Captain America #34 was released yesterday, January 30, and Bucky Barnes has officially taken over the role for America.

On our end, the Captain America Giveaway is now over and the winners have been e-mailed.  Keep an eye on your inbox to see if you are a winner.  Once the winners have acknowledged the names will be posted.

The next official giveaway will celebrate the Iron Man movie.  Details will be released soon!

Happy New Year!  To kick off 2008 Comic Book Secrets is running our first giveaway.  The giveaway will celebrate the “return” of Captain America in issue #34.  If you’ve read issue #33, you know the majority of the votes in last month’s poll were correct about the next Captain America.  I don’t want to spoil it for anybody, so I won’t let out any details of that issue.

The two giveaway items are The Captain America Omnibus and Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America Premiere Edition.

The only requirement to be eligible to win one of the two prizes is to be a current subscriber to the Comic Book Secrets newsletter.  Click here for full giveaway details and the signup form.

Good Luck with the Giveaway and take a moment to fill out the new poll on the right sidebar!

I want to talk about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a way to subscribe to the blog. Many of you may be familiar with RSS, but read on because there is going to be an important update to the Members Only Section of the website in the next couple of days, and those of you who are members will really enjoy the capability that I’m adding.

You can read the blog by visiting the site directly on a regular basis, or you can “subscribe” to the feed by clicking on the large orange symbol in the upper right hand corner. The symbol will take you to the feed (I run through Feedburner) and then you will know when the blog is updated.

Don’t know what a feedreader is? No problem. It is basically a way for you to keep track of one or many blogs in one place. I use Bloglines, primarily because it is easy to use and works very well with my cellphone. I can keep track of all of the blogs I read in one convenient place and access them on the road. Most browsers come with some sort of feedreader, including Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can also add feeds to your Google or Yahoo homepage. Just go to one of the customization options for your homepage and click on the “add rss” , “add a feed” or similar option.

I still recommend that you visit the full blog page when I update, because some items such as polls cannot be read on the feed. But you will still get the bulk of the content and have fresh updates.

Now, for members of the website, I will be releasing a great tool next week that you can use with a feedreader. I have been testing it for over a month, and I have really found it to be a big help. Details will be released Wednesday in the December newsletter (along with a couple special surprises for a special day!).

Anyway, if you want to have easy access in one place to the blog updates, think about subscribing to the feed. Use you own browser reader or you can add the feed to your Google, Yahoo, or other account. Just click on the “RSS” feed button on the upper right of the blog.