I’m sitting in my hotel room on Saturday morning, eating a traditional New York breakfast (bacon egg and cheese on a roll and a coffee, bought from a guy in a street cart), and I have a lot of random thoughts running through my head. (Not enough coffee yet.) I suspect that this breakfast might be a little non-traditional, actually, since I think the guy used turkey bacon. But close enough, I guess.
First, I guess I should write up a run-down on yesterday. I took the subway to Javits. That worked out reasonably well. It was fast and not that crowded. Coming out of the Hudson Yards subway station, they were herding everyone around the block, so we all had to go around the back end of Javits and then come back up. That was kind of a pain, but it’s good crowd control, and really the only way to do it, I guess. When I got in, I spent some time wandering around the show floor, the same as I did on Thursday. I didn’t really stumble upon anything interesting that I hadn’t seen yet. I hadn’t made it down to artist’s alley at all on Thursday, so I went down there and wandered. I bought a pack of Weirdo trading cards from Denis Kitchen, which I will probably give to my brother for his birthday. And I bought a Love and Capes comic from Thom Zahler. He’s a pretty cool guy. He was on Mac Power Users recently.
I missed out on the DC Nation panel, since it was apparently full already when I got there. (I’m still a little confused about the process for swiping your badge in the morning to reserve a spot in a main stage panel. I couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to do that. Of course, I didn’t ask anybody either. But I didn’t think a DC panel would fill up the main stage.) There’s a fairly coherent write-up about the panel at The Beat, and a liveblog at Newsarama. A few interesting tidbits came out of the panel. I guess the biggest thing is the new continuity timeline. I remember being somewhat excited back in the 80s when DC was doing Crisis on Infinite Earths, and rebooting their continuity. But they’ve rebooted and revised so many times since then, I don’t think continuity really matters anymore. So I can’t really get excited about this. All I can say is that, if they do another New 52 or Rebirth style wholesale reboot, I’ll probably take that as a good jumping-off point, and stop buying monthly comics again. (I may want to do that anyway, but that’s maybe a subject for a future post.)
I went to a couple of lower-profile panels in the early afternoon, one on Berger Books and a DC Wonder Comics panel. Berger Books has published some pretty cool stuff, but I haven’t bought or read any of it. I’d like to, but there’s just so much good stuff being published these days. Eventually, I’ll get around to it. I have a lot of respect for Karen Berger.
The DC Wonder Comics panel was pretty good, though Bendis isn’t at NYCC, so it was a little weird to have a panel about his imprint without him being there. I’m actually a bit interested in the new Amethyst series, after listening to Amy Reeder talking about it.
The big panel for me was the Viz panel, with Warren Ellis. There was a long line to get into that one, and they filled up the room, but I didn’t have any trouble getting in. The panel was really a general Viz Media promotional panel, so the first half of it was largely a guy from Viz going over their upcoming releases and stuff like that. I’m kind of interested in some of their stuff, but, again, there’s so much stuff coming out these days I just can’t buy and/or read everything I’m interested in. They brought out Ellis and three of the voice actors for the second half of the panel, and did a Q&A with them. (Not an audience Q&A, just a Q&A with the panel moderators.) It was fun, and they all do genuinely seem to be enthusiastic about Castlevania, but there was also a bit of a “we’re doing a contractually-obligated press tour for this Netflix thing and we have to be relentlessly positive about it” vibe. And I can now say that I’ve seen Warren Ellis in person, so that’s cool. There’s a full Castlevania panel on the main stage tonight, and I will probably try to get into that one too, though I don’t think they’ll cover much ground that they didn’t already cover yesterday. (I really wish they could have gotten Ellis to do a general “spotlight” panel, or least participate in one of the DC panels, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get.)
I walked back from the convention to my hotel, which is about a two mile walk. Between that, and a bunch of other walking, I set a new record on my Apple Watch for my “move” ring, burning 957 calories (530 active calories). I also got 137 minutes on my exercise ring, over 23,000 steps, and a total distance walked of 11.8 miles. I actually didn’t get as tired as I did on Thursday though, for some reason, and managed to stay awake until my usual bed time of 10 PM. I’m a little worried that I might hit a wall or crash at some point today or tomorrow, but I seem to be doing ok.
The plan for today, to the extent that there is one, is to take the subway down to Javits again, and probably follow the same circuitous route into the convention center again. I’m not too enthusiastic about that, but it’ll probably be fine. After I get in, I want to go straight to a 10:30 DC “Year of the Villain” panel. Other than that, there’s an Adam Savage panel on the main stage at 3:30 PM and the Castlevania one at 6:30 PM. So I’d like to try to get in for both of those, but I won’t be surprised or (too) disappointed if I can’t.
I was fairly smart about food yesterday. I brought a couple of apples, a couple of Kind bars, a falafel wrap from Pret, and a full bottle of water with me, so I was eating reasonably healthy food and staying hydrated. I want to do the same thing again today, so I’ll run over to the grocery store that’s near my hotel before heading for the con.
And now it’s 8:30 AM and I’ve been working on this blog post for about an hour, so I should really wrap it up and go get some more coffee.