Coming in late today because of a truly awful day on the work front. One of these days, I need to write one of those tell-all books about the non-profit industry. But for now, it's blog time.

So a couple of things have come to my attention from the world of comic books and cartooning this fine Wednesday, so I thought I'd share:

First, the world of the Smurfs might never be the same after this story coming out of Belgium:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/08/wsmurf08.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/08/ixhome.html

Apparently, Peyo, creator of the little blue guys that live in mushrooms, teamed up with UNICEF before his death to make an adults-only movie where warplanes destroy the Smurf village. I mean, sure, it's an anti-war statement, but it verges on the, say, alarming and crazy.

Also apparently, Gargamel and his mean old cat Azrael were not behind the warplanes. And the piece does not include any Smurf retaliation, like possibly a Dirty Dozen a la Smurf. If it had been up to me, once the Smurf village was razed, you would have seen a team of 12 Smurfs putting together an elaborate plan and getting those bad old warmongers.

This, by the way, proves that I'm an American. I see war movies in everything.

But seriously. Imagine Hefty Smurf in the Lee Marvin role. I don't know if I can name 11 other Smurfs, but let's try. How about a team with Papa, Brainy, Smurfette, and . . . aw crap, well a bunch of them.

I'd watch that.

Second, Fantagraphics is releasing its fifth Peanuts collection this year - printing a number of cartoons that have not seen the light of day since the late 50s/early 60s. If you'd like to see them, and consider the reasons that they have not made it into the popular canon, read this:

http://www.fantagraphics.com/blog/archive/2005_10_01_fantagraphics_archive.html#112889542161162538

As you all know, I'm a huge Charles Schulz fan. But I can see the point of the blogger. By 21st century standards, nobody wants to hear that Linus has a weight problem, Schroeder is exploring his sexuality, and so on. And what was Linus doing out there on the snow?

Finally, INFINITE CRISIS #1 hits stores today - the sequel to 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths. Back then, the DC Comics Universe had a, well, infinite number of earths, each with a distinct group of heroes. The super-heroes of World War II were on one world. Shazam and his crew on another. On Earth X, the Nazis won World War II and the good guys were like a resistance force.

And so on. Well, the original Crisis shoehorned all those worlds into one earth, with the big DC characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and so on) fighting crime in the present day. But there have been real continuity problems ever since.

So now, Infinite Crisis is here to try and fix them. We'll see how it goes. I expect there'll be a heavy body count by the end of it, but maybe some good story-telling to go along.

It never hurts to hope, I guess.