and vowed to never do so again! (I made a font from it.) As with most things, if you practice enough, you’re bound to get faster and better at it. That’s what happened to Jim Wroten…’
16 March 2026
[timeline] Chronology of Everything (almost) … A timeline of the Quality Comics Universe put together by Alan Moore and Steve Moore including Axel Pressbutton, V, Marvelman and the Warpsmiths.
ALTERNATIVE REALITY ONE
1982 – Marvelman not reborn.
1988 – World War III.
1992 – Fascist take-over of Britain, controlled by Fate.
1997 – V debuts.
13 March 2026
[comics] Horror Manga That Transcend Borders: Ito Junji / Horror Manga Artist … Go watch this wonderful TV profile of Junji Ito on what inspires him among other things.
9 March 2026
[comics] Tatjana Wood, Award-Winning Comic Book Colorist, Dies at 99 (archive.ph) … NYT Obituary for the long-time DC Comics colourist – worth visiting for the lovely photo of her with the Eisner Hall of Fame trophy. ‘Karen Berger, who edited Swamp Thing, wrote in an email about Ms. Wood: “Her magnificent and evocative palette was a perfect fit — she was an integral part of the magic of that groundbreaking series. She loved coloring ‘Shvampy,’ as she called him in her thick, gravelly German accent.”’
4 March 2026
[play] XKCD Dependency … Make the tech stack fall with this amusing interactive version of the XKCD cartoon. [ via]
16 February 2026
[moore] Alan Moore: ‘There Is Something Dark And Ugly Within The Heart Of Fashion’ … Alan Moore Interview from 2013 on Fashion Beast. ‘I met [Malcolm McClaren]; he gave me a choice of three films to make. The one that immediately appealed to me was ‘Fashion Beast’ a combination of the Beauty and the Beast fable and the strange and tragic story of Christian Dior. Malcolm gave me a couple of books on Dior, a few on fashion, just so I could acquaint myself with that world. He suggested Flashdance and Chinatown as other influences I might look at. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I began to see what he meant. After that, he pretty much left me to my own devices.’
10 February 2026
[comics] The Judge Dredd Cover That Never Was … The hidden art behind 2000AD #18’s Judge Dredd cover. ‘In 1977, [Don Lawrence] was hired to draw the cover for 2000 AD Prog 18 which was meant to illustrate that issue’s Judge Dredd story ‘Brainblooms’. But it turned out there was a hitch – he hadn’t drawn Dredd! Lawrence’s cover featured ‘Greenfingers’ Ma Mahaffy harvesting her grotesque plants but as creepy and bizarre as the cover was, editorial at the time didn’t feel it was ‘dynamic’ enough.’
9 February 2026
[moore-monday] 'Putting Descartes Before the Horse' … An interview with Alan Moore by Koom Kankesan. ‘By the time I was twelve, I think I was more interested in my writing as a thing in itself rather than as a way of courting praise and attention, although it’s likely there was a fair degree of overlap in that particular Venn diagram. By then I’d absorbed a large amount of nonsense poetry (which I’d always had an interest in because of all the outrageous things it does with logic and language), ghost stories, science fiction stories, and the other material you might expect from a boy of that age. All of these things would be filleted for the aspects that seemed to me to be of most worth, which would then be assimilated, clumsily and ineffectively, into my own attempts at writing.’
2 February 2026
[moore] The Ordering and Reordering of Data (From Hell) … Elizabeth Sandifer does a deep dive into Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. ‘This, then, is Moore’s real accomplishment with From Hell. Its subject matter may be infinite. So too might its implications. But From Hell itself is finite; it contains five hundred and seventy-five pages, with no more than nine tiny boxes on each one. Moore has taken the infinite scope of Whitechapel and fit it down into the nine panel grid.’
28 January 2026
[comics] Master Post: Kyle Baker … Go look at this collection of little-seen art from Kyle Baker. 
27 January 2026
[comics] I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026 … Comics Journal obituary of MAGA commentator and Dilbert creator. ‘In an eerily prescient interview with The Comics Journal in 1988, Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed predicted the next big trend in newspaper comics. “You know who the syndicates are looking for? They’re looking for the dissatisfied stockbroker, sitting in his office right now, he’s about 30 years old, thinking how funny it is, there’s all these office things going on around him, with computers and stuff. And he can draw a little bit. A little bit. He’s got the gags in his mind because he lived them. He’s going to start drawing comic strips, and he sends the stuff off to the syndicate. Even though they’re badly drawn, it doesn’t matter because they’re all reduced down to sub-microscopic size. And they start the comic strip. I have seen so many of these come across my desk in the past five years…they hit fast, they’ve got a good gimmick, and they’ve probably got a hook that sounds good to editors.” The following year, Dilbert, not yet an office strip, made its newspaper debut on April 16, 1989…’
26 January 2026
[comics] R. Crumb on His Controversial Work, the 1960s, and How He's Changed … Crumb at 82. ‘Crumb has not exactly adapted to these surroundings. Over 32 years in this village, he has not learned to speak French. And yet, he has no intention of leaving.
“I’m kind of passive that way, I guess,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to die here. This is it. Die here with all my junk in this big house.”’
9 January 2026
[comics] An interview with Crumb biographer Dan Nadel: “He has this incredible instinct for survival” … fascinating interview about a recent biography of Robert Crumb. ‘I must say I was really, really surprised by how fast and how hard he hit in the fall of 1967, that was shocking to me. I had no idea that Robert was so internationally known by the end of 1967. Then Zap comes out in February ’68, Head Comics comes out in October ’68. By the end of ’68, he’s really, really famous. And known for being essentially an avant-garde artist. And he was unclassifiable, like he’s in a Whitney exhibition, he’s in a gallery show, he’s in the East Village Other, he’s in Rolling Stone. He’s across all media. That was really surprising.’
7 January 2026
[comics] Out On The Wildy, Windy Moors: Judge Dredd – The Cursed Earth … Tom Ewing is revisiting the early years of 2000AD. Here he’s looking at the first extended Dredd story. ‘Twenty-five weeks with two artists, with colour pages each week, was an exceptional stint on Dredd. Mills in his memoir gives full credit to Nick Landau for shepherding McMahon and especially Bolland (whose detailed, precisely inked work looks, and was, time-consuming to produce) into delivering it. But the storyline also shows how good the writers and editors were at matching stories to artists – maybe aside from the Vegas section, there’s no part of “The Cursed Earth” where you wish McMahon and Bolland had swapped places. Bolland gets to draw the freaky mutants, the deceptively cute aliens and the weird satirical living brand mascots, all segments where his crisp, realistic style enhances the strangeness he’s being asked to visualise. McMahon’s speciality is the Cursed Earth as a blasted wilderness, full of wild-eyed, wild-haired men, robots and monsters.’
28 December 2025
[comics] The Comics Journal Best comics of 2025, Chosen by their Contributors … Tiffany Babb on the Solitary Gourmet manga: ‘As noted by Joe McCulloch in his review, the book is best enjoyed in small bites, something I appreciate. It’s small, it’s quiet, there’s no major drama to be found, it’s beautifully illustrated, and it’s all about food. Maybe I’m having flashbacks to all the time I spent wandering Tokyo by myself, or maybe it says something about my state of mind, but this weird book about a man eating food by himself is my favorite graphic novel of 2025.’
25 December 2025
[comics] Happy Christmas from Kev O'Neill … Go look at some Christmas cards designed by the late Kevin O’Neill. He did some stunning Christmas comics covers as well. 
23 December 2025
[batman] Some links on the children’s rhyme “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker got away!”- Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy … A wonderful analysis of the many versions of Batman Smells. ‘As some of you know, I work in lexicography but came to this work via a science background, and it felt very much like what I was looking at was taxonomy: an evolutionary tree if you will, with certain characteristics conserved between different forms of the rhyme, while mutations cause changes which are selected—or not—by the playground troubadours, and die out or spread, to mutate again.’
- Batman Slapping Robin Meme … ‘LAY AN EGG BITCH!!!’
- The Secret True History Of 'Jingle Bells, Batman Smells' … ‘So, children of the 1960s would’ve been used to hearing several different (and politically charged) versions of “Jingle Bells” by the time Batman had his TV debut. What’s most noteworthy about “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” is that, once invented, it’s persisted in the public consciousness right up to this very day.’
18 December 2025
[comics] 650 Greatest Comic Books Lists Aggregated … ‘If I were to ask 10 different people what the best comics were, I’d probably get 10 different answers. But if you asked enough people, eventually, you would see some of the usual suspects start to pop up more frequently. So the following isn’t necessarily my ranking of the best graphic novels, but instead, a collection of 655 different “Greatest Comic Books/Graphic Novels/Manga/Bande Desinee/Manhua/Manhwa/Fumetti/Historietas of All Time” lists.’
12 December 2025
[comics] The Beat's Best Comics of 2025 … Just added Noah Van Sciver’s “Beat It, Rufus” to my to buy list: ‘Rufus’s hallucinatory journey through regret, nostalgia, and, frankly, self-deception becomes a meditation on cultural obsolescence and the personal myths we construct to make sense of the harshest of realities. Expressive cartooning and lettering, paired with a color palette that shifts between wistful melancholy and vivid psychedelic chaos heighten every moment. Instead of offering hope for redemption, Beat It, Rufus lingers on the uneasy truth: some dreams inevitably sour but they still merit some kind of understanding.’
10 December 2025
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interviewed in 2010 … Huge interview by Douglas Wolk covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics. ‘A few years later I went up to the DC offices in New York — I was curious to see an actual copy of the Comics Code. I’d never actually seen one. I’d asked Archie Goodwin, and he said he’d look around, but he couldn’t find it — which is pretty funny, actually! Eventually, he found a very old one, it had some stuff like “no werewolves, no vampires” etc. They did have a phone number on it for the Code, and I rang them up, and this woman answered — I said I was a British comic-book artist visiting New York, and I’d heard so much about the Comics Code, could I come up and visit the offices? And she said, “There’s nothing to see here” — and hung the phone up!’
8 December 2025
[blogs] “Suddenly, Twenty-Two Years Later….” … Happy Blogiversary to Mike at Progressive Ruin. ‘Ah well, What Can You Do™? Well, what I can do is keep educating and entertaining the masses, for certain definitions of the word “mass,” here on my site, as I dump my knowledge and experiences out on the printed webpage for all to see. And I plan on continuing it here on ye olde-fashioned blogge for the foreseeable future. Well, until I finally make the switch to video and you can watch me doing my hair and makeup while explaining what a “splash page” is.’
1 December 2025
[moore] Giant of the Attic … A long, deep-dive profile of Alan Moore. [via Kottke] ‘Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.
Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again.’
3 November 2025
[crazy-walls] Narrative String Theory … A huge collection of crazy walls from various TV, movies and comics. [via Phil] 
30 October 2025
[comics] The Common Man Is Coming into His Own … A look at how Jack Kirby’s Jewish identity was reflected in The Thing. ‘In important ways, though, Kirby’s work was intensely personal. “I told in every story what was really inside my gut,” he said in a 1990 interview. If his Jewish identity is reflected at all in his published work, it’s coded, inscribed as a subtext to be deciphered later. “My generation lied to survive,” Kirby told a group of fans in a 1972 conversationwhen he was explaining why he changed his name from Jacob Kurtzberg.’
29 October 2025
[comics] Seymour talks about Alan Moore … A tribute from By Rich Koslowski. 
10 October 2025
[comics] After 36 Years, DC Comics To Publish Rick Veitch's Final Swamp Thing … ‘At the DC/Vertigo panel at New York Comic Con, DC confirmed the publication of a story that we have been waiting on for almost thirty-six years. The conclusion of Rick Veitch’s run on Swamp Thing from 1989. With the four final, unpublished issues… unpublished until 2026, that is. And credited to Rick Veitch, the late Michael Zulli, Vince Locke, Tom Mandrake and Trish Mulvihill.’
9 October 2025
[comics] Area Man Has Far Greater Knowledge Of Marvel Universe Than Own Family Tree … ‘Sundling reportedly reread several issues of Moon Knight recently and found himself enjoying the subplot of the hero’s romantic involvement with Tigra, it is believed he did not realize his cousin was dating anyone until he received an invitation to the wedding. “I guess Andy had been engaged for a while,” Sundling said of his cousin Tom, whom he has met on 26 separate occasions and once spent two weeks with at summer camp but routinely confuses with other relatives.’
10 September 2025
[comics] A List Of How David Banner Got Angry … From the 70s Hulk TV Series. (Repost – originally from 2008) 47. Being stuck in a cab in New York rush hour traffic – “You don’t understand,… I
have to be there by 4.00!” – “Hey, mac, it’s rush hour, we ain’t gettin’ there til five,
so relax.” – “BUT I HAVE TO BE THERE BY FOUR!!!”
9 September 2025
[comics] Leonides and the belt of gold – by Kevin O'Neill … An early, unknown and unpublished Kevin O’Neill comic. 
2 September 2025
[comics] DC To Actually Publish Rick Veitch’s Final Issues Of Swamp Thing? … OMG. I’ve been waiting 36 years for this! :) ‘[The listing for the final Rick Veitch Swamp Thing collection] claims to include four issues of a comic book that simply does not exist. Swamp Thing/Vertigo Special #1-4. DC has never published such a book. Could… could those four issues be the unpublished and uncompleted Swamp Thing #88-91? If so, will DC Comics publish them outside of the book as well? Will we see Swamp Thing/Vertigo Special #1 from DC Comics in December?’
19 August 2025
[comics] Alan Moore’s Greyshirt “How things work out” with art by Rick Veitch … ‘We’re able to tell, by some quite complicated story gymnastics, quite an interesting little story that is told over nearly sixty years of this building’s life, with characters getting older depending upon which panel and which time period they’re in. There’s something that you couldn’t do in any medium other than comics.’ 
6 August 2025
[comics] The most important British character in US comics … John Constantine is 40. ‘What would Delano, the writer most closely associated with Constantine’s rise, think if he met the character? “My relationship with Constantine is one of both love and hate. I’m grateful for the changes to the course of my life our association enabled, but, undeniably, that debt also engenders some resentment,” he admits. “Constantine is a cranky old bastard, and so am I. We’d probably clash. I imagine any meeting would be affectionate, but we’d soon start to irritate one another.”
4 August 2025
[comics] The (Lost) Frank Miller ‘Elektra’ Screenplay? … A review of an Elektra: Assassin screenplay from the late 1980s written by Frank Miller. ‘Some familiar names from Elektra Assassin that show up here are Presidente Huevos, Ambassador Reich, Perry and Garrett, Beaker, and of course the Kennedy-style politician Ken Wind. Unfortunately, there is no Chastity or Nick Fury. Garret, a comedic foil who makes the comics very entertaining, is written in a very serious and earnest way into the screenplay and his character is much more standard and ‘cookie cutter.’ The main villain is Kirigi, an unstoppable brute and member of the ninja group The Hand whom Elektra faced more than once in Miller and Klaus Janson‘s original Daredevil run…’
26 July 2025
[moore] Alan Moore interviewed on art and magic by Roberto Bartual … ‘All of my magical enterprises, though, since the beginning, have been geared towards public revelation, whether as a published piece, a multi-media performance, a film project or a recorded audio work, which I suppose are all different applications or kinds of magic. These days, however, with diminished mobility and a diminishing tolerance for the role of public figure, I am entirely focussed on writing – the first technology, that makes magic and all other technologies possible. This is not to say that I might not do the occasional tarot reading or offer kabbalistic advice to friends and family, but from my point of view, there is nothing in the conceivable universe that cannot be captured and contained by the couple-of-dozen squiggles in the average alphabet.’
3 July 2025
[comics] Rare early British fanzine Orpheus, featuring work by Ian Gibson, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse rediscovered … Scans can be found here. ‘In the second part of his wonderful interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Steve Moore talked about the almost mythical issue 2, which was printed in Spring 1973. However, because Steve Parkhouse and Barry weren’t happy with it, it was never released. The printing and paper aren’t as high quality as with the first issue, so perhaps that was the reason?’
26 June 2025
[comics] Dark They Were And Golden Eyed Adverts … DTWAGE was a sci-fi and comic book retailer based in London in the 1970s. Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alan Moore and many other comics artists created adverts for them. 
20 June 2025
[comics] Jack Kirby Draws Jack Ruby … Today I discovered that Jack Kirby did a annotated 3-page comic about Jack Ruby for Esquire Magazine in 1967. ‘Ruby looks like a dissipated, angry version of Kirby’s later creation, Goody Rickels. He’s a small man who thinks he’s big, and other than brooding over the president’s assassination and killing Lee Harvey Oswald, he spends most of the three pages doing things such as ordering cold cuts, placing advertising for his club, going for a swim, demonstrating something called a “Twistaboard,” and having a Coke.’
9 June 2025
[comics] Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales … Garth Ennis mentions an unseen anthology series with Alan Moore during a 2024 interview. ‘There’s a series called Yuggoth, and it’s based on the work that Alan did – Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft. And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline. Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.’
30 May 2025
[comics] Waiting For The Check: In Conversation With Eddie Campbell, Again – The Gutter Review … Interview with Eddie Campbell from 2023. ‘There’s an anger there almost all of the time. Usually it’s an anger about money. Looking back now, now that I’m out of that, I managed to — for two decades — I managed to bring up a family as the breadwinner, somehow. We were never delinquent. Everything came out right and everyone came up right. There was never any embarrassment about the car being repossessed. The bills were paid on time. And I think…why was I so angry all the time? Everything was pretty good. Everything came out alright in the end. I don’t know why I was so angry. I would have been a much happier individual if I had just taken a second to notice that everything was working out. Or as my wife had said — “I don’t know why you worry about this stuff all the time! It always comes right in the end!”’
13 May 2025
[comics] Zodiac Killer Revealed by His Love of Comic Books, Author Says … WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! ‘He noted that a “Halloween card” that Zodiac sent on Oct. 27, 1970 included the curious phrase, “By Fire, By Gun, By Knife, By Rope” — four ways the Zodiac planned to kill his victims, in order to make them his slaves in the afterlife. Kobek — like some past Zodiac sleuths — traced the phrase to a 1952 Western comic book, Tim Holt #30. “In the background, on the cover, there was a ‘wheel of death,’ and on the wheel of death is says ‘by knife, by rope, by gun, by fire.’ That is a clear quotation. It’s never existed anywhere else,” Kobek explained…’
23 April 2025
[comics] The John Wagner and Alan Grant Interview … A Comics Journal interview from 1988…. ‘GRANT: I didn’t think at the time that the “Apocalypse War” story worked all that well, but having read it in album form, I think it’s a really good story and that Carlos [Ezquerra]’s art-work suited it down to the ground. We were given him for that story as they wanted to use one artist all the way through it. They’ve got constant art problems on 2000 AD finding people who can keep up the output that they’ve got to have.’
21 March 2025
[comics] Alan Moore’s Five Tips for Would-Be Comics Writers … ‘4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.’
6 March 2025
[comics] An Inside Look at the 13 Pre-Flashpoint Eras of Hellblazer … A great, detailed guide to the many different runs on Hellblazer. ‘Garth Ennis – Illustrated by Will Simpson and Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis’ tenure took Moore’s smug bastard, melded him with Delano’s substance-abusing mystic, and added a love for pubs.’
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27 February 2025
[gaiman] The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) … Elizabeth Sandifer does a deep dive into Neil Gaiman, his work, and the allegations of sexual assault and abuse. ‘In one of his few public comments about the influence of Scientology, Gaiman noted that he “grew up in a world in which being a science-fiction writer was a good thing. As far as my parents were concerned, that was an incredibly esteemed profession.” And now, as he swept the genre awards for that field, picking up nominations for practically every Best Novel award there was and winning the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards, the engrammatic patterns implicit in the Gaiman family’s vision of being a famous science fiction writer took hold.’
[tags: Books, Comics, Neil Gaiman][ permalink][ Comments Off on Neil Gaiman Deep Dive – The Man, His Work and the Recent Allegations of Sexual Assault and Abuse.]
25 February 2025
[comics] Interviewing Alan Moore … A huge collection of scans of Alan Moore interviews over the years with plenty I’ve not seen before. From an early interview in 1981: ‘My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!!’
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