Blog

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.