I’ve been hearing from folks who get the AAUGH Blog via email, over some formatting issues.

The blog entries that have links to Amazon have some little invisible images on them; Amazon uses them to recognize that people are coming from my site and to credit me for your purchases. We’re seeing two things happen when these little mini invisible images show up in the email. Sometimes, they just create a line break in the midst of a sentence, and that’s just a little annoying. But in some email readers it shows up as a large graphics-failed-to-load image. So that’s what you’re seeing going on. You’re not missing any vital picture.

And while I have this, using the excuse that I will show you what I mean, I’ll promote something else that I released recently. There is an interesting few months on the comics pages when a couple of kid strips that would run a long time were launched. Peanuts, which ran just shy of 50 years, first appeared in October, 1950, and Dennis the Menace, which continues to this day, appeared in March 1951. And also that March, just a few days earlier, was the first appearance of An Altar Boy Named ‘Speck’. which ran for 28 years. But i you have’t heard of it, don’t be surprised, as it wasn’t on your typical comics page; Speck was for Catholic weeklies. Like Dennis, this was a single-panel series about an impish boy… although Speck spent more time causing trouble for a Father than for his father.

The creator of Speck, Tut LeBlanc, died only a couple years into the run (he was only in his thirties, but had had heart problems since he was a child.) The series was taken over by Margaret Ahern, who had earlier had a syndicated strip in mainstream papers called Little Reggie and would later start a second panel called Our Parish… but both of those were under pen names. Ahern stayed with the panel until its end.

There were a number of collections of Speck issued during its run. What I’ve just done with my publishing hat on is put out, well, a pair of Specks. An Altar Boy Named ‘Speck’ is a reprint of the very first reprint book, with about 60 strips by the original artist. The other book reprints two collections of Ahern cartoons, which were titled Speck the Altar Boy and Presenting… Speck the Altar Boy, and so there are about 200 panels in Speck the Altar Boy: The Collection Compilation. (I had wanted to subtitle it The Collection Collection, but Amazon deemed it too confusing.)

And it’s in that last paragraph with the links in it that you should see any formatting difficulties, if you get the blog by mail.

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