"Schrodinger's Cap" is a term explaining how Captain America can be alive in one Marvel title while dead in another title that comes out the same week.
I should have something more substantial later today but right now I've got a couple of different deadlines breathing down the back of my neck. Really, though, you should check out the comedy gold that is Hibb's post below. Just beautiful.
There are items that are our Grail markers from when we're young. Things we saw or did once, then only recall that we liked it -- not the why or the how of it. (though, really, this coming generation may not face that problem -- if all is digital, then all is "eternal")
For me, the first thing I can ever remember coveting was a comic book. An issue of, of all things, THE JOKER. #4, in fact, which features The Joker standing on top of the "Star City" bridge, holding (Black Canary) over his head, threatening to throw her off while Green Arrow looks on madly. It's this issue, actually
(This wasn't the first comic I remember READING - that would be JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #110 -- where John Stewart becomes Green Lantern after Hal Jordan slips on the soap in the shower and knocks himself unconscious just as a JLA emergency happens. I also vividly remember Black Canary (who made me feel very weird) getting absorbed by a giant christmas ball. There's also a JSA reprint in the issue, which is probably why I love the JSA oh so very much.)
I saw THE JOKER #4 in the window of a bodega several blocks outside of my normally allowed walking range (this was '75, so I'd have been 8), but I didn't have the 25 cents to buy it. By the time I finally got the money for it, and, presumably, got an adult to take me there, it was GONE!! We lived on Warren st. in Brooklyn, between Court and Clinton. The boundaries of my world were Court st. to the East, Hicks (or, really, the BQE) to the West, Atlantic Ave to the North, and Caroll st. to the South. The bodega was probably either on Smith, though I guess it could have been Hoyt -- but Court was the "big street", and I wasn't allowed to cross it by myself. Disturbingly, looking at a Brooklyn map today, it's probably just about where ROCKETSHIP is today... though I remember the bodega having a corner location, so *whew*
I probably had found a copy of THE JOKER #4 by 1980... though it seemed like forever to me. When I did my FIRST comics purge (I was 13 and I wanted weed more than comics), I sold it and never looked back -- it really wasn't that good of a story.
The second thing I remember coveting was the soundtrack albulm of THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH. I saw it in a store on Atlantic, but same thing, didn't have the cash (IRONIC!), and when I came back it was sold out. I'd seen the broadcast on what I remember being on PBS, and thought it was the funniest thing ever. That one took me much longer to find, probably well into my teens, though, of course, now you can just buy the film, AND the soundtrack from the internet, and the soundtrack has a score of songs that weren't on the LP.
The THIRD thing I remember coveting was something called MAD MONSTER PARTY? made by Rankin-Bass in 1969. It's claymation-whatever, just like RUDOLPH THE RED NOSE REINDEER or FROSTY THE SNOWMAN, but this one is Halloween and it has all of the monsters -- Dracula, and Frankenstein, and the mummy and the werewolf, and the Invisible man, and so on. It's also co-written by Harvey Kurtzman, something I didn't know until it was released on DVD last (?) year.
I saw MAD MONSTER PARTY? on TV on what I'm going to guess was '76 or '77, and it was broadcast (as far as I know) exactly the one time. It's obscure, and, usually, when I mention it to be they're all "Uh.... what?"
So I was pretty joyous when I found it last year on DVD.
Well, it's not very good, actually, but I, of course, bought it, because I had to -- it was a childhood Grail.
A couple of months ago, I decided that Ben could watch it -- the monsters are all cute, and what kid doesn't like that style of animation. But little did I know I was UNLEASHING a monster!
Ben, as he is wont to do (see: his Superman obsession, or his garbage/garbage truck obsession), DEVOURED it, and wanted more more more. He especially liked the Mummy, which led us getting him various books on Egypt and Pyramids and Mummies. He's probably one of a few 3 year olds in America who knows about Egyptian burial customs, and how they remove the brain through the nose, and stored the organs in canopic jars, and so on. He'll have a 10 minute conversation about mummies with you, if you'll let him.
A part of me kind of regrets it -- part of getting him into monsters is explaining what they are. He knows something about corpses now, and that's not a usual 3-year old topic, really. Some days I'm afraid I'm sending him down a path towards black fingernail polish, and hanging around Hot Topic. But then the other side of me says its good for him to start understanding that part of society's unconscious, and it will make him less likely to be afraid of those kinds of things as he gets older (he's had a few bad dreams in his life, but they're always "generic" monsters, not the Name ones)
His grandmother even made him some mummy "action figures", by wrapping some dolls up in gauze, and making him a "tomb" out of an old check box, and some 99 cent costume jewelry. Then, after we went to the Ginsberg's baby shower, where there were little micro babies frozen in the ice cubes, and Ben collected like 9 of them, he had us glue those to the roof of his tomb. It's really quite surreal!
Anyway, I bring this all up as a sort of a way to try to explain how impressed I am with Ben's brain being able to inter-relate concepts and intuitively build upon them. Ben's never seen FRANKENSTIEN yet, though he's seen the Dr.'s lab indirectly in books like (the TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME) Maurice Sendak pop-up book "Mommy?", or in MMP? and things like that. I've also verbally described how Frankenstein’s Monster was created, with lightning providing the spark of life. ("though, son, you should always be careful and respectful of electricity, because it can be very dangerous" "I know, daddy, don't worry.")
So today, he starts gathering up all of his action figures, and tells me they're a pile of corpses. Um, alright. Why are they corpses, though? The superheroes are there to help people not be hurt. "I know, Daddy, its just 'magination"; Fair enough!
Then he carefully arranges the corpses, and starts talking in the sing-song that all little kids do when they verbalize what's happening in their play -- I'm not even sure they know they're doing it, really -- "we need all of the body parts, I want this one's leg, here I'm taking the lungs" and stuff like that. He piles the bodies up between two dollhouse-bed-sized mattresses (meant to be the operating table, I think), then sets up this industrial-sized construction bolt (he likes me to hold it up to my neck and pretend I'm F's Monster), and says something like "and this is the Frankenstein machine", and then places 2 old dead batteries that we let him keep as part of his "garbage dump" on top and declares "then the 'lectricy strikes, wha-boom! wha-boom!" and tells me that tomorrow his Frankenstein monster will be alive.
Maybe it's just crazy proud-poppa syndrome, but, to me, for a 3 year old to make the intuitive leap between the electricity in batteries, and lightning, and to further assemble that all in his own "laboratory", to make his OWN monster is just pretty insanely smart.
Plus I told you last week how he's pooping in the potty solo? Well, the potty is upstairs in the bedroom (since he needs it to pee before going to bed, and that makes it harder to use bathroom breaks as an excuse to stay awake, with the production number of going all the way downstairs), and I usually sleep an hour past him. So, when he was doing his morning business, he'd yell out "Mommy, come upstairs and wipe my boo!", and by day 4 I was Grumpy McIwantToSleepMore, and I snarled "Dang it, kid, just wipe it yourself!" from my half-asleep bed. And so he did, and he hasn't gone back yet.
Man, that was easy!
Now all we got to do is get him to sleep in his own bed (we co-slept in the beginning because it felt exactly right. At year 3, I'm sorta sick of it), and he'll have made the full transition away from baby. I really can't wait.
He can freeze there, as far as I'm concerned -- childhood is something that shouldn't be rushed, and should be treasured as much as possible -- but I'll be happy once we're fully past the baby stage.
His brain, though... the kid terrifies me with how he's able to make conceptual leaps between topics, and apply logic to a situation.
Anyway, I wanted to tell that story... sorry it's only tangentially related to comics. I *will* be doing reviews sometime this week, and I'm sure Jeff and Graeme both will too, given the week's contents.
-B
Okay, so some of you may remember me mentioning Secret Writing Project X (as far back as here) and some of you have been kind of enough to remember and ask, "When the hell are you going to tell us about Secret Writing Project X?" Well, that time has come. Yesterday.
Yes, yesterday would have been the perfect time to tell you about it, because yesterday is when Telltale Games released Episode 3 of "Sam & Max: The Mole, The Mob & The Meatball" for which I worked on the dialogues.
As you probably know, Telltale moved into the area of episodic gaming a while back, and their plan is to release a "first season" of interconnected Sam & Max games over a very short period (six episodes released over the course of seven months). Because they were working on such an ambitious schedule, they found themselves looking for a contract writer to help with the dialogues in Episode 3 to keep on schedule. And, through a confluence of absurd good luck, good friends, and hard work, I ended up working with Writers/Producers Dave Grossman & Brendan Ferguson on two of my favorite characters in the whole world.
Seriously. Look at my answer to Spurgeon's Five For Fridays back in June, or this Savage Critic cancellation page from 2002. I've been a huge fan of Steve Purcell and his Sam & Max comics almost twenty years. And it's not like there's a lot of opportunities to work on the characters (unless you're, you know, Steve Purcell).
It was a pretty intimidating gig, considering I'd never written for video games, had no programming experience, and was working on two of my favorite characters of all time, and it was strange coming into a game where everything was all mapped out, and only funny dialogue needed to be provided. But I'm pretty happy with the result. I guess Telltale was too, because I also ended up contributing to the dialogues for Episode 2, Situation Comedy. (I thought about making this announcement back when Episode 2 came out but considering I had even less to do with it than Episode 3, I thought I'd wait.) What made the difference is that Dave and Brendan are incredibly great guys--funny, and smart (to which their writing on Episode 1--and the resulting GDC nomination for Best Game Writing--will attest) and also patient and gracious--and that I got tons of support from Hibbs, Edi, Tim & Michelle Reardon, and all my friends. (Having a regular paying job where you can take a few weeks off each year didn't hurt, either.)
It's weird seeing the episode almost five months later; they changed the game design around, pulled some of my dialogue and rewrote other bits. (I was a little bit spoiled because although I didn't write nearly as much for Episode 2, almost all of it made it through exactly as written.) On the other hand, Episode 3 has a truly amazing song I had nothing to do with: it's like Tom Lehrer writing a song for a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant about the non-existence of organized crime... only funnier!
I could bore you interminably with stories about how great the people at Telltale are, how hilariously squalid their offices are, or how strange it was to go from someone writing "fire and forget" reviews to somebody who relentlessly combed Google to read any positive mention of a product I'd worked on, but my time at the comic book store draws near. If you've played either of the episodes on Gametap or directly, I'd be curious to know what you think: I'm in the perfect position of being able to take the blame for almost nothing (and, since it's the Internet, the credit for just about anything). I'm not sure I can guarantee reviews (or replies) for the next day or two since it's Edi's birthday on Saturday, but, work willing, I hope to have more for you in the early part of next week.
I kinda forgot that I had to photocopy ONOMATOPOEIA today (like in, it's 11:30, and I reach into my bag to get this week's invoice to set up, and I'm thiking "why is this so thick? Ohhhhhhhh fuck.") Then, when the truck shows up, its a new driver (cue the trumpet player "wahWAH!"), whoi tells me they give him the truck without the lift gate ("..."), and, no his only obligation is to get the boxes to the curb, not to get them inside the store ("....!")
Of course, it's 1 at that point, and Rob isn't due in until 2, so I have to haul Five Store's worth of funny book boxes (approx 1600 pounds the ladeling bill says) all by my lonesome.
So, reviews tomorrow. Maybe Thanksgiving at the latest.
-B
But don't be sad about it (Watch this to cheer yourself up if you need to). If nothing else, I want to bitch about Civil War and Iron Man, so expect something this week.
Just a quick story here (maybe reviews in the next few days), because I thought it was funny, and if I don't type it up SOON, then I never will. So, it's last Tuesday, Halloween, and I super-double rush through work early so I can take Ben Trick-or-Treating (3 years old is the BEST time for that, yes)
(Digression: We went to his grandmother Michele's neighborhood, Seacliff, because we could go there and not feel like carpet-baggers. Michele has an apartment there, but its home to some of the nicest houses in SF -- and some of the richest. Robin Williams' house is there [handing out glow in the dark lanyards, which I think is an EXCELLENT thing to give out to kids who are wandering in the dark] for example.)
(We went into all of these fancy courtyards -- y'know, courtyards that are bigger and nicer than our entire house! -- in front of all of these fabulous mansions overlooking the ocean. The nicest, I think, was the one that was owned by, I'll assume, the 49ers owner or head coach or lead player or something. There are big burly security guards at front, with like earpieces and whatever. The gate opens down to this path with a "velvet rope" [well, there were stanchions, at least] between TWO side-by-side mansions [on the same property] that leads out to this bluff overlooking the water. There, literally in a 135-degree or so view, like the whole range of your eye's peripheral vision, is the Golden Gate bridge. I'm not even slightly describing what an impressive and magical view this is. I'd need hand gestures. There, on this bluff, the 49ers cheerleaders [!] are handing out candy to the children. Um, wow.)
(It was a nice Halloween. End digression)
Anyway, like I said, I was on my way home, its maybe 4 in the afternoon, couple of hours before the festivities start in the Castro, and I'm waiting for the 35 at 18th and Castro, watching the police set up the barricades and whatnot for the street parties.
Because I've come back from processing this week's comics, I'm holding some comic that I was reading (52, I think) while I wait for the bus.
A really nerdy (Don't *think* it was a costume, but it *could* have been) black guy comes up to me, and says, "Um, excuse me, are you Rich Johnston?!?!"
Now, if I had any web skills of any kind, I'd link that cover shot of Rich from CSI: DYING IN THE GUTTERS next to a picture of me, and you'd think "Yes, I can see why someone might possibly make that mistake"; but I don't have those skills, so you just have to trust me.
And, if I hadn't just come back from racing through the comics and the subs and the racking, so my head wasn't all filled up with a bunch of stuff, I should have answered "Crikey, Guv'nor! Aye, oy'm bleedin' Rich Johnston, like. Strewth! Chim-chimmeny-chim-chim-charooh, didjer know tha' bloody tosser Mark Millar 'as a tattoo of Princess Di snoggin' Superman on his wee arse? Throw another shrimp on th' barbie! Beggorah!"
But I was tired and engrossed in my funny book, so I just sadly shook my head, and said "No."
"Yeah, because I thought it would be really weird to meet Rich Johnston in the Castro on Halloween in San Francisco"
"Yeah, that WOULD have been weird. Have a good day"
And he wandered off.
Ah, the things we think of in hindsight. Oh well.
Anyway, there’s this week's funny story, and tale of why I love living in San Francisco. I hope you relish it as much as I.
(Also, for the funny, go read Spurgeon's minute-by-minute account of THE GUIDING LIGHT/Marvel crossover -- I had tears coming out of my eyes: http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/cr_reviews/6715/)
-B
The big Four-Oh! and Happy Halloween to the rest of you!!
-B
Sorry, Internet. I wrote a whole post and transferred all of Hibbs' exciting bug-eating photos but blogger doesn't feel like uploading them. So now I'm late for work and we don't have any bug-eating entry for today. Hooray!
I'll try posting them again tonight. (And, now, finally, I understand why people switch to Wordpress. Grrr.)
I have nothing to say about this week's books, I have to admit. It's not because they weren't interesting, because they probably aren't. I say probably because the real reason I have nothing to say is that I haven't read them; I didn't make it to the store this week, so the only things that I've been reading are a second-hand copy of Essential Savage She-Hulk - which I'll probably write about at some point, but I want to read Essential Spider-Woman first, to see if it was a similarly aimless attempt at franchise growth or not - and a wonderful book called The United States of Arugula by David Kamp, which is all about the rise of "gourmet eating" in this country since the end of the Second World War. I know what you're thinking: "Why are you telling us about that? That has nothing to do with comics!" Sure, you think that now, but wait until Mark Waid's upcoming Brave and Bold series teams Green Lantern up with Adam Strange after Jacques Pepin gets caught in a Zeta Beam and introduces Rann to modern French-American cuisine. Next week, real reviews, honest.
Right. So last time you heard from me, it was several weeks ago and I was planning a garage sale. Although you might or might not care (particularly since Graeme and Hibbs have been so on top of things), I thought it'd be nice to let you know what's been up since then. First, the garage sale. Honestly, it was great. I knew all would be well when the sale's patron saints, Joe Keatinge and Chris French, showed up early and hit those longboxes like they wanted 'em to bleed. (You can find a terrifying inventory of Joe's purchases here and a more concise summation of Chris' stuff here.) Joe and Chris were the first guys at my garage sale last year, and impressed the hell out of Edi both years with how friendly, sharp and normal they are. Thanks, guys!
But also big, big thanks to everyone else who showed up: Dave Robson, Peter Wong, Sam Phillips, Ian Brill, Steve Byrne, that guy Mark, that guy Shannon, that surly dude with the mohawk who bought well over a hundred comics, and tons of others my rusty memory can't remember at the moment. It's always great seeing stuff I like go to people who are really going to appreciate it, and to be able to clear out a ton of space, get some extra money to the Bernal Heights Seniors Center, and hang with great people all at the same time? It's the closest I'm ever going to get to owning my own comic shop (because I'd run my own shop out of business in about eight weeks) and it was great. Again, thanks.
As for why I haven't posted since--well, I don't know if you remember me mentioning Secret Writing Project X, but I actually got the gig and have been up to my eyes in it ever since. I can't give you any details at the moment (and can't even say for sure when I can) but it looks like I'm not going to be able to contribute much here until the end of September. But I'm really excited by SWPX and hope, when I'm finally able to tell you about it, you will be, too. Those of you who like my humor column for the newsletter will be pleased, I think.
Okay. Back into hiding for now. I was going to do very, very fast reviews on some good recent manga (Beck Vol. 5, Monster Vol. 4, Drifting Classroom Vol. 1) but that's not going to happen at the moment. Maybe if I end up with a few spare minutes between now and Monday...
Anyway, I'm well. Hope you are, too. Real reviews from Graeme are right below if you haven't read 'em.
Okay. Last update. I'm kinda tired and brain-dead--running a comic book store on a slow day is infinitely more tiring than running one on a busy day. Not sure what law of thermodynamics is covered by that, but it's true.
Tomorrow from 9 to 4 is the garage sale and this is my very last chance to hector you about it. It's on Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights. For those travelling by Bart/Muni, get your butts to 24th Ave. and then take any Mission bus down to Cortland Avenue (the delightful Zante Pizza is on one corner of Cortland and Mission and the even-more-delightful Spicy Bite is on the opposite corner). From there, you can either walk up the hill and over (about a ten to fifteen minute walk, depending), or you can catch a 24 Divisadero bus to take you up Cortland to where all the activity will be. It's a Hillwide Sale day to benefit the Bernal Heights Senior Center and I've heard there's 110 registered sites all over Bernal Hill--even if you're not interested in my stuff, there'll be something across the Hill for everyone.
I should be right across from the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center. You can find a Google map of that location here.
The pricing is more or less straightforward. All comic books are a quarter, unless you buy 20 or more, and then they go down to twenty cents a pop. All VHS movies, Hong Kong or otherwise, are a quarter. DVDs (with very few exceptions, one of my favorite Seijun Suzuki films among them) are six dollars apiece, but if you buy 7 it's $35 and if you buy 10 it's $40. The PS2 games range between $7 to $10 and are in faboo condition. Action figures are $4 each or 3 for $10. (And yeah, hauling all that stuff from my place is gonna be FUN.)
So, you know. Stop by. Say "Hi." Some of my favorite people in the world have already said they're stopping by so it should be a great time. Hope you can join us, but have a great weekend either way!
Stupid Picasa. I wrote two different versions of this post and both of 'em disappeared into the ether. So now you get the super-short version. Dammit.
I was a huge Hong Kong movie junkie back in the '90s and I'd be loathe to tell you what I spent on all of these movies back in the day. But I'm not watching them and they're slowly fading (and have faded) and do nobody any good sitting in a storage space. So they're going to be at the garage sale too--a quarter a piece. I can't exactly guarantee that they'll play or be watchable or anything but I think a lot of 'em will be, and a quarter isn't exactly a lot of money to gamble, not when you could end up with a full copy of Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon in your hands.
You know what else you can get for a quarter?
I was looking through all my Kirby books and realized I'd picked up a some dupes back when I was buying the books in lots. So they're in there along with all the other assorted craziness. Hopefully this will entice more of you to make the trek out to the Cortland Avenue on Saturday. A copy of Millionaire's Express and a Kirby Kamandi for fifty cents total? Back in 1995, my head would've imploded at such a concept...
Tomorrow: an update on some books, times and prices, location and bus info. See you then!
...than the Allemany Flea Market.
Edi and I went with our pals Rob and Rachel Ginsberg today, as we've been telling each other forever we would. The idea is that maybe Rob and I would team up to sell some over our copious amounts of crap and split the cost of renting a table together, and this would be our chance to research the market and see how it shaped up. That was what we were supposed to do. What we actually did, of course, was pounce on any box of comics we could find and rifle through, holding up particularly unappetizing examples to each other.
Which is how I found issues #2-5 of Captain America by Rob Liefeld and Jeph Loeb.
Now, I should, with a header like the above, talk about how freakin' scary the Allemany Flea Market is. But it's hard, frankly, to really convey the sheer weight of how depressing and awful the place actually is. It's less a flea market and more like a refugee camp for the self-deluded. Large bins of rusty tools and battered jewelry compete for space with tattered, unread magazines. A grease-stained kimono flaps like the flag of a defeated army over quivering fold-out tables and rusted out tricycles. And all of that would be fine if it was priced accordingly, or at least put forward with a kind of humility that would allow browsers to amuse themselves. But the prices were ghastly--"Three dollars," a man announced proudly when I started to sift through his collection of battered VHS cassettes to see if he had any DVDs (he didn't).
At one point, I held up battered X-Men: The Motion Picture action figures, still carded but flecked inside the bubble with spots of moisture. "Oooo, you can complete your collection, Rob," I said and the owner all but leapt at us from the other side of the table. "I've got others," he said and pushed forward to Matrix action figures. "Only six dollars each."
Similarly, when I was caught elsewhere showing off a pair of matching Punisher figures (from the Toy Biz "Street Action" series), the guy came forward and said, "Both figures for ten bucks."
I scrutinized the figures, still marked with yellowing Kaybee Toys tags of four dollars. "They're exactly the same figure. Why--"
"Different comic books," he said, pointing at the backs. "They're, uh, variants."
At another point, walking by DVDs, I said to Rob, "Oooo. One Night at McCool's."
"Yeah," Rob said. "How could they let that one go?"
A young guy appeared out of nowhere. "Which movie?"
"Oh, uh, One Night at McCool's."
The guy stepped forward to the table and looked at the movie. "Oh, yeah. Great movie."
Rob and I walked forward about ten steps and Rob looked back. "Dude," he said to me. "I think we convinced him that One Night at McCool's is a keeper. He took it off the table and put it over near his car."
"Unbelievable."
It wasn't until halfway around the "Mart" that we found any comic books at all. A large Jamaican woman had approximately two long boxes of mid-90's DC and Marvel titles, with the quality reaching the peak of the four issue Saint of Killers mini (and a few issues from the first ten of Hitman) and then quickly spiking back down to Midnight Sons, Dan Chichester's Daredevil, issues from the Death of Superman storyline, and Liefeld & Loeb's Captain America.
I walked over to the woman with seven books. "How much?"
"Fourteen dollars."
"Two dollars each? How about seven for all of 'em?"
She shook her head and nodded her head at the long boxes. "Those are thousands of dollars of books."
"No," I said. "They really aren't."
"When I was a girl," she said in her accent, which may not have been Jamaican. "A man who lived next door collected comic books. And one day, another man came and bought four comics for twelve hundred dollars. I couldn't believe it. Four comics for twelve hundred dollars!"
"Yes, well, some older comics are worth money to collectors. Some collectors."
"..."
"So," I said. "Seven?"
She shook her head. "Ten." She kept shaking her head while taking my money, sure I was robbing her.
Finally, Rob and I found four boxes of good stuff. Starlin issues of Warlock; issues of Jimmy Olsen, including what appeared to be the entire Kirby run scatted among the different boxes. Gold Key Twlight Zones. Werewolf By Night. Creatures on the Loose featuring Man-Wolf. Unfortunately, they were priced like the good stuff. "50% off the marked price," the wild-haired guy in his sixties said to us. The marked prices were between eight and fourteen dollars apiece.
As we walked away, Rob said, "It was just a relief to see some real comics. Even if they were comic book store prices." And he was right. The rest of the flea market was like something out of a Nathanael West novel, a small setpiece of despair where people who'd been cheated out of their money by buying useless junk tried to prove they hadn't by selling it to the next guy. It was commerce as a failed redemptive act.
"Yeah, but I dunno," I said. "I was just hoping we'd find some, you know, Rom: Spaceknights for cheap."
And then finally, at the end, in the back corners of the mart, next to the guy selling plastic lawn furniture for twenty dollars a piece and a lonely guy who'd talk about his Tex Avery sheet music to anyone who'd ask, I found a small beat up stack of yellowed, unbagged, bowed-in comic books. Supergirl #401. Montana Kid #46 (called Kid Montana in the indica and the corner of the cover). An issue of Strange Tales. Our Fighting Forces. And Amazing Spider-Man #35. I walked over to the guy standing by his van, a shirtless man in a baseball cap eating salad out of a foil take out tray.
"How much for these?" I said, holding up the small pile.
He looked at me, squinted. "Three dollars a book."
"Uh..."
And so, somehow, despite all my bitching and my group's general lowered spirits from visiting this short, brutish and nasty pavillion of chintzy, overpriced goods, I ended up with this:
for three dollars. And I admit it: my tiny mind is still kinda blown by that. 
Spoiler the First: Please remember that because of the holiday weekend, CE (and other fine comic stores everywhere) will be getting new comics in on Thursday, not Wednesday.
Spoiler the Second: Unless someone in DC's marketing is being super-crafty, Batwoman's secret identity is spoiled in this story in the NY Times today which concerns itself with the concentrated effort on the part of DC to create (and Marvel to spotlight) more superheroes of color and sexual orientation. I was actually just thrilled to see the new Blue Beetle below the fold on the front page of the A&E section.
Spoiler the Third: I'm on vacation this week, which means that while, yeah, I probably will do reviews, I probably won't get to 'em until Tuesday again. (The missus has assured me she's got some work to do on Monday so if I'm feeling inspired, maybe I'll get to 'em then.) So this isn't really a spoiler, unless you consider visiting our site ten or fifteen extra times to see if we've updated an activity worth spoiling.
Oh, and I fixed the tags, finally. Funny about that Firefox/IE thing, huh?
...I'm just sick. Which is very annoying, because it means I've not picked up Scott Pilgrim 3 yet, nor had a chance to bitch about Moon Knight #2 from last week or say that 52 #2 was better than #1. Someone who is healthy, however, is Brian, who's got a new Tilting at Windmills up at Newsarama, so go and read that while conducting magical ceremonies to make me healthier.
Just in case you don't check it out on a regular basis, this week's Onion A.V. Club brings the critic with a side-helping of savage this week. Their review of DC's One Year Later titles is really just an overview (so Hibbs should clear some space in his schedule and get to his take on the books), but their Comics of Note section has quick takes on sixteen or seventeen recent books, from La Perdida to Ganges to Daredevil and X-Men: Deadly Genesis. Worth checking out, although comparing Kevin Huizenga to Peter Bagge and Terry LaBan? Hmm...
After a hideously short period of time, you'll have to register to read this, but for now you can read this keen little profile on Alan Moore and his frustrations over the V For Vendetta movie here at the New York Times. So far, I think my favorite quote from Moore is, "I am what Harry Potter grew up into...and it's not a pretty sight." But I'm not all the way through the article yet.
Normally at this time, I come here and bitch about what books have appeared this week while trying to be funny with varying results. This week, however, I've managed to fail to get to the store, and therefore have nothing to review. Well, nothing apart from the programming schedule for next week’s Wondercon here in Sunny San Francisco, of course. "With over 90 hours of programming over 3 days, WonderCon’s programming schedule has something for everyone," claims the official website, which means that somehow they’re adding in an extra six hours per day for your pleasure. Time means nothing to these people, I’m telling you.
I have a love-hate relationship with conventions that can best be described as "I am scared to talk to people whose work I like, equally scared to talk to those whose work I dislike and have said as much in public where they could see it and may want to hit me as a result (Greg Rucka, for example. Will it help if I say now that I really enjoy his novels and liked his Wonder Woman before it was derailed by Infinite Crisis? Probably not), and all those people in homemade outfits make me nervous”. With some love being added in somewhere, of course. Nonetheless, I’ll be headed to Wondercon like everyone else, lured in by the promise of some of the following:
Amongst some of the many things that I’ll miss because of that thing I call "my job" are panels with Ramona Fradon (whose great work graced the recent DC Showcase Presents Metamorpho collection), Mike Mignola, and Mike and Laura Allred. Gerard Jones gets a panel to himself to talk about his wonderful Men of Tomorrow book, and New Yorker illustrator and Neil Gaiman favorite Gahan Wilson also has an hour of Room 2018 to fill. Being the first day, the running themes of the Con get started: Obsessive Firefly/Serenity fans, and DC’s corporate panels. The Whedon Worship gets underway with the world premiere of "Done The Impossible: The Fans’ Tale of Firefly and Serenity," a documentary about how Joss Whedon’s fans did the same as Star Trek’s fans, only about ten years sooner, and Dan Didio gets to host "Modern Architecture: The Architects of The DC Universe," with guests Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison and Mark Waid, talking about post-One Year Later DC. That panel will be nothing like Saturday’s "DCU 2006: The Best Is Yet To Come", which also features Rucka, Morrison and Waid talking about DC post-One Year Later and is hosted by Didio, nor will it resemble Sunday’s "DC Comics’ Crisis Counselling," which has the stellar line-up of Greg Rucka, Grant Morrison and Mark Waid, all talking about post-One Year Later DC with host Dan Didio.
Highlight of the day may possibly be the mysterious "Special TRON event" that ends the night. As the blurb explains, "It’s a special TRON event! The fan-favorite, groundbreaking movie from the 80s is becoming a comic book in April, published by SLG, with story and art by Landry Walker, Eric Jones, and Louie De Martinis. This new comic series continues where the TRON 2.0 video game left off, chronicling the adventures of Jet Bradley, a talented young programmer who is trapped in a computer mainframe. Known for its incredible use of computer graphics before they were widely used in film, TRON makes the jump from movie to comics! Join us for this exciting event!" Anyone who can explain exactly what the nature of this special event is, feel free to tell me. I’m hoping that Jeff Bridges zaps all the attendees into a computer where they can fight that massive tank thing, myself.
If it’s Saturday, it has to be Hollywood day! Sure enough, this is the day that holds your best chance to see clips of movies before your friends see them online that evening. Bryan Singer has a Superman Returns panel with exclusive clips, JJ Abrams has a Mission Impossible 3 panel where lots of people will ask questions about Lost, just to piss him off, and Pixar celebrate being bought out by Disney by showing clips of Cars, their upcoming movie about those horse-drawn carriages that everyone’s talking about these days. Other media types around will include Kevin Smith, Wes Craven, Lucasfilm’s Steve Sansweet, and a collection of animation writers like Paul Dini, Mark Evanier and Adam Beechen.
If it’s comics folk you’re after, then be prepared for panels starring Grant Morrison, Frank Cho, Eric Powell, Peter David, Mark Waid, Terry Moore and Greg Rucka where you can ask them whether Civil War really is Marvel’s rip-off of Infinite Crisis or whether than honor falls to Annihilation. Alternatively, you can go and see the premiere of Ultimate Avengers and have that burning question – "Why not take Marvel’s over-the-top reimagining of the Avengers and tone it down for a wider audience who have suddenly decided that they want to watch a cartoon version of the Avengers?" – answered once and for all. There’s some grooviness happening out in the fringes of entertainment, though: A panel about "The Girls of Peanuts," as hosted by the Charles M. Schulz Museum, for one (I admit it; I have a crush on Peppermint Patty). Sergio Aragones doing a panel where he answers questions with drawings, for another, as well as Scott Saavedra’s Comic Book Heaven Live (Scott Shaw!’s also doing a live version of his Oddball Comics column which should be fun for those of us who like cheap laughs at other people’s hard work). Fans of Firefly and Serenity can entertain themselves with the "Sacramento and San Francisco Browncoats Meetup," although Browncoats from anywhere other than those two cities – even somewhere closeby, like Oakland – will be shot if they try and sneak in.
This is the traditional "If you can only make it to one day, make it this day" day – All the big solo panels, with a couple of exceptions, are on Saturday, and the amount of movie-related events (There are quite a few horror things that I’ve not mentioned because I couldn’t be bothered), mean that this is easily going to be the busiest day of the three. So if you have a fear of being in an enclosed space with lots of Imperial Stormtroopers, this may not be the day for you. Just a warning.
Last minute addition to the guest list Frank Miller gets his turn to shine on the last day of the con, having his panel run with no other big name guests appearing elsewhere as competition (But there is a new episode of Spongebob Squarepants premiering); the programming promises that there’ll be some Comic Book Legal Defense Fund-related surprises at this one, so place your bets about what that means. Other than that, the con does its normal Sunday winding down, which means that the panels stay interesting but will probably be calm affairs – There are panels about the future of comic retailing, how comic books can be brought into classrooms and libraries, and a bunch of robot-related nerds arguing whether Robby The Robot could kick MechaGodzilla’s ass (Hint: No). Those poor under-served Firefly fans get their own charity prize drawing as well as a charity auction, Chris Bachalo explains why he really hasn’t lost his talent after Shade The Changing Man, and there’s an entire panel about whether Star Trek is dead after the cancellation of Enterpise, or whether it lives on in our hearts and alternate universes where we all have goatee beards.
The real reason to go on Sunday, mind you, is to try and grab some cheap comics from all the dealers just before they close up for the weekend. That complete run of Kickers, Inc. is yours for the taking, dear friends… All of that said, looking into my crystal ball, I can see myself spending all of Sunday apologizing to Kate for wanting to spend the weekend before Valentine’s Day at a comic convention, but that might just be me.
So there you have it: Wondercon 2006. Looking ahead, my pick of the weekend is more than likely going to be the Grant Morrison panel, just to hear whatever he’s thinking about these days. My pick of the weakend has to be the Tron event, because, well, it’s a Tron event. For the nerdier of the San Franciscans like me, all of Wondercon may be eclipsed by Sarah Vowell doing an appearance at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books this Wednesday, however...
Jeff does reviews below. Go read them, because they're more interesting than all of this.
But Brian gave me new photos of Ben to put up months ago, and I finally got around to putting them up today. So if you're a fan of der vunderkind, or just want to see that scary photo of Garth Ennis again, have at you!
Ben likes him some super-heroes. I've told you all about his absolute Superman fixation, but he's started branching out recently. Now he's also into Spider-Man.... or at least the theme song. After about the 10th time of singing it for him, with him singing along on the "'pider-man, 'pider-man!" parts, I got sick of it and decided to try and find it on the WWW.
Then I found this version, sung by a "Michael Buble", apparently released with the second Spidey movie -- kinda big band swingy version, as sung by an absolute Lounge Lizard -- it never made the final movie, I think? Dunno, I didn't sit through the end credits. Ben can watch this 6-8 times in a row, easy.
I get a big laugh out of it, especially because of the over-the-top stylings in the second half, and maybe you will too.
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2644156
-B
