A certain megalomaniac who will remain nameless lest we feed her already bloated ego recently sent out an email to god knows who, hyping the national tour (including a stop in Seattle tonight) supporting a book she edited. Note the humility evident in the priority of the first sentence:

Subject: best americans on display

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:30:32 -0500

My Fellow Americans,

Me and my new book Best American Comics and Harvey Pekar are all coming to a town near you!

Is it just us or did she just give herself top billing over the book AND the celebrity talent? No, it's not just us. One of the book's contributors privately joked with Seattlest:

I get a visualization of Harvey carrying her bags through various airports...

Does it sound like we're making a big deal over nothing? Well, fuck you. A few years ago the megalomaniac in question wrote an article for a zine you never heard of falsely accusing (more like implying, as we seem to recall she weaseled out of identifying the company by name (a shrewd libel dodge)) our favorite local comics publisher of being guilty of gender discrimination. The charge was absolute bullshit, of course. We can't find the article online anywhere, but we recall there not being one single anecdote, quote, or incident cited in the piece as evidence to support the charge.

This was all four years ago, but it still creeps up today. From a recent thread on The Comics Journal message board, one of the book's contributors describes the San Francisco stop of the tour:

There were a few questions on "why didn't you pick anything by ______"; Harvey [Pekar] said he did pick stories by Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine, but that neither of them wanted to be in the book… I know there's been speculation that some cartoonists would avoid this project because of bad blood between [Name redacted] & Fantagraphics. She made a point of not wanting to speculate about Clowes's reasons and left it at that.

No shit she didn't want to speculate.

Seattlest recommends that our readers, both of you, avoid the U-district tonight if you can help it. If we find out that either of you went anyway we will, like, totally de-friend both your asses on MySpace!