Category: comics

thinking about Comic-Con

I’m continuing to torture myself by looking at the “on this day” widget in the sidebar of this blog, and the “on this day” view in my Day One journal. The last time I went to SDCC was 2012, and it was going on right now! (And, looking at my journal, I see that, two years ago today, I went to the library and checked out a couple of books, and also went to a Somerset Patriots baseball game. Sigh. Eventually, I’ll be able to do those things again…)

I’ve got my schedule all planned out for Comic-Con @ Home next week. I’ve bookmarked about 35 panels total, from Thursday through Sunday. I’m not sure how many I’ll actually watch, but I’ve got plenty to choose from. I think it’ll be fun. I’ve also been getting myself in the mood a bit by reading some stuff that’s related in some way to the con. I read some issues of Rob Hanes Adventures last weekend, which I bought directly from Randy Reynaldo at that 2012 SDCC I mentioned above. (I’m not sure why I let them sit in my “to be read” pile for so long. It’s a fun series, and the issues are all basically “done in one” stories.) I plan on checking out his virtual booth this year, and maybe picking up all the issues that have come out since 2012.

And I also recently read an Usagi Yojimbo trade paperback. I didn’t buy that particular volume at a San Diego con, but I have bought a number of past volumes directly from Stan Sakai at cons, and I usually see him in San Diego, either at his booth or on a panel. I haven’t heard anything about Stan doing anything for Comic-Con @ Home, but I do know that he’s supposed to be on Mark Evanier’s Groo chat this Thursday, so I’ll probably watch that.

In less pleasant comics-related news, the Warren Ellis thing that I’ve mentioned previously has kind of blown up, with a new website going up this week aggregating the stories of many women who say they have been “targeted and manipulated” by Ellis. The website is… a hell of a thing. It even includes a bar chart graphing the number of women he was involved with per year, from 1999 to 2020. (Peak year: 2009, 22 women.) There’s some coverage of it on The Beat and in The Guardian. I joked about burning my CBLDF t-shirts recently, after the Brownstein thing. I’m not really ready to burn my Warren Ellis comics, but I think I might feel a little differently about them now. I’m not really sure that Ellis ever really understood what he was doing? Or understood how much he was hurting people? I don’t know. I can’t really see him as a super-villain or evil genius. I mean, he was clearly being dishonest with people. (You can’t have 22 girlfriends at once without lying to several of them, at least, I think.) I said in my previous post that I wasn’t sure how to feel about this, and I’m still not. This is all outside my areas of expertise…

Anyway, I need to keep this stuff out of my head and concentrate on positive stuff. Like the fact that NJ is still in the green on the CovidActNow map. (One of only three states in the green! Hope more states join us soon!) Or the fact that there are new Stargirl and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes coming out this week!

Comic-Con @ Home

Today, I went ahead with my plan to take a couple of days off from work for Comic-Con @ Home. (I put in for Thursday and Friday off.) They posted the Thursday schedule today, and it’s got some good stuff, including some old favorites like Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics and Ric Meyers’ Kung Fu Extravaganza. I’ve managed to find stuff to keep me busy from 10 AM to 7 PM. That’s PDT of course, so that’s 1 PM to 10 PM my time. I guess I need to find something else to keep me busy on Thursday morning. (I’ll probably spend the morning reading comics!)

In other comics news, I enjoyed watching Mark Evanier’s talk with Peter David last night. I missed seeing it live on Tuesday, since it was on too late for me (10 PM). They talked about a lot of stuff, including memories of old San Diego cons, so that was fun. I know Mark will be doing some panels for Comic-Con @ Home, but I don’t see any on the Thursday schedule. He’s specifically said he’s not doing a Quick Draw panel, which is kind of a bummer, but I can understand why he’s not doing it. It would be technically difficult, and it wouldn’t be nearly as fun without a live audience.

In yet more comics news, this article at The Comics Journal site goes into even more detail on the CBLDF situation. I said previously that I wasn’t quite ready to burn my CBLDF t-shirts, but now maybe I am. I think it’s going to be some time before the CBLDF earns back anyone’s trust.

On a more positive note, this article about Carol Kalish has been getting a lot of attention. It’s good to read about somebody who was almost universally admired. (By the way, I’ve noticed that any article about comics that talks about somebody “you’ve never heard of” is always about somebody I’ve definitely heard of, and probably know a lot about. This is probably because I’m old, and I’m a nerd.)

And in one bit of COVID-19 news, the company I work for has pushed back our “return to office” date from early August to early September. I was starting to worry about that August date, given how things have been going in NJ and across the country. (I kind of doubt that things will be much better in September, but here’s hoping. And if things aren’t better by then, maybe they’ll give up and just let us work from home for the rest of the year.)

physical media and lockdown anxiety

I’ve now reached the stage of the lockdown where spending $100 for four Avengers movies on Blu-ray seemed like a good idea. (I already have the first one on Blu-ray, but none of the others.) I’d been keeping an eye on iTunes and Vudu to see if maybe the digital versions would go on sale for $10 each or something like that, but yesterday, I decided that it was OK to just go ahead and get the fancy SteelBook box set.

I go back and forth with my thinking on digital vs physical media. On the one hand, my cable & internet went out last night, while I was watching a Blu-ray, so I patted myself on the back for still holding onto physical media there. On the other hand, I accidentally knocked over a big stack of DVDs this morning and had to pick them all up and get them back in order. You can’t knock over digital video. I guess I’ll still keep going back and forth on this for the foreseeable future. There’s an argument to made on both sides.

I have been feeling lately like the lockdown is starting to get to me. I’ve seen some articles about post-lockdown anxiety recently. I think my main problem is that I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be talking about “post-lockdown” yet at all. I see a lot of people without masks wandering around downtown these days, and I keep reading about the pressure to open stuff back up. I think we need to be real careful about that, and I think we at least need to be wearing masks more often. As of today, NJ is requiring people to wear masks outdoors, so that’s good, though there’s really no enforcement mechanism for this.

And I’m pretty steamed about movie theater chains suing NJ. This really seems like the last thing they should be spending time and money on right now. I’m fairly sure I won’t be entering a theater any time before the end of this year. And I probably won’t want to go into one until next summer, at least. (Assuming there’s a vaccine and/or treatment for COVID-19 by then.)

Some of my anxiety and restlessness is no doubt coming from the simple fact that it’s summer, and I really can’t do most of the things I like to do in the summer. Like going out to see a movie. Or going into NYC and visiting the Met and MoMA. Or going to a comic con. To address that last one, I’m thinking about taking a few days off for Comic-Con@Home later this month. Just sitting around in my apartment and watching panels online won’t come near the experience of actually being in San Diego for the con, but at least it’ll get me away from work for a few days and maybe let me recharge my batteries a bit (so to speak).

They have the Wednesday panel schedule up now, and it’s mostly not that interesting to me. It’s mostly serious stuff related to education. Which is fine. I assume the nerdier fan stuff will be Thursday through Sunday. So maybe I’ll take Thursday and Friday off from work and just chill and watch panels and read comics for a couple of days. I’ve been thinking about other things I could do to make the experience feel more like actually being at the con. I could skip my usual meal habits and get take-out on those days. Maybe I could even find some local take-out that reminds me of the kind of stuff I like to eat in San Diego, like fish tacos. I could sleep a little late and stay up a little late. (Or I could even try to switch to PDT for a few days.) Maybe I could try to ignore “regular” news for a few days and just read con-related news only. (That might be kind of hard to manage.) I guess that’s about it though. I can’t dress any more casually than I’m already dressing. I can do an excessive amount of walking, I guess, but just wandering around Somerville isn’t the same as wandering around downtown San Diego and the convention center.

more odds and ends

I’m kind of exhausted now, and I kind of want 2020 to just be over. But it’s not. I’m doing my best to stay positive and keep working and exercising and eating right (and I am doing all that), but I’m getting a little frayed around the edges. Anyway, here’s another round-up of (mostly) bad news. Writing helps me process things and clear my head. I don’t necessarily expect anything here to be useful to anyone else, but writing it down helps me.

More #MeToo

Well, the #MeToo stuff in comics is really starting to snowball. After Cam Stewart, Warren Ellis, and Charles Brownstein, now it’s Scott Allie’s turn. Allie was an editor and writer at Dark Horse. He was the editor on all the Hellboy and Hellboy-related books for a long time. And he’s written a few also. I’ve been a Hellboy and BPRD fan since Hellboy #1 from back in the 90s. I didn’t really know anything about Allie, other than just knowing his name from the credits and letter columns. So I can’t say much about him. I don’t think there’s any indication that Mike Mignola knew anything about this, so that at least is something. I’d hate to have to lose my respect for Mignola. (And I do have a good bit of respect for him.)

And back to Brownstein: He was apparently involved in another incident, about ten years ago, involving a CBLDF employee, who was then essentially forced to sign an NDA. So things are looking worse for them. I’m not quite ready to burn my CBLDF t-shirts, but I’m not going to be wearing them in public anytime soon either.

New Toys

I don’t think I’ve even turned on my new laptop yet this week. I’ve been doing a bunch of React stuff on my MacBook, and all of my actual work on my work machines, of course. So I haven’t had time to do any setup on the Lenovo.

I have had time to mess around with my Echo Dot a bit though. I’ve discovered that it’s pretty good as a speaker (given it’s small size), but not if you’re using it via Bluetooth. So if you’re playing stuff over it via the usual Alexa route, it sounds pretty good. But it’s not really worth trying to use it as a Bluetooth speaker. So I’ll yell “Alexa, play WQXR” if I want to hear some classical music while I’m working and that works out fine.

React

Speaking of React, I’ve been reading the second edition of Learning React via my ACM O’Reilly subscription. It’s an “early release” version, so it’s a little rough, but it’s more up-to-date than any other book on React that I’ve seen. I’m at a point now where I’m not sure if I should keep working my way through books and videos or if I should stop reading/watching and start actually working on a project. I think I might need to finish the Learning React book at least. I’m still having trouble getting at the big picture with React. I’m learning little bits and pieces, but they don’t all fit together in my head yet.

Reopening NJ

Somerville is really hopping this week, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Mostly nervous, I guess. All the restaurants are doing outdoor dining, which means that they’ve annexed about 90% of the sidewalks. So a walk down Main St right now is kind of an obstacle course. And the obstacles are people sitting at outdoor tables, talking, eating, and not wearing masks. My early morning walks are still OK, since there are only one or two places open that early. But I’ve been avoiding Main St on my afternoon walks. Still, though, it’s kind of fun to see the outdoor dining. And it’s nice to hear people talking and laughing and all that. I just wish I could shake the idea that one of them is going to spray COVID-19 all over me.

Meanwhile, the Bridgewater Commons is going to reopen on Monday. I don’t think I’ll be going back there any time soon though. Maybe I’d risk a trip to the Apple Store if I really needed something, but only as a last resort. I just ordered two new pairs of shorts from the Macy’s web site, and I think that’s all the new clothes I’ll need between now and the end of the year. Macy’s and the Apple Store are really the only places at the mall that I frequent, so I don’t think I’ll be tempted to go over there.

And Yestercades is reopening too, on July 2. This seems like an even worse idea that reopening the mall. There’s no way they can keep all those arcade machines clean. And that place is really too cramped for social distancing. I don’t know, maybe they’ve figured out a way to make it work. I can definitely say that I’m not going back in there anytime soon either.

I may be more stressed now than when I started writing this post, which is not how I wanted this to turn out. Maybe I should spend the next hour listening to this public domain recording of the Goldberg Variations. That’ll help me calm down.

 

CBLDF

I’ve been a supporter of the CBLDF for years. I haven’t kept my official membership up to date at all times, but I’ve signed up for membership on multiple occasions, in addition to some random donations, and have a collection of t-shirts, pins, and other bric-a-brac to prove it. I let my membership lapse again a few months back and have had renewing it on my to-do list since then, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Now I guess that might be a good thing. After last week’s #MeToo moments for Cam Stewart and Warren Ellis, it seems that now it’s Charles Brownstein’s turn. Brownstein was the executive director of the CBLDF for years. He resigned yesterday after some old sexual assault allegations against him from 2006 resurfaced.

I never really knew much about Brownstein. I was aware of his role at CBLDF, but didn’t really know anything at all about him personally. But I don’t recall ever having heard anything bad about him. Oh well. The statement from CBLDF on this is short and doesn’t come anywhere close to addressing the issue of how it took so long to get to this point, given that these allegations were apparently well-known among comics creators, several of whom had stopped supporting CBLDF over this some time ago.

While I didn’t know much about Brownstein, some of the folks on the CBLDF board (and advisory board) are people I have a lot of admiration for, including Paul Levitz and Neil Gaiman. I guess I’m a little disappointed in them, if they knew about this and didn’t push for Brownstein’s removal. I don’t really know what the situation was there, so I’m going to assume they either didn’t know or were convinced that Brownstein hadn’t done anything wrong.

Either way, I guess maybe I won’t be renewing my CBLDF membership this year. I can revisit it next year, and see how they’re doing. There are plenty of other worthy causes out there to support right now. A number of folks on Twitter mentioned Hero Initiative as a comics-related organization that’s worthy of support, so that’s something to consider.

Warren Ellis

I have a few things I want to blog about this weekend, but I guess I might as well get this one out of the way first: Warren Ellis has been accused of multiple instances of “sexual misconduct.” I started seeing stuff about this popping up in my Twitter feed earlier this week. It was all a bit confusing. He’s released a statement addressing the allegations, and The Beat has a write-up on that. There’s also an article on Bleeding Cool. And I see that a short story of his that was supposed to be in an upcoming Batman one-shot has been pulled. I am in no way qualified to evaluate and/or judge any of this mess. All I can say is that I’m really disappointed.

I’ve been a really big fan of Ellis for a while now. Searching for his name on my blog, I found 38 mentions, going back to 2005. I’ve been subscribing to his weekly newsletter since 2016, and I’ve really gotten a lot out of it. (He’s ended the newsletter now, of course.) Selfishly, I’m wondering if the rest of Batman’s Grave is going to be published. I haven’t started reading it yet, but the reviews have been good.

It’s weird to say that I looked up to him, but I guess I kind of did? He seemed to be a successful guy who’d figured out how to deal with things and get a lot of good work done despite a number of obstacles. He was always self-deprecating in his newsletter and recommended a lot of good work from other writers, artists, and musicians. And he had a lot of good general life advice in there too. I don’t really know where all of this is going to go. And I don’t really know how to feel about it. But I thought I should at least acknowledge it here.

Yet another week

I should probably stop blogging about pointless mundane stuff, but… I’m not going to. It makes me feel better. And nobody really has to read any of this, so I might as well.

I’ve mentioned previously my experiment with home grocery delivery from Whole Foods. Last week, I’d pretty much decided not to do it again. But I started feeling a little sick last night, and didn’t feel any better this morning. So I went ahead and put in a Whole Foods order for delivery, figuring it would be safer for everyone if I didn’t go to the grocery store this week. Things seemed to be going well with it. They made a few reasonable substitutions. And there was only one item they were out of and didn’t have a substitute for. The delivery guy showed up at 8 AM, no problem. But he only dropped off one bag, when there should have been three. So I didn’t get most of my order. To make a long story short, I got a credit from Amazon for the missing items, then went out to ShopRite and bought all the other stuff I needed, since it didn’t look like the missing bags were going to show up. So that was kind of a failure. Then, at 10:30 AM, someone randomly showed up with the other two bags. So now I have a bunch of extra stuff, and a very full refrigerator and freezer. I probably still have the credit from Amazon too, so I guess it all worked out? Either way, it was all more trouble than it was worth. (And as to feeling sick: I’m still not quite right, but I think it’s just an upset stomach.)

On a completely different topic: I’m a little worried about the comic book industry. DC just announced that they’re withdrawing their business from Diamond entirely, and using two new distributors. There’s a round-up of reaction and some analysis here. I wouldn’t want to own a comic book store right now. I’m not sure how this is all going to play out. Maybe everything will be fine? But probably not. I’m still ordering comics from Westfield, but it’s getting harder for me to justify the expense. They skipped shipping anything in April (for obvious reasons). My May shipment showed up last week, and it only had two comics in it. So the shipping cost was higher than the cost of the actual comics. I just placed my order for this month (for stuff that should ship in August) and I only had four regular books on my order. I added a couple of one-shots, so hopefully I’ll get at least six books. With delays and cancellations, I think I’ll probably be averaging 4-6 comics per month, for the rest of the year, which isn’t really enough to justify the shipping cost. So it would make sense for me to just switch to digital. But I feel like now would be a bad time to cut and run on Westfield. Their service has been great, and supporting a (relatively) small company seems like a good idea right now.

On a bright note, the 2020 Eisner Award nominees have been announced. I haven’t heard anything about how they’re going to actually hand out the awards, since SDCC is of course canceled. Maybe they’ll do a virtual awards gala, or maybe they’ll just issue a press release with the winners, and then do something to celebrate them at the 2021 con (assuming there is a 2021 con). There’s a lot of stuff on the list that I haven’t read. Some of it is stuff I’ve been wanting to read but haven’t gotten around to (like Immortal Hulk), and a lot of it is stuff I’ve never heard of. Looking at stuff I’ve actually read, there’s Death Wins a Goldfish, by Brian Rea, which I read just recently. And The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, which I read a few months ago. And I think that’s about it. So there’s still definitely some quality comics work getting published, and there’s still a ton of it that I haven’t read.

Another week down

This is undoubtedly going to be another rambling hodgepodge post. It’s Saturday morning and I didn’t get much sleep last night. You’ve been warned.

In last Saturday’s post, I mentioned that my employer might have people start coming back to work in June. At that point, they hadn’t actually announced anything, but now they have. The details of the plan can be found here. It all seems pretty reasonable, I guess, but I’m still a bit worried about it. I might be able to opt out of the August A/B plan and continue working from home. I need to talk to my doctor. (Speaking of which, I haven’t seen my doctor since before this thing started. I hope he’s OK.)

I have an appointment with my dentist for a regular cleaning coming up in mid-June. I’d been assuming I’d have to reschedule it, but my dentist has reopened his office and called to confirm the appointment yesterday. He is spacing appointments out a bit more, so multiple patients aren’t in the office at the same time, so he changed the time of the appointment, but it’s still on the same day. And I assume he and the hygienist will be using a lot more PPE than usual. It’ll be interesting to see how that works out.

Looking back at previous blog entries in the “on this day” column for today, I saw one about the Big Bambu exhibit at the Met from ten years ago. That was probably my all-time favorite roof garden installation. In a normal year, I would have been up there by now, maybe more than once. They are still planning on going ahead with this year’s exhibit, but we’ll see what happens with that. It was originally scheduled to run from April 21 through October 25.

I decided to take another shot at getting my groceries delivered from Whole Foods this week. This time, I put in the order on Friday night for Saturday delivery, in the 8-10 AM window. I’m tempted to write in way too much detail about this week’s order, but I’ll boil it down to a few points. They were out of stock on four items, and offered substitutions for all four. Only two of those were reasonable substitutions though. (Example: seltzer water is not a good substitution for iced coffee!) So, again, I had to make a supplemental trip to ShopRite to pick up some stuff. And their prices are, in general, higher than ShopRite’s. (There’s a reason why their nickname is “Whole Paycheck.”) Things went pretty smoothly though. The delivery guy showed up at around 8:30 AM and brought the bags all the way up to my door. Everything was well-packed and nothing was missing. So, while it’s convenient, I don’t think it’s going to become a regular thing.

My plan for this afternoon involves maybe watching a meditation-related talk at 1 PM and the SpaceX Demo-2 launch at around 3 PM. There’s also been quite a bit of WonderCon from Home content posted recently. There are at least a few panels in there that I’d like to watch. So life is (relatively) good. I’ve still got a job, I’ve got groceries, and I’ve got plenty of content to keep me entertained and/or distracted.

A Quiet Memorial Day

As I mentioned in my last post, there will be no bike race today, so it should be a pretty quiet Memorial Day here in Somerville. I went out on a relatively long walk this morning: two miles, thirty minutes. I don’t usually use my AirPods while I’m walking, but today I decided to try that, and listened to the new Vessels VIII compilation from Future Astronauts. I didn’t see too many other people out, and the weather was great. So it was a nice relaxing walk.

I’ve added some more photos to my May 2020 Flickr album, covering all of the random photos I’ve taken since I last uploaded any, on May 3. Nothing special, just random photos. I’ve been trying to maintain certain habits since this thing started, as a way to help myself stay sane. Doing a morning walk, and taking a photo or two, is one of those habits.

I’ve been looking back on past posts again, both here and in my Day One journal. I see that’s it’s been a year since I bought my Xbox One. As I predicted, I kind of lost interest in it at some point, and I’m mostly just using it as a DVD & Blu-ray player now. I canceled my EA Access subscription, which would otherwise have billed me for a second year this week. I’d really only been using it to play Bejeweled 3, which is kind of silly. Bejeweled is really more of an iPhone game, and certainly easy to play on an iPhone. I’ve considered trying to get back into some video games during this pandemic, but haven’t really managed to do that. I feel like doing something a bit more interactive than reading and watching TV would be a good idea, but can’t really work up too much enthusiasm for it. I guess I’m really just not a “video game guy” anymore.

I started working my way through the Resident Alien comic book series this weekend, and will probably read volume 5 today. That one was published in 2018, and is the most recent. There’s supposed to be one more mini-series coming, and I’m looking forward to buying that one when it comes out (hopefully soon). It’s a really good series, and has been a pleasant distraction this weekend.

One more habit that I’ve been trying to maintain during the pandemic is meditation. I’ve been working my way through a forty-day course called Mindfulness Daily At Work in the Insight Timer app on my iPhone. It’s pretty good. I’m still not sure that meditation helps me that much, but I guess it helps me enough to be worth the relatively minor time investment that I’m putting into it.

exhausted

This post is mostly going to be more of the same stuff I was posting about yesterday. First, today was supposed to be Free Comic Book Day, but of course that’s been postponed. I found some folks trying to do FCBD-ish stuff today on Twitter, but nothing that was too interesting to me. This weekend is also Awesome Con Online. They have some mildly interesting stuff going on, but honestly nothing that I’m likely to watch.

I had some trouble sleeping last night, but I still got out of bed at 6 this morning and worked my way through my to-do list: laundry, grocery shopping, bank, and a few other little things. I even drove my car for the first time in a month. (Apparently, you have to do that once in a while, or the rats take over.) It’s just past noon now, and I’m ready for a nap. And, since it’s Saturday, I think I can just go ahead and do that.

I had a few more things I wanted to mention here, but I’ve just about run out of steam. So I guess it’s time for that nap.