San Diego ComicCon: Day 1

Ah, ComicCon! Four days of comics, toys, movies, games, and copious amounts of porn. Something for every red-blooded American male. Be prepared for me to totally geek-out in the following day-by-day accounts, but if that’s not your bag, fear not! There will be plenty of pictures of sexy strippers in superhero costumes and the occasional celebrity or Klingon to hold your interest.

Thanks to my buddy Jay’s masterful itinerary planning, I headed over to JFK at the asscrack of dawn with Jay and his pal Frank the Puma (who I only just met that morning, but who I guess now ranks as my pal, too). We got to the airport at a disgusting 4:30am for the obscene two-hour buffer the airports demand of you for domestic flights in this paranoid age. Gotta make sure you don’t have any nail clippers on the plane!

For once, I managed to breeze through security without being searched and violated, and the flight was on time. The movie was Ice Princess or some shit. They made us pay extra for the mediocre turkey sandwich on the flight.

I hate to travel. I get paranoid about missing my flight, losing my luggage, being away from my home base, losing contact with my main communications inputs, my bed, my cat, etc. On the rare occasions I travel without my wife, it’s even worse. Maybe it’s a little sexist, but I always feel I need to keep it together more for her sake, and that in turn makes me more together. As they say, if you act a part, you become the part.

Of course, Dani decided to sit this one out. She went last year, but I think she saw me hit a nerd-level beyond what she had heretofore experienced, and wanted to leave me to it. When the time came to leave, she was upset she was staying behind, so hopefully she’ll go next year, but this one she skipped. Double stress.

I hate planes, too. I hate not being able to straighten my legs, breathing recycled air, getting hit in the elbows with the drink cart, and a hundred other things.

But I love to fly.

I love takeoff. I love the window seat; seeing the world from above. I love crashing into the cloud layer and having your view collapse into fog. But most of all, I love the sublime beauty of that moment when you break above the cloud ceiling, up above the contaminants that dilute the heavens’ beauty. The rich blue of the sky; the perfect yellow-white of the sun; the indigo of night with its clear speckles of a universe that comes more and more into humanity’s reach every day. Problems seem so insignificant up there. The world that causes you so much stress seems so simple from 3200 feet.

Yes, I love flying. I just despise everything that surrounds it.

We landed in beautiful, sunny San Diego at 9:30 California time. Just the sight of a palm tree makes your stress level plummet, and they line the walk to the airport taxi stands. We stopped first to check into our hotels. Jay and Pum were in a hotel next to the MAMMOTH San Diego Convention Center. I, having booked my hotel a mere three hours after Jay, was 10 blocks away. Uphill. Feh.

On the other hand, my hotel was right across the street from Larry Flynt’s Hustler Hollywood store (left). Fate?

Once our bags were stowed and our jeans exchanged for shorts, it was off to the con!

Stuff I did on Thursday:

1. Spotlight on Eric Powell. Eric Powell writes The Goon for Dark Horse Comics. The Goon is a funny goddamn book. It also won an Eisner award last year for Best Single Issue, and one this year for Best Humor Publication. I didn’t want to miss this chance to meet him and ask questions.I went in and found Eric Powell on a panel with Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant of Reno 911. Apparently, they are Goon fans and wrote a screenplay, which has been picked up for a major motion picture… with just a few changes.They go on to talk about the alterations they made, how the Buzzard’s half-life was too occult for mass market appeal, and how the Goon’s scars didn’t test well, and they were discussing getting Colin Farrel to play the part. Oh, and Frankie was now a woman.

   Finally, Eric Powell got up, grabbed his chair, and busted it across Thomas Lennon’s shoulders, proceeding to beat both of them down under the table. He then took questions on the comic.

   Lennon and Garant never got back up. I think they hid under the table for the rest of the interview.

   There weren’t a lot of questions, and most of them were just inside jokes. Q&A is always a let-down after unexpected stage violence. Being a Goon fan is like being in a secret club, and the people who had just gone into the room on a lark were surely confused by the chair-beating and the assurances that Charlie Noodles was, indeed, good people. Eric kept asking to end the panel early, because only like 5 people had questions. People asked him where he kept getting all his hysterical ideas, and he said it was just stuff he and his friends make up when they’re goofing around.

   Now where have I seen that before?

2. Spawn Animated: This was supposed to be a Q&A with the creators of the new Spawn animated movie in production. They were also supposed to show a trailer. I guess I was interested, even though the last Spawn movie was horrible, the HBO cartoon wasn’t much better, and I gave up on the comic a long time ago. Spawn, like the Secret Wars, represents something that I loved in comics that was really just the beginning of an entropy that threatened to destroy the very things I loved. Secret Wars was a fun adventure, but it was really a marketing ploy to dupe kids into buying more comics, which led to profit, and not story, being the focus of comics. In the same way, Todd McFarlane started Spawn to get away from the dominance of Marvel and open up new markets for comics. It worked, but it kicked off the whole market speculation on comics that brought us holofoil duplicate premium edition comics, which suckered thousands of people out of their hard-earned money chasing a paper tiger.Anyway, this session was bullshit, which is what you usually find when you scratch a layaer away from Image comics, especially those by Liefeld and McFarlane. They showed a 10 second trailer, 9.5 seconds of which was just text, and then some peripheral guys involved with the movie talked about what it was like working with McFarlane.I felt masturbated upon, so I left.
3. Lunch: We went to some restaurant in the hotel and spend $25 apeice for burgers, fries, and soda. The San Deigo tourist machine was in full-on swindle mode.
4. 4. Wandering: Strolled around the convention floor, accepting freebies and looking at the booths. Not really focused on buying anything, was was just getting a feel for the place. I jotted in my Palm Pilot the locations of the places I wanted to see again. Mostly I was just looking at toys, statues, art samples, and girls.Ye, gods, so many girls! Girls like Tiffany Taylor (left), who looks as if God himself had airbrushed her to perfection. Most models look much worse in person, without the airbrusher’s mask, but not this chick. I don’t think she’s human.
5. 5. Crash: We didn’t last long. By 7:00 when the convention floor closed, it was 10:00 NY time, and we had been up since 3:45. We all stumbled to our hotels and passed out.

Stuff I didn’t do on Thursday cuz I was busy doing the stuff I did:

1. Batman: Year of the Bat: Jay and Frank really wanted to go to this, so it was our first destination. It was just an update on the current plans for Batman, including the movie property.The session was packed, though, and we couldn’t get in.
2. Writing fight scenes: This was on at the same time as the Batman thing. Here’s the catalog blurb on this one:

Is That Your Sword or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me? Writing Fight Scenes for Science Fiction and Fantasy— Epic fantasy means epic battles, both large and small. These writers all work hard to make the sword as mighty as the pen. Panelists include Jim Butcher, best-selling author of the wildly popular Harry Dresden series, and Academ’s Fury; James Clemens, whose first book in a new fantasy series is titled Shadowfall; Comic-Con special guest Robert Jordan, whose most recent novel is Knife of Dreams, Book 11 in his internationally best-selling The Wheel of Time series; and Eldon Thompson , who went from quarterback to author with his 2005 debut novel The Crimson Sword. Moderator Mary Elizabeth Hart is an owner of Mysterious Galaxy, one of the premier independent genre bookstores.

I wanted to go to this primarily for Robert Jordan, whose work has influenced me enormously. I went there straight away when Batman was full, but Robert Jordan is popular, too, and I couldn’t get in the packed room.

Oh, well. Not to be immodest, but I write fight scenes just fine. It’s the least of my writing worries. WHY people are fighting is always harder to write than HOW.

3. Self-Publishing 101: I wasn’t really planning on publishing anything myself, so this wasn’t a big loss. I was mainly interested since I handle print and distribution vendors by trade, and thus thought I would be good at this.
4. Spotlight on Pia Guerra: Pia is the artist on Y the Last Man, which I love. Her clear, simple lines are powerful and complex while not straining the reader. Hard to pull off. I wanted to meet her. I had a feeling she was cute. Not Uma Thurman cute, but Janeane Garofalo cute. Oh, well. The world may never know.
5. Marvel Ultimate U: Orson Scott Card and Brian K. Vaughn were going to discuss their plans for the Ultimate Universe. I was interested, but since I read the Ultimate books pretty religiously, I thought, why spoil the upcoming surprises? Better not to know.



6. 6. Spotlight on Bruce Campbell: He’s that guy from Evil Dead. And Evil Dead 2. And Army of Darkness. And Hercules: the Legendary Journeys. And Xena: Warrior Princess. And both Spider-man movies.Essentially, anything directed by Sam Raimi.I might have missed this, but I did snap a candid shot of Bruce leaving the autograph booth (left). He’s clearly seen better days.
7. 7. Sergio & Mark show: Am I the only one that remembers Groo, the Wanderer? I used to love that fricken’ book.

More to come…

Posted on July 20, 2005 at 12:14 pm by PeatB
Filed under Events, Life, Musings
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