Our friend Jimmy J. Aquino at the mighty Fistful of Soundtracks blog has begun a new series of posts he's calling "Lacuna Matata." His mission is "to preserve the fading memory of TV shows (or in some cases, comic books) that no one except me remembers watching because the networks somehow Lacuna'd these things from everyone's noggins." Part one deals with the short-lived Fox series, Tribeca. Part two is everything you would ever want to know about Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. Check it out.

"The history of a TV series, like the history of a nation or an art movement, falls into four periods," writes Robert Fulford in the National Post, "primitive, classic, baroque and decadent."

For example: Without A Trace. (Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily.)

For reasons he can't begin to justify or explain (and yet somehow does), Reihan Salam at The American Scene stayed up incredibly late Tuesday night to write a column -- and he wound up watching all 20 installments of the WB's new web series, Rockville, CA.

"Wow," he writes. "That's really embarrassing."

And how. I haven't seen the show, but Reihan's post -- which is really quite long -- delves into the particulars of what sounds like a uniquely irritating program. On the upside, it has Veronica Mars and Freaks and Geeks-ties, so I'm sure it will make Nathan happy.

Marvel Comics is clearly making comic collecting as hard as possible. My son bought Amazing Spider-Man #588 a couple of weeks ago. Today I wanted to see when the next issue would be out and I can find...#592 on April 22. With a variant cover! What happened to issues 589 through 591? Who knows?

Click on "Spider-Man" on the Website and you find Amazing Spider-Man 588 (got it, thanks!) followed by Spider-Man: With Great Power, Sensational Spider-Man, Amazing Spider-Girl (Zombie Variant), Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Amazing Spider-Girl, Spider-Man Fairy Tales, Amazing Spider-Man #544 (Djurdjevic Variant (!)), Ultimate Spider-Man, Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, and absolutely no sign of Amazing Spider-Man 589.

Do not under any circumstances attempt to use the search function. Even if you think that by unchecking "Trade Paperbacks", "Digests", and "Hardcovers", and then putting "amazing spider-man" into the search box, and narrowing the release date to April 2009, even if you think by doing all that you'll somehow find what you're looking for; don't do it, because the results will lead off with Ms. Marvel #40 followed by Spider-Woman #1. The cover of which is creepy -- how does one get a superhero costume with a navel? Those crazy unstable molecules!

What the hell is wrong with Marvel Comics? Oh, wait, the answer's right there on the bottom of every Web page, where you can find prominently linked "Corporate Information & Investor Relations".

Yesterday I was in the studio I share with Reilly Brown, erstwhile Cable & Deadpool penciller, and Chris Irving, comic book writer. Reilly said something about the upcoming movie Wolverine having been pirated and already released online, and both Chris and he were saying things like "What kind of jerk would do such a thing?"

I jumped in because, with these guys, I'm not afraid of sounding like an idiot. They already know I'm an idiot. "Who cares?" I asked.

Reilly's opinion is that now the movie's box office will be ruined. "Most comic fans have seen the trailers already and know it's going to suck, so they're only going to go so they can see how bad it is. And now they won't have to, they can just download it."

"And think of all the creators who worked on the movie, what about them?" added Chris.

As far as that goes, I'm pretty sure all the gaffers and best boys and hot-gluers got paid already.

As far as Reilly's point, though, I think it's amusing, because I'm a comic fan, and an old-time X-Men collector, and this is the first X-movie I've actually been interested in seeing. Comic fans of my acquaintance really liked the first X-movie, and the director Bryan Singer gained a lot of cred in comic circles -- where he was even forgiven for the aggressively mediocre Superman Returns -- but about the best I could say about it was it was better than I expected. Since I expected it to be the worst superhero movie of all time, this isn't saying much. The second X-movie was less good, and I never bothered with the third one. I just didn't need another two hours or so of underlit cranky mutant angst and blurry CGI, not even for brief shots of Rebecca Romijn essentially naked.

But Wolverine looks pretty cool. Not, you know, great or anything. I mean, isn't Liev Schreiber just too limp-wristed and sensitive an actor to pull off a feral villain named for a giant prehistoric carnivore? Maybe part of why it looks good to me is none of the characters aside from Wolverine had really gained prominence before I stopped collecting. Chris said, "I really want to see them do Gambit well." Who? Name rings a bell. Wasn't he one of the New Mutants or something Art Adams used to draw? Do we give a crap about him now?

In any case, I can't imagine the pirated version making a difference to the movie's bottom line. If anything it might help by generating even more buzz, although the damned thing's being marketed so strongly I can't imagine squeezing any more out of it. Still, Reilly eventually became sanguine about the financial damage: "Fox deserves whatever it gets for how the movie ruins Deadpool."

Who?

Hi, and welcome to The Incomparable. Let me tell you a story.

In the late summer of 1996 my wife and I had dinner in San Francisco with Ben Boychuk, a college friend. Since late 1995 Ben and I had been writing strange things about television and sending them to a group of college friends. I suggested that we post them on the Internet, a wild idea at the time. And in September 1996, TeeVee was born.

In the intervening 12-plus years, TeeVee writers have come and gone. At its height, we had more than a year where we basically posted new content every day. That height was a long time ago. In the intervening time that group of college friends expanded, to encompass our friends and even like-minded folks who read the site and liked it and wanted to write for it. But in that intervening time, we grew up and got jobs and got married and started families.

The Internet grew up, too. What was a novelty in 1996 — a site with writings about television! (the word blog hadn’t even been coined yet) — is now quite common. TV critics who get paid to write about television now blog about it, many of them quite well. (I occasionally contribute to TV Barn, run by our old pal Aaron Barnhart. I listen to Tim Goodman’s podcast religiously. And my TV viewing would not be the same were it not supplemented by the excellent blogs operated by Alan Sepinwall and James Poniewozick.)

For 12 straight years we posted an April Fool’s web site. It was a lot of fun, though as the perpetrator of most of the HTML fraud over 12 years, let me tell you, it’s a lot harder to fake a web site in 2009 than it was in 1997. But this year, we’re not doing one. (I repeat: this is not a joke.)

Instead, we’re doing something else. We’re shuttering the old TeeVee site and starting something new, The Incomparable.

What is The Incomparable? The short answer is, we’re not sure yet. But the idea is to make it a home where we can write about things beyond just TV. This month we wrote thousands of words about “Watchmen” in an e-mail thread on our mailing list, but it never went anywhere. We have enough comic-book geeks and movie geeks to form angry cliques and have a falling out, but TeeVee didn’t give us anywhere to put it.

So at The Incomparable, we’ll put it up for grabs. We’ll still talk TV, sure. But I hope we also write about comics and movies, books and magazines, sports and art and culture and who knows what else? It’s my hope that all the writers who have darkened TeeVee’s door over the years will blog here, joined by others we recruit.

We also want this to be a site from 2009, not 1996. As a result: We’re going to open comment threads on what we write. We’re going to maybe try to do a podcast, this time for sure. We’re going to Twitter, I think. YouTube embeds? It wouldn’t surprise me. (Not everything is working now, and this site design is more generic than we’d like — we’re just getting started. Pardon our dust.)

After 12 years, it was time for something different. I don’t know what The Incomparable will be, but it will most definitely be different. Maybe even incomparable, even.