Category: comics

WonderCon day one (almost)

I managed to sleep from around 9pm last night until about 6:30am this morning, though it probably wasn’t really high-quality sleep. So my fear that I’d wake up at 4am and not be able to get back to sleep wasn’t really a problem. I’m definitely feeling some aches and pains from the travel yesterday, though I think it’s manageable.

I was too tired to do anything interesting for breakfast, so I settled for a bacon, egg, and cheese sub from Subway, which was not a great idea. But it got some food in me. I’m drinking the free K-Cup coffee in my hotel room for my caffeine fix.

I have everything I need and I’m all ready to go to the con, but the doors don’t open until 11:30, and it’s currently just 8:30, so I’ve got about three hours to kill. This might be a bit of an issue, since there’s not that much to do in Anaheim other than Disney. So I guess I’m either going to talk myself into going to Downtown Disney for a little strolling and shopping, or I’m going to sit in my hotel room and read a book.

I just checked, and Downtown Disney is a half-hour walk from here, so maybe not a great idea on a day when I’m going to be doing a lot of walking at the con.

I guess I don’t really have anything useful to say in this post. But writing it seemed like a good idea at the time. This is one of those posts that could just as well have been a Day One journal entry instead, but when I started, I thought it might have been going somewhere interesting. Sorry!

WonderCon day zero

I flew out to Anaheim for WonderCon today. After a fairly lengthy trip out here, I’m now happily eating chips & hummus in my hotel room and winding down for the day. Adjusting to Pacific time is going to be a little hard, I think. I got up at 4:30am Eastern time today, and I’m feeling like I want to go to bed right now, but it’s only 6pm Pacific, so I think I need to at least try to stay awake until 8 or 9, if I can.

A bunch of little things went right today, so that helped. The Uber driver for my trip to the airport showed up on time. I got through security at the airport pretty quickly. (Though I got a rather intrusive “inside the waistband” screening today after something about my ass looked suspicious on the scanner.) The flight itself was pretty smooth. (Though it took off an hour late.) The hotel I’m in is pretty nice. And I got a nice falafel wrap for dinner from a place that’s right around the corner from hotel, and will probably be my go-to dinner spot for the rest of the con.

I think I learned some lessons about my limitations when I went to Redmond on business last year. That was the first time I’d been on a trip to the west coast in several years. This time, I took my Claritin with me, so I can hopefully avoid allergy problems. And I took some melatonin, in the hope that it’ll help me sleep. And I have some Breathe Right strips, and Flexall, and Advil. So I hope all that will get me through.

I took a walk to the convention center this afternoon, to make sure I knew where it was. It’s only a ten minute walk from my hotel. There were a few people milling around , since they were open for badge pickup today. (I got mine in the mail, so I’m all set on that already.) I’d never been to the Anaheim Convention Center before. It’s pretty big. Not San Diego big, but still pretty big. And I’m pretty sure the con uses the whole thing. So WonderCon is definitely a lot bigger than it was the last time I went, back when they were in San Francisco.

I’m looking at the panel list for tomorrow, and there’s a few really good ones. The one I’m most interested in is the Mark Evanier & Sergio Aragones panel. I’m also hoping to get to Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics panel. These are both panels that have existed, in some form or another, for 20 years or more, at SDCC and/or WonderCon. (So, yeah, I’ve got a little nostalgia going on. I’ll try to find something current to get interested in too, to balance it out.)

So I guess that’s about enough incoherent rambling for today. I was mostly writing this to kill time, to be honest. I’ve managed to kill about an hour, so that’s something. Now I just need to read or watch TV for an hour or two, then I can go to bed.

C2E2

In my post about WonderCon yesterday, I mentioned that Marvel didn’t seem to have much of a (comics-related) presence planned. Now that I’m looking at the news coming out of C2E2 this weekend, I guess it’s because they’ve got a lot of stuff going on there instead. They made some (relatively) big announcements there.

I’ve never seriously considered going to C2E2. It’s run by the same people who run NYCC, so it’s similar to that convention, only farther away and in a city that’s generally colder than it is here. I’ve been to Chicago, and I don’t have anything against it, but, in March, I’d rather be in Anaheim, where it’s going to be in the 70s, rather than Chicago, where it’s currently in the 40s. It’s probably a great convention to go to if you’re already in (or near) Chicago.

Getting ready for WonderCon

I’m leaving for WonderCon on Thursday, so I need to do a little bit of prep this weekend. I’ve gone through the schedule and picked out some stuff that I’m interested in. WonderCon is using some third-party system called “Sched”, so I had to register an account with them, and go through their interface to create my “schedule”. As these things go, it’s not that bad, and signing up for it doesn’t seem to have opted me in to anything horrible. I took a quick look at their TOS and privacy pages, and I guess they’re not too bad? Anyway, the old days of printing out a PDF and going over with it a highlighter are gone, I guess. (That was so much simpler…)

Here’s an article with some coverage of the TV and movie panels at the con. I’m interested in a few of those, but not necessarily the big “blockbuster” ones. And here’s an article about DC’s plans for the con. I’ll probably go to one or two of those panels. And here’s one more, about Marvel’s plans (mostly just the TV stuff). I might go to the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and/or Cloak & Dagger panels, if it’s convenient. (I’m not interested enough in them to wait in a long line though.)

It doesn’t look like Marvel is doing much at the con, outside of the TV stuff. I’m not seeing any comic book panels from Marvel on the schedule at all. DC has a few, mostly related to Batman’s 80th, and a “Meet the Publishers” panel with Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. So that kind of works out for me, since I’m not currently reading any Marvel books, and I am reading a handful of DC books, including a few Batman family books.

I’m glad to see some old familiar favorites on the panel list, including a few Mark Evanier panels, like the Mark & Sergio one, Cartoon Voices, Quick Draw, Cover Story, and a Jack Kirby tribute panel. I think he did all of those at the last WonderCon I went to, in 2008, and they were all great. And I just followed a link on Mark’s site to the WonderCon Quick Guide, which is a PDF including schedule grids that I can print out and go over with a highlighter, so now we’ve come full circle. I should spend more time looking at the Toucan blog today, since there seem to be a few things on there that I’ve missed.

Usagi Yojimbo

I was really surprised to read today that Usagi Yojimbo is moving from Dark Horse to IDW. (And also surprised to read about it in the NY Times. I never really thought of Usagi as being mainstream enough to warrant a NY Times article.) There’s more detail at The Beat.

I’ve been reading Usagi for many years. I gave up on the regular comic back when I gave up on all my regular books, in 2009 or thereabouts. I’ve been buying the trade paperbacks since then. I’m really surprised to see Usagi leave Dark Horse. Stan Sakai has been with them for almost 25 years.

I’m getting a little worried about Dark Horse. I hadn’t previously seen the news about them being mostly owned by a Chinese company now. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…) They’ve lost Star Wars, Buffy, Conan, and now Usagi. I guess Hellboy is the last big property that they still publish. (My idea of what’s “big” may be out of date and entirely wrong though. Their video game tie-in books are probably popular with the kids, but I’ve got no clue about that stuff at all.) I’ve always been a Dark Horse fan, going back to the days when they were publishing Boris the Bear. They’ve published a lot of great stuff over the years.

Anyway, I’m glad that Stan is still doing Usagi. It’s always been a great book, and a nice change of pace from most of the other stuff out there. And Stan has always been a really nice guy. I’ve met him at the San Diego con several times over the years, and gotten some of the early trade paperbacks signed by him.

I’m actually several volumes behind in my reading right now. I still haven’t read Senso, and I think I’ve got volumes 27 to 30 of the regular series on my “to be read” shelf. Maybe I should read one of those this weekend.

WonderCon Anaheim 2019

I haven’t been to WonderCon since 2008, back when it was in San Francisco. They moved it to Anaheim several years ago. (And I haven’t been to Anaheim since 2001, apparently.) So it’s time.

I bought the tickets for WonderCon back in mid-January. They were refundable through to mid-February, so I’ve been going back and forth over the last few weeks as to whether I was going to book a flight and hotel, or if I should back out and get a refund on the tickets. I finally decided tonight to just go ahead. So now I have everything pretty much set to fly out to Anaheim on March 28 and back on April 1. The con itself is March 29-31.

I think this is actually going to be my first vacation outside the NY/NJ area since 2012, when I last went to the San Diego con. (I did go on a business trip to Redmond last year, but that doesn’t count. I’m also not counting my trips to Washington DC and Georgia in 2014 or Florida in 2015, since those were all death-related.) Air travel is expensive, inconvenient, and painful these days, but it’s worth doing once in a while. And I’ve left myself enough of a buffer zone so that I’m not taking any red eye flights or running straight from the con to the airport, or anything like that. And I’m hoping that late March is close enough to spring that I won’t get caught up in any snowstorms on the way out or back.

When they first moved the con out of San Francisco, I hoped that it was temporary and that they’d move it back, since I kind of like San Francisco. But I guess they’ve done better with it in Anaheim, so they’re keeping it there. Anaheim seems kind of boring to me, as an old weirdo with little interest in Disneyland. But the weather should be nice, and I can probably find enough stuff to keep me occupied with just the con. There’s no programming detail posted yet, but the guest list looks good.

Stumbling Through

I’m taking a scheduled day off from work today. My original plan was to go into NYC and see the new Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library. But I started feeling sick earlier this week. And it started getting really cold. Yesterday started out at 1° F, with a “feels like” temp of -12°. So I called in sick yesterday. If not for the weather, I probably could have stumbled through work yesterday and even made it into New York today, but it got to be too much. Today is a little warmer. It started out at 5° (at 6am), and is now up to 14° (at 10am). But that’s still cold enough that hopping on a train to New York seemed like a bad idea. So I’m cocooned in my apartment, trying to stay warm and comfortable.

I didn’t leave the apartment at all yesterday, and spent most of the day reading comics, listening to podcasts, and watching TV. I’m being a little more productive today. I actually left the apartment (to take out the garbage), and I’m currently working through my to-do list, getting some tax stuff organized and taking care of some other miscellaneous paperwork.

I was doing a lot of stuff on my desktop PC this morning, and it had been working fine, but it decided to crash again, about a half-hour ago. I thought I was going to have to reinstall Windows again, but after a few reboots, it came back up, and has been working fine. My faith in Windows 10 in general, and this PC in particular, is getting pretty shaky. I still really don’t want to have to buy a new PC right now, but I might have to. I have other things to worry about right now, so I’m going to hope for the best. But if it keeps crashing, I’m going to have to think about either getting a new PC or maybe giving up on Windows 10 and switching my desktop machine over to a Mac Mini or something like that.

Anyway, that’s not really what I wanted to blog about today. I had a few subjects I was going to cover. First, I was going to return to my comic book indecision post from late last year. The news that St. Mark’s Comics is closing got me thinking about that again, along with a couple of articles related to the DC Universe service. (Specifically: Young Justice sounds pretty good, and the comic book library associated with DC Universe is getting bigger.) I was never actually a regular customer at St. Mark’s, but it was a pretty well-known store in NYC. I still like the idea of supporting independent brick-and-mortal comic book shops, but it’s not really practical for me to do that right now, even with the shop that’s right across the street from me.

I’m also still not ready to switch to all-digital though. I’m going to hang in there with Westfield for a few more months, at least until the end of Warren Ellis’ Wild Storm series. After that, though, I may stop buying monthly books again. I’m looking at my pile, and I see that I’m about a year behind on some of my books. So I’m probably going to need to take a break.

I had a few other things I wanted to blog about, but I should probably stop now. It’s almost 11am, and I want to actually read a few comics today too. I read Christopher Priest’s run on Justice League yesterday, and I want to try getting through maybe a dozen issues of something or other today. I still can’t decide what though. And I probably won’t make it through a dozen comics today either. I’m actually feeling like maybe it’s time for a nap now.

New Year’s Day 2019

It’s 7am on New Year’s Day, and I don’t have anything big planned today, so I might as well get started on my traditional New Year’s Day blog post. I’ve been doing this for several years now. Here are some links to the last few posts:

Weight, Sleep, and General Health

My general health was been OK this year. I had blood work done a few weeks ago, and it looks very similar to 2017’s blood work.

My weight has been pretty steady for the last few months. I was 140 on New Year’s Day last year, and I’m 135 now. I’ve been steady at 135 for a while now, +/-2. Last year, I wrote “I can’t see myself dropping to 135, but we’ll see.” Well, I did drop to 135. This year, I’ll say that I can’t see myself dropping to 130. If I do, then that might actually indicate a problem. My doctor this year actually asked me if I wanted to put on a little weight, or if I was OK as-is. I think I’m fine, but if I drop another 5 pounds in 2019, that might be a problem.

I’m still using Lose It every day, and recently paid for a lifetime subscription.

I’ve been doing OK with exercise, relying on the Apple Watch to keep track of things and give me a little nudge now and then. I got a new Series 3 Watch for Christmas, so I’ll likely be sticking with that. My move goal was 440 for a while earlier in the year, but has been adjusted down to 390. I generally hit that goal 5 or 6 days per week.

Sleep is still an occasional problem. I did OK (but not great) last night, and I’ve had a few bad nights recently. I still use Sleep Cycle to track my sleep. I’ve cut back on caffeine a bit, but probably not nearly enough.

I’ve been meditating on and off this year. I had a little streak going back in October, but I stopped again and haven’t started back up. When I do meditate, I’m using Insight Timer. I’ll likely stick with that. I want to get back to meditating regularly. If Bill Gates can find time to meditate for 10 minutes a few times a week, so can I.

My vision is continuing to go downhill, though I haven’t had anything really bad happen yet. (Given my family history, I’m kind of expecting that I’ll be legally blind at some point in my 60s, though maybe I can avoid that.) I went to my eye doctor earlier this month and got a prescription for progressives, so I’ll get that filled at some point this month and see if I can get used to those, and if they help me with computer work and reading. We have a vision plan at work now, starting in 2019, so I can at least get those at a discount.

My hearing is also going downhill. I haven’t seen a hearing doctor yet, though I plan to do that in 2019. I’ve been following advances in hearing aid tech, so I hope that, if I need a hearing aid, I can at least get a good one that works with my iPhone and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I signed up for AARP last year too. I’m hoping I can get some useful information out of that in 2019. I’m trying to be proactive about aging, from both a health and finance standpoint.

Work

I hit the five-year mark at SHI in January 2018. I spent a lot of time this year working on a project related to Microsoft’s Partner Center, so I got to do a good bit of C# programming this year, and got to play with a few things in Azure, so that was good. This year, we should be opening a new warehouse, so that’s going to keep us busy, with related projects.

I, once again, got a very good performance review from my boss this year. I’m not going to get too specific, in case any coworkers stumble across this post, but I’m doing well.

Professional Development

I didn’t do any structured professional development this year, really. I watched a few Pluralsight courses, mostly related to specific stuff I needed to learn for work. Looking at my Goodreads history, I see that I read a handful of programming-related books this year:

Wow, that’s actually a longer list than I thought it was going to be. Some of those aren’t really programming books, like “Hit Refresh,” Satya Nadella’s book, and some are just short ebooks, but it’s still enough that I feel like I put some effort into keeping my skills sharp and staying current.

Finance

I did a quick year-end finance review over the weekend, and it’s a bit depressing. Any gains I had for the year were soundly wiped out by the recent stock market plummet. But, ignoring that, I can at least say that I have things in order. I did a little bit of reorganization in 2018, including moving some money from my legacy Merrill CMA account to a new CMA Edge account, where I can do my own trading online. I invested some money there into a couple of Vanguard index funds. I read John Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing in May, and I’ve tried to reorient my finances in a more “Boglehead” direction, though I still have a lot of old-style mutual funds. I also made an attempt to book a session with an independent financial advisor, but failed to find someone who looked good and was willing to take on a new client. I should probably try again in 2019, since I really should have someone else look at things, given my age and the somewhat haphazard state of my portfolio.

Reading

According to my Year In Books on Goodreads, I read 106 books this year. A lot of those are actually short stories, short ebooks, and comic books, but I did read a fair number of novels this year too. I participated in a Great American Read group on Goodreads, and read a number of books that were outside my comfort zone. I posted about that in November. I’ve finished a few more TGAR books since then (Lonesome Dove, The Lovely Bones, and Lu), and started To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the winner of the TGAR poll.

I should note that I used my local library system a lot more this year than I have in previous years. I’ve used it for physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks. I’ve visited both my local branch, and the larger Bridgewater branch multiple times. So I’m thankful that we have such a good library system here in Somerset County.

As to comic books, I posted in December about my current indecision about sticking with Westfield for buying new comics, or maybe just giving up on buying new monthly books for awhile. I think I’m probably going to stick with Westfield for a few more months, at least, but I’m not sure. The reading pile is getting too big again. I’m pretty sure that I’ll stop buying monthly comics at some point this year though.

Looking at my Goodreads 2018 list again, I see a lot of Batman and Batman-adjacent stuff this year. Probably my favorite comic book read of the year would be Warren Ellis’ The Wild Storm series.

In terms of general reading goals for 2019, I want to (finally) read a couple of books on meditation that I bought early last year, Search Inside Yourself and 10% Happier. I also want to read this book on “finances after fifty” that I bought last year. I don’t have any specific goals related to fiction reading. I have a bunch of books piled up that I’d like to read, that I didn’t get to last year, including Ready Player One, and several other science fiction novels. I put off some of my genre reading in favor of TGAR books last year. I’m glad I did that, but I’d really like to get back to some SF. My “want to read” list in Goodreads has 308 books on it right now, so I’ve got plenty to choose from.

Summary

I’m skipping over a few things I could include here, but it’s now almost 10am, and I have a few things I want to do today, since it’s stopped raining and it’s reasonably warm out. So this post will be a little shorter than last year’s. Maybe I’ll write some follow-up posts over the next few weeks.

end-of-year comic book indecision

It’s getting near the end of the year, so I’m probably going to be posting a bunch of end-of-year review stuff over the next few weeks. Today’s end-of-year thoughts are all about how I’m buying comic books. I posted back in July and August about my decision to stop buying most of my comics from my local comic shop and switch back to Westfield Comics. Westfield has been fine, but I see now that I’m falling far enough behind in my reading that I’m probably going to have to give up on buying monthly books again and take a year or two to catch up.

It’s tricky deciding when to jump off the bandwagon though. I kind of like the idea of finishing Warren Ellis’ The Wild Storm series in print. There are six issues to go on that, so that would keep me buying monthly books until the middle of next year. Also, Tom King intends on writing 100 issues of Batman. So if I decide to keep following Batman through King’s whole run, I’ll be buying monthly books all through 2019 and into 2020. Of course, if I fall far enough behind on Batman, then it gets cheaper to just buy the collected trades rather than the single issues, and I can see myself doing that. I think I’m about 12 issues behind right now. (It’s easy to fall behind on a biweekly series.)

And I should probably consider the advantages of giving up on print and just sticking with digital. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about the way digital comics are sold/rented, but there are some serious advantages too. Looking at how much I’m spending on comics, I could actually sign up for ComiXology Unlimited, Marvel Unlimited, and DC Universe, and still be paying less per month than I’m currently spending on print comics.

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.