Category: comics

NYCC day two

It’s Friday and I’m back in my hotel room. I have once again paid for the expensive hotel WiFi, so I might as well type up and post a little con report.

As an experiment, I’m typing this up in Drafts, using Markdown. I’ll paste it into WordPress when I’m done. Yesterday’s post was written via the normal WordPress post editor. I guess I’d never used that on the iPad before. It works, but it’s got some really annoying quirks, which might be related to the Bluetooth keyboard. So we’ll see how Drafts works out.

Getting into the con today was, again, not terribly hard. I got down a little earlier than yesterday. The line to get to the security checkpoint was actually a bit shorter than yesterday. But I got through that around 9:30, after which we all had to wait around outside until they opened the convention center doors, which they did around 9:45. After that, it was easy enough to get in and up to the show floor.

I once again wandered around the main show flow without buying anything. I then had a little lunch, which was overpriced (expected) but pretty good (unexpected).
I went to two panels after lunch. The first was hosted by Collider, which is apparently a pop-culture web site that has a few video podcasts going. I wasn’t really familiar with them. I went to the panel mostly because the description mentioned Robert Meyer Burnett and Chris Gore, both of whom I’m familiar with, but neither of whom made it to the panel. So it was a panel of four or five people I’ve never heard of. But they seemed cool, so now I guess I should check out their site and videos.

I then went to a panel called Why Will Eisner Still Matters at 100. They scheduled this panel at the same exact time as a Jack Kirby 100th birthday panel, so it was pretty hard deciding which one to go to. But the Eisner one looked like it would be less crowded, and possibly more interesting, and I guess that, if I have to pick between Eisner and Kirby, I’ll pick Eisner. (But please don’t make me pick!) It was a nice overview of Eisner’s career and influence, with some reminiscences from people who have worked with him, including Jules Feiffer (via a video clip), Denis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Michael Uslan, and Danny Fingeroth. As a long-time Eisner fan, they were mostly covering stuff that I already know, but there were some good little anecdotes in there that I hadn’t heard before. And it’s always nice to see a little slideshow of cool Eisner splash pages.

After that, I went back for another pass on the show floor, with the idea that I should really buy at least a couple of comic books, since it seems wrong to go to a comic con and not buy any books. So I found a dealer with a bunch of 50% off trade paperbacks, and picked up a couple. I got Resident Alien: The Sam Hain Mystery by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse and New York: The Big City by Will Eisner.

I thought it would be nice to pick up an Eisner book right after the Eisner panel, so that worked out. I was pretty sure I didn’t already have this one, since the cover wasn’t familiar, but I think it may actually be a repackaged version of a book I do already have. In fact, now that I’m paging through it, I’m entirely sure that it is. Oh well. I guess it can’t hurt to have two copies of a good Eisner book. Maybe I can give one away, and introduce someone new to Eisner.

As to the Resident Alien book, I knew I didn’t have that one, since I don’t have any of them. This turns out to be volume three, now that I’m looking at it carefully, so I guess I should get volumes one and two also. I’m familiar with the character through the story that was serialized in Dark Horse Presents, and liked it enough that I’d made a note to pick up the trades or back issues at some point. So now I’ve made a start on that, but not from the beginning. So, overall, I guess I didn’t do a great job of picking out these trades. But I could have done worse.

I left the con around 3pm, I think. I would have liked to stay later, but there wasn’t much else I really wanted to do, and I was getting pretty tired. After resting up in my hotel for a bit, I made a quick trip to MoMA. I’d forgotten that Friday is the night when they let everyone in for free, so it was really crowded. I hung out in sculpture garden for a bit, but that’s all. I’d had enough of big crowds for the day!

So now it’s 7pm and I can’t decide if I want to go back out, or just give up and watch Netflix on my iPad for a few hours, then go to bed early. It seems like a waste to get a hotel room in New York on a Friday and not go out at night, but I’m pretty worn out. Getting old is a drag. As to whether or not this mini-vacation actually helped me work out any stress: I guess it did. We’ll see what kind of mood I’m in when I go back to work on Monday.

NYCC Day One

I paid for WiFi in my hotel room today, and I brought my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard, so I might as well write a “day one” post for NYCC. I got to the con right around 10am. I had to wait in a line that was about a block long, but it moved quickly, and once I got past the entrance checkpoint, I had no problem getting onto the show floor.

I spent a couple of hours wandering the show floor and artist alley. Lots of cool stuff to look at. It was pretty crowded, but not unmanageable.

After lunch, I went to three panels. The first was a general DC panel with Dan DiDio and Jim Lee. (Grant Morrison made a surprise guest appearance, which was cool.) The second was a general Marvel panel with Nick Lowe and a bunch of Marvel creators. And the third was about the relaunch of the Milestone comics characters. (I was really stoked about that one, and it looks promising.)

So I got a good sampling of the usual comic-con experience. I’m back in my hotel room now, resting my feet and eating dinner. (In usual comic-con fashion, dinner was nothing fancy. Just a wrap I picked up at a deli.)

Since I’m staying overnight in New York, I should really go back out and do something tonight. But I may wind up streaming old Star Trek episodes on my iPad instead (assuming the WiFi here is good enough to handle video streaming). I did so much walking today that I’m really worn out.

My game plan for tomorrow is basically more of the same. The show floor is so big that I know I didn’t hit everything, so I figure I’ll have to do another hour or two of walking around. And there are some good panels tomorrow too.

So this is turning out to be a good break from reality, as I hoped it would be.

NYCC 2017

I’ll be going to NYCC this week. I’ve got tickets for Thursday and Friday only, so I’m taking a couple of days off from work, and making a little mini-vacation out of it. The last big con I went to was NYCC in 2013. (The last time I made it to SDCC was 2012. And I previously made it to NYCC in 2011.) I haven’t been going to a lot of big cons lately, in part because of how hard it can be to get tickets (SDCC) and in part due to lack of interest (NYCC).

But I’m glad I got the Thursday and Friday tickets for NYCC this year, and I’m looking forward to the con. I haven’t really taken any kind of vacation this year at all, so this will be the closest I come to a “real” vacation in 2017. I’ve even got a hotel room booked, so I’ll be away from home for a few days (though only about 50 miles away).

I feel a little guilty about taking a vacation right now and (presumably) enjoying myself, given the news from Las Vegas, and Puerto Rico, and probably a few other places. But not going to NYCC wouldn’t help anybody in any of those places. I’ll do what I can about gun control, and hurricane relief, and whatever else goes wrong this week in the world. But I’m also going to take a couple of days to enjoy some escapism and maybe get myself a stuffed Lockjaw toy.

Len Wein RIP

As reported by Mark Evanier, and many others, Len Wein has passed away. I wasn’t going to write a post about this, since I didn’t think I had much to add, but then Kurt Busiek posted a few pages from various Len Wein stories to Facebook, including the one below. It’s from “Never Say Die!”, a 12 page story from Adventure Comics 466. I bought that issue off the newsstand when it came out, in 1979. At that time, DC was publishing Adventure as one of their Dollar Comics. Basically, it was a 64-page anthology title, with stories featuring Flash, Aquaman, Deadman, and the JSA.

I remember enjoying all of the stories in that issue, but the Deadman story really stuck with me. In it, Deadman sees an old man preparing to commit suicide, and intervenes. (There’s a good synopsis of the plot on the wiki page I linked above.) It’s the kind of story that (at the time) probably couldn’t have been published outside of an anthology title. It was a little too weird and a little too dark. (The story can be found in Deadman Book 4, by the way, which includes his other Deadman stories from Adventure Comics.)

I’d forgotten that it was written by Wein, but I never forgot that story. I don’t remember any details about the other stories in that issue, or really in very many other comics that I bought around that time. This was probably one of the first comic book stories I read that broke the mold of the typical Marvel/DC 70s superhero story, which was the only thing I’d been exposed to, up to that point. (In a few years, of course, I’d be reading Cerebus and Love & Rockets, and I’d have a much more expansive view of the kind of stories that could be told in comics. But I digress.)

I’ve never really thought about Len Wein as being one of my favorite writers, but when I look at some of the comics I was reading and enjoying as a kid, some of the best of them were written by him, including this one. His Batman writing was also really good, including the Untold Legend of the Batman mini-series with John Byrne, and other stories that can be found in his Tales of the Batman volume.

Batman: The Animated Series

The one random thing I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post is the 25th anniversary of Batman: The Animated Series. I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about it, many of which are pretty pointless, but here are a few good ones.

B:TAS is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, and one of my favorite takes on Batman (and his supporting characters). This all reminds me that I only ever bought the first season on DVD. I should really buy (and watch) the rest. Or I could just re-watch them all on Amazon Prime.

 

Stuff I wanted to mention

There are a number of things I kind of wanted to mention on this blog, but that I probably don’t have enough to say about to warrant a full post. And they’re piling up in my brain, so I want to jot them all down, then maybe I can relax a bit.

First, today is the 80th birthday of Sergio Aragonés. I’m having a hard time accepting that he’s 80. I know he’s older than me, but the last time I saw him, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was over 60 yet, and that wasn’t that long ago. (OK, maybe it was five or ten years ago, but still…) Anyway, I have a bunch of his comics in my “to be read” pile right now, including a Groo mini-series, some of the Sergio Aragonés Funnies series, and a few issues of Bat Lash. I should really read some of those.

Next, I have started getting into Pere Ubu again for some reason. Probably because they have a new studio album coming out, so I must have seem something about that, which triggered me to start thinking about them again. I spent a little time tonight digging up my old Pere Ubu CDs are ripping them to MP3. I have five of their CDs, which is a decent sample of their output, but not nearly everything. (They’ve been around since the 70s.) Their web site is a lot of fun to browse through. It’s mostly text, not the usual graphics-heavy band site. The organization is somewhat idiosyncratic, but there’s a lot there.

And a couple of recent deaths: First, John Ashbery. I first read him back in college, as assigned reading for a creative writing class (I think). He’s one of the few poets I’ve read who has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking that I should read more poetry. And there’s certainly a lot of Ashbery poems out there that I haven’t read yet, so maybe I should start with some of those.

Second, Holger Czukay. I’m not sure where I first learned about him, but it was probably in a Matt Howarth comic book. I don’t actually own much (or any?) of his recorded output, as part of Can or elsewhere. I should fix that.

Labor Day

Things I did this weekend:

  1. Watched four bad movies, with RiffTrax commentary.
  2. Finished reading a very nerdy Star Trek novel.
  3. Read a few random comic books.
  4. Backed up my desktop PC with Macrium and my Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

And that’s really about it. I didn’t go anywhere, or do anything particularly productive or useful. I’d been running a number of vaguely interesting and variously ambitious plans through my head over the last few weeks, ranging from NYC museum visits to flying to Atlanta for Dragon Con, but I decided to punt and just relax. I made one half-hearted stab at watching a Pluralsight video, but I couldn’t get into it. I feel a little guilty about that, but at least I didn’t just give up completely and binge-watch NCIS all weekend. (That has happened. But not recently…) And I did manage to hit my Apple Watch activity goals every day, I think, so there’s that.

NYCC badge activation

I got my badges for NYCC in the mail this week. These things are getting very complicated. They sent me two badges, one for Thursday and one for Friday, and they needed to be activated online, similar to what you need to do with a new credit card. They’re RFID badges, and you need to tap them against… something… as you go in and out of the con. I guess I’ll figure it out when I get there. I had to give them my mobile phone number as part of the activation, and I’m hoping they don’t abuse that. (I think I probably gave that to them already for the “fan verification” thing you need to do to buy tickets, so I guess it’s fine.)

I guess the days of having a simple paper badge are long gone. The badges do look pretty nice, and they have photos of people from The Walking Dead TV show on them, so I’d probably think that was cool, if I actually watched The Walking Dead. (I’d much rather have, say, people from the Flash and Supergirl TV shows on them, but oh well.)

I do have a list of grievances about badge activation. I should probably just keep that to myself, but what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t use it to post a list of grievances?

  1. The activation number is printed on the badge in pale yellow on a white background.
  2. Each badge needs to be activated separately.
  3. There is no option at the end of the badge activation process to activate another badge under the same name. You have to start over again from scratch.
  4. There is no option to log in to your NYCC account and just pick up your name, email, and phone # from that. You have to type them in.
  5. There’s a sticker on each badge telling you to activate it. The sticker does not use the easy-to-remove adhesive that’s typically used for these things. I had to use a razor blade and rubbing alcohol to get the stickers off.
  6. Seriously, why do I have to activate these at all? They were bought online, under an account that’s already associated with my ID.

So that’s my list of grievances. I feel slightly better having written them down. (Insert old man yells at cloud image here.)

My bookshelves are a mess

Scott Hanselman posted a tweet yesterday with a photo of a bookshelf, asking people to reply with photos of their bookshelves. I was bored last night, so I took a few photos. This morning, I posted them to Twitter. A lot of other people replied to him too, with some cool photos.

I thought I’d post my photos here too. Of course, a large portion of my reading these days gets done via Kindle, iPad, and laptop, so my physical bookshelves aren’t necessarily reflective of what I’m reading these days.

It would be nice to have organized bookshelves, but what I have is really just piles of stuff, sometimes on bookshelves and sometimes on the floor or on various horizontal surfaces. It seems like the piles just grow, until they become structurally unsound, at which point I need to toss some books and/or reorganize. That’s one of the many reasons why ebooks are so great. I can buy as many as I want, and they never become a fire hazard.

I feel a little like I need to justify and explain these photos a bit, but maybe it’s better if I just let them speak for themselves. Or maybe not. The first one is a pile of random computer books, most of which I’ve read, but a few of which I never really got around to. The second is a pile of paperbacks, mostly Vonnegut, that I got from one of my brothers. (I can’t remember which brother.) I haven’t actually read most of them. (Oh, and there’s a couple of Ghost in the Shell DVDs on top of the paperbacks.) The third is some random SF paperbacks, all of which I have read. Mostly Gibson and Zelazny. The fourth is one of several “to be read” piles of graphic novels. There’s some stuff in there that I’m really looking forward to, including Grant Morrison’s X-Men run, a few volumes of Bill Winningham’s Fables, and some Usagi Yojimbo. (I’m a little embarrassed by the Vampirella book in that pile, but I’ll own up to liking Vampirella. It’s goofy cheesecake, but it’s fun.)

 

 

Not at SDCC, again

Once again, I am home in NJ instead of enjoying San Diego Comic-Con, since I (again) couldn’t get a ticket. I was entirely OK with this, up until this week, when the weather here in NJ got really hot and humid, and I started thinking about that beautiful San Diego weather. It’s been pretty brutal in NJ this week, and I could really use some nice moderate San Diego summer weather. I shouldn’t complain though; my air conditioning is working fine.

I’ve been following the news out of San Diego, but in a very scattershot way. The Beat and Newsarama have had some good coverage. I’ve watched some of IGN’s video coverage on my TiVo and on the web. And I’ve set up the TiVo to catch SyFy’s nightly show and Conan’s show from the con. All of this is a very welcome distraction from the usual barrage of disheartening political news. I even added “comics” and “comic con” as topics under Apple News on my iPhone, so now I’m seeing stuff about Batman and DuckTales in with the usual Trump news. I plan on continuing to nerd out on Comic-Con news through the rest of the weekend. If anything important happens in the “real world” I can wait until Monday to find out about it.