Category: comics

Criminal

So, after having some thoughts about doing something interesting this weekend, I seem to have wound up doing very little today. I went out for a walk in the morning, and then spent some time installing Windows 8.1 Update 1 (or whatever it’s called) on my ThinkPad, and reading comics.

Specifically, I’ve been reading Ed Brubaker’s Criminal. I read the first series, with “Coward” and “Lawless”, a few weeks ago, and now I’m reading volume 2. I have V2 #1-7 in single issues, which I bought when they first came out. (They’ve been in my to-be-read pile for quite a while.) I stopped buying new comics not long after they came out, so I’ll need to pick up the rest in trades or hardcover, or on Comixology or something. (The series is definitely good enough that I will be reading the rest of it!)

I remember reading some of Brubaker’s early work in Dark Horse Presents, years ago, and really loving it. This series reminds me of that stuff, but a lot more mature. (Not that his Captain America work wasn’t great too, but that’s a very different kind of thing.) And the essays on film noir in the back of each issue are pretty cool; I’ve added several books & movies to my Amazon wish list based on recommendations found in those essays. The artwork by Sean Phillips is also great; just perfect for this kind of story.

a little more on digital comics

As a follow-up to my post earlier today, I spent some time today looking through my e-mail receipts for Comixology and Dark Horse Digital purchases, and made lists in Evernote for stuff I’ve read and stuff I haven’t read yet. First, let me say that I was surprised to see how much stuff I’ve bought, in both apps, but haven’t actually read yet. But now that I have decent lists to start from, I should be able to keep track of it all, going forward.

Thoughts on digital comics

OK, this is going to be my obligatory post on Amazon’s purchase of Comixology, and possibly some related topics, depending on whether or not I run out of steam before I get to all the stuff that’s in my head right now. 🙂

First, let me say that I have hundreds of books in my Comixology library. I can’t tell you how many, because Comixology’s web interface for browsing your library really doesn’t tell you much. (OK, picking up my iPad and looking at the app, I can see that it’s apparently 635. But there’s no way to see that on the web, as far as I can tell.) This is the main beef I have with Comixology, both with their web interface and their apps. Since their books are DRM’d, I can only store them and read them in the Comixology apps (and site), and they really haven’t put much work into making any of their interfaces really useful for people with more than a handful of books. Even something as simple as keeping track of read vs unread status across devices would be nice. They have said that they’re “working on it” and “we need to do this“, but they really haven’t done it. The iPad app will mark as “new” stuff that you’ve just downloaded and haven’t read yet. But that’s only tracked in the app itself. The “cloud” view doesn’t track when or if you’ve read something. And since they just replaced their apps with new versions, all that info from the old app is effectively gone now.

I’ve recently started using Goodreads to keep track of my reading for dead-tree and Kindle books, and I’m thinking that maybe I should use it for Comixology too. Though single-issue comics don’t fit well into Goodread’s model, really. Maybe I should just track them in Evernote? The thing that really clutters up Comixology is all the free comics. Not that I’m complaining about all the free comics I’ve downloaded from Comixology, but it can make it hard to find the stuff I’ve actually paid for. Even just having a simple user-contolled tagging system or folder system would solve this problem. How hard would that be to implement? 

Moving on to the subject of Amazon’s purchase of Comixology, this could be good or bad. Removing the in-app purchasing option wasn’t a big surprise. You can’t do in-app purchase in the Kindle iPad app either. I want to say that Amazon’s purchase might let them spend more money on both the web and app interfaces, and maybe implement some of the stuff I’d like to see there, but then I remember what the interface looks like in the Kindle app, and on the Kindle itself, and I laugh at the idea that Amazon might implement nested folders or useful tagging in the Comixology app. (Not that I’m bitter or anything..)

Meanwhile, I just recently bought Comic Zeal for my iPad, so I can have a nice interface for managing and reading my DRM-free comics. Previously, I’d used Goodreader to read some comics I had in PDF format. Goodreader is a pretty great piece of software, and it works OK for comics, but it’s not perfect for them. So I looked around at comics readers, and Comic Zeal seemed to have the best reviews. I’ve loaded a bunch of stuff into it, including comics I’ve bought from Matt Howarth and some stuff from Drive-Thru Comics. I really like the ability to organize stuff. It’s quite easy to put stuff in folders by series, to tag books, and to reorder the list of books. The software does keep track of your reading progress in individual books, but I haven’t found any option to, for instance, show only unread books. But really, since I’m only using it for DRM-free books, I can just delete stuff that I’ve already read, and just keep that stuff on my PC. In terms of the actual reading experience, I’ve found it to be a bit slow on page-turning for some PDF comics. I really haven’t used it enough to have formed much of an overall opinion yet though.

I’m thinking about picking up the Image Comics bundle that Humble has on sale right now, so that would give me a bunch of new stuff to load into Comic Zeal and enjoy. If I do that, and actually get around to reading some of it, then I’ll probably post a follow-up with more thoughts on how well Comic Zeal works in practice.

grab bag

OK, I haven’t written a blog post in a while, so this one is going to be a bit of a grab bag.

First, on the weight loss front, I’m down 15 pounds so far, over about eight weeks, so I’m losing almost two pounds a week. My plan was to shoot for one lb per week, so I’m doing fine on that. I’m also getting in maybe five or six hours of walking a week, which is pretty reasonable. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do when it gets too cold to walk outside though.

On the tech front, I picked up a new iPhone 5s a couple of weeks ago. My previous phone was an iPhone 4, so there’s a good bit of new stuff for me in the 5s, including Siri.

  • I’m finding that I’m not using Siri much, though it’s kind of fun and does seem to work well.
  • The fingerprint sensor works quite well, and I’m using that to unlock the phone most of the time now.
  • Overall, I’ve found that the speed of the phone is greatly improved over the iPhone 4, especially for certain things, like using the camera.
  • The battery life is pretty bad. I’m usually at 50% by the end of the day, and I really don’t think I do anything that crazy with it.
  • The iPhone 4, on Verizon was 3G. The 5s is LTE. I haven’t seen much of a difference in speed, in everyday use. But I haven’t really done much that would stress the network connection. In general, anything that relies on the internet connection over LTE has worked well.

I went to NYCC this year. I didn’t go to San Diego this year, nor did I go to any other conventions, so this was my one and only convention for the year. The con was very well managed, and very crowded. Getting in could take a while, but once you were in, it wasn’t that much of a hassle to move around. The exhibit hall was quite crowded, but navigable. There were a few interesting panels, but nothing quite like you get in San Diego. I bought only a handful of books, mostly discounted hardcovers and trade paperbacks. (I realized at one point that I still have stuff I bought at NYCC 2011 that I haven’t read yet.) I’m not sure if I’ll bother going next year. Maybe I’ll just go in for one day. It’s fun, but there’s not really enough interesting stuff to keep me occupied for all four days. (In fact, I wound up skipping Sunday and going to the Met and MoMA instead. The Magritte exhibit at MoMA is pretty good, by the way.)

comic-con blues

So I didn’t get to SDCC this year, nor have I really been following the news out of the con. I’ve caught a few things via Twitter, but haven’t really seen anything that’s caught my attention. Usually, there would be a handful of interesting tidbits coming out of the con that I could link to in a post like this, but there’s really nothing that seemed all that interesting to me. I’m sure there’s some really cool stuff going on, but either it’s not my kind of cool stuff, or I just haven’t stumbled across it. There’s been a good bit of coverage of the con on The Beat. (That link should show all posts tagged SDCC 2013.)

Still, I really wish I had gone to the con. This past week, the weather in NJ/NY has been brutal, while San Diego has been quite nice, apparently. Even just for that, I would have rather been in San Diego for the past week! If I don’t get a ticket next year, I may just go anyway, and enjoy the weather and some of the related events that don’t require a ticket.

Meanwhile, at home, I’ve been catching up on Fables. I’ve read volumes 6 to 9 of the trade paperback collections over the last few days, and I’m reading “1001 Nights of Snowfall” right now. Fables continues to be a really good series, and I’m glad to see that it’s still being published. I still have a ways to go before I’m all caught up on the collections, and after that, I could probably read Jack of Fables, and some of the other spin-off series. So, I can look forward to enjoying this series for some time.

Unfinished Stories

After going for a few months without reading any comics, I decided to spend a bit of time, over the last couple of weekends, trying to put a dent into the big pile of unread books sitting on the floor of my bedroom. In particular, I decided to finally read a few “orphan” books that have been sitting in the pile for, oh, five years or so. I read the first (and only) issue of Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target last week. And I read the three comics that Grant Morrison wrote for the Worldstorm relaunch of the Wildstorm universe today.

I thought that Kevin Smith’s “The Target” got off to a good start, so I’m disappointed that it never got past that first issue. I don’t really have too much to say about it past that; I think it would have been a fun story.

The Morrison Worldstorm stuff was quite interesting, though I’m not sure if it would have really gone anywhere, long-term, or if it would have wound up being a disappointing mess. It would have been fun to see where it went, regardless, but maybe its collapse was inevitable. One interesting aspect of it is that, for an “event” that only resulted in one issue of Wildcats, and two of The Authority, there’s a good bit of writing about it available on the web. I found three pretty interesting articles, one at seqart.org, another one here, and one more here. And all three are from 2011. (The comics came out in 2006.) So there seems to be something about it that has engaged people, even five years after the books were published. I guess that’s the nature of pretty much any “grand plan” stuff cooked up by Grant Morrison.

Speaking of Grant Morrison, I’ve got a couple of other random mini-series written by him in my reading pile: Sebastian O and Vimanarama. I picked them both up at the same time, out of someone’s dollar box at a convention a while ago. And both series actually ran to completion, so it’ll be a nice change of pace to read stories that actually come to an end!

CBG, RIP

I just stumbled across this article by John Jackson Miller, talking about the end of Comics Buyer’s Guide. I had a subscription to TBG (as it was called at the time) back when I was in high school. I didn’t save those issues, as it came out every week, and was mostly ads, so there didn’t seem much point. But there was some good content in there, from people like Don & Maggie Thompson and Cat Yronwode. And some nice covers by folks like Terry Beatty.

I let my subscription lapse at some point, but I picked it up again and read CBG faithfully for quite a few years, before letting the subscription lapse again a few years back. Even though I hadn’t been reading it lately, it’s sad to see it go. I actually think I learned a lot about a number of subjects unrelated to comics from CBG, mostly from Don and Maggie’s writing. CBG was always very well-edited and well-written.

I see that Maggie is now writing for the Comic-Con blog. And other former contributors have also been blogging at various sites — John Jackson Miller has The ComiChron, Mark Evanier has News From Me, Tony Isabella has his Bloggy Thing. So I still get to read stuff from some of the best writers who appeared in CBG over the years. But I’ll miss the good old hard-copy version.

A few things I bought at the con this year.

I’d been meaning to pick up Umbrella Academy for a while, so now I have two trades of that to read. And a couple of Incal books I found for $5 each, and a discounted Bryan Talbot Alice in Sunderland hardback, which now has a nice big rip on the back cover, thanks (likely) to the TSA. (I got the TSA note card in my luggage on both the trip in to San Diego and the trip back home. Not sure what they found interesting enough about my luggage that they needed to rifle through it both times.)

Comic-Con Day Four

I’ve posted a blog entry for every other day of the con, so I might as well post one more, for Sunday. My friend Bill came to the con, but only for Thursday and Sunday, so I had a chance to hang out with him again a bit today. That was cool, since I’m usually on my own for these things. I went to the DC “Young Justice” panel with him, which was not actually about the Young Justice cartoon, rather it was about several DC books featuring young heroes. I’m not reading any DC books right now, but it was interesting to learn a bit about what they’re doing. Plus, I got a free copy of Justice League #1, which means that I now own exactly one “New 52” book.

I spent most of the day in panels, going to the “Cartoon Voices II” panel, and a couple of others. I managed to avoid buying anything at all, other than coffee, at the con on Sunday.

The trip home was fairly uneventful. I managed to get a seat with extra legroom on the flight, so that was nice. And the flight was only a little late getting in. And the drive home went smoothly.

Overall, it was a nice enough con, and a nice vacation from NJ and work. I came home with some new books, but few enough that they fit in my luggage. (I still have a huge backlog of stuff to read, much of it purchased at past cons. But, as I keep reminding myself, that’s a good problem to have.)

Back at home, NJ is still way too hot, and the A/C in my apartment is still not quite working as well as it should be. So, here I am, back in reality. I’ve got tomorrow off, to get laundry done and try to get back on east coast time. Then, back to work on Wednesday.

Comic-Con Day Three

Last night’s Nerdist thing was fun. Also, much shorter than W00tstock, thankfully.

Today, I got into the con right at 9:30, and, surprisingly, walked right in the door, no waiting. The floor was actually not that crowded. I wandered around a bit, but didn’t buy anything. I went upstairs, and sat through three panels, all in the same room. First, a Marvel animation panel which included a screening of a very funny Spider-Man episode, where Loki turns Spider-Man into Spider-Ham. Silly, but funny. Then, the Quick Draw panel, which is always fun, and the Cartoon Voices panel which is also aways fun.

After that, I wandered for a bit, then went back upstairs for a couple more panels. First, a Roddenberry panel, where they talked about the movies and comics they’ve got going on, then Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics presentation, which was hilarious, as usual.

Then, I wandered around the Gaslamp for a bit, then hopped on a very crowded trolley back to Mission Valley. It’s now just about 8pm. I’d like to go back to the con now, but I’m really tired, and there isn’t much going on tonight that I’m all that interested in. I think I’ll just stay in for the night, and maybe watch a movie here in my room.