Category: comics

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.

Kirby and Eisner Humble Bundle

Humble has a pretty interesting bundle running right now, celebrating Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, who would both have turned 100 this year. It’s definitely an odd assortment of stuff. Most of Kirby’s work was, of course, work-for-hire, done for Marvel and DC, so none of that’s going to be in a bundle like this.

Eisner’s Spirit character was creator-owned (very unusual at the time). I think DC currently has the rights to reprint the original Spirit material, so none of that is in the bundle. Some modern Spirit comics, published by Dynamite, are in the bundle though. (DC published new Spirit stories for a while, a few years back, and I’ve read most of those. I haven’t read the newer Dynamite stuff.)

A couple of Eisner’s modern graphic novels are included, and those are all pretty good. (Of the two included, I’ve read one.)

For Kirby, there’s a couple of collections of his very old romance comics, plus some of his creator-owned stuff from the 80s (Silver Star). And some newer comics featuring his creator-owned characters, but done by other creators. I read the original Silver Star series when it first came out, and it’s pretty weird stuff. I haven’t read any of the modern spin-offs.

And there’s a bunch of magazines and books about Eisner and Kirby, including a bunch of stuff from TwoMorrows. So quite a random collection of stuff, of varying quality. But probably worth $15 or $20, given that some of that would be going to CBLDF and/or the Hero Initiative.

If you wanted to read a nice collection of Eisner’s original Spirit comics, Will Eisner’s The Spirit: A Celebration of 75 Years would be a good place to start. I was trying to think of something similar for Kirby, but I can’t really think of any one book that would be a good starting place. Maybe Fantastic Four Masterworks Vol. 1? Kirby did so much work for Marvel (and DC), it would be pretty hard to create a “best of” volume.

finishing Transmetropolitan

I just finished the final volume of Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan series. I bought the series from Comixology back in 2012, when they had it all on sale for some reason I can’t remember. I started reading it about a year ago. I got through about half of it last year, then took a break, then picked it up again a few months ago. It’s a really good series, and holds up well. (It was originally published from 1997-2002.)

I’ve been on an Ellis kick lately. I also recently finished his book Normal, which was fun little novella. I have some more of his stuff in Comixology that I might read soon too. But I’m also on a Grant Morrison kick, having recently finished his Batman & Robin run. (His Batman Inc stuff is up next.)

So I have a lot of good stuff waiting to be read. I went to Garden State Comics Fest yesterday, expecting to come home with some more books to add to the pile, but I wound up buying only one comic, out of a dollar bin. So I guess I spent more on gas driving to and from the con then I did on actual comics. I thought about going back to the con again today, but decided to sit outside on Division Street reading Transmet instead. I think that was a pretty good decision.

Joe Sinnott

Here’s a nice article about Joe Sinnott, from the NY Times, earlier this week. One thing that’s good about all the superhero movies coming out nowadays is that they usually kick up a handful of related media stories that can bring some attention to creators like Sinnott. (Though this article isn’t directly related to the new Spider-Man movie, it does mention it, and the article probably wouldn’t exist if not for the new movie.) I tend to think of Sinnott primarily for his long run on Fantastic Four, but that’s barely mentioned in the Times article.

The article is largely about Sinnott’s current work on the Spider-Man newspaper strip. It’s kind of cool that the Spider-Man newspaper strip is still running, and that folks like Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott are still involved with it.

Speaking of stuff that’s loosely related to the new movie, this exhibit at the Society of Illustrators sounds interesting. (I’m still a little annoyed that I missed their recent Will Eisner exhibit. That’s entirely my fault; I knew it was there, and I just didn’t get around to it. So I should make a point of going to this one.)

more on subscriptions

This post is a follow-up to this morning’s post about subscription software and services. First, it turns out that I do have a 7-day trial subscription to Comixology Unlimited. I got an email today telling me that it would expire soon and that I could convert it to a full 30-day trial, if I wanted to. But it looks like it won’t auto-convert into a paid account, so that’s nice. (It would have been even nicer if Comixology was more straightforward about it to begin with, but close enough, I guess.)

On the O’Reilly item, there was a discussion about this on Hacker News today. (And one on Slashdot, though I don’t pay much attention to Slashdot these days. And another on Reddit.)

In the Hacker News discussion, a few people mentioned the Safari subscription that’s included with ACM membership. This has always been a limited subscription, with only a small subset of the full Safari library, and a limit of ten books on your “bookshelf” at a time. Well, it turns out that ACM now offers full access to Safari, starting yesterday. (See this FAQ for details.)

While I’m pretty happy to have found out about this, I’m a little confused. A full Safari subscription costs $400 a year. An ACM membership costs about $100 a year. I’m not sure why O’Reilly would give away full access to Safari like this. ACM is a professional society, but (as far as I know) they don’t enforce any real membership criteria. Most members probably have at least a BS in Comp Sci, but I don’t think it’s a requirement. So I don’t know, now, why anyone would pay $400 for Safari when they could just give $100 to ACM and get Safari, plus the other ACM benefits. Maybe I’m missing something. Either way, I guess I don’t need to worry about buying any computer books any time soon. (I’ve been an ACM member for many years.)

This all gets me thinking about Pluralsight again. I paid for a one-year subscription back at the end of last year. I got some good use out of it for a while, but I honestly haven’t done much with it over the last few months. Part of the reason for that is that I was using it to get up to speed on SharePoint programming; I’m not currently working on any SharePoint stuff, so I really don’t need to finish watching all the SharePoint content I had queued up. Another reason is that they’re cracking down on streaming video at work, due to concerns about bandwidth usage. While Pluralsight is probably OK, I don’t want to risk showing up on any management reports, so I just haven’t watched any videos at all at work recently.

I don’t have any particular area of technology that I need to learn for work right now. I should probably pick something new to work on in my spare time. I could get back to F#, but I’ve read several books on that, and I don’t see much value in getting back to it without having a real project to work on. Or I could get back to Ruby on Rails; I really didn’t get very far with that, the last time I started working on it. I picked up some TypeScript skills on my last SharePoint project, and I can see where there’s a lot I could work on with TypeScript and modern front-end development in general. (There’s a lot I don’t know.) Or I could try to learn more about .NET Core, which would be more in keeping with the career track I was trying to keep myself on before I got side-tracked into my current Dynamics AX position. Oh, and hey, Swift looks interesting!

So I should really pick a topic, then watch some Pluralsight videos and/or read a book or two on Safari, and see where that takes me.

Subscription software, books, and comics

I found out this week that Day One is switching over to a paid subscription model, much like other Mac software has done over the last few years. (TextExpander and 1Password come to mind.)

Day One has said that they’ll continue to support users who have previously purchased the software, and not require that anyone switch over to a subscription, so that’s cool. (1Password did much the same thing. So did TextExpander, though they kind of stumbled into it after some backlash.)

I gave up on TextExpander, for various reasons, not long after they introduced subscriptions. I’m still using the non-subscription 1Password, and I’m pretty happy with it, though I’m thinking about switching over to a subscription. As to Day One, I guess I’ll keep using it for now. I definitely don’t get enough use out of it to justify a subscription. At some point, I may give up on it and just add a “journal” notebook to my Evernote account. I’m already paying for Evernote Premium, so that’s probably a good idea.

Meanwhile, it seems like subscription-based software and services are really getting pushed by a variety of companies. I got an email from O’Reilly today, saying that they’ll no longer be selling books directly, and pushing their Safari subscription instead. It’s still possible to buy their books from Amazon, so that’s good, but their own site was a pretty good place to buy ebooks, since they offered DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats (PDF, Mobi, and ePub). Oh well. It’s not clear from their FAQ if the ebooks you’d get from Amazon are DRM-free or not. Kindle books usually aren’t, but they can be. And I guess there’s no way to buy a DRM-free PDF of an O’Reilly book now. PDF is really the best format to have, if you’re using a book for reference.

Packt still sells DRM-free ebooks, but they also push their Mapt subscription service. The same goes for Apress: they still sell directly, but also push Apress Access, their subscription service.

On a semi-related subject, I think I may have accidentally signed up for a trial of Comixology Unlimited. I was trying to use the Comixology iOS app this weekend, and it was acting a bit funny. At some point, I briefly saw a screen saying that I’d activated a 7-day trial. I hadn’t purposely clicked on anything that should have done that, and I think the app crashed right afterwards. My account page says I don’t have a subscription, but I’ve noticed that eligible titles now have a “borrow” button underneath them, instead of an “add to cart” button. So, who knows? I have enough unread purchased comics in my Comixology account that I can’t really see myself ever needing Comixology Unlimited. I’ll just have to keep an eye on my account and make sure that, if I do actually have a trial, it doesn’t convert to paid.

Speaking of borrowing comics, I’m currently reading a well-worn copy of The Return of Bruce Wayne, borrowed from my local library. They have a pretty nice selection of graphic novels. And the Bridgewater Library (not far from here, and in the same library system) has an even better selection. So I could probably give up on buying comics altogether and just rely on the Somerset County Library System, if I wanted to.

Comixology problems

Last week’s big Marvel sale was cool, but it doesn’t matter how cheap the books are, if you can’t read them!

 

Warren Ellis – a useful quote

I find myself collecting little quotes from Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter, as I read through the backlog that I’ve allowed to pile up in my email. Here’s a good one, from July 2016:

Remember – your internet has an off button, and so does your news.  It’s okay to turn the volume down, and even to turn it off. There’s no shame in self care and pausing to take a breath before you re-immerse yourself in the world and its velocity.

…Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t skip work to watch the James Comey testimony today, if you want to.

Mysterious Marvel Kindle Sale

From Bleeding Cool:

A few days ago, unpromoted and for no apparent reason, Marvel titles on Amazon Kindle dropped. Really dropped. To between 70% to 97.5% off.

Very weird. Comics bought from Amazon for the Kindle can also be read through the Comixology app, and I’ve noticed in the past that the Amazon/Kindle price for a given book is often synced to the Comixology price. That’s definitely not the case here as, for instance, Comixology is running a one-day Spectacular Spider-Man sale, where most of their sale prices are more than the current Amazon prices.

I’m not sure what Amazon’s motive is here. It’s not an advertised sale, and the prices are so low, they can’t be making much money off it. Maybe they’re just trying to get more people interested in reading comics on the Kindle?

I bought twelve books on Friday, for a grand total of around $25. (I wasn’t going to buy any more, but I broke down and bought two more today.)

I’ve been trying to control my spending on digital comics. I buy a lot of stuff from Comixology (and Humble and Dark Horse Digital) when it’s on sale, then I just keep a running list in Evernote of what I’ve bought and what I’ve read. My Comixology unread list is at 99 items right now. Most of those entries are collections or runs of single issues, so it’s not 99 comics; it’s more like 999 comics.

But hey, as Dennis the Menace once said, “One thing I’ve learned in life is you can never have too many comic books!”

NY Times Magazine all-comics issue

The NY Times Magazine today is an all-comics issue.

It would have been impossible to imagine them doing something like this when I was a kid. Comics sure have come a long way, in my lifetime, in terms of mainstream acceptability. I haven’t read any of it yet, and the comics are mostly by people I haven’t heard of, but it looks interesting. There’s one story from Francesco Francavilla that looks promising. And one by David Mazzucchelli!

It appears that you can read the whole issue online, but I’m thinking about buying the dead-tree version of the paper today, just to have a physical copy of it. Though, as I look around my apartment, I think maybe the idea of bringing more paper ephemera into it is not a good one.