Category: comics

Often, I start my Sunday by reading some stuff out of the “Read/Review” folder in my email, generally including one of Warren Ellis’ email newsletters. I’m pretty far behind in my reading. This morning, I was reading stuff from October 2018, including this newsletter from Ellis, with the second half of a speech he gave at a festival called Thought Bubble.

Ellis’ newsletters make for good Sunday morning reading. They often include links that send me off on little explorations that eat up more time that I intended to spend. But that’s fine, since it’s Sunday morning. In this case, he briefly mentioned Richard McGuire’s six-page comic story Here, which originally appeared in Raw, in 1989. I have that issue of Raw, and would have read it back in 1989, but probably haven’t reread it at any point in the last twenty years. Anyway, I didn’t remember the story or Richard McGuire, so I did some internet searching, and found a bunch of references to it. It’s such a well-regarded story that it has a Wikipedia page devoted to it. From there, I found that McGuire turned the concept from the story into a whole book, in 2014. I saw that I’d already added the book to my Amazon wishlist, in 2015, so I must have read about it at some point after it came out, but I don’t remember that at all.

McGuire is from New Jersey, and the story takes place in Perth Amboy, according to this NJ.com article. And there was an exhibition at the Morgan Library relating to the book in 2014. And here’s a good review of the book from the comics blog Broken Frontier. So it must have popped up briefly in my consciousness back then, from one of these references, which would have led me to adding the book to my Amazon wishlist, then promptly forgetting about it until now.

It was also available as an enhanced ebook, which might have been interesting, but it no longer seems to be available. There’s a bit about the ebook (and the Morgan exhibit) in this Atlantic article. (Weirdly, I can find an Italian language version in the Apple ebook store, but no English version.) I could go off on a tangent here about the transient nature of enhanced ebooks, vs. good old-fashioned dead-tree books, but I probably shouldn’t.

Anyway, having gone back and reread the original story, I remember it now, and I understand a bit about why it was so well-regarded. I haven’t gone and pushed the “buy now” button on the hardcover book, though. I went on a bit of a comics buying spree yesterday, so I don’t want to get started on another one today. But it was fun to follow all these little threads through the internet and think about the old days of Raw and how one six-page story created in 1989 by a guy from New Jersey can be referenced in a speech given in 2018 by a British writer, at a festival in Leeds.

I’m back home now, having spent much of the day yesterday getting back. The trip back went pretty well, all things considered, though I almost missed my flight out of LAX in the morning. I used a shared shuttle, booked as part of my hotel & airfare package, and they set a pickup time of 7:10 AM for a 10:15 AM flight. That should have been fine, but I was the first of five pickups, and the last drop-off. (And every passenger needed to be dropped off at a different terminal.) So I cut it close, but managed to get through check-in and security quickly, and got on the plane with no trouble, thankfully. Everything after that went fairly smoothly. I took the train home from Newark, and had good luck with that, getting back to my apartment around 9 PM.

I had a good day at the con on Sunday. I made it to three panels: a Greg Capullo spotlight, the Cover Story panel, and the Jack Kirby tribute panel. I would have also liked to have made it to the Tom King spotlight, but that overlapped with one of the others, plus I needed to give myself a little time for a lunch break. King was on the Kirby tribute panel, though, so I got to hear him talk about Kirby and Mister Miracle a bit.

Sunday night, I met up with some old college friends at Trader Sam’s Tiki Bar, at the Disneyland Hotel. That was a lot of fun, and a good cap to an otherwise entirely comics-oriented vacation.

Overall, it was a good con and a good vacation. I’m not sure if I’ll go back next year, given the distance and cost. But I’m going to consider it. I only made two purchases at the con: the Groo vs. Conan trade paperback I mentioned here, and a WonderCon shirt. I considered a few other books, but decided not to weigh myself down too much for the trip back, and not to add a bunch of new stuff to my reading pile.

Here are a couple of links to articles about panels I didn’t make it to: the Tom King spotlight and the Scott Snyder spotlight. I like both of these guys, though I’ll admit that I’m not buying King’s Heroes in Crisis or Snyder’s Justice League. I will probably pick up both as trade paperbacks (or digital TPBs) when they’re complete.

I have today (Tuesday) off from work, so I can get my laundry done and try to get back on Eastern time. I have a few other thoughts I was going to include here, but I’m feeling pretty tired right now. I think it’s all catching up to me. So I’m just going to finish my laundry, get a few other things done, then maybe take a nap.

I seem to be doing more blogging than usual during this con. Maybe because I’m an old man and I’m spending more time back in my hotel room than I usually would at a con. Anyway, I gave up on the con a bit early today, so here I am.

I got to the Tim Sale and Peter Tomasi spotlight panels this morning, as planned. Both were good. Sale mostly talked about his past DC work. He seems to have mellowed a bit since the last time I saw him at a con. I guess that was at least ten years ago, now that I think about it. He didn’t talk about any new or upcoming work, which was a little disappointing. I was kind of hoping he’d announce that he was working on something new. But I guess he’s mostly just doing covers these days. (Which is fine. I can always go back and reread Long Halloween if I need a Tim Sale fix.)

Tomasi also mostly talked about his DC work, though he did mention The Bridge, which I read recently, and is quite good. I’ve missed out on most of Tomasi’s DC work, since he started writing when I wasn’t actively buying books and his Rebirth-era work has all been on books that I’m not reading. But he started writing Detective recently, so I’ll be reading his work on that. I think I also have some of his New 52 Batman & Robin stuff in ComiXology, waiting to be read.

Later, I went to the DC “Meet the Publishers” panel, which was fun, but mostly just a reiteration of stuff I’d heard on DC panels yesterday. After that, I thought about staying in that same room for the Batman birthday panel, followed by Quick Draw and Cartoon Voices. But I decided I needed to get some air, so I skipped the Batman panel and walked around a bit. I thought I’d be able to come back for Quick Draw without too much trouble, but when I got back, the line for that panel was (literally) out the door and running along the outdoor balcony. So it didn’t look like I’d make it into that one. It was a big room, so maybe I would have, but it didn’t seem likely. So I gave up, and here I am back in my hotel room eating dinner and writing a blog post.

Again, I didn’t buy much today, but I did pick up the trade collection of Groo vs. Conan. It occurred to me yesterday at the Mark & Sergio panel that I’d never gotten around to picking that up. And, since Dark Horse lost the rights to Conan, I wasn’t going to be able to pick it up digitally, which is how I’ve been getting most of the recent Groo books. So I found somebody with a copy at half-price and bought it. Mark, Sergio, and Tom Yeates are all at the con, so theoretically I could get all three of them to sign it tomorrow, if I can find all of them. I probably won’t do that, but I’ll keep an eye out and see if I can.

It’s only 5:30, so I could go back to the con now and do some more stuff, but there’s not really much I want to do. The big event tonight is the masquerade, which would be fun, but it doesn’t start until 8:30, and I’ll be just about ready for bed by then. At this point, I think I’ll just do some reading and maybe watch a movie or something. (I wonder if the WiFi here is fast enough for Netflix…)

Tomorrow, I have a handful of panels I want to see, then after the con, I’m going to meet some old friends who live out here for dinner. So that’s cool.

OK, so this post is going to be my actual “day one” end-of-day report. I got to the con at around 10:30, an hour before the exhibit floor opened. I kind of came in the back way, from the north, instead of from the “grand plaza.” That worked out well, since there wasn’t much of a crowd, and I badged in through an entrance with no line at all. That got me onto the grounds, basically. I was going to just hang around outside until they opened the main doors to the exhibit floor, then just walk in, but instead I wound up getting into the giant line in the basement. I probably would have been better off staying outside, but I didn’t mind hanging out in line. (Except for the guy near me who clearly hadn’t showered today, but that’s always a risk at any con.)

Anyway, the show floor wasn’t crowded at all. I expect it’ll be more crowded tomorrow. There wasn’t much that really interested me on the floor, to be honest. DC had a nice booth. There was no presence at all from Marvel. There were a fair number of back issue dealers. I didn’t buy any books today though. I might not buy any at all this weekend, since I don’t want to have to drag too much paper back to NJ with me.

I went to the Mark & Sergio panel that I previously mentioned. It was a nice low-key panel, with Mark & Sergio gently ribbing each other and telling funny stories. After that, I went to DC’s “80 years of Batman” panel. They had a bunch of the current Batman creators on the panel, including Tom King, Scott Snyder, and Greg Capullo. Right after that, in the same room, was the “Spotlight on Jim Lee” panel. That was another fairly low-key panel. It was just Jim Lee on stage, taking questions and doing a couple of sketches, which he gave away at the end of the panel. After that, I thought about staying for the “DC Universe” panel in the same room, but I wanted to get up and move around a bit, and I had a feeling that the panel might be too much of a hard sell on the DC Universe service, which I’m still resisting. I might have to give in though, since they announced that they’re expanding the number of digital comics available on the service to, I guess, pretty much everything they’ve got. I ended the day at the “Greatest Cartoons Ever” presentation, featuring a bunch of great old cartoons selected by Jerry Beck and Frank Gladstone. They picked some great ones, including Bimbo’s Initiation, which is quite a doozy. After that, I left the con and headed back to my hotel. I grabbed a nice burrito on the way back for dinner.

I didn’t spend much money at all today, except to give CBLDF some money to renew my membership, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, but never got around to. Breakfast was a $5 sandwich from Subway, lunch was a $10 rice bowl from a food truck at the con, and dinner was a $6 burrito. And there were a few $3 coffees in there too. So I guess I’m upholding the stereotype of the cheap-ass comic book fan.

Looking at the schedule for tomorrow, my must-see panels are Mark Evanier’s “Quick Draw” and “Cartoon Voices” panels, which are back-to-back in the same room near the end of the day (4:30 and 5:30). There’s also a DC “Meet the Publishers” panel and a “Happy Birthday Batman” panel in that room earlier, so I could conceivably plop down in that room at 2:30 and just stay there for 4 hours. There are a bunch of other interesting panels on Saturday, including spotlight panels on Andy Kubert, Tim Sale, Peter Tomasi, and Scott Snyder, all of which will probably be interesting. I might get to one or two of those.

I think I should be able to sleep reasonably well tonight, though I may have had a bit too much coffee today. We’ll see.