Highway 62

I watched as Graeme tried to take in the vastness of SDCC. It’s good he’s a strong will on him, or he’d have been broken in mere moments, such was the onslaught that awaited him. Though I’m sure he spent the flight back to his home, head in hands weeping as his mind tried to confront the sheer size of the Beast that he’d wandered into. Or I could be making that up.



We got upstairs in time for the impromptu Comics Blogger Summit that was taking place ahead of the Comics Blogging panel. Funny that most of the folks involved were actually making some money on their blogs this year, when last year it was unpaid work for almost everyone but for Heidi MacDonald and Tom Spurgeon. Last year seemed better attended as well, probably because Peter David was there, as was Mark Evanier, both of whom are noted comics pros.



I’m not going to go over all the content, mostly because you should be able to intuit a lot of it given the people involved: Heidi MacDonald (The Beat), Tom Spurgeon (The Comics Reporter), Graeme McMillian (Newsarama and The Savage Critic, as well as the late, lamented Fanboy Rampage), Christopher Butcher (Comics212.net), Ron Hogan (Galleycat on Media Bistro) and Tom McLean (Bags and Boards on Variety). Of the panelists there, only Chris Butcher was a free agent, so to speak, doing this on his own time and not seeing a dime out of things. That gave him a unique perspective and a freedom to speak that the others didn’t seem to have. Granted, Tom isn’t going to cover most “news” in mainstream comics at all and the others have a different focus.



Butcher was passionate about his assertions regarding the independence of bloggers and the necessity of them facing down the big companies and calling their bluffs about media blackouts and the like. Of course, this led to a conversation about comics journalism as a whole, and frankly I’m not sure that most bloggers fall into the category of journalists uncovering stories. I may get back to this topic at another time, but there’s a number of things preventing these folks from acting as “real” journalists, some of which have to do with their actual jobs and that blogging is only half of what they do, resources needed to do these jobs, etc. We were once in the wild west phase of blogging, but now we’re being settled down, barbed wire fences now marking out territories and things are changing. Perhaps we’ll get to the point where a site like Newsarama will become an entity that’s able to fund real journalism (contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just spring into the world via spontaneous generation.) Until then, it’ll be folks who are passionate and driven by that.



As always, it’s interesting to see the faces behind the blogs. Contrary to popular belief, the voice that you blog with isn’t always the voice that you talk with out in public.



Went back out and hit the floor and found myself wandering the seemingly half of the convention floor dedicated to custom toys. And for some reason, I found myself profoundly depressed by what I saw. Sure, there was some real art on display, but it all seemed pretty calculated and mercenary and sort of lifestyle-fixture oriented and not out of any sense of play. These things were fetish objects to be boxed and worshipped or perhaps shelved and nothing else. Certainly there was beautiful craftsmanship involved but aside from that it seemed, I dunno, sterile and removed from any sense of connection. Yes, toys for the sake of nostalgia are sort of a dead end (said he, angry that he couldn’t find a Baron Karza this year), but the short-run production toys all seemed like a total evolutionary and emotional dead end. I will say, it was great to see a sort of mutated hip-hop sensibility driving some of these artists into making something new and unique. Would I be treating any of these things differently had they been in an installation somewhere being revered and fetishized as “art”? Probably not, as my disdain of art for the sake of art is steady after all these years.



Then I headed through the aisles and aisles of videogames that folks were eagerly playing and I kinda despaired of my own chosen craft, of the Story, the dictatorial author leading the audience through a linear, non-mutable emotional experience. Was there anything greater being offered in the seeming sense of control that drives videogaming? Sure, you can go anywhere you want in GRAND THEFT AUTO, but is it fulfilling the purpose of story with a capital S or is it just running you through a non-linear seeming plot? Yes, you could easily apply the same criticism to most comics output these days. Hence my deepening despair…



Luckily I was able to salve that sort of existential doubt by going through pages of original art and experience the sort of raw storytelling power of sequential art, and by this I mean the good stuff, not the Top Cow output of…well, pretty much forever. While at the Splash Page booth, I was able to catch up with Cameron Stewart (he of SEAGUY and THE GUARDIAN and CATWOMAN, among others). I saw some really lovely pages from THE OTHER SIDE, which he’s working on for Vertigo currently. It’s like his earlier work, but he’s taken huge leaps in terms of refinement of his rendering and the addition of texture, but not at the loss of his abilities to express emotion and get it on the page. Can’t wait for this to come out. October, I’m told.



That afternoon, I was able to get a chance to talk to Doug Rushkoff, who’s a media critic of some renown as well as the author of TESTAMENT (which I’m probably one of…well, not too many people actually picking up the book.) It’s a shame, as it’s a story that could only be told in comics, at least in terms of the techniques at work. Granted, people have been doing adaptations of The Bible for some time, but this is a completely different approach, showing the stories for what they are: stories of men and women facing the same sorts of dilemmas that we do today, only thousands of years ago. Rushkoff isn’t preaching, not by any stretch. I’m hoping he is able to enact his plan for the series, including getting to the New Testament some years down the road, but the market being what it is, I’ll enjoy it for the now.



I should mention that I spent a bit of time lurking around the BOOM! Studios booth, keeping an eye on things. Their winner for the show seemed to be the HERO volume that they were selling, under the watchful eye of Amano himself. No, really, they could only sell it when Amano was there to sign and authenticate each volume sold. It made for a big hullabaloo and long lines. Also in the offering was a WARHAMMER 40K preview that I couldn’t bring myself to spend the five dollars on, but as an unreformed 40K nut, I’m keeping my eye on this.



Also ran into Kevin Church (Mr. Beaucoupkevin to you, kids) there and chatted for a bit. He’s not terrifically unlike his net persona, and was gladhanding copies of his mini (Affable? I don’t have it in front of me to check) to anyone who’d hold still for a microsecond. Sadly, didn’t get a chance to do any post-convention socializing with him, but these things happen. He’s a busy guy.



I did attend the Wildstorm panel, mostly so I could see what Grant Morrison had in store for his revamp of the Wildstorm Universe. I found it odd that such a “new” universe was already so continuity-clogged and people came out, hat in hand, asking about the fates of their favorite characters and if they’d be in the limelight anytime soon. I guess it’s that whole thesis+antithesis=new thesis (aka “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”) thing at work in comics. That said, what Morrison has planned does sound interesting, and I’ll be picking up a copy of WILDCATS for the first time ever. But it looks like that and THE AUTHORITY and perhaps Gail Simone’s new series (and maybe a look at THE BOYS and THE RED MENACE, which isn’t a Wildstorm U book itself). I’d like to think that Morrison and company can pull this off, but something tells me that he’s going to be fighting an uphill battle and it won’t be a very long run. Maybe it’ll make for a handsome hardcover volume. I have to say, the premise for THE AUTHORITY “Doing superheroes in the real world” sounds like a retread at first, but Morrison is very good at this sort of thing, and seems to get what that * actually * means.



Milled around the floor, ran into some familiar faces from THE ENGINE and the Internet in general, passed out more copies of the STRANGEWAYS preview (trying to get rid of anything that says “Speakeasy” on the cover, really, as well as getting more eyeballs on the book.) Still didn’t hook up with the editor in question and ended up trying to beat the 7 o’clock rush out of the convention center and to dinner with friends. Which I made, and was lovely, even if we all couldn’t fit at one table.



Then I got the phone call that the water heater at home had broken, and that water was off in the house, leaving kids and my wife in a bit of a pickle. What turned into a run back to the car just to drop off my pack became an errand of mercy, bringing some bottled water to the house so that toilets could be flushed and the like.



Which was great until I found that my car got towed. On the phone, my wife just laughed. I suppose it was the only sane response. I, instead, stewed as I rode in the backseat of the taxi, windows down, feeling the not-hot, not-cool of the San Diego Evening as we trekked down to 28th Street and Commercial to the tow yard (the driver didn’t know where we were going, and neither did I). Then I had the supreme joy of waiting on the street for fifteen minutes while the operator I’d spoken to came to man the after-hours desk. It wasn’t like I’d just asked for directions on the phone and said “I’m on my way” or anything. Oh wait, that’s exactly what had happened… A not so lovely evening to a sort of existential treadmill sort of day.