But before we head down there and do the flurry of signings, handful of meetings and one panel, we have one more milestone ahead.

Today (Wednesday, that is) is the official launch of our new weekly manga series, The Ninja Diaries.

It will run weekly in Metromix, and then be collected online.  The first 4 pages will debut in today's issue, and all pages will be collected online at Metromix.com... they're up now.

We're very proud of this... for many reasons.

As an opportunity, it is amazing.  Metromix prints 100,000 issues weekly, and there's a really good chance that collected pages from this may find their way into the Los Angeles Times(!).  In fact, if you go to the times website today, you'll see that we made the front page of their site - 2/3 of the way down, right in the center.  That kicks all kinds of ass.

As a collaboration, it's been fun.  Jason DeAngelis at Seven Seas has been more involved in developing this than he was in Amazing Agent Luna and Destiny's Hand.  But we're doing the writing, and it's felt very much like ours... just with a nice touch of Jason, too.  The collaborative nature of it has been outstanding.

And as a story, we're very excited by it.  We look forward to writing each page, and when you can do that, you're at the great part of writing for a living.

We've got meetings at the con, which hopefully may lead to work down the line.  We'll be promoting 2 new books at Oni, and hyping the final volumes of Luna and Destiny's Hand.

But for us, the story of the con will be Ninja Diaries.

Check it out.  We hope you enjoy it.  Free copies of this week's Metromix will be available at the Seven Seas booth.  Come by and we'll talk ad nauseum about this one, and sign your copy too.

If you can't make it, check it out on Metromix.com.

We hope you enjoy it... because ninja don't do disappointment.

(Long story... stick with us, you'll get the joke)