I loved issue 7!My two preferred stories: "Bait" by Paul Milliken and "Haruspex". The comics were awesome as well. I LOVED the "Brief Story of Dogfighting"and "Bite The Bullet". I like the r@t as well, which is strange;I usually hate rats. The r@t report was very good and so were the bios of the artists.
An answer to Mr Wallace (I really like his reactionary column):
I agree with your points of view about TWILIGHT. I believe that the reason why these books - as well as the Harry potter series - have so much success, is the fault of the editors and maybe some writers as well. You see, when something is successful, everybody tries to imitate it (rather than taking the risk to create something new) in order to have better chances to sell.
Of course, we end up with plenty of bad versions of Harry Potter, awful sword and sorcery books and terrible vampire stories. I love vampires (please don't shoot on me for this), but I must admit I have read very few stories which were original and clever. One of them was Neil Gaiman's "Tarot Vampire"; the two other were short stories by Ian Watson (YES, Ian Watson DID write stories about Vampires and they were awesome). There was a comic story about a vampire's wish in Christmas that was not bad and of course, Tezuka's VAMPIRES were a masterpiece, the only book giving a different dimension to vampires. All the rest was repetitive and boring...even the Mammoth Book of Vampires and Werewolves (suffering from the same syndrome vampires suffer). I can not say I am crazy about Ann Rice's books;on the contrary, I liked the Anita Blake series (PLEASE let the gun down! Everyone has the right to like something stupid as well.)
Congratulations for your column anyway!