Category: comics

The day started out a bit rainy and windy, so I got a little wet on my way to the Moscone Center this morning, but it was nice and clear when I surfaced at 5pm. Hopefully, everything will be fine for the flight home tomorrow.

I bought a few comics today, including the first ten issues of the Justin Gray / Jimmy Palmiotti Jonah Hex book. I’ve heard good things about it, so when I saw the issues in somebody’s dollar boxes, I grabbed them.

I spent most of the day in panel rooms. I went to the Tim Sale panel, the Wildstorm panel, and the Art of the Cover panel that Mark Evanier does every year. That’s always fun.

Finally, I ended the day watching the New Frontier movie. I was quite impressed with it. I think they captured the essence of the original Darwyn Cooke comic reasonably well. The animation, character design, and overall look of the movie was great. I was afraid that it would all be watered down, but it was very well done and true to the original.

Overall, it was a great con. Not too crowded, but certainly not empty. Plenty of good guests and interesting panels. Definitely a good little late-winter vacation!

It’s Sunday morning in San Francisco, and the big storm is hopefully going to peter out today. At some point, I’ll have to leave the hotel and meander down to the Moscone Center. Hopefully, I won’t get too wet doing that. I had a good day at the con yesterday, but I got pretty wet coming back from the convention center at the end of the day. I wound up watching the Chinese New Year parade on TV and ordering a burger from room service.

Friday and Saturday were both good days at the con. I saw Bill Willingham on Friday. I haven’t been reading Fables, but I picked up the first trade at some point last year, and it’s in my reading pile. I picked up a couple more trades yesterday, at half-price, then ordered a few more from Amazon, so I’ll have the first six volumes to read.

I picked up the first four trades of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible series at half-price yesterday too. That’s another series I’ve been meaning to read, but just haven’t gotten around to.

I saw JMS at a few panels: his spotlight panel, a writing panel, and one of the DC panels. He’s involved in some pretty cool stuff right now. He’s got several film projects going on, including the film version of World War Z, which sounds like it ought to be fun. On the comics front, he said that he’d continue doing some work for Marvel, but he’s no longer exclusive to them, and he’ll now be working for DC also. He didn’t say what he’d be working on at DC though. And he said he’s got a couple of creator-owned projects in the works that will be published by Image. All good stuff. It sounds like there’s a possibility of more Babylon 5 DVD projects, given the sales on the Lost Tales DVD, so that’s also good news.

Another funny video from MJHibbett.

I spent a little time today looking through the various tributes to Steve Gerber that have been popping up on the web. There’s a good one at The Comics Reporter, and another one at The Beat.

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.

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.

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.