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New York Comic Con: The Brain-Dump Roundup

  • News
  • April 23, 2008

Here we are, two days after the beast that is New York Comic Con settled back into hibernation, and all that’s left of the big show are piles of discarded promo cards, comics with dinosaurs fighting tanks, and a bunch of skrull masks missing their rubber-band straps. Welcome to my post-NYCC highlight reel, folks.

All things considered, the convention was a fine time. Sure, the bar was set pretty low when you consider the debacle of the first NYCC show, but even when one adds all of the other recent conventions to the frame of reference, this year’s NYCC fared pretty well. With a few exceptions, it felt like just the right level of crowd — not packed to an uncomfortable San Diego Comic-Con level, but not the empty, depressing little ghost towns of Wizard World Texas and Philadelphia. The creators I spoke with seemed happy about the show, too. They weren’t hustling to cover the cost of their attendance or feeling frazzled by crowds, contradicting policies or inevitable scheduling issues that pop up at these types of events.

Friday was manageable, Saturday was tolerable and Sunday was actually somewhat relaxing. The temperature allowed attendees to dress comfortably — no winter jackets to increase the sweat level once you enter the building, and no oppressive heat outside to raise the humidity levels before you even reach the front door. The big programming dust-up on Saturday, in which a perfect storm of late-running panels and big-name guests prompted the convention staff to close the panel area for a short time, was the only major problem I had with the show — and only because it made me slightly late to the panel I planned to attend. (more…)

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Review: Chris Ware’s ‘ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18’

acme1-7237097ACME Novelty Library, Vol. 18
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, 2007, $18.95

My friend and former colleague James Nicoll once said “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” For me, Chris Ware fills the same function – Ware’s work is almost terminally depressing, but executed with such craft and skill that it’s impossible to look away.

This edition of [[[ACME Novelty Library]]] continues Ware’s current graphic novel, “Building Stories” – at least, that’s what this has been called before; there’s no page with that or any other title in this book – with a series of interconnected short stories about an unnamed woman who lives on the top floor of that apartment building. (Parts of this volume also appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2007 as part of their cruelly-misnamed “Funny Papers” feature – Ware might have been the most bleak thing in that comics space so far, but all of it has been serious, most of it has been dour and none of it has been funny.)

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We Become What We Deserve To Be, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • April 23, 2008

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…)

Happy Birthday: Steve Englehart

  • News
  • April 22, 2008

Born in 1947 in Indianapolis, Indiana, Steve Englehart graduated college from Wesleyan University and served briefly in the Army before moving to New York. He got his comic book start working as Neal Adams’ art assistant at Warren Publishing.

Art was not Englehart’s chief interest, however, and he soon switched to different areas, going to work for Marvel as a proofreader. Then he got the opportunity to write a story for Amazing Adventures, and from then on it was writing all the way.

Englehart wrote The Avengers from 1972 to 1976 and also wrote Doctor Strange, Captain America, and The Hulk before moving over to DC Comics to help revamp their core characters in Detective Comics, Superman, Flash, and other titles. Englehart left comics and the U.S. in the late ’70s and early ’80s to travel Europe and work on a novel, but later returned to design video games and created Coyote for Eclipse.

Englehart has since written Green Lantern, Fantastic Four, Night Man, and several others, and has written more videogames and several animated series as well.

ComicMix Radio: It’s Business As Usual Again, So Let’s Go Comic Shopping!

It’s a new week and a new round of comic books and DVDs to ponder, plus:

— The next step for the Wolverine manga series (art at right is not final)

— Stan Lee and his next “New Universe”

— Move over, Mickey Mouse, Marvel gets a a theme park!

It’s only been a a day, so you know how to press the button!

 

 

  And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via badgeitunes61x15dark-1575629 or RSS!

 

Jon Sable, Freelance: The End of Jon Sable?

  • News
  • April 22, 2008

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In today’s brand-new (and final) episode of Mike Grell’s Jon Sable, Freelance: Ashes of Eden, our heroes have only moments to defuse the bomb.  If everything goes their way, the bomb will only explode underground.  And if they’re not so lucky …

Credits: Glenn Hauman (Colorist), Glenn Hauman (Assistant Editor), John Workman (Letterer), Mike Gold (Editor), Mike Grell (Artist), Mike Grell (Writer), Shannon Weaver (Colorist)

More: Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden

 

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NYCC: ‘Webcomics: Threat or Menace’ Panel Report

  • News
  • April 22, 2008

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.

Gary Tyrrell of Fleen moderated a panel that featured an intriguing spectrum of webcomics interests, consisting of Rich Stevens (Diesel Sweeties), Robert Khoo (Director of Business Development for Penny Arcade), Richard Brunning (Senior VP and Creative Director for DC) and Jeremy Ross (Director of New Product Development for Tokyopop).

The discussion kicked off with a hard look at the definition of webcomics found in the convention programming schedule, and its curious (one would hope, tongue-in-cheek) view on the potential effects of the webcomic evolution:

There’s a dizzying array of different models for delivering comics over the Web, from Webcomics, to PDFs for a fee, to ad-supported PDFs, to PDFs as promotional tool, and behind it all is the backdrop of illegal file sharing of comics. Are comics on the Web going to be a tool to increase the popularity of paper products, an alternate distribution channel that takes sales from retailers and circulation from libraries, or a threat to legitimate channels as illegal downloads grow?

While all of the panelists agreed that the definition and potential implications of webcomics in the booklet left quite a bit to be desired, that was pretty much the only point at which everyone was on the same page with regard to webcomics, where they’re headed and what the ripple effect might be for print publishing. (more…)

NYCC: A Post-Game Analysis

  • News
  • April 22, 2008

comicart2-4363435Fifty-nine weeks ago I slammed the first two New York Comic-Cons pretty hard, so it’s only appropriate that I comment on this year’s jamboree. The previous shows were held in February, so the mere fact that people waiting in line this year didn’t have to suffer in below-freezing wind chills is, in and of itself, a vast improvement.

The show was better organized, crowd flow on Friday and Sunday was almost manageable, and the convention staff from Reed Communications (not the volunteers, who were great) drifted more towards being hospitable and informed. In fact, they were neither hospitable nor informed but you could tell that this year somebody suggested being so might be a good idea.

Saturday was pretty much the same premise as last year: “What if you tried to squeeze the entire population of Manhattan into a phone booth?” They claim attendance records were broken and that would be nice to believe, but it would be even nicer if they were at a venue where they could actually obtain enough space so that people could walk down the aisles without getting bashed in the face by an endless number of backpacks and tripped by an equal number of light sabers.

I can’t help but wonder what the show would have been like if god hadn’t helped out. Passover started Saturday and the New York metropolitan area contains a lot of religious Jews. And the pope was in for the weekend, so a lot of Catholics were attending one or another event. In fact, it looked like he was on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight panel.

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Review: ‘Fantasy Classics’ edited by Tom Pomplun

fantasy3-7944618Fantasy Classics: Graphic Classics Vol. 15
Edited by Tom Pomplun
Eureka Productions, 2008, $11.95

The “[[[Graphic Classics]]]” series most of the time sticks to a single author per volume, but not always – they’ve had [[[Horror Classics]]], [[[Adventure Classics]]], and [[[Gothic Classics]]] already, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more along those lines. (There’s no one chomping at the bit for a full volume of Sax Rohmer or Anne Radcliffe, for example, and it’s also a way to do more Poe or Lovecraft without doing a full-fledged “volume two.”) 

[[[Fantasy Classics]]] has two long adaptations – of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 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.

The book leads off with a single-page adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s “After the Fire” by Rachel Masilamani; it’s fine for what it is, but basically a vignette.

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The Holy See in NYC, by Dennis O’Neil

  • Uncategorized
  • April 22, 2008

Well, the Holy Father has certainly been all over the media this past week, hasn’t he? Just a while ago, I looked, briefly, at Benedict celebrating Mass in no less a venue than Yankee Stadium – lots bigger than the biggest cathedral – and judging from the shots of the stands, it was a sellout crowd; I wonder if the Yankees themselves attract so many spectators, even when they’re against the Red Sox.

Shall we seek meaning here? Dare we posit that a) this pope is super-beloved or b) the church he leads is making a comeback or c) both of the above?

I’m reminded of an evening in Chicago, about 20 years ago, that I shared with a comic book artist and an actor. I don’t remember exactly why we were thrown together, but it probably had something to do with a convention. The actor was featured in a movie I’d recently seen and kind of liked, though I don’t recall having any strong reaction to this particular man’s performance, which probably means that I thought it was all right. As a dinner companion, sitting across he table at a Chinese restaurant, he was nice enough – chatty and just a bit gossipy, without any hint of malice. Not a stupid man, but he didn’t dazzle us with his intellect or wit, either. An okay guy. And, midway through the evening, I found myself trying to make him like me. It seemed important that he like me. Why? The only answer I have is that he was a celebrity. His image was on thousands of screen. Passersby recognized him. He was privy to really big, major-honkin’ celebrities.

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