Category: comics

Steve Gerber

I just came across the news of Steve Gerber’s death. Mark Evanier has written a very good blog post about Mr. Gerber. I have very fond memories of reading his Howard the Duck comics when I was a kid. At the time, Howard was pretty much the strangest thing to come out of mainstream comics (e.g. Marvel and DC). And I loved Destroyer Duck too. The first Destroyer Duck comic would have been one of the first independent (e.g. NOT Marvel or DC) books I’d ever picked up.

Along with a few other guys, like Don McGregor, Steve Englehart, and Jim Starlin, Gerber redefined mainstream comics in the 70s and early 80s. I never got a chance to meet him or hear him speak at a con, but I loved his work, and it sounds like he was a nice guy. RIP.

San Diego Comic-Con hotel stuff

As usual, it was nearly impossible to get into the Comic-Con hotel reservation site when it went live today. Eventually, I got through. Nearly everything was taken by then, but I managed to snag a room in the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina. It looks like an OK hotel, but it’s not in easy walking distance of the convention center. And it’s right by the airport, so it may be noisy. I can cancel the reservation, if I decide it’s not worth it, but I think it’ll do.

There are a lot of interesting comments on the experience in this entry on The Beat’s blog, and more in the official Con blog. Lots of grumbling about moving to Vegas and/or dumping Travel Planners. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I actually find the whole process kind of fun. It takes just enough effort that I feel like I’ve accomplished something when I’ve got the reservation made, but not so much effort that it annoys me.

San Diego hotels

Comic-Con has started a blog on “Staying in San Diego.” Hotel reservations open up next week. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes. They haven’t even posted the list of con hotels and rates yet, so I have no clue how many hotels they’ve got deals with this year, or what the rates are. Their initial post in this blog even encourages you to try booking a hotel outside of the official con block, since that’ll obviously sell out quickly.

I’ve been scouting alternatives myself, and I haven’t come up with much. There are few downtown hotels you can book through normal channels, but they’re all $300+ a night. There are a couple of hotels in Mission Valley that can be had for under $200, but that’s a bit of a haul to get back and forth to the convention center every day. I think it can be done via the trolley, but I’m not sure about the logistics on that. One of the hotels I was looking at is across the highway from a trolley stop, but it’s hard to tell if there’s any way for a pedestrian to get across the highway.

Well, I guess I’ll try getting a room in the official block, and if that doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll consider skipping the con this year. The way the economy is headed, maybe that’s not a bad idea anyway.

Meanwhile, WonderCon is just a few weeks away!

too many comics

I just cross-filed the last two months worth of my Westfield shipments into my “to be read” pile. I’m embarrassed to say that, if I were to make one big pile of comics I’m waiting to read, that pile would be three and a half feet tall. (I’ve actually got all this filed into a foot-long box, a two-foot pile, and a six-inch pile. A 3.5 ft pile would be kind of dangerous.) I’m gradually cutting back on my Westfield orders. I’ve got 21 books total on this month’s order, which is a bit less than what I was getting a year ago (28 books on my January 07 order), for instance. And I’m pretty sure I’m not signing up for any weekly books after Countdown is finished, though I don’t know if DC is planning a new weekly book anyway. Either way, that’ll knock 4 books a month off the total.

Meanwhile, I picked up four trades at Waldenbooks today, since the store in the Bridgewater Commons is closing (as, apparently, are most Waldenbooks) and they had everything on sale for 40% off. I’ve got a pretty big stack of trades to read through too, so I didn’t really need four more, but hey, 40% off is pretty good, right? I picked up Black Dossier, which looks to be pretty deep and fairly strange, just judging it based on a quick look. And I picked up Buffy Omnibus 1 and the season eight Long Way Home trade. Mind you, I haven’t actually watched the season 7 DVDs, so I won’t bother reading the season 8 stuff until after I’ve done that, which probably won’t be for another year or two.

The fourth book I picked up was the first Moon Knight trade from the Charlie Huston run. I’ve been curious about that, but just hadn’t gotten around to picking it up. (I was a big fan of Doug Moench’s run on Moon Knight from back in the eighties.)

So, to sum up, I still have quite a lot of comics and graphic novels to read! I think I need to be careful about what I buy at WonderCon next month.

Spider-Man

I dropped Amazing Spider-Man a year or two ago, so I haven’t been following all the stuff leading up to the “One More Day” story. I’ve read a bunch of the online reaction to the conclusion to this story though. This article at Newsarama sums up some of the conflict between JMS and Joe Quesada on the matter. I don’t think that I’d be happy with either of their approaches to this story. It doesn’t really seem like a story they needed to tell at all. I do agree with JMS that Joe Q genuinely cares about the character, and is doing what he thinks is right. I’m actually wondering if they’re going to undo this whole thing at some point and just go back to Peter and MJ being married. The whole point of the story might be to set up an arc that ends with the whole retcon being undone. That might be interesting.

Either way, I have to admit that I’m not really much interested in the Marvel Universe right now. I did enjoy Civil War, for the most part, but I wasn’t too happy with some of the character changes made during the course of that event.

Happy New Year

I didn’t do much today, aside from watching football. I’m not making any major resolutions this year either. I did make all the arrangements to go to WonderCon today though. As usual, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go this year, but a few things convinced me to go again. Basically, a good guest lineup, plus a general desire to get out of New Jersey for a few days. And a chance to see the Chinese New Year Parade again!

I haven’t really done much reflection on 2007. Normally, I would get kind of reflective on New Year’s Day, but I haven’t really been in that frame of mind. Well, just for the heck of it, here are some things I’ve done in 2007:

Books and comics I’ve read and liked:

  • Absolute Watchmen
  • Nextwave
  • David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything (though I haven’t finished RFA yet)
  • the first two Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” novels
  • a couple of Jim Butcher “Harry Dresden” novels

Movies & TV shows I’ve enjoyed:

  • Paprika (my favorite movie of the year, for whatever that’s worth)
  • Once
  • Ratatouille
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Rise: Blood Hunter (okay, not exactly high-brow, but fun)
  • Torchwood
  • Life on Mars
  • Heroes

Music I’ve liked:

  • Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
  • Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
  • Paul McCartney – Memory Almost Full
  • Pizzicato Five – Made in USA (from 1994, but I’d never heard it until this year)
  • Derek and the Dominoes – Layla (I only just got around to buying this CD in 2007)

Pointless stuff I’ve spent money on:

  • new couch
  • iPod Touch
  • TomTom One LE GPS
  • Dell Inspiron laptop
  • MacBook
  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Motorola SLVR
  • 19″ widescreen LG monitor
  • Toshiba HD-DVD player

Things I didn’t get around to doing:

  • buying a new car (the old one’s still working, but maybe not for much longer)
  • checking out the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met
  • visiting the new Morimoto restaurant in NYC

Well, that’s just a bunch of random lists off the top of my head. I guess the two big things that happened in 2007 for me were the office move my company did (from Edison to Somerset), and my mostly successful implementation of GTD.

Heroes on Amazon

According to this article, new episodes of Heroes will be available on Amazon Unbox rather than iTunes this season. I bought the first season from iTunes, and I might find myself looking to buy digital versions of the show this year, too. It’s nice that they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot and choose not to offer it at all, which is what it was starting to look like after the iTunes thing fell through last week. I’ve rented a few movies from Unbox (downloaded to my TiVo) and the quality is OK. I imagine the quality on Heroes would be similar to the iTunes quality. It’s kind of annoying that Unbox doesn’t work on Macs though, so I wouldn’t be able to watch Heroes on my Mac if I got it from Unbox.

comic-con Sunday

Well, comic-con is over and done with for this year. Today was pretty mellow. I went to three panels — a DC panel, the second Cartoon Voices panel, and an “Art of the Cover” panel. All were great. Only the voice panel was uncomfortably crowded. I didn’t buy anything at the con today though, other than coffee. I feel kind of bad about that, but really, I’ve got plenty of stuff in my reading pile at home right now. The last thing I need is more books to read! Over the course of the con, I think I bought just three trade paperbacks, and several toys, most of which are for other people. I think this is the least amount of stuff I’ve ever bought at the con.

The NY Times actually has an article about the con. A decade ago, I wouldn’t have imagined an article about comic-con showing up in the NY Times; now, it’s really not that surprising. The article concentrates on the Hollywood stuff, mostly, which I completely skipped out on this year. I didn’t go to either Stargate panel, the BSG panel, or any of the movie studio panels. I never saw the inside of Hall H or Room 20 at all this year.

comic-con Saturday

Once again, I seem to find myself back in my hotel room early. I went to Mark Evanier’s “Quick Draw” and “Cartoon Voices” panels this morning. Both were great. Neither was overcrowded, or hard to get into. There was a DC panel right after the Cartoon Voices panel, in the same room, and I was going to stay for that, but I decided to make a trip to the bathroom, then try to get back into the room. That was a mistake; there was a big line to get into the room, so I gave up and wandered the floor a bit. Then, I went upstairs to try and get into a different panel, but I got there a few minutes late, and they’d filled the room already. I wandered around some more, then decided to go for a late lunch. I got myself a turkey sandwich and a beer, then headed back to the hotel, and here I am, blogging and enjoying the peace and quiet.

There’s an interesting article about the fire marshall over at Sign On San Diego. The photo they ran with it is a bit misleading, though. At first glance, it looks like she’s dressed as Prof. McGonagall. When you look at the picture more closely, though, you realize that she’s in the background, wearing her uniform, and the woman in the foreground is a random Harry Potter fan. (They couldn’t have managed a picture with the subject of the article in the foreground?) Either way, they’re doing a pretty good job of crowd control at the con, given the circumstances. I have to admit that I long for the days when I could just walk into any random panel five minutes late, and still get a good seat, though.

comic con – Saturday morning

I’m not sure whose wifi I’m using right now, but it’s working OK, so I’m spending a bit of time this morning browsing the blogs and news sites. A lot happened at the con yesterday, apparently. CBR has a whole bunch of stories up.

I have no idea what I’m going to do today. There are probably twenty different panels I’d like to attend, but, like yesterday, I’ll be lucky if I can get to two or three. Hopefully, I’ll have more energy than I did yesterday, though.