Month: July 2005

The Japanese have figured out how to laser-etch encrypted data onto fingernail clippings. I can only make a viking-joke.

You can’t have a Comic-Con without an awards show! Occasional VM contributor Tom Spurgeon just posted his diary of the Eisner Awards night at last week’s Con.

A lot of the jokes are really industry-specific, so you might not laugh as much as I did.

9:32 — Sean McKeever wins Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, which is a neat award because it helps to solve the problem it presents in its title.

9:33 — I dream of an entire awards show designed along the same, utilitarian lines as the previous award, like “Artist Most in Need of Something Small to Place on a Desk.”

I’m still fixing up the pix from Saturday and Sunday; they’ll be up soon. You get back to work.

I meant to get a bunch of material posted today, but my town’s electricity is down (and it’s around 90 degrees). I’m crashing over at my dad’s, but I can’t figure out how to get my laptop onto his network. So you’ll have to wait to see how the last day of the Con stacked up. Trust me; there’s a pic that makes it all worth it.

Didn’t hit the Con on Saturday. Instead, the official VM fiancee & I went out with our San Diego-based friends Ian & Jess, went up to Cabrillo National Monument, and had some In-N-Out burgers. We met up with my buddy Tom at the Turf Supper Club for dinner.

I took a bunch of pix from the afternoon, but it was kinda hazy and they didn’t come out great. I’ll try to fix them up in Photoshop and post ’em later. We’ll head over to the Con in a few minutes, to check out the last day’s stragglers, pick up some funnybooks, and say goodbyes to people, before our afternoon flight back to Newark.

Had a fun day at the Con yesterday: spent WAY too much money on books and art, including a great sketch of Penny Century by Xaime Hernandez. This photo from the EA booth says it all:

Anyway, not much time/motivation to write this morning, so I’m just posting links to my pix, with captions:

Zander Cannon will probably not be happy to be captured for posterity thus, but he’s a good guy and a real pussycat, so I’m not afraid of him coming out from Minneapolis to whup my ass.

I laughed like a retard when I saw these guys.

Gary Panter is a heck of a good guy, and a legendary cartoonist. I’ll tellya my story of meeting the guy sometime.

Mario Hernandez is “the third Hernandez Brother” and, by all accounts, the hippest. I never met him before this year, and he was awfully friendly and personable. I felt bad that I didn’t have any comics for him to sign. I probably should have asked him to sign something really incongruous, like an old issue of Captain America that he had nothing to do with. I sure could use some coffee.

Dr. Doom, contemplating that fine pimp cup. I wonder if he equips his robot army with spinners, too.

Eddie Campbell, who never looks happy at these things.

Recreating the Spider-Man/Mary Jane scene from the first movie, except he’s not hanging upside-down.

I don’t have a picture of it, but the official VM fiancee spoke to Pete Bagge during his autograph session and asked him to sign his recent comic strip in Reason magazine, about the absurdity of medical marijuana persecution. Since everyone else was there with copies of Bagge’s old Hate comic, I think he was kinda gratified to see someone show up with a piece of his libertarian cartooning.

So far, out of 85,000 projected attendees & exhibitors, we’ve only met one other person who hasn’t seen the new Star Wars flick. So that’s three of us…

My buddy Tom posted his version of yesterday’s events at the Con. I forgot to mention, while we were at the CBLDF booth yesterday, we looked over at the XBox booth next door, which had a number of comics-related games that people could play.

Charles Brownstein, the CBLDF director, was looking over our shoulders at the booth, agog. He said, “The Hulk is beating a cow to death.”

We turned around. A youngish kid was playing a Hulk video game and was, in fact, beating a cow to death, smacking it against a cliff, picking up a boulder to throw at it, etc.

Tom & I were both thankful that we’re not kids nowadays, as we’d never get out of the house.

Got in late-ish last night and didn’t feel up to writin’. Another three G&Ts may have contributed to that vibe, but what’s it to you?

Anyway, the official VM fiancee and I had fun at the Comic-Con yesterday. It was chilly in the exhibit hall, so she got a little goose-bumped, but at least that prepared her for the thrills and chills of seeing so many comic-book, science fiction and gaming stereotypes brought to life.

For some reason, I was incredibly slow on the draw with the camera, so the only shot I took was this one. I hope to take a bunch more photos today, even though we’ll only be spending a couple of hours down at the show.

A lot of people dress in costumes for the Con, which is really one of its main attractions. I mean, sure, it’s nice to meet some cartoonists whose work you’ve adored, or make new friends or connections discussing your favorite topics, but it’s a blast to gawk at a fat chick dressed in her Princess-Leia-as-a-slave-girl costume.

So we checked in yesterday, and I picked up my press pass. I walked into a bathroom and saw a pile of clothes on the floor. Around the corner of the bathroom, a man was putting the finishing touches on his Jedi Knight costume, checking himself out in the mirror as he worked on his “press-on ponytail”. Evidently, he would’ve felt self-conscious walking through San Diego in this get-up, so he brought it all in his backpack.

Once inside the show, the OVMF & I walked through the first 37 aisles of displays till we got to home base: the Fantagraphics booth. Fantagaphics is the best “alternative” comics publisher in the field, home to cartoonists such as Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge and Los Bros. Hernandez. After introductions, we dropped my bag of show materials at the booth, met up with my buddy Tom, and began walking the show.

And it’s here that I made a mistake I’ll rue for all of blog-time. Just as we were getting ready to start out, the OVMF said to me, “Isn’t that the guy from The State?”

I looked over at the Top Shelf Comix booth and said, “Yeah, that’s Ben Garant. Oh, and that’s Tom Lennon with him. MAN, are they small.”

Now, I was a huge fan of the MTV comedy show The State, back in 1993-1995 or thereabouts. Tom & Ben, both members of The State, went on to do several other shows, including Viva Variety and Reno 911! (but not, fortunately, Stella). They marked the third and fourth members of the troupe whom I’ve bumped into (my Michael Showalter and Joe Lo Truglio stories aren’t any better than this one. Actually, the Joe story is; I’ll tell that one sometime).

Anyway, it was early in the show, and I was still a bit hungover from Wednesday night, and I managed to convince myself that I shouldn’t go over and take their picture. I kicked myself for that decision immediately after they were out of range, as they would’ve been a great addition to this chronicle. Especially if the picture consisted of Tom, who’s 6’2″ and about 335 lbs., picking both of them up and holding them under his arms.

We crossed their paths later in the afternoon, but I didn’t notice. So life is filled with regrets. I suck. If I see them today, I’ll try to get them to stop for a photo. I promise.

We walked the show after that, and Tom made conversation with a number of exhibitors and artists, to get a feel for this year’s edition. We hung close by and listened in, even while the OVMF shivered from the cold. I told her I’d buy her a Green Lantern hoodie over by the apparel booths, but she declined the offer. I don’t know why.

I knew a few of the artists, but not many, and it made me realize how much I’ve drifted out of this scene. My comics-knowledge really sorta peters out around 1998 or 1999, and I’ve convinced myself that if these younger guys were really good, I’d have found out about them already. I just don’t have the time/energy to devote to the new comics scene, to find out if anyone’s making good stuff on a par with the aforementioned Clowes/Bagge/Hernandez axis.

It’s not as if I don’t like the artform anymore; just as I don’t spend a lot of time watching art flicks anymore, my priorities seem to have shifted a bunch in recent years. It’s probably the same reason I stopped being a book publisher.

When I stopped by the Drawn & Quarterly booth later, I saw a new hardcover collection of Frank King’s comic-strips from 1921-22. Back at the Fanta booth, there was a massive hardcover collection of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips. I said to the gentleman running the booth, “I’m glad that my professional development has followed the same progression as your companies’ ambitious projects.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Just that when you guys started coming out with high-end, expensive, but fantastic collections, I reached a stage in my career where I can comfortably afford to buy them.”

“Gotcha. That Frank King collection is not to be missed.”

I’m holding out on that one, though. It’s not like King’s around to autograph the thing, so I’ll likely pick it up on Amazon (and get a third off).

During our promenade, we stopped by the booth of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which helps defend comic-store owners and publlishers in first-amendment-related cases. The director of the fund chatted with us a while, and told embarrassing stories about cartoonists and other industry figures. The CBLDF was having a fund-raising party that night in our hotel, so we promised to stop in. There are a lot of messed-up legal cases that the fund gets involved in, and which don’t get much coverage in the mainstream press. But if they involved prose books instead of comics, you can be sure you’d hear a lot more about them. What I’m saying is, go to the fund’s site and contribute a little cash, if you wanna help defend some freedom of speech in this country.

Eventually, the OVMF was too cold to keep moving, so we headed out for lunch (Thai, as is my wont), returned to the show briefly, where I spent too much money buying a page of original art from one of my favorite cartoonists, Eddie Campbell. We took a break from the show, returning to the hotel, rearranging wardrobes, and otherwise reducing the sensory stimuli that the Con can inflict on a person.

Late in the afternoon, we went back, saw Tom on a panel on “blogging about comics,” and walked out in the middle of it when we couldn’t take anymore of the fanboy atmosphere and comics writer Peter David’s idiocy. Later, Tom told us that he wanted to join us when we got up and left.

We decided to hit the Padres game after the show ended, since we were in a baseball town with a new stadium and this was the only night we’d be free. I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I do enjoy going to games. That said, this game was boring as shit, and we left after the sixth so we could hit some parties. The only fun part was the girl sitting in the row in front of us, who pulled the double faux-pas of showing off extreme butt-cleavage AND a tanline-of-demarcation. The OVMF says that the girl’s pink underwear makes this a triple faux-pas, but I think that it falls within the “crack kills” aspect of her low-risers.

Anyway, the new stadium was nice, but not fantastic. Tom concluded that it didn’t mess anything up, but wasn’t as inspired as, say, Camden Yards. We concurred.

From the game, we walked up to the Horton Plaza for a party hosted by Scholastic, which is publishing several cartoonists. The guest of honor was Jeff Smith, who wrote and drew Bone, a 1400-page comic book that I’m currently making my way through. We drank several rounds and Tom said, “Remember: Harry Potter is paying for our drinks.”

I said, “Yeah, I hear at the stroke of midnight tomorrow, the Scholastic execs will actually start shooting $100 bills straight outta their asses.”

We drank, and bantered, and a young man who was in the audience at Tom’s blog-panel came over to talk with us. Evidently, after we left the session, he asked a question that Tom just jumped down his throat over. But he didn’t have any hard feelings about it.

We split for the CBLDF party, where we had some nice conversation with cartoonists Zander Cannon and Shad Petosky. We’ll stop by their booth today to see their stuff.

The day ended there. We did plenty of walking, a lot of talking, and tons of gawking. I’m really sorry I didn’t bust out the camera more yesterday, but I’ll try to make up for it when we stop in today to see Los Bros. Hernandez (and maybe buy some of Xaime’s sketches) and a few other cartoonists. I’m also sorry to offer more prosaic chronicling than wacky commentary, but I’m a little tired and the sheer volume of material is pretty overwhelming (but also esoteric, requiring lots of background commentary).

Bad weather kept us from leaving Newark Airport for quite a while yesterday, so our first day of vacation was spent largely doing crossword puzzles, reading (thought I’d read Huck Finn again), listening to our iPods, and doing more crossword puzzles. We got in around 9pm local time (midnight by my standards, after getting to Newark 12 hours earlier).

Our suitcase was the last one to show up in baggage claim, prompting a 25-minute wait by the carousel. Then my buddy Ian (whose One True keeps a blog) picked us up and got us to our fantastic-ish hotel. The three of us met up with my buddy Tom, who’s in town for the Comic-Con. I knocked down 3 G&Ts in pretty short order, and then got back to the hotel and thought, “All told, it’s not a bad start to a vacation.”

On to the Con!