San Diego ComicCon: Day 4
Huntress Nightwing
Here’s how the day worked out.
Stuff I did on Sunday:
1. Trailer Park: Another movie extravaganza in the massive H Hole, this one was all previews. Zorro, Zathura, Narnia, Potter, the Island, and about 50 others. Good stuff, though waiting in line to see previews still seems somehow wrong to me.
2. New Monthly Visions of VERTIGO – Bo-ring! Vertigo comics may be awesome, but listening to the marketing people drone on about them will make you want to poke out your own eyes with a lightsaber. I cut out and ran to be on time to…
3. Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Do you care about free speech? Do you thnk it’s worth preserving? If so, donate to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF). Do it today.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund provides free legal counsel and support to artists, retailers, and importers of comic books who have been arrested or sued for the content of their material. Comics have never been a lucrative field. People don’t get into comics for the money; they do it for love of the art. But that very lack of profit makes them vulnerable. No comic shop retailer can afford an expensive lawsuit; it would drive them out of business. People who want to force censorship into common law KNOW this, and attack these people with lawsuits and vague ‘decency’ laws, hoping they will roll over without a fight, allowing easy wins for censors that they can then cite in future cases. And fuck the comic people. The voting public doesn’t care what happens to some schlub artist who draws smutty pictures, or the aging hippie that runs the comic shop down the block.
Enter the CBLDF. They accept petitions from people facing these kinds of rabid, legal assaults from the religious right, and foot the expensive bill to keep vague and subjective rules limiting our freedom of speech and the press from becoming law. They’re fighting for your right to decide for yourself what kinds of drawings you’re allowed to look at, and not have some religious nut from Kansas decide it for you.
Of course, you wouldn’t know that from this presentation. The presenter, one of the CBLDF’s lawyers, was 20 minutes late. Apparently he had spent too much time in the hotel bar the night before. Scary, that he’s our last line of defense.
He showed up and apologized, and went on to discuss some fo the ongoing cases the CBLDF is fighting, which you can read about on the above website.
Censorship has taken a new form in comics, no longer pushing to classify things ‘obscene’, the new talking point is ‘Harmful to minors’. This term, of course, is completely subjective, since there is no evidence that comic books of ANY kind have been harmful to minors. But even worse is the implicit assumption that comics are solely FOR minors. Comics are as wide and varied a medium as books, movies, television, or paintings, and I, for one, and fucking sick of people assuming otherwise and trying to prevent me from reading the comics that I want to read.
We were intoduced to Gorden Lee, a comic shop owner from Georgia who was arrested for giving away comics that depicted the life story of Pablo Picasso, because they contained (non-sexual) nudity. He is still on trial, and if he loses, we ALL lose.
Here’s that donation link again: Donate
You can also go to the site and buy t-shirts, books, and comics, the proceeds all go to the charity. I cannot tell you enough how important this is. Not just to comics, but to our right to be free in this country.
4. Spotlight on Bill Willingham – Bo-ring! I showed up at 12:20, after the CBLDF thing, and was immediately disappointed. Bill Willingham is a BIG name in comics, but that’s not what I love him for. I love him for his old-school AD&D art from rulebooks like Fiend Folio. Man, that shit brings back warm memories. He also did a D&D-based porn comic called Ironwood.
Of course, Ironwood is Harmful to Minors, so if you’re not going to give to the CBLDF, you’d better buy it quick, while you still can.
Anyway, This session was dull, so I left.
5. Half hour on floor:
Wandered around a bit more. Here’s some of what I saw:
Orange chicks: Don’t ask me. I have no idea.
If anyone other than Jay, Jeremy, or Matt can tell me who this is, I’ll give them one US dollar.
6. Lunch and Anchorman We went out for $15 hamburgers and then crashed for a bit, watching Anchorman. Will Ferrell is hit or miss, but this movie gets funnier every time I watch it.
7. Chachka shopping and bargin hunts: Puma bailed then, and Jay and I went back to wander the floor some more. We bought a bunch of junk, but we were really just waiting for the vendors to start throwing around big discounts as the convention wound down. Sadly, they never really did. Oh, well. Their loss. I still had some money left.
I took this picture of Jay (right) at the Dark Horse booth as the day was about to end. I swear, it was not intentional that Van Hellsing the vampire hunter is in the shot.
8. Nap: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
9. Drunken chicken, pear cider, and girl watching: Puma crashed Sunday night, so Jay and I wandered the Gaslamp District, the Greenwich Village of San Diego. We stopped at the only restaurant whose menu items averaged under $20 a plate. I had Drunken chicken. Jay had viking steak. Good times.
While we ate at our sidewalk table, we girl-watched. I’ve always said, there is no shortage of beautiful women in New York City, and it’s true, but where NYC has no shortage, San Diego has an abundant overflow. I guess it’s all the models who come out to California, breed, become MiLF’s, and raise beautiful daughters.
Not a bad way to spend the Sabbath.
Stuff I didn’t get to do on Sunday cuz I was busy doing the stuff I did:
1. Christian Comics Meeting: I just wanted to go heckle the brainwashers, but I was busy.
2. Universal: Doom: They made a movie about the video game Doom. It stars the Rock. >yawn<
3. Threshold:
Side note: I just watched the original The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe cartoon from when we were kids. I made my jaw drop. I’ll rant about that later.
5. Sequential art: I just wanted to meet Jim Mahfood, but then I realized I had nothing to say to him anyway.
6. Kept missing Jae Lee. I wanted to berate him over Hellshock. He started and stopped that fucking book TWICE, and I had thought it was the bees knees. I feel I owe him a kick in the nuts.
The End.
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