A few days ago we posted about Harvey Weinstein's decision to debut Clerks 2,  Kevin Smith's long-awaited follow-up to Clerks, at Cannes instead of Sundance, where Smith got his start. Readers have been all over that story laying out their erudite opinions, but now we have a comment from The Man himself. No, not Weinstein, geez - he kinda scares me, to be honest. But Kevin Smith (or at least someone who claims to be Smith and does a remarkably accurate Smith impersonation) commented on the post to clarify some points:

Regular readers will know that I consider myself to be a "casual fan" of Kevin Smith. By that, I mostly mean that I enjoy his flicks for what they are and find him amusing and occasionally witty. However, I'm also ready to admit that he is entirely fallible, and in fact does some flat out stupid things from time to time. In short, I think he's your average geek whose particular talents have allowed him to live the proverbial "dream."

The reason I bring this up comes straight from K. Smith's personal blog, in which he addresses one of his self-admitted biggest mistakes: that Marvel Spider-Man and Black Cat fiasco. Several years ago, Smith started writing a 6 issue mini-series for Marvel- then abruptly stopped after a cliff-hanging third issue, only to complete the run years later, in 2005. Amusingly, thanks to a switchover in systems on Marvel's part and a (self-admitted) "idiot" failure to file the correct paperwork on Smith's part, the dude never saw cash for those issues. You can read the entire AIM exchange between Kevin and his Marvel contact over at SilentBobSpeaks.

As Smith says, he deserves every ounce of criticism he got for his belated work on the series, but his critics can take heart in the fact that he didn't get the cash for any of it until he delivered the finished product.