Category: comics

I left the con early today, largely because I was weighed down with so much stuff I could barely move, and also because I’d hit a lull in the programming where there really wasn’t anything I wanted to sit through at that point. I may head back in a bit to catch a panel with Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and Tony Harris. I’m not sure I’d be able to claw my way back to the Moscone Center, though, since the streets are starting to fill up for the Chinese New Year parade already.

I picked up a bunch of stuff today, mostly at pretty good prices. I got The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, which is a book I’d been meaning to pick up since it came out, a couple of years back. Really oddball stuff in there, including contributions from Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore.

I also got several Powers collections, volumes 5 to 8, at various discount levels. I’d read the first four volumes some time ago, but hadn’t gotten around to picking up any more. Looking at the dates on these, I guess I’m still not up to date, but I’m a bit closer. It’s great that Bendis continues to work on this. It’s different from his other Marvel work, and always a good read.

I haven’t been following Civil War at all, but I’ve been curious, and now that it’s done, I figured I’d try and pick up a set of 1-7. I found someone selling a set at right around cover price, along with a set of Civil War: Front Line also at right around cover, so I went ahead and got both. I’m not generally seeing Civil War back issues selling at below cover, so I guess people are still interested in this storyline, and some (like me) are just jumping on the bandwagon now that it’s over.

What would a con experience be without picking some stuff out of the quarter bin? Incomplete, I say. Brian K. Vaughn, during his spotlight panel, mentioned that he’d done a Ka-Zar annual early in his career, and I managed to find that in a quarter box. I also found some of the Jeph Loeb / Tim Sale Challengers of the Unknown mini-series, which Loeb talked about during *his* spotlight panel. I would have liked to get the Ka-Zar annual and one of the Challengers issues signed, just for laughs, but I may have missed out on my chance for BKV and Loeb autographs at this point.

I’m here in San Francisco at WonderCon right now. In a (perhaps) interesting example of Old Ways meet New Ways, I picked up Nextwave 1-7 from a dealer yesterday, for $15, then went on eBay last night and bid on a set of Nextwave 7-12. I won the auction at $7.50, so I now have a complete set of Nextwave 1-12 (with an extra #7) for a pretty reasonable price. Now, I need to go looking for Fell, another Warren Ellis series that flew under my radar, so to speak, when it first came out.

Mark Evanier has posted the list of panels he’ll be hosting at WonderCon. Looks like some good stuff, including a spotlight on Gene Colan, one of my favorite artists.

The main WonderCon site has an updated program schedule posted. They’ve got a Pixar panel on Saturday that I’m definitely interested in, with Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt.

I’m a bit worried about what the weather might do to my flight out of Newark, but it’s looking like the snow and rain will likely clear up by Thursday.

Mark Tatulli’s comic strip Lio is starting to grow on me. Very odd humor. Have you hugged your cephalopod today?

Once again, Wondercon will coincide with the San Francisco Chinese New Year parade. The initial programming schedule for Wondercon is up, too, and it looks good.

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.