Category: comics

I registered for WonderCon today, and made my travel arrangements. This will be the third year I’ve gone out to SF for WonderCon. I was originally going to skip it this year, mostly due to financial considerations, but then I realized that I’m turning 40 about a week after the con, so this will be my very last vacation before I hit 40! (Not that my birthday has any real bearing on anything, but it seemed like a good excuse for going.)

Well, I just finished re-reading Watchmen last night. One of the recurring motifs in Watchmen is a clock that’s counting down the minutes until midnight. It is, of course, a reference to the doomsday clock that indicates how close we are to nuclear armegeddon. (This is also the inspiration for one of my favorite Iron Maiden songs, “2 Minutes to Midnight“.) I haven’t seen the doomsday clock mentioned much in the news since the Reagan years. In fact, I’d mostly forgotten about it until re-reading Watchmen. Today, out of the blue, I stumbled across an article announcing that we’re now at five minutes to midnight, the closest we’ve been to “certain doom” since the eighties. The last time the minute hand was moved was back in 2002. On the one hand, I should probably be seriously depressed that we’ve regressed so much, in so many ways, over the last few years. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel somewhat nostalgic for the good old days of the Reagan administration. There’s something bracing about being a mere hair’s breadth away from oblivion.

A couple of years back, I spent a little time looking into the comic strip subscription services that are available online. I blogged about it here, and what I wrote then is still mostly correct. At the time, I kind of lost interest in the subject, but I started thinking about it again this year. My local paper recently cut back their Sunday comics section from six pages to four, dropping some strips and shrinking others. It’s kind of depressing to read, knowing how much better the section could be, just by adding those two pages back, and changing the mix of strips a bit. The Sunday NY Daily News still has a good comics section, but I don’t get around to picking it up every week.

After reviewing what was available again, I decided to start up a subscription to MyComicsPage.com. They’ve got a couple of my favorite strips, namely Doonesbury and Foxtrot. Now, I know that there are plenty of ways to get those two strips for free, but it’s nice to be able to get those, plus a bunch more, consolidated into one nice page, and also to know that I’m contributing at least a little money toward keeping comic strip artists in business.

MyComicsPage.com has a pretty nice interface for putting together your preferred page of strips. You can reorder strips on the page, though you can only move strips up or down one position at a time, and the page does a postback every time you do that; someone really needs to add some Ajax to the interface there, and get current with the whole Web 2.0 thing. Also, the list of available strips is somewhat misleading, since they include a bunch of discontinued strips that are available in the archives, but are not really available for your daily page. They list Spanish language strips in a separate section; I really think they should put the discontinued strips into their own section too, just to make it more obvious which strips are still alive. One nice thing they have is a “collection” feature, where you can store links to specific strips you like. (I started a collection of anti-cat cartoons; that should be fun to maintain.) I should also mention that they have a number of good editorial cartoonists, too, including Tom Toles, my all-time favorite.

I ordered Absolute Watchmen from Amazon a week ago, and it showed up in the mail today. I haven’t reread Watchmen since it came out, but I’ve meaning to pull out the original issues and reread it for some time. Now, I’ve got it in a nice big hardback! Watchmen is a definite classic. The wikipedia article for Watchmen has a lot of good info, and links to a bunch more stuff.

Comic book writer Grant Morrison talks about, um, many things.

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I’ve been thinking about going to DragonCon for the last few years, but I just haven’t done it. Too much other stuff going on, generally. Look at what I missed this year, though: Klingons on motorcycles!

You know, I think this was the first year I didn’t see Caveman Robot at the con. This photo proves he was there, though. Plenty of other con-related photos up on Flickr, too, of course.

After initially deciding that I would skip 52 entirely, or maybe pick up the collections after it’s finished, I broke down today and went over to the comic shop and picked up issues one through twelve. I just finished reading the first issue, and it looks like it might be an interesting series. I’m still balking at getting all 52 issues at $2.50 a pop though. That’s a bunch of cash.

I’m done with the con, and back in my hotel room, trying to figure out how to fit all my stuff back in my luggage. I think I’ll get everything packed away OK, but I’m wondering how it will all look by the time I get back to Newark. Hopefully, everything will still be in one piece.

Looking back, I think I did most of the things I like to do at a con:

• Ric Meyers’ kung-fu thing.
• A few DC and Marvel panels.
• A couple of the panels done by the CFQ guys. (This year, the movie preview and Robot Rumble panels.)
• A couple of Mark Evanier’s panels. (This year, the cartoon voices panel, and a panel on cover art.)
• A couple of TV or movie panels. (This year, BSG and Blade.)
• I picked up a few cheap TPBs from TFAW’s “nick and dent” sale.
• I picked up a few books from Mile High’s “last hour of the con” 50% off sale.
• I picked up a stack of books out of somebody’s $1 box.
• I picked up a couple of action figures. (Hellboy and the Ikki Tousen figure I mentioned in a previous post.)

As usual, I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be going back next year. I probably will, but the con is getting so big it’s almost a hassle to deal with it. I find that I can still have a good time, if I set my expectations correctly. I don’t assume I’m going to get into any particular panels, or get any specific signatures, or anything like that. That generally works.