It’s Friday and I’m back in my hotel room. I have once again paid for the expensive hotel WiFi, so I might as well type up and post a little con report.
As an experiment, I’m typing this up in Drafts, using Markdown. I’ll paste it into WordPress when I’m done. Yesterday’s post was written via the normal WordPress post editor. I guess I’d never used that on the iPad before. It works, but it’s got some really annoying quirks, which might be related to the Bluetooth keyboard. So we’ll see how Drafts works out.
Getting into the con today was, again, not terribly hard. I got down a little earlier than yesterday. The line to get to the security checkpoint was actually a bit shorter than yesterday. But I got through that around 9:30, after which we all had to wait around outside until they opened the convention center doors, which they did around 9:45. After that, it was easy enough to get in and up to the show floor.
I once again wandered around the main show flow without buying anything. I then had a little lunch, which was overpriced (expected) but pretty good (unexpected).
I went to two panels after lunch. The first was hosted by Collider, which is apparently a pop-culture web site that has a few video podcasts going. I wasn’t really familiar with them. I went to the panel mostly because the description mentioned Robert Meyer Burnett and Chris Gore, both of whom I’m familiar with, but neither of whom made it to the panel. So it was a panel of four or five people I’ve never heard of. But they seemed cool, so now I guess I should check out their site and videos.
I then went to a panel called Why Will Eisner Still Matters at 100. They scheduled this panel at the same exact time as a Jack Kirby 100th birthday panel, so it was pretty hard deciding which one to go to. But the Eisner one looked like it would be less crowded, and possibly more interesting, and I guess that, if I have to pick between Eisner and Kirby, I’ll pick Eisner. (But please don’t make me pick!) It was a nice overview of Eisner’s career and influence, with some reminiscences from people who have worked with him, including Jules Feiffer (via a video clip), Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Michael Uslan, and Danny Fingeroth. As a long-time Eisner fan, they were mostly covering stuff that I already know, but there were some good little anecdotes in there that I hadn’t heard before. And it’s always nice to see a little slideshow of cool Eisner splash pages.
After that, I went back for another pass on the show floor, with the idea that I should really buy at least a couple of comic books, since it seems wrong to go to a comic con and not buy any books. So I found a dealer with a bunch of 50% off trade paperbacks, and picked up a couple. I got Resident Alien: The Sam Hain Mystery by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse and New York: The Big City by Will Eisner.
I thought it would be nice to pick up an Eisner book right after the Eisner panel, so that worked out. I was pretty sure I didn’t already have this one, since the cover wasn’t familiar, but I think it may actually be a repackaged version of a book I do already have. In fact, now that I’m paging through it, I’m entirely sure that it is. Oh well. I guess it can’t hurt to have two copies of a good Eisner book. Maybe I can give one away, and introduce someone new to Eisner.
As to the Resident Alien book, I knew I didn’t have that one, since I don’t have any of them. This turns out to be volume three, now that I’m looking at it carefully, so I guess I should get volumes one and two also. I’m familiar with the character through the story that was serialized in Dark Horse Presents, and liked it enough that I’d made a note to pick up the trades or back issues at some point. So now I’ve made a start on that, but not from the beginning. So, overall, I guess I didn’t do a great job of picking out these trades. But I could have done worse.
I left the con around 3pm, I think. I would have liked to stay later, but there wasn’t much else I really wanted to do, and I was getting pretty tired. After resting up in my hotel for a bit, I made a quick trip to MoMA. I’d forgotten that Friday is the night when they let everyone in for free, so it was really crowded. I hung out in sculpture garden for a bit, but that’s all. I’d had enough of big crowds for the day!
So now it’s 7pm and I can’t decide if I want to go back out, or just give up and watch Netflix on my iPad for a few hours, then go to bed early. It seems like a waste to get a hotel room in New York on a Friday and not go out at night, but I’m pretty worn out. Getting old is a drag. As to whether or not this mini-vacation actually helped me work out any stress: I guess it did. We’ll see what kind of mood I’m in when I go back to work on Monday.
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