The con really got hectic over the weekend, so Saturday and Sunday get combined into The Weekend Report. There were 36,000 attendees at this year’s convention, and every single one of them brought a car and expected to park under the convention center.
Keyhole is an anthology of work by Josh Neufeld, Sari Wilson, Dean Haspiel, and occasional others. The features are Josh and Sari’s trips abroad, and Dean’s “Billy Dogma”, a superhero story reminiscent of Flaming Carrot. Highly recommended. Get more info at http://suba.com/~keyhole/. I have an extra copy of issue 3. If anyone’s reading this, and you’d like to take a look, write me: but you gotta promise a net review. I paid for mine, I don’t gotta promise jack. But I strongly recommend this book if you can find it. And if you can’t find it, have your dealer order it.
The end of Kingdom Come was disappointing. Also, I seem to be missing a couple of pages. A nuclear bomb explodes; once militant heroes realize the error of their ways; peace reigns. This is a new message for the millenia: nuclear explosions heal. Lex Luthor is punished by having to listen to bad jokes from Bruce Wayne. I would think that they could hire Adam West to handle that job and let Bruce get on with more important things, like dropping more bombs and really bringing peace to the world.
The JLA is getting better and better under Grant Morrison’s watch. The latest two issues bring Connor Hawke—Oliver Queen’s son—into the fold as the new Green Arrow. Basic idea: Green Arrow Jr. teleports up to the JLA’s moon headquarters for his initiation test, only to discover that the JLA has been captured. His nice, normal, bladed arrows get destroyed, and he has to improvise with his dad’s display collection: exploding arrow; net arrow; boomerang arrow; handcuff arrow; boxing-glove arrow. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. The first four issues of Morrison’s JLA are collected as “New World Order”. Pick it up.
Flaming Carrot is back, retro. Dark Horse and Bob Burden are reprinting the old Carrot issues in collected form. Flaming Carrot: Man of Mystery collects issues 1,2, and 3. The next installment, The Wild Shall Wild Remain will collect issues 4 through 11.
Am I a killer?… Yes. Am I a monster? Perhaps. Am I wrong?… Hardly ever! I am Flaming Carrot!!! Even best friends fear me a little! I am the fate of all things that cross my path… Good and evil! I am grim… and harsh… and ripe with fury! I fight and kill and howl and get all bloody! I go bowling whenever I want!
I completed my collection of the first run of Invisibles with issue 22. Great stuff, no question. Jim Crow is stepping up to be one of the more interesting characters, but I want to see more of Division X. Presumably they were dealt with in issue 1 of the second series, but that’s running $10 now. I’ll wait til it’s collected.
MAD Magazine is back: $2.50 cheap! dedicated to ending civilization as we know it. Reasonably cool irreverent stuff: retold children’s stories, Joey Buttafuoco’s Guide to Chivalry, ranking on PETA, “butt-naked celebs”. Check it out or not, mine was free and worth every penny.
Greg Beda’s Postmodern Anxst covers “Humor, Pathos, Life”. The first issue takes place in a group home; the second is a series of vignettes and one-panels on relationshiops. Number three returns to Rosewood, the group home and furthur shorts. “I’m sorry, but my heart belongs to someone else.” “What about your hormones? Do they still belong to me?” Look for Greg Beda at Anxst Dot Com. Buy the whole collection. Greg also has a number of zines and maxi-zines: Loose Ends, Hooked on Recovery, Rosewood and the Art of Everyday Life, Comics-the Internet-CD-ROMs-and the Future of Comic Art, and Postmodern Anxsts 0, 1/2, and 4.
The Future of Comics
The two questions faced by this panel: how will comics fare in the next millenium? and will serial comics be replaced by the graphic novel.
The answer to the second question: yes. sort of.
The first question took the most of the panel, and kept us outside the door for a good half an hour extra while Scott McCloud’s editor waited patiently and invisibly in a hidden corner.
The panelists were Scott McCloud, Brent Anderson and his son Bryce, and Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame. Scott, incidentally, is working on a sequel to Understanding Comics called Reinventing Comics.
When talking about the future of comics in the digital medium, there are three basic factors to consider: digital production of printed comics; digital distribution of comics; and digital comics: not how we make them or get them, but comics where we have to ask the question, “is it comics?” Most of this is from Scott: Brent took the role of interviewer, and Shannon provided examples of his own on-line experiences. It’s great, says Shannon. “I don’t have to deal with anyone socially any more.”
Scott: “Technology changed art forever 500 years ago.” Scott’s favorite example—he also used it Friday—is crosshatching. We use it now because print technology couldn’t handle tones. It’s a way of approximating tones in a technological medium that can’t handle true tones. Now we’ve come to love it. Unfortunately, computers don’t do cross-hatching very well… but they handle tones just fine. Scott calls it revenge of one technology against another. But “for a considerable period”, maybe 20 years or more, print will be alive. But it will slowly move towards becoming a medium for its own sake, rather than a medium of general information transferal. That is, we will use print for art where print is an integral part of the art, rather than just because it’s the way we do things.
How will comics be transformed digitally? Will it still be comics? Scott’s definition is that comics is sequential images “substituting space for time”. Time is under control of the reader, not the author. Where ever the author takes control of time away from the reader, you don’t have comics—you usually have multimedia. For example, video clips are not comics; neither are voice overs, because actual soundtracks take time away from the reader.
JLA Year One/Year Two
Senior editor Dan Raspler moderated a panel discussion with Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, Howard Porter, and Mark Millar.
Mark Waid will be doing JLA: Year One, a story of the first few months of the original JLA. It’ll be a 12-issue maxi-series. Mark Millar is working on JLA: Paradise Lost, a three issue mini-series giving Zauriel his own storyline.
There is a JLA/JSA team-up scheduled towards the end of the second year of JLA.
All of the creators are currently reeling from a great idea for including more women in the JLA. My guess is groupies or a secretary.
Metamorpho will be back, of course, “but I won’t be bringing him back”.
The Justice League television show “looks really cool”. It’s a mix of heroes and costumes.
Mark Waid knows he can trust Morrison on the Flash because of stuff like the “seven rainbow flashes” coming soon.
Grant: “Mark [Millar] likes Firestorm because he’s ten years younger than me. I hate Firestorm, I can’t tell you how much I hate Firestorm.”
On deconstruction: “The dark age is over. The sun has come up again. There are some heroes who fight crime.” Rather than “what if they thought like us”, Grant is looking from the perspective of bringing us up to their level, “what if we thought like them?”
And the Wonder Twins? Says editor Dan: “I just found out we actually have the rights to use them.”
“Don’t play the geek game on Waid.”
Will the Atom be showing up? No problem, says Grant: in issue 15, Green Arrow and the Atom alone against Darkseid. I think he was joking.
What books do the creators recommend?
- Grant Morrison: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
- Mark Millar: The Hiram Key
- Dan Raspler: Sun Tzu: The Art of War
- Mark Waid: Anything about hyperspace.
Lulu and Tubby
As you’ll recall from Wednesday, the Friends of Lulu annual meeting conflicted with the Friends of Tubby annual meeting (Scott Shaw!’s annual “Oddball Comics” presentation.
It was yet another finger-snappin’ time at the FoL meeting; Martha Thomases was busy at DC this year, “so we forgive her” for not showing. Diamond is an active fund-raiser on FoL’s behalf. The biggest item to come out of this year’s meeting is that (a) almost all of the conventions lack female guests, so (b) we’re hopefully going to see about finding female creators—especially from the dawn of comics—who want to come, and hook them up with sponsors who can bring them in to various conventions.
I sat in on the tail end of Oddball Comics. They did seem toned down from the midnight version, but of course I have no idea what he showed during the first ninety minutes. Remember that even if you don’t attend the San Diego con, you should be able to find the “Oddball Comics” card set. It was released by Kitchen Sink Press as “Set One”, but as far as I know there has never been a set two, which is too bad. The card set includes the famous cross-dressing space cowboy and the pissing gorilla.
If they do this next year, I’m quitting Lulu, I swear. On the other hand, I don’t know for sure when I’ll be showing up next year, if at all. I decided not to preregister as I usually do. I’ll probably change my mind: I’ll still want to come to see old friends. But I’m buying an extremely small number of comics at this thing. If you read each of these three installments, you know exactly what I bought; I didn’t leave anything out. I spent two hours today trying to find one recent issue of Invisibles; that’s overkill. And then I didn’t buy it because it’s too expensive.
We’ll see. Maybe next year I’ll actually feel like searching the quarter bins for seventies Avenger issues.
