Category: comics

Comics, Cons, and COVID-19

OK, I know this is my third post today, but it’s Leap Day, so I need to get in four year’s worth of posts today. And this one isn’t another obituary-related post. (Well, maybe not. It might turn south at some point.)

I’ve been thinking about going to WonderCon this year, like I did last year. But then I started noticing how Facebook canceled their F8 developer conference, and Microsoft (and other companies) were pulling out of GDC, and how the whole event has now been postponed, and I started getting a little concerned about traveling. And about whether or not WonderCon will still even be taking place this year. So maybe I should just stay home, and hope that this whole coronavirus thing is wrapped up by October so I can go to NYCC without worrying about COVID-19. The Beat has an article about how coronavirus fears are starting to affect comic cons, though it doesn’t say anything specific about WonderCon.

Speaking of cons, C2E2 in Chicago is happening this weekend. I was kind of curious about what kind of news might be coming out of the con from DC, given the recent Dan DiDio brouhaha. The “Meet The Publishers” panel was canceled, not surprisingly. I thought maybe there would be some interesting news from the DC Universe panel, but it looks like that was just about the DC Universe subscription service, and not specifically about actual DC comics. Jim Lee made a few statements about the future of DC comics at his spotlight panel, but he didn’t really say much.

Meanwhile, The Beat has a good postmortem (for lack of a better word) on Dan DiDio’s run, by Heidi MacDonald, and a round table retrospective on him by a few other contributors. Both pieces are good reading, if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

I’m still on the fence about what I want to do about my monthly Westfield subscription orders. I’m still buying Batman and Detective, but I’m not too enthusiastic about the Joker War crossover, both because I’m a little tired of the Joker, and I’m also a little tired of crossovers. I’m still kind of enthusiastic about Bendis’ Legion and Young Justice books, but honestly I haven’t read either yet. Young Justice has more than 12 issues out and Legion has 4, I think, so I do need to catch up. I’m looking at my March order now, and I’ll probably keep it as-is, not adding or dropping anything.

The last 20 years of comics follow-up

This post is just a follow-up to my last post, where I was ruminating a bit on comics, based on an article from Polygon. After I posted that, a friend mentioned that Dan DiDio had just left DC Comics. Dan was definitely a big part of the last 20 years of comics, having started at DC in 2002 and becoming co-publisher, with Jim Lee, in 2010. I’ve seen him at a bunch of con panels over the years. He’s really been the main public face for DC over the last two decades, at least in terms of communicating with the fans. He’s always been a high-energy guy at his con panels, and I generally look forward to them and enjoy them. He and Jim Lee made a good pair at their “Meet the Publishers” panels, with DiDio playing the “carnival barker” and Lee being more laid-back and understated.

DC hasn’t officially said much about DiDio’s exit, but it sounds like he was fired, according to Bleeding Cool. BC also has a couple of articles (here and here) rounding up social media reaction to his departure. Most folks have had only good things to say about him, though of course there’s some negative stuff in there too.

Mark Evanier has a blog post about DiDio’s exit that is really more about how large media companies work these days than it is specifically about DiDio. It does put things in perspective. This may lead to a bunch of changes at DC, or… it might not. This article from the LA Times gets into the business side of things. I occasionally forget that DC is now just a part of AT&T. If you told me 20 or 30 years ago that, some day, my long-distance phone company would own Batman, I’d have laughed at you. But, yeah, AT&T owns Batman now. And there’s probably no one there, above a certain level, that really cares about the comic books. They care about the “intellectual property” and whatever value they can wring from it, and they might see the comics as a key part of that, or they might see them as outdated and unprofitable.

I’m looking at the March Westfield catalog now, and I’m seeing at least one new thing from DC that I’m interested in: a new Batman Adventures mini-series, written by Paul Dini and Alan Burnett! So that’s cool. But, looking at the fine print, I see that it’s a “digital first” series, and also that the main purpose of the series is as a tie-in to a new action figure line. So this does back up my feeling that the comics are, more and more, seen as an addendum to the other stuff being done with the property, rather than the source that makes the other stuff possible. And that they’re continuing to move away from the traditional 32-page physical comic books. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with DC, and the industry as a whole, over the next year.

The last 20 years of comics

I just read an interesting article on Polygon about the last 20 years of comics. They interviewed a bunch of creators about the last two decades, looking at the 2000s and 2010s separately, and then summarized it all. The summary version is here, and a version with the full responses from the creators is here.

There were a lot of different perspectives, though they mostly talked to mainstream creators, so there’s a bit of a mainstream bias and not as much mention of stuff outside the usual Marvel/DC bubble. But a lot of it got me thinking. I thought I’d share some quotes here and add my own thoughts.

  • Amanda Conner, Coleen Doran, and Gail Simone all mentioned the positive changes with regard to women, among both creators and fans.
    • Conner: “Now girls read comics across the table and it’s great. It’s really good. There’s more female creators, there’s more female readers. I feel like this decade has been a very, very girl power decade, which is great.”
    • Doran: “Now, women and girls in comics are not just becoming the norm, but a major creative and financial force.”
    • Simone: “So, yeah, it’s been a couple decades of great superhero comics, but also, the rise of people like Kelly Sue DeConnick and Marjorie Liu and G. Willow Wilson.”
    • I remember how weird it was, early in the 00’s, to start seeing so much more diversity at comic book conventions. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you’d mostly just see guys like me at cons: white, male, nerdy. Now, you see… everybody. The wide popularity of manga and anime had a lot to do with that initially, I think. At this point, it’s broadened out to include a lot of related stuff that all gets lumped into the “pop culture” category. So comics are just a part of that, but they’re an important part.
  • A number of people mentioned or alluded to 9/11, including Bryan Hill and Tom Brevoort.
    • Hill: “I think the early ’00s were about reconciling with loss, and we needed fiction to recognize it with us. You start thinking about Ultimates, and all that stuff. We needed the fiction to do that.”
    • Brevoort: “This all really started in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, when comics were among the first entertainment media (due to our speed of production) to be able to effectively and emotionally deal with the aftermath of those attacks and the psychic scars that everybody was feeling.”
    • I tend to think of J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man 36 as being a key book early in the 2000’s, dealing with 9/11 in a way that could have been a really awkward failure, but was instead a really uplifting story.
  • Jim Starlin was the only guy to mention something that’s been on my mind: “I think you’re gonna see the pamphlets slowly disappearing; the little 22-page or 20-page books. There’s just not a system anymore where those are profitable. Most of those books are losing money.” I’ve been wondering about that a lot. The comic book store here in town still seems to be doing OK, but I’m starting to wonder how much life the current system of monthly 32-page books has left in it.
  • Kieron Gillen mentions Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority as being a defining comic for the 00’s. I’d agree with that, to some extent. The Ultimates was definitely influenced by The Authority, and that comic became a major influence on how Marvel’s characters were portrayed in the movies. And of course the success of the MCU is a major factor in the place that superhero comics have in pop culture right now.
  • Scott McCloud mentions Chris Ware and Raina Telgemeier, so he was one of the few folks to mention anything outside of the Marvel/DC bubble. I have to admit that, while I’m certainly familiar with Ware and Telgemeier, I still haven’t gotten around to reading anything by either of them. I’ve probably read a few short pieces by Ware somewhere along the line, but I’ve never read any of his longer works. I need to rectify that at some point.
  • Steve Orlando mentions Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, which is a series I still haven’t read, despite owning all of the TPBs. I think that may have been (arguably) his first major mainstream US superhero work. (I’m not counting his 90’s DC/Vertigo work as “mainstream.”)
  • I just read a few Fables TPBs over this past weekend. Fables ran from 2002 to 2015, so it’s solidly in the 2000-2019 time frame. I’m not too sure if I’d point to it as a hugely influential series, in the way that Sandman was in the 80s/90s, but it was a popular book that lasted for 150 issues, so that counts for something. (I’ve now read all the trades through to issue 100, so I have a few more trades to go.)
  • Hellboy has been pretty influential and popular, though it started back in the 90s. The two Guillermo del Toro movies came out in 2004 and 2008, so the peak of Hellboy’s popularity was definitely in the 2000s. I think Hellboy’s success as a creator-owned comic that went on to spawn a couple of relatively popular movies may have helped later properties like The Walking Dead. Speaking of which, TWD ran from 2003 to 2019, so that’s solidly in the 2000s also, and has been wildly successful. (I have digital copies of a few of the Walking Dead collections, but haven’t read them yet.)
  • For myself, I stopped buying monthly comics in 2009, then started up again in 2016. I’m thinking about stopping again, just due to the backlog that I’m building up. The stuff I’ve been gravitating to most over the last 20 years has been pretty diverse, though there are certain characters, and writers and artists, who I keep coming back to. For characters: Batman. I can’t seem to quit Batman. And I still love stuff like Hellboy and Usagi Yojimbo. For writers: Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Christopher Priest. (And Neil Gaiman, though he doesn’t do much comics work these days.)

Software and subscriptions and stuff

This is going to be a follow-up to my last two posts (here and here). Sorry. I have some interesting ideas in my head that I want to turn into blog posts, but I’m still plodding through a bunch of largely mundane stuff, trying to see if I can streamline or realign some stuff in my life. Anyway, here’s a brain dump of updates on stuff from those last two posts, plus some new stuff.

Cable TV: I got my February cable bill, with the new rates. My initial understanding of the rate increase was that my bill would go up by about $35. But it actually only went up by $14. The base rate for my cable package is now $85 (plus a bunch of fees) and my internet package is $90 (plus fees), but they’re applying a “special discount” of $42 so the total bill didn’t rise more than that $14. So I guess I’m sticking with my current plans. Any changes to the plans would probably invalidate the discount. So, while I could save a little by changing or dropping my cable plan, it’s not enough to make it worthwhile for me. (I’ll have to keep an eye on that discount and see if they phase it out over time. If they do, then I can think about a change again.)

Web hosting: I haven’t done any more with this. My new contract starts on Feb 12, so I’ll have to review it then. And I have plenty of time to drop my .org domains if I want to do that. They renew in May and August.

AmEx card: I haven’t done much with this either, though I did drop all recurring charges from the card. And I’m planning on using up my rewards points so I don’t lose those. That way, I can drop it cleanly and easily, if I decide to.

Westfield Comics: I did place a February order with them, but it was a small one. And I still haven’t talked myself into dropping Batman and Detective.

Flickr Pro: I took the deal to renew for two more years at the old price ($100 for two years), so now I don’t have to think about that again until 2023.

Quicken: Quicken switched to a subscription model a couple of years ago. I bought a 27-month sub from Amazon for $54 in November 2017, which was due to expire next month. The regular yearly rate to renew it directly with Quicken would have been $50/year, which seems a little steep to me. I found that I could buy a 14-month sub from Amazon for $30, so I did that, and now I’m good for another year. I took a quick look at a few alternatives, including Banktivity, Moneydance, and See Finance, but didn’t find any of them compelling enough to get me to switch.

H&R Block tax software: I’ve been buying their “Deluxe” package every year to do my taxes, for quite a long time, going back to when it was TaxCut. (I took a break for a few years and used an accountant instead, but she was a lot more expensive and not really any more convenient, really.) I generally buy it from Amazon, but this year, H&R Block had a “flash sale” where I could buy it from them for $30, so I did. So now I’m set to do my taxes, whenever I can find the mental energy to sit down and get it done.

Fantastical: I’ve been using Fantastical on my iPhone as my default calendar program for several years. I bought the iPad version a couple of years ago, and the Mac version just a few months ago. And now they’ve just released a new version and switched to a subscription model. (Sigh.) They’re being pretty good about existing users of the paid version, so I can use the new version, but not the new features. So that’s what I’m going to do. The new features are great if you’re really a calendar power-user, but I’m not. I just use my personal calendar to keep track of birthdays and medical appointments, mostly. The MacStories review of the new version is thorough and worth reading, if you’re the kind of person that needs a really powerful calendar management program.

Other stuff I’m subscribing to: This could be a long list, but I’ll limit it to apps and services I probably haven’t mentioned recently and that might be worth reconsidering: Instapaper ($30/year), 1Password ($30/year, with discount), Twitterific ($10/year), Sleep Cycle ($2/year).

Other stuff I’m not subscribing to: In a few cases where an app switched from paid to subscription, I’ve talked myself out of subscribing to it, and either stuck with the “free” version, or dropped the app entirely: TextExpander (dropped), Day One (still using free “Plus” version), Drafts (tried the “pro” version for a week; went back to the free one), Overcast (still using the free version, with some features unlocked from my original purchase).

I recently listened to an episode of Mac Power Users with Greg Pierce, the developer of Drafts. He seems like a good guy, and I do really appreciate the fact that subscriptions give small developers like him a steady revenue stream, and make software like Drafts possible. As a user, it’s frustrating to get pushed into all these subscriptions, and it’s often hard to justify the recurring expense for something that (for me) has limited utility. But I don’t agree with the idea that developers are getting “greedy,” which often crops up on places like Reddit or other online forums, when a developer switches to a subscription model. (On the other hand, I am kind of bothered when a large corporation like Apple or Amazon starts pushing subscription services. But that’s a subject for another day.)

So that’s about it for now, I guess. The stand alert on my Apple Watch has gone off twice while writing this, so I’ve been at it for more than an hour. I have another post bouncing around in the back of my head, similar to this one, but just about music and podcasts. The way I pay for and consume music has gotten a little complicated, and seems to be worth reviewing again. And there’s probably a post about buying and reading comic books in there too.

Reading plans for 2020

I’ve been thinking about changes I could make in my life and habits for 2020 lately. Nothing major, though. I’m mostly thinking about what I want to read, watch, and listen to next year. I briefly thought about designating 2020 as a “catch-up year,” where I resolve not to buy any new books, comics, or DVDs and just try to catch up on stuff I already own. My Goodreads want to read list currently has 348 books on it. The way I use Goodreads, this is a list of books that I already own but haven’t read yet. They’re mostly ebooks, and a bunch of them were free ebooks, so many of those may never actually get read, which is fine. But a lot of them are books that I actually paid money for, and really do want to read.

And, on the comic book side, I have almost 200 comics in my Comixology account that I haven’t read yet. Some of those are individual issues, but many are graphic novels. And I’ve got about a two-foot high stack of physical comic book issues, mostly from my Westfield orders. I had pretty much made up my mind to at least stop ordering new books from Westfield in 2020, but there’s still a bunch of good stuff coming out that I want to read. I’m not going crazy with Westfield; I only have 11 items in my January order and I may drop a few. (I’m starting to feel a little burnt out on Batman-related books, so I may drop those.) But if I start ordering less than a dozen books a month, then Westfield isn’t really a good deal, since the shipping costs outweigh the discounts. So I guess I still haven’t made up my mind on Westfield.

Getting back to “regular” books: I’m still the main moderator for a Goodreads group related to The Great American Read, a series that aired on PBS back in 2018. I had been planning to put the group in “maintenance mode” in 2020, discontinuing group reads and just leaving it open for miscellaneous discussion. But another member volunteered to be a co-moderator with me, and I ran a poll to see if people wanted to keep the group reads going, and of course they did, so I’m going to be doing that in 2020 too. We just did our polls for January, and we’ll be reading The Handmaid’s Tale as our standalone group read for January, and Ken Follet’s Kingsbridge series as our series read. The Follett books are all very long, so I’m allocating two months for each of those, so that’ll stretch out from January to June, for the three books.

I’ve already read The Handmaid’s Tale, back in college, so I don’t think I’ll try to read it again. (The Kindle ebook is available for free under the Prime Reading program right now, by the way.) I may read the graphic novel version though. And I’d really like to read The Pillars of the Earth, the first book in the Kingsbridge series. The Kindle version was available for $1.99 last week, as a “deal of the day”, so I went ahead and bought it. (Those $1.99 deals are how a bunch of Kindle ebooks got on my “want to read” list. It’s hard to resist those…) Meanwhile, I’m only about 25% of the way through Gone with the Wind. And 5% through The Stand, which I want to get back to after I finish Gone with the Wind. Sigh. I need to keep reminding myself that having too many good books to read is a good thing!

Catalina upgrade and Buffy comics

I’m been fighting a cold, on and off, for the last few weeks. I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’d like to do that involves leaving the apartment, but I think that staying home and drinking herbal tea is a better idea right now. So I managed to get my MacBook Air upgraded to Catalina yesterday. It went smoothly, no snags at all, as far as I can tell. I’d read the Take Control books on upgrading to Catalina and using Catalina, so I knew what to expect. I was a little worried about the new volume group thing, but that doesn’t seem to have broken anything.

And I was worried about the split of iTunes into separate apps, but that also, surprisingly, isn’t as bad as I thought it might be. The Music app retains (nearly) all of the music-related functionality of iTunes. Apparently, the column browser disappeared in 10.15.0 but reappeared in 10.15.2, which is the version to which I just upgraded. So I’m glad I waited before upgrading.

I need to decide if I want to switch my default shell from bash to zsh. It’s probably fine, and I should go ahead and do that, but I do have a few little aliases and scripts that I should review first.

I also just finished reading the Angel & Faith season 9 series. It was really good! I blogged about my recent Buffy kick about a month ago. I think I’m almost done with it, and ready to move on to a new kick. I still need to read a couple of spin-off mini-series, Willow: Wonderland and Spike: A Dark Place. But, after that, I think I’ll take a break from Buffy. I’d been looking at acquiring the season 10 books, but they’re all out of print and some are a bit expensive right now. It looks like Boom is finally going to start reprinting Dark Horse’s Buffy books, so hopefully they’ll get around to printing new editions of the later Dark Horse stuff that’s currently hard to find.

So that’s some random thoughts on macOS and Buffy comics. I was going to toss some unrelated music thoughts into this blog post too, but I’m running out of energy. I need to get some more tea, or maybe take a nap.

Gahan Wilson

I just heard that Gahan Wilson passed away earlier this week. Here’s something from the NY Times, and an article from the New Yorker, and finally a blog post by Neil Gaiman.

From the New Yorker:

Weird was his specialty—he thought that way, and he drew that way. Wilson was part of a select group of cartoonists who own their style, who deliver on paper what seems to be a good piece of themselves. (…) The work is somehow inseparable from who they are, and that’s part of what makes it so memorable.

I’m not sure where I first saw his work, but it was probably in National Lampoon, since I was buying that occasionally as a teenager, but definitely wouldn’t have been buying the New Yorker or Playboy, the other two magazines that published most of his cartoons. Though, now that I’m thinking about it, he also drew cartoons for F&SF, so maybe that’s where I first saw his stuff. Either way, I’ve always loved his work.

A collection of his F&SF cartoons is available from Comixology, as is a large collection of his Playboy cartoons, both published by Fantagraphics. A couple of other collections, Still Weird and Even Weirder, are available for Kindle, at a pretty low price. I really should pick up one or more of those. I could use a little more Gahan Wilson in my life right now.

There’s also a documentary about him, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, that can be bought or rented from Amazon or iTunes. I haven’t seen it, but I might rent it tonight.

Buffy comics

I’ve been on a Buffy kick lately. I finished reading the Dark Horse season eight run not too long ago, and that got me interested in picking up and reading season nine and a bunch of the other stuff that came out from Dark Horse along with that.

I’d picked up the first trade paperback of season eight way back in January 2008. I read through the first half of season eight in trade paperback form, though I’m not quite sure when. I donated those trades to a library sale or something like that back in 2015, so it was a while ago. I bought the second half of the series in digital form from Dark Horse in 2012, probably after I finished reading the trades. Then, I just never got around to reading the rest.

So, at some point last month, I was in a mood for Buffy and started reading those digital issues. The whole arc of season eight was pretty goofy, but it was a lot of fun. I’m glad I finally got around to finishing it. Then, of course, when I started looking into buying season nine, I realized that Dark Horse had lost the rights to Buffy, so none of their stuff was in print anymore. I have a little bit of season nine from an old Angel and Buffy Humble Bundle from 2016, so that gave me a starting point. But the back issues, trades, and hardcovers are all getting hard to find. I wish the current publisher, Boom!, would get this stuff back in print. I don’t know if they actually have the rights to the old stuff though. Maybe they just have the rights to print new comics. Either way, I managed to snag a full set of the Angel and Faith season nine TPBs from eBay for a reasonable price. And I managed to find all of the main Buffy season nine series, though maybe I shouldn’t mention how I got it.

So I’m reading season nine now. I’m hoping I can talk myself into stopping at the end of season nine, and maybe moving on to something else, or going back and reading some of the older stuff that was in that Humble Bundle. But I’m enjoying season nine so much that I may wind up hitting eBay again to find season ten, and maybe paying a little too much for it.

On a related subject, I started listening to the first episode of the Buffering podcast recently. It’s pretty good. I’ve been a fan of Jenny Owen Youngs for awhile, and heard about the podcast through her Twitter feed. It looks like they’re up to season five now, so I don’t think I’d really be able to catch up, but maybe I’ll listen to a few more episodes at random. Of course, that may lead to me actually wanting to re-watch Buffy, which would be even more of a time sink…

NYCC 2019 wrap-up

I’m back home from NYCC, so I might as well write one more post about my trip. I didn’t go to the con on Sunday. Instead, I took a walk from my hotel up to the Met. I took a fairly circuitous and leisurely route through Central Park. It was a pretty good day to do that. It was a nice autumn day, and Central Park on a Sunday morning was certainly more quiet and peaceful than NYCC would have been. At the Met, I went into the members preview for The Last Knight exhibit. (The title of the exhibit is quite similar to the title of the new Scott Snyder Batman series, Last Knight on Earth, but they are definitely not related in any way!) I then walked down to the Breuer and saw the two exhibits that are currently running there. The Vija Celmins exhibit was pretty interesting. A lot of her “Night Sky” paintings are cool.

My hotel was just right across the street from MoMA, so it would have been easy to go over there too, but they’re still not open. They will be opening to the public October 21, with member previews next weekend. I’ll probably miss the member preview, since I’m going to have other stuff to do this coming weekend. But maybe I can get in on Sunday. The NY Times has a lengthy article about the reopening that I haven’t had time to read yet. I did peek through the windows at MoMA, and it looks like they’ve enlarged the gift shop, which isn’t a surprise. That was about all I could really see. I’m definitely curious to see what they’ve done to the place.

Back on the subject of NYCC, The Beat published a Sunday wrap-up article that includes links to all (or most) of their NYCC content over the whole con. This includes a write-up of the big Castlevania panel that I missed. It sounds like it wasn’t that different from what I saw of those guys at the Viz panel, just longer and with more of the cast and crew present. And there’s a write-up of the Star Trek panel for Discovery and Picard. That one would have been fun to go to, but I imagine it would have involved waiting in a very long line and was probably quite crowded. I just found a reddit thread talking about the panel and various other NYCC Star Trek items. It turns out that there was also a Star Trek panel as part of PaleyFest during the con. If I’d known about that, I might have gone to that one, since you have to buy tickets in advance for PaleyFest panels, so it wouldn’t have been one of those “wait in line for two hours and hope you get in” things. Oh well. I’ll try to keep a closer eye on Paley Center stuff in the future. I should probably sign up for their mailing list.

Despite being fairly interested in Discovery and Picard, I still haven’t talked myself into paying for a CBS All-Access subscription. Nor have I managed to convince myself to shell out for a DC Universe subscription, despite some interest in a few of the shows on that service. Any time I get too tempted to subscribe to DCU, I remind myself that I just bought a Blu-Ray box set of the complete Batman Adventures, and I should probably just watch that if I’m keen to see some superhero action on my TV. (And I’ve got the new seasons of Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, and Batwoman to look forward to also!)

I’ve spent a little time reflecting on whether or not I learned anything from this year’s con, and whether or not I’ll go back for next year’s one. Here are a few takeaways:

  • I surprised myself a bit, in that I made it through four days in NYC carrying around a backpack and getting in 20k+ steps each day, without really much back pain or any major trouble sleeping. Yes, I did bail out on a few things, but I still did quite a lot.
  • After five nights of pretty decent sleep on a hotel mattress, I think I’ve almost convinced myself that I need to buy myself a new mattress. Depending on how I feel tomorrow morning, after my first night back on my own mattress, I might have to start getting serious about that.
  • There might be a few new things that I’m curious about, but I’m not really jumping on any bandwagons right now. I have such a huge backlog of stuff to read and watch that I can’t add anything new unless it’s really great.

So it’s back to the old daily grind tomorrow. I haven’t checked my work email since Wednesday, so there should be a good pile of stuff to go through when I get in tomorrow morning. (Yes, technically I could check it now from home and clean it up a bit, but I really don’t want to!)

NYCC day three, part two

OK, so this post is an end-of-day wrap-up post, which I’m writing in my hotel room on Saturday evening, because I bailed out on the con early. I had a pretty good morning at the con, and went to the DC Year of the Villain panel, and a Mutts panel with Patrick McDonnell. Here’s a write-up on the DC panel. Nothing unusual came out of that one. Just more talk about what’s coming up in the Year of the Villain event.

The Mutts panel was a lot of fun. It was mostly to promote the new Mutts book The Art of Nothing. It looks like a really nice book. McDonnell did a slideshow of various old bits of Mutts and pre-Mutts art and ephemera. I guess I never really knew much about him or his history. I was surprised to learn that he’d once been in a punk band that used to open for The Ramones. I don’t really read any daily comic strips anymore, and I’d kind of forgotten that Mutts was even still running, but now I’m finding myself thinking about picking up this book. (I’m also thinking that maybe binge-reading a bunch of old Mutts strips might be a good antidote to reading about current events, so I’m going to keep that idea in my back pocket for possible future use.)

I fully intended on hanging out all day at the con, and going to the 3:30 Adam Savage panel and the 6:30 Castlevania panel, but it all got to be a bit much and I bailed out around 1 PM. I went off and did some other stuff, skipping the Adam Savage panel, and came back around 5 PM for the Castlevania panel. But again, the con was just a bit too crazy for me and I bailed out again.

So my plan for the rest of the night is to maybe watch some TV then go to bed early again. I feel kind of bad about that, but not too bad. I’m on vacation and trying to relax, and if hanging out watching Supergirl on my iPad is more relaxing than fighting crowds and waiting in lines at Javits, then that’s fine.

I don’t really have much that I want to do at the con tomorrow, so I think I’m going to bail on it entirely and go to The Met instead. I think that will be more my speed. After that, maybe I’ll hit a couple more museums and wander around the city a bit. Then back home on Monday morning and back to reality.