Highway 62

I suppose that my view of comic conventions is somewhat jaundiced after having attended SDCC nearly exclusively for the last 18 or so years. Sure, SDCC started smaller, but it’s become the 8000 pound gorilla of the convention season.

As it stands, it need not fear the competition immediately. Wizard World was perhaps 10-15 percent the size of SDCC in terms of floor space, unsure about attendance numbers though. This isn’t a bad thing. Frankly, I don’t know that I could survive two SDCC’s in a single year. Wizard World, however, was eminently survivable.

I’m guessing, as this is their first year out here in LA, that they’d planned a bit small to see how things worked out. Judging from what I saw on Saturday and Sunday, I’d say that they could expand a bit and not have to worry too much. The aisles were crowded, but not overly so. You could mostly get around without having to push people over or have bags of convention swag crushed against you.

And speaking of crush, apparently there was some kind of Heroclix sale on the floor, one of those “buy it now for $75 or buy it on Ebay for $300 things,” so there was a mad dash for their booth just at the time that I hit the floor on Saturday. It was like the running of the geeks or something. I barely escaped with my life.

I suppose it was fortuitous enough, as the throngs pushed me in the direction of the Illuminati Entertainment booth. Illuminati specializes in representation for comics creators and other media types, and Ford Gilmore, who runs the show there, seems like a good guy. Chatted with him for a moment, as well as Steve Leiber, who put the first sketch in my brand-spankin’-new sketchbook.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really read Wizard. I’ve got too much to read as it is between the net and print, and they don’t seem to cover much of what I’m interested in. Sure, I like(d) New X-Men, too, but most of what they feature just doesn’t move me to pick up the mag. Though I’m glad they gave props to Sleeper, even if their readership doesn’t seem to be widely embracing it. That said, there was a lot of stuff to keep my interest, particularly over in the Artist’s Alley.

Sure, I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I really love to look over original art, even if it’s not by artists whose work I usually follow. You get a real feel for the work and pick up a lot of subtlety and detail that often doesn’t reproduce well (particularly in many of the ‘cartoony’ artists.) So yeah, I spent a lot of time down there.

One of the first guys I ran into down there wasn’t an artist at all, but a writer/publisher, Patrick Neighly, who run Mad Yak Press, as well as writes a great column over at Newsarama. He showed me some preview pages from his upcoming Texarkana, which looks to be a lot more substantial than his “Saturday morning cartoon” Black Eyed Susan. Looking forward to that. Also picked up a copy of his Supernaturalists preview.

The work of Stuart Sayger caught my eye back when I saw him profiled on Newsarama a couple of weeks or so ago. I was surprised and quite pleased to seem him at the alley, selling copies of his self-published Shiver In the Dark, which has a great Jeff Jones/The Studio vibe to it. Chatted comics with him as he sketched The Joker for me. Turns out I’m not alone in thinking that Elektra: Assassin is better than a lot of folks give it credit for. That and we both agreed on Marshal Law being another criminally overlooked book. Hopefully someone over at Image or even Vertigo will take a look at his work and get him some more attention.

Next stop was the contingent of Royal Academy of Illustration and Design (that being Kagan McLeod and Chip Zdarsky this time out.) My unclean love of Mr. Zdarsky’s Prison Funnies has been noted here previously. Mr. Zdarsky himself is every bit the well-dressed, immaculately-groomed and flower-fresh-scented dandy that you’d expect him to be. Plus he draws a damn fine Captain America. Marvel, are you listening? Apparently a new Prison Funnies is due out in May or so, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

I managed to miss most of the big events there, so don’t ask for my views on the Joe Quesada panel (though I did hear him say that he was going to get Ultimates on a monthly schedule, to which I said “good luck.” Of course, they’re putting the book on hiatus until they have a bunch in the can to do it. Drastic, but probably a smart step, if they can get people to come back to it in a few months or however long it takes.) So yeah, no panel coverage this time out. Like I said before, most of the programming offerings didn’t really light my fire.

Spent an awful lot of time just wandering the aisles, looking at a lot of overpriced comic books that had come out in the last couple of years. If you wanted stuff for Michael Turner to sign but hadn’t brought any from home, you’d have been okay, that’s for sure. If you survived the line getting up to him. Hell, even Alex Ross had a shorter line than he did, which surprised me.

The funniest markup I saw was on The Goon, which had issue 5 priced at something like nine bucks. A sticky on the cover proclaimed “THE NEXT HELLBOY! GREAT READ!” Well, if it’s a great read, then why aren’t you letting folks read it for a decent price? Sorry, but the speculator/collector market doesn’t have much truck with me. So if you were looking to pay top dollar for recent comics, you’d come to the right place. Me? I couldn’t even find a copy of the latest New Frontier, but I could find the first two.

And yes, there was the usual assortment of anime and bootleg videos (though most of ‘em were on DVD this time, which is somewhat encouraging, as those bootleg VHS tapes SUCK in general.) If you’d never seen The Star Wars Holiday Special, you could suck it up within two or three passes of the merchandise area. There were some interesting HK martial arts flicks, too, but I am sadly without a region-free player to watch a lot of ‘em.

Over at DC’s booth, I flipped through the preview copies of some of their next month’s offerings. Seaguy looks great (I know, big fat duh with Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart at the helm). The next Human Target looks great as well (if you can’t have Mr. Pulido’s art, then you might as well have Mr. Chiang’s.) The new Sam Keith project, called Scratch looks pretty interesting as well, if you like his work, that is.

Oddly enough, there was no Marvel booth. Sure, there was the titanic monolith of the Punisher preview booth, which dominated the front of the convention center, dwarfing even the Top Cow booth complex. I saw far more of the preview than I wanted to, really. I’m not wildly interested in the character, and if I want to watch things blowing up, I’ll rent Con Air instead. But as to Marvel not needing a booth, it was pointed out to me that most of what they’re doing is likely behind the scenes and they probably don’t feel that they need to have a booth presence. I just think that they feel the movies are likely to be more of a moneymaker for them than the comics and they’re planning accordingly.

But then I’ve been accused of being cynical before.

Both Dark Horse and IDW had fairly low-key presences there, though the big Dark Horse events were over in the signing area, coinciding with the Hellboy movie promotion that was going on. I’m a lot more excited about that particular comics-to-film translation, but still have to wonder if Dark Horse is going to do anything to try and point the movie viewers in the direction of the comic books. One can always hope.

So, what else did I see? I finally bought a copy of The Interman by Jeff Parker, as I’d been meaning to do so for some time now and didn’t have an excuse not to. I also talked to the artist of the upcoming Image title Waterloo Sunset and picked up a copy of the advance preview. It looks great, filled with interesting settings and visuals. Hard to get a sense of the story from this, but I’ll be sure to pick up the first issue at least, sometime this summer.

I spoke with the folks at The Red Star and was happy to hear that they’re working on finishing up the current story arc before SDCC (which means either one or two more issues by then). They’ve had a rocky patch in terms of a regular release schedule, but the book is still worth your time and money, and their oversize collections are still the best way to see the art.

Finally, upon my return to the Illuminati Entertainment booth, I spoke with Rick Remender for a bit and picked up copies of his Black Heart Billy and Doll and Creature and glanced at some of the artwork he’s turned in for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which has made me want to pick up an issue for the first time since Michael Zulli did artwork for it back in 1992 or so. Then I took a moment to flip through some of Howard Chaykin’s work for the new Challengers of the Unknown book that’s coming out shortly. I’m guessing it’s going to make lots of folks unhappy. I’m not one of them.

I’m sure I’m missing a bit, like the glamour girls or a haggard David Carradine signing pictures over at the Artist’s Alley or the gigantic Nightmare Before Christmas puppet that dwarfed everyone at the floor or my surprise at seeing Top Shelf with a fully-stocked booth on the floor.

Overall, a pretty good show, enough of what I’m interested in to keep me going and look forward to next year. Certainly not the huge spectrum of work that you’re going to see at SDCC, but there are far less pleasant ways to spend an afternoon.

See you all next week. And I think in two weeks, I’ll be posting an interview with Darwyn Cooke, so be sure to check back then. (Postscript - never happened. Don't bother looking for it.)