L.A. and Vegas Vying for Comic-Con
As all interested parties get ready for this week’s Comic-Con International, a couple other municipalities are preparing to try to wrest the massive convention away from its historic home in San Diego.
Both Los Angeles and Las Vegas have their eye on Comic-Con, according to Variety. The event’s extreme growth has been a boon, but San Diego can’t handle the demand anymore, Comic-Con marketing director David Glanzer said.
That means Comic-Con may have to embrace the marketing mayhem that became a fixture of E3 before it downsized a year ago. So, even with the convention locked into San Diego for the next four years, cities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles are actively trying to lure Comic-Con away.
"We don’t like to go in and infringe on other people’s leases when they are in the middle of doing business," says Chris Meyer, VP of convention sales for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau. Nevertheless, he admits, "We will be down in Comic-Con 2008 to have some discussions."
The way he sees it, Las Vegas has some dramatic advantages, including twice the floor space and a surplus of competitively priced hotel rooms. Meyers notes, "I’ve got more rooms on my corners than they do in most of their downtown area."
Warner Bros. is apparently looking to emulate the success Marvel has had making its own movies, such as Iron Man and Incredible Hulk.
Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that not everyone gets the same education, even if schools and transcripts are identical. Some folk mentally compartmentalize: church goes here, family here, school stuff here, life in general there. So when they pass tests on what they’ve heard in classrooms, and at the end of a span of time, usually16 years and some august personage hands them a rectangle full of fancy lettering, they’re done with it. No more schooling, and no learning above what’s needed to live comfortably. Schooling in its compartment yonder, not touching this compartment, which is where we live.
I always thought Thomas Wolfe was full of shit. Of course you can go home again. Heck, with the Internets you can bring home with you wherever you go.
Ever since the Apple iPhone’s debut, tech-minded comic fans discussed it as the ideal platform to read comics in the 21st century. When your friends talk about it, it’s utopia dreaming. When the suits talk about it — especially if they can make money — it’s a step closer to becoming reality.
I first came across the concept of "safe spaces" for women when I was in high school. I went to an all-girls religious school (yeshiva) in 9th and 10th grades. The idea didn’t make sense to me at the time, separating boys and girls just when they were beginning to find out about each other, to really relate to one another as fully-realized people. I was convinced then that the segregation could only come to no good, that we’d grow up completely lacking in social skills regarding how to communicate with the opposite sex, and that it was all doomed to end in tears.
Leading North American manga publisher 
Over at Cinematical, Elisabeth Rappe responds to all the acclaim for Iron Man by 
made comic book movies big business, and we have yet to see a proper superheroine. Ant-Man is on a faster production track than Wonder Woman – and who is more recognizable to the general public? Why is Thor more palatable to the mass audience than Black Widow? I don’t buy that there isn’t a mass appeal for these stories.
I met Drew Friedman in 1990 through a long-standing friendship with his brother and then-frequent collaborator, the songwriter and social critic Josh Alan Friedman, while we were attending a cartoonists’ convention in Dallas as working artists and comic-book developers. Drew had built a reputation within the industry as a meticulously lifelike portraitist, capable of arraying tiny dots of ink into images of dreamlike accuracy that captured the soul – unflatteringly so, as a rule – as unerringly as it suggested a physical reality.
