We Become What We Deserve To Be, by Elayne Riggs
It’s now been three days since NY Comic Con 2008 ended, but I had to save my con report until now because it usually takes me this long to fully recover and gather my thoughts. The older I get and the more convention time I’ve logged, the more a few patterns begin to present themselves, and this con pretty much ran the gamut for me.
Friday was our longest stint at the con, and is pretty much a blur to me now. I’d had no set plan other than touching base with the ComicMix office and wandering around Artists’ Alley to see friends, but I was determined to give the exhibition hall as thorough a perusal as possible during the "trade only" portion of the con in the morning. But between the non-comics media stuff and the dealers in which I had little interest, it all ran together far sooner than I’d expected, and I quickly found myself in "seen one, seen ’em all" mode, wishing I’d prearranged specific meetups with blog friends and such. Thing of it was, though, I wanted to wing it. I’ve had to insert so much structure into my life what with the job search that I just wasn’t up to organizing anything having to do with fun, leisure activities.
Speaking of organization, I should mention that this was hands-down the best run NYCC yet, even with the reported surge in attendance. The volunteers were helpful without being intrusive, polite to a fault (one even asked if we needed help finding anyone in Artists’ Alley) and extremely professional. What a total pleasure! We saw a queue on Friday to get into the Javits, but nothing like the chaos of previous years. And here I must confess that part of the reason we may have seen only the sunny side was that we’d decided to truncate our time on Saturday and Sunday to about four hours rather than the entire day.
We have to face facts — these days, even in our home town, a full convention day takes a lot out of us, between all the walking and the hour-plus bus rides (which turned into two hours going back, as the crosstown bus from the Javits tended to arrive at Sixth Avenue moments after our express bus departed, leaving us to wait another 30 minutes for the connection). We’re not about to keel over or anything, we make it up and down the two flights between our apartment and the sidewalk just fine, but neither are we cut out any longer for the more frenzied activity we could handle ten years ago. (more…)
It’s a new week and a new round of comic books and DVDs to ponder, plus:
or 
I’m not certain whether anyone determined if webcomics were a threat, a menace or a combination of the two during Saturday’s "Webcomics: Threat or Menace" panel at New York Comic Con, but it was a lively discussion all the same.
Fifty-nine weeks ago 
Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Vol. 15
and of H.P. Lovecraft’s “[[[The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath]]]” – that each take up about a third of the book, and some shorter pieces that fill up the rest. They’re all fantasy, as advertised, but they’re very different kids of fantasy from each other – many, in fact, consider [[[Frankenstein]]] to be science fiction, indeed the ur-SF novel – and none of them are much like what’s mostly found in the “Fantasy” section of a bookstore. There are no Tolkienesque elves or post-[[[Buffy]]] vampire lover/killers here.
Well, 
In today’s brand new episode of 
A few months back, retailer Gordon Lee escaped prosecution when a mistrial was declared in the case against him for distributing obscene material. Today comes word the case 
