Because I lead a rich and satisfying life, I was casually looking at the people who are currently following my Twitter account and was surprised to see a picture of Katherine Heigl floating in the list of avatars.

Thinking it was a Heigl super-fan who was now stalking me using Twitter, I investigated further to discover that it was actually an account created for Abby Richter – the fictional character Heigl plays in The Ugly Truth.

Reading some of the tweets, I could see that “Abby” was having a contentious back-and-forth with one Chad Meister. That’s right – the character in played by Gerard Butler in the same movie.

Now I totally understand using social media to help promote stuff and realize that most likely it’s some intern at Sony Pictures having a conversation with himself. But what I don’t understand are the real-life people who are following this inanity.

Certainly it would be one thing if “Abby” were throwing messages into the digital ether and responding to questions or comments posed by fans of the movie (whoever they might be). But when these two fictional characters are carrying on a conversation with each other, excluding everyone else, you kind of wonder what the point of it is…

If you’ve been following me on Twitter the last couple of days, you’ll know that I was inspired by my friend Gordon McAlpin’s excellent parody poster for Memento that I finally got off my rear end and put together a parody poster for Iron Man that I’ve been thinking about for months.

I think it turned out pretty well…

I’m proud enough of my work that I’m printing up 50 copies and plan on selling them as 11 x 17″ prints at Chicago Comic-Con this weekend. We’ll see how they do. If I have any left over, I’ll sell them here. If the demand is high enough, I’ll print up more! Either way, I thought you guys might like to see it.

Don’t forget: I’ll be at Artist Alley table #3414. Please come by and see me. I’ll be selling copies of both books, all of my t-shirts, the Iron Man parody poster and original sketches.

I look forward to Chicago Comic-Con all year and with the stars aligning between the convention, our 7th anniversary and 1,000 comics… I think this is going to be a good show for me.

Long-time readers of the site are probably familiar with our online community, the THorum. When I started Theater Hopper, it was a great way to interact with fans and we had a really good run of civility and fun for a couple of years.

Unfortunately, time commitments prevented me from visiting the THorum as often as I would like and the time I did spend there was directed toward fending off spambots, who were swarming the forum by the dozen, daily.

When I relaunched the site in WordPress earlier in the year, I decided to take another stab at the THorum, this time upgrading to phpBB3.

Unfortunately, the same maintenance problems reared their ugly heads and the THorum is now inaccessible.

I was pretty much ready to pull the plug and rely on feedback from the blog comments when I received an interesting offer from Halforum.com.

First, a bit of history. About a year ago, Scott Kurtz from PVP closed the doors on his forum. Halforum was founded by a couple of people from the PVP forum in an effort to keep the community together. I was a semi-regular on the PVP forums before they shut down and have been casual acquaintances of the group since.

Recently, the administrators from Halforum have reached out to me with an interest to establish a partnership. Basically, I link to a subdomain within their forum from Theater Hopper. They obtain access to potentially new members and I have the burden of forum maintenance lifted off my shoulders. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

I’m mentioning this to you guys because I’m trying to build some consensus. I know most of you who respond in the comments filed will probably say that the comments are suffice when it comes to community building or feedback. But I’m curious if there are any of you out there looking for something more?

Generally, I just want to know your thoughts. Is partnering with Halforum a good idea or a bad idea. Do you think you would check it out? If not, why?

The original THorum went a long way toward helping establish Theater Hopper and make it a success. So I still find value in using forums as a communications and networking tool. I just wanted to take everyone’s pulse on the matter. What do you think?