Having kicked off Halloween night, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are in the process of working their way up the West Coast on a mini-tour titled An Evening With Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Ok, so other than being married, what do an author and a musician hope to bring to our entertainment experience?

we’ll have a piano, a ukulele, and maybe some other weird instruments, as well as some unpublished and uncollected Neil Gaiman stories and poems. we’ll both probably switch up what we’re presenting from night to night. we’ll be taking questions from the audience, chat-style, and trying to do special things in each venue, busting out a few surprises, and more or less trying to feel like we’ve connected with you, the people we love and usually only get to talk to directly on twitter & blog-land.

Teaser for Marvel's Winter Soldier #1, written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Butch GuiceWe’ve talked a lot here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives about the formula of event comics: new costumes, giant battles, and the death of at least one character. Some creator boasting that the event is so big it will “change everything” and will “break the Internet in half” remains optional. For now. Rob Liefeld still has to submissively piddle at the end of each event. Rumor is it’s in his contract, along with the whole “coprophagia” clause. But this is no time to be making up stories about Liefeld, this is serious business. We’re talking about death here.

One of the two big deaths in Marvel’s Fear Itself event was the death of Bucky, Captain America’s old World War II sidekick who took over Cap’s mantle after Steve Rogers was killed in (say it with me!) a big crossover event in 2007. Bucky, who was also killed during World War II, was the victim of the new Red Skull, who tore his arm off… probably at the direct order of Joe Quesada, who figured out that it would probably be a bad idea to have a different guy as Captain America in the comics than in the multi-million dollar blockbuster movie of the same name. He apparently realized this several months after the movie was released, and several years after most of us understood that “Bucky Cap” sounds like euphemism for some kind of French Tickler-type device, but that’s not important right now.

What’s important is that Bucky is dead. He is bereft of life. He rests in peace. His metabolic processes are now history. He’s kicked the bucket. He is an ex-Bucky. And he’s been an ex-Bucky twice. That’s pretty final. Right?

Sure it is. This is Marvel we’re talking about: