Welcome, dear readers, to our regular letter column; a series of missives from and to the internet, delivered by a series of tubes. We welcome your comments and questions. About anything! We’ll answer it, and at least one of us will take you seriously. Maybe.

You can ask questions about comics. You can ask questions about things that aren’t comics. You can ask questions for a friend, even if the answers are really for you. We don’t judge. Well, James judges quite a bit, but not if you’re seeking information. He’s usually pretty good for a straight answer. Anyway, you can ask all the questions, is what we’re getting at.

Thank you, internet.

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Erin E. Fraser (@erinefraser) asks: Will you be at the Graphic Content series finale and how excited are you for cake?

Brandon: You mean the big finalé next Tuesday? The one where you’ll be showing The New Frontier, one of DC’s strongest animated outings of all time? Heck yeah I’m gonna be there. Who in their right mind would want to miss an event like that?

James: Probably! I mean, maybe I’ll get sick (Brandon poisons me) or injured (Brandon hits me with his car) or something similar! My point is that Brandon will definitely ruin my life and if I miss the screening, you know exactly who to blame.

Avenge me!

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Cody F. Schmidt (codyfschmidt) asks: How do you like your burrito?

Brandon: Chedder [Ed. Note: Nope.] cheese. Meat. Lettuce. The blood of my rivals, the tears of small orphaned children. Pretty standard stuff.

James: Meat (I like pork al pastor the best, but I’m easy, too), black beans, rice, salsa/pico de gallo, lettuce, guacamole, cheese, crema or sour cream, cilantro. Easy-peasy.

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Cody F. Schmidt (codyfschmidt) continues: Why isn’t skateboarding cool anymore?

Brandon: It isn’t? I just read an Archie comic that was all about sweet skateboarding moves, and we all know that Archie Comics has their finger right on the pulse of current trends. Although actually, that’s not a fair joke to make anymore. Usually, the company is running so much backlog that they get to trends a couple years too late - and in addition to the story I read about sweet kick-flips, they did a Guardians of the Galaxy parody using the weirder characters in their catalogue that was so timely, it came out during the big push. That’s pretty crazy.

Anyway, I think the current trend died with Tony Hawk, god rest his soul. It’s a shame that Jason Lee murdered him in exchange for the power to grow a sweet moustache. Decent trade at the time, I guess, but he really should have just ate him and absorbed his powers like a normal god damn human being.

James: Do not listen to Brandon regarding this. Tony Hawk is alive and well with his RIDE YouTube Channel and being one of the narrators of a (probably terrible) documentary about the interconnectedness of naturewhatever and the unifying force of consciousness. He also does charity work and, one miraculous time, an episode of MTV’s Cribs.

The real reason skateboarding isn’t really cool anymore is that it is, just not at the incredibly culturally pervasive level it used to be. The X Games are still around and I still see teens skateboarding around, whether it’s on my street or a brand new skate park in town, which means that skateboarding still has a certain level of caché. Honestly, the reason it probably doesn’t seem that cool anymore is that the initial zeitgeist is over and we’re not fifteen anymore either, which means we’re not exactly plugged into the ins and outs of what’s cool to people that age. Maybe skateboarding is still really big at junior high and high schools and we just don’t know it because we’re not perverts hanging around schools.

I am looking at you, Brandon.

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Scott Williams (@scottowilliams) asks: It’s wedding season! What’s the most memorable wedding you’ve been to?

Brandon: Very interested to hear which one James picks, because he’s been to a lot of ’em in the past few years. As for mine? It was the wedding I was hijacked into a couple of years back, alongside the groom. I’ll explain.

Going on five or more years back, my sister took off towards Europe and stayed there for two years or so. While there, she spent a lot of time on the channel island of Sark, and met quite a few friends. These friends came to Canada a year or so later to get married and they had my sister plan their wedding. Now, I love my sister, but as she goes through with planning her own wedding, it is readily apparent that she is… not a great planner. I think a week or so before this joyous occasion, which took place at Olds College in one of their agricultural buildings, I was asked to be one of the groom’s best men, alongside my sister’s then-boyfriend, current fiancée. The wedding was fast and a bit weird, and featured a moment where the groom went off for a smoke. I went and chatted with him, and he let loose with the fact that he had no idea what was happening at his own wedding, and seemed… not sad by it, but distressed. He wanted to get married, but man, can you imagine the jitters involved with having zero control over your own wedding, and having the brother and boyfriend of your wedding planner as your wedding party? Anyway, the ceremony was actually quite nice, if not incredibly strange, and the whole experience ended with wedding pictures at a Tim Horton’s and a John Deere tractor dealership (at the request of the bride, who drove tractor and loved the look of John Deeres) and… yeah. It was something.

James: It’s not even that I’ve been to a lot of weddings, but that I went to a lot in 2013 specifically. As for which was the most memorable, while it’s tempting to say that the most memorable was the last one I attended last year, largely because I was a groomsman and thus had a lot more responsibility than in any other one, I’m going to pick the first one I went to last year, my cousin’s, for a few reasons:

• It’s the only wedding I’ve traveled for, so there are a lot of memories around that - the hotel, the plane delays, the day trip to the Hockey Hall of Fame where we got stuck in traffic for hours on the highway and my other cousin had to pee in a bottle in the back seat, etc…
• A member of the wedding party having an allergic reaction at one of the events;
• I did a reading!
• After most of the older relatives had left and the younger folk had all had a lot to drink, a dance circle opened… and man, let me tell you about dance circles. Let me tell you about how it is impossible for me to not enjoy the heck out of them;
• Related: everyone asking me, for the entire day afterward, how my knees were feeling, because that is how hard I rocked it;
• Partying with Ryan North;
• An ex-girlfriend, after her husband had gone home to their hotel room, wanting to dance and repeatedly whispering in my ear, “In another life…”
• I am pretty sure I left my Josie and the Pussycats t-shirt in the hotel room.

Clearly, I ended with the most important one.

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Trenton Broens (@Trenton_BROens) asks: What are some under-appreciated works from major creators? (i.e Morrison, BKV, Ellis, Ennis, Millar, Rucka, etc)

Brandon: Hmm. Whelp, my view of “under-appreciated” might be a bit skewed, because of my general proximity to the product, but I’m going to run with the qualifier of “more people should be aware and own this work”, based off of what I’ve sold here.

Ellis’ Ignition City comes to mind immediately. In my opinion, it’s one of Ellis’ best works through Avatar. The book’s main pitch is “space pulp hero Deadwood”, and Ellis unleashes a lilting dialogue style to match. A wonderous work from one of comics’ best.

Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber’s Whiteout is definitely up there. I almost put down Queen and Country, but it’s a bit of a stronger seller than Whiteout is, and man… both of them deserve to be moving alllllll the copies. And Stumptown. Actually, people just need to be reading more Rucka in general, I think.

As for Morrison, these day’s I’d say Kill Your Boyfriend has to be up there. Short, prestige format comic about… just that, but in that inimitable 90s Veritgo style.

Annnnd Brubaker. Find anything that he’s written AND drawn. Lowlife in particular. Maybe not the best, but man, is it neat to see. And Detour, which is, in many ways, what Deadenders would turn into for him - a weird noir with bits of magical realism thrown in. Wonderful.

James: Like Brandon, mine are going to be skewed, but in a different way: I haven’t read a lot of these guys truly lesser known, underappreciated works. Like, I can’t talk about Lowlife beyond the one issue of it Brandon gave me as a gift. But anyway, here I go:

• Ellis: Nextwave - I know, I know, this seems like a disqualification because it’s a pretty legendary run, but the thing is, it’s mostly popular among a very specific crowd. I’ve mentioned it a lot to people who aren’t comics cognizanti, and they often don’t know about it, which is crazy, because it is crazy;
• Rucka: Whiteout, like Brandon said;
• Morrison: his recent Action Comics run. Like with my pick for Ellis, it seems like it should be disqualified because of its recency, but I honestly think a lot of people missed it among the various controversies around the New 52. Which is a shame, because while All Star Superman will forever be Morrison’s ultimate opus about Superman, his Action Comics run is fun, smart and really ambitious. It’s also a love letter to the character’s optimism, and I will never not go to the mat for that kind of thing;
• Brubaker: His work on Detective Comics. Another “come on, a major publisher work was underappreciated?” choice, but really, I think when you ask about his work at DC, most people will bring up The Man Who Laughs, Catwoman and Gotham Central, which are his major works for the publisher. In comparison, his Detective Comics run is often forgotten; it’s not an indie darling and it’s not his most famous work; it’s kind of just caught in the middle, which is where I think a lot of good works by many writers gets forgotten.

Jay Runham (@jayrunham) asks: What’s your favourite Spider-Man costume? (With pictures please)

Brandon: That would be Ben Reilly’s costume, from the time he believed himself to be the true Spider-Man (and not a clone). It would later be re-purposed as May “Mayday” Parker’s costume in the long-running potential-future series Spider-Girl. Full disclosure: the first appearance of this costume was the first superhero comic I purchased with my own money, and Spider-Girl was the first series I purchased right from the start, so this skews my answer a little - it has nothing to do with asthetics, and everything to do with being a thing entrenched in my comic book identity.

James: I’m a sucker for the classic Spider-Man costume, and in particular it as drawn by John Romita, Sr:

As far as I’m concerned, Spider-Man is one of the few superhero costumes that the creative team got perfect right out of the gate. It’s simple, but with a weird amount of detail. It’s got sharp colours, iconic lines and I’d wager it’s what people think of when they think of Spider-Man. Any time I see a Spider-Man costume that starts messing with the classic one and isn’t, say, a clean break like with Miles Morales, it just looks wrong to me. You don’t need to mix up the division of colours on the gloves and boots, for example. They got it right the first time, and I think that’s the main reason why ultimately, they keep returning to it, give or take some underarm webs. Everything else is just a detour that inevitably comes back around.

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That’s it for the one hundred and forty-sixth instalment of Um, Actually. Check in every Monday and Thursday for a brand new column. If you have anything you’d like answered, hit up our contact page! If you submit anything via Twitter – to @blogaboutcomics, @Leask, or @soupytoasterson – remember to include the hashtag #UMACTUALLY so that we don’t lose it. Remember: you can ask us anything. Seriously, anything.