My First Comic Con: A Boston Comic Con Report From A Convention Virgin

For some time now Rob and Amanda have been trying to talk Trebuchet and me into attending San Diego Comic-Con with them, making their case with enticing details such as:

“You can’t really walk there. It’s more of a shuffle-step. Be prepared to throw an elbow.”
“The only place you might get trampled to death is the toy floor.”
and, most disturbing: “There’s no Dunkin Donuts.”

While we haven’t quite worked up the enthusiasm to fly cross-country and spend five days in the middle of a mob, we did think it was time to check out the much closer (though still two hours away) Boston Comic Con. If you have read Rob’s and Amanda’s recaps, this was not the tiny regional con we anticipated – but as it turned out, in spite of the growing pains, the unexpected crowd actually made the event more exciting.

They’ll Fix You. They Fix Everything: Robocop: Last Stand #1 Review

Robocop is awesome. Sure, there are a lot of questionable moments in the franchise, like parts of Robocop 2… and all of Robocop 3… plus the entirety of the Robocop animated series… not to mention every instant of the live-action Robocop TV series that was created to keep Orion Pictures from being sold for corporate parts in the mid 90s… but that original Paul Verhoeven flick? I can watch that all day.

Frank Miller, too, is awesome… or at least he was once. Sure, there have been a lot of questionable moments, like Holy Terror… and his film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit… and whenever he goes anywhere near a device that has an Ethernet port… but all those stories like The Dark Knight Returns, and Give Me Liberty, and Batman: Year One? Miller in the late 80s, early 90s, I can read all day.

Now, Miller famously wrote the original screenplays for Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 in the late 80s, before various studio executives and directors ripped the things apart to turn them into the respective okay and awful movies they became. And for a long time through the 90s, those screenplays were kind of legends in the comics world: Miller, working when he was at the top of his game, on a genre franchise that exploded into a classic right out of the gate.

Almost ten years ago, Avatar Press released an adaptation of Miller’s Robocop 2 screenplay, with a comic script by Two Guns writer Steven Grant, that was pretty solid as I recall, and was a hell of a lot darker than the actual movie. But that still left Miller’s Robocop 3 screenplay floating around out there. And in the meantime, Dynamite Comics got their hands on the Robocop license and put out some books that, frankly, made Robocop 2 look like Godfather 2.

However, the license has now moved to Boom Studios, who has put the band back together with Robocop: Last Stand, an adaptation of Miller’s Robocop 3 screenplay again adapted to comics by Steven Grant. So we’ve got an 80s Robocop story based on an 80s story by Frank Miller. On paper, it’s everything I ever wanted when I was 20 years old… but the question is: is it a classic like I always hoped? Or is it another wretchedly disappointing Robocop comic like every one I’ve read since we started this Web site?

The answer is… neither, really. But it is pretty damn good

Write What You Know, And Then Stop: Wolverine: In The Flesh Review

Editor’s Note: And one last quick review before the comic stores open today…

When I was younger, I was a professional stand-up comedian. I started almost exactly 20 years ago, performing for the first time in the back of a shitty bar called Headliners off of the main drag in Buckhead, Georgia (it’s not there anymore) in mid-August, 1993, hundreds of miles away from anyone who knew me, so that if I completely sucked and couldn’t face doing it anymore, no one would know that I stunk up the joint.

Well, I did completely suck, but I got better over the course of years, going from shitty college bar open mike to the back rooms of Chinese restaurants 20 minutes off of any highway in northern New England, honing my craft enough to reach the point where I could do some opening in bigger rooms in Boston. It took me years to get there… and during that time, there was nothing that pissed me off more than hearing that some bubblegumming fallen D-List celebrity or maybe some scandal celebrity try to string out their 15 minutes of fame by trying a stand-up.

Year after year, I’d hear it: Kato Kaelin was doing stand-up! Screech from Saved By The Bell was doing a weekend at the Comedy Palace! John Wayne Bobbit was doing two appearances at – wait, that was porn he did… but that’s not the point. The point is that it pissed me off that these celebrities thought that they could just announce that they were comedians and just do the thing that I had spent ten years going from crappy club to crappy club, eating shitty food and going without sleep while driving through the night, learning how to do well enough to reach the bottom rungs of the ladder of success! With my only consolation being that after those initial big announcements of their new careers in comedy… you never fucking heard of any of them again.

All of which is a long way to go to say that celebrity chef and Food Network personality Chris Cosentino has written a Wolverine comic book for Marvel, and this is my review of it.

Whacko Storage Facility: Batman Annual #2 Review

I have been reading Batman comics since I was five years old, and therefore, I know what the purpose of Arkham Asylum is: it’s to give supervillains a place to take a nice rest after the end of a starring turn, and a place to break out of at the start of the next starring turn. And that’s pretty much it.

Seriously: can you think of anyone who has ever been cured at Arkham Asylum? I mean, in theory, any insane asylum is actually a psychiatric hospital; here in Massachusetts, the local nuthatch is known as Bridgewater State Hospital, not the Southeastern Mass Whacko Storage Facility (however, that will be the name of my next punk band). And when a facility is a hospital, one would assume the application of some form of medical treatment… and yet at Arkham, no one ever gets better. Hell, no one ever tries; the only people I can think of who were released from Arkham are Harvey Dent and The Joker, and that was in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and it only happened as a way for Miller to mock liberals, and ended in the deaths of hundreds. If you believe the portrayal of psychiatry in Batman, the field only exists to clap you in a straitjacket and pump your full of antipsychotic drugs. Which is why I self-medicate with 30-packs of the Poor Man’s Valium. But I digress.

But if one stops to think about it, if there is a psychiatric hospital, there must be someone who went there under their own power looking for a little medical help, right? And what would happen if the place that that person went for healing became, over the course of years, the location where a city locked up its most dangerous and escape-prone homicidal maniacs?

It’s an interesting idea, and its the focus of Batman Annual #2, with a story by regular Batman writer Scott Snyder and new comics writer Marguerite Bennett, with the script by Bennett herself. And it is successful in giving readers a new point of view on comics’ favorite spastic hatch… even though it isn’t completely successful as a completely immersive and believable Batman story.

Don’t Go Back To Nahant: Boston Comic Con 2013’s Locke & Key Panel Full Report

Editor’s Note: If this writeup of Sunday’s Locke & Key panel sounds fun, you can see a bunch of video from the panel, with a lot of additional information that didn’t make this report, right here.

If Boston Comic Con had a single event that no other convention, regardless of size or location, could reproduce in 2013, it was the Locke & Key panel, because it featured all the main players in the production of the book: writer Joe Hill, artist Gabriel Rodriguez, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall. And considering that the book is coming to a conclusion in just a few months, and therefore all of these guys will be moving on to other projects, if you ever wanted to see these three guys interact and talk about Locke & Key while it’s an ongoing concern, the only place to be was the Waterfront Room at the Seaport World Trade Center at 2 p.m. on Sunday.

The one thing that that panel didn’t have was a hell of a lot in the way of actual news, but who the hell expected that? We all know the comic is closing up shop (minus the odd rumored one-shot, which wasn’t something that was addressed at the panel), we all know that the Fox pilot for a TV series is two years dead, and the Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (of Star Trek reboot fame)-produced Locke & Key movie is only a month and a half into its existence, and there’s no way in hell that they would allow any hard information to be released in a function room full of people wearing t-shirts reading, “Yankees Suck!”

So these guys were not facing a crowd that was rabid for any new information (beyond maybe how, and who will make, Dodge eventually suck the pipe, but even that was a low-key questions; after all, the final issue is just about on its way), which meant that tensions were low for the panel, and it showed. The panel unofficially started with Hill looking at his phone at the stroke of 2 p.m., grabbing a microphone, and saying, “Guys, this just in: the BBC just announced that the next Doctor will be Jason Statham!”

And when the crowd groaned, Hill said, “It would be awesome, and you know it!”

Yeah, this panel looked to just be a good time. And it was.

Doctor Who News – Peter Capaldi Is The 12th Doctor

Yesterday, the BBC announced that Peter Capaldi will be the next Doctor in Doctor Who. Capaldi is probably best known for his work as Malcolm Tucker on The Thick Of It. He also was most recently seen on the big screen in World War Z as W.H.O. Doctor (ha!).

Capaldi’s casting is a departure from the recent trend of casting much younger actors to the role of The Doctor in order to court the demographic. Indeed Capaldi is 55, the same age as William Hartnell when he was cast as the very first Doctor back in 1963. Reportedly, Capaldi was the only person show runner Steven Moffat was interested in for the role. As of the Doctor Who panel back at San Diego Comic-Con back in July, Moffat had said that there had been no casting decisions made with regard to the 12th Doctor. Nice to see Moffat continue his streak of being upfront and transparent with the show’s fans.

Check out the video of Peter Capaldi’s introduction to Doctor Who fans from the BBC television special that aired yesterday, after the jump.

Closing The Door: Video From Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key Panel At Boston Comic Con 2013

Boston Comic Con is now over, and it certainly has one thing over the San Diego Comic-Con: getting back to the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office from Boston Comic Con only took 20 minutes and cost $2.50 on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Boston Comic Con might well have been a pleasant surprise and an exciting jump from a little regional convention to one that feels more and more like one of the bigger boys, but it certainly wasn’t perfect. In the coming day or two, either Amanda or I will be addressing the truly deficient methods this convention had for dealing with crowds both attempting to enter the convention and trying to attend the panels (for now, let’s leave it with the stark reality that, if someone tried to clear a convention room at SDCC in between panels, that effort would start with bemused laughter and end with a truly epic riot), but Boston provided some experiences that were indistinguishable from some of the biggest and best conventions in the world.

And one of those experiences is exhaustion. We are wiped out. And unlike when we attend San Diego, we don’t have a long flight and several vacation days with which we can recover; we’re right back to our daily lives tomorrow morning.

So while we will be publishing that general Boston Comic Con postmortem, as well as detailed coverage of Joe Hill’s, Gabriel Rodriguez’s, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall’s panel on Locke & Key (which, since Locke & Key is concluding, realistically marks the final time these creators will probably be in the same room at the same time), we didn’t want to leave you hanging while we weakly sip beer and appreciate our art purchases (Amanda picked up a J. O’Barr original sketch of Iggy Pop that is as awesome as it is an off-kilter work by the creator of The Crow) while yawning.

So in that spirit, here is a series of short videos we took of Hill and Rodriguez at the Locke & Key panel. And I gotta tell you: if you get a chance to see either of these guys at a convention panel, take it. Rodriguez is clearly enthusiastic about the work he does, and Hill is just plain old laugh-out-loud funny to see speak.

But don’t take my word for it; you can get a taste, straight from our YouTube Channel, right after the jump.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Boston Comic Con, Day One

Jesus Christ, I wasn’t expecting that.

In the times that I have attended Boston Comic Con in the past, it has been a nice little regional convention. Sure, in the past few years, it has attracted some A-List talent like Tim Sale and Geof Darrow, but generally, those guys have stayed at their tables on the floor, and while some of them might have attracted a decent individual line or two, it didn’t affect the little regional convention as a whole. Which meant that you could walk in off the street, wander up and buy a ticket at the door within thirty seconds on a whim, comfortably wander the floor at your leisure to see everything you want, spend a bunch of quality time with every creator you could make eye contact with, and leave within a couple or three hours, comfortable you’ve seen everything there is to see.

And frankly, that was what I was expecting this morning, when we got to this year’s delayed opening of the Boston Comic Con. Sure, the convention had picked up one or two more high-toned guests like DC Comics’ Publisher Dan DiDio and Batman writer Scott Snyder, but thanks to the delay created by the Marathon Bomber, the convention was being held at the Seaport World Trade Center – a much bigger venue than the originally-booked Hynes Convention Center – so there should have been plenty of room to handle the expected demand for a little regional convention, right?

Yeah, right… except it seems that 2013 was the year that Boston decided that it no longer wanted a little regional convention. By noon today, the main floor of the convention, even at this bigger venue, was like walking the floor at San Diego Comic-Con on any given Saturday, and every volunteer on the floor – who thought they were signing on to wrangle a nice little regional convention – looked like they had suddenly realized that they had signed on to be the local intern guide for Galactus.

At least for today, Boston Comic Con was not a nice little regional convention. It was a major convention with world-class talent and a comparably excited and enthusiastic crowd that could hold its head up with any convention short of San Diego and New York…

Even if the people running the convention weren’t completely prepared for it.

Falling For Another Con: Boston Comic Con Coverage Starts Today

We are posting this as we are preparing to leave to attend the first day of Boston Comic Con 2013 – a smaller convention than San Diego Comic-Con to be sure, but I’ve seen a couple of estimates on Twitter that 15,000 people are expected to attend, which means it has grown hell and gone from four years ago, when it was still being held in the function room of a local hotel. But there’s a lot to be said for attending a smaller convention, particularly when it it being attended by A-List talent like Scott Snyder, Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, Colleen Doran, Dan DiDio, David Mack, and a pile of other exciting creators… and when attendance requires only a subway ride as opposed to a cross-country flight. Besides, after a week of leaving a convention and then begging and scraping for the odd spare Internets, it will be nice to have a pre-paid multi-megabit pipe to post pictures of people in Wolverine outfits.

We will be attending and covering both days of the convention (but if you’re local to southern New England, you don’t need us; tickets will be available at the door at the Seaport World Trade Center at 200 Seaport Boulevard in Boston, or you can preorder them through Eventbrite), including as many panels as we can get into (including a Batman panel featuring Snyder that has just been announced), but please be sure to follow us on Twitter, as we will be live-Tweeting panels and photos right from the scene. In addition, we will be uploading videos from the convention to our YouTube channel both tonight and tomorrow evening (and honestly, probably on into next week).

But if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to make our way to the convention. Being a trip via the subway system, I will just as forbidden to smoke as I was on our flight to San Diego… but the good news is that, being the Boston subway system, I will be allowed to urinate.

Live Forever: Batman Incorporated #13 Review

Editor’s Note: I don’t know if Batman’s dead or not. All I know is this. Parts of the city out there, it’s like Spoiler Year all over again.

Grant Morrison has been working on his Batman story since 2006. During that time, DC has gone through a Final Crisis and a full reboot, Batman has died and been reborn after traveling through history, had a son and lost him (despite a couple of stories predicting his future as Trenchcoat Gunslinger Batman), and I have been infuriated at least as often, if not more often, as I have been delighted by what Morrison has done with the character in the past seven years.

Seriously: for every awesome speculative story about a future Batman presiding over the end of Gotham City, there is Batman with a handgun shooting Darkseid. For each interesting revival of obscure Silver Age ephemera, there is a Joker story that is mostly text with the occasional odd computer-generated image (seriously, Grant: if I wanted to read a giant block of text, I’d read this Web site). And for every moment where Damian does something awesome, there are about 700 moments where Damian speaks, breathes and / or exists. I was not a fan of Damian, I guess is what I’m saying.

But Morrison’s Batman story is over now, completed in this week’s Batman Incorporated #13, where Batman finally has his last showdown with Talia al Ghul (who started this all by dumping that little rugrat Damian on Batman’s doorstep back in the first place), with the fate of Gotham and six other cities hanging in the balance. And in the issue, Morrison tries to have things a lot of ways, simultaneously tearing down and destroying Batman and Bruce Wayne while asserting that that could never happen, and pointing out the ridiculousness of the idea of Batman while also calling it timeless and classic.

All of which should be a filthy Goddamned mess, and in certain ways it is, as Morrison makes a couple of choices here that directly contradict other things that he did earlier in his run. However, there is no denying two things: while I don’t always enjoy or agree with his story choices, there is no question that Morrison is an excellent writer… and if you’ve been following his career since Animal Man, you know he can write one hell of a final issue when he wants to.

And while Batman Incorporated #13 might not be the best wrapup to an epic storyline I’ve ever read, it is, in fact, one hell of an interesting statement on Batman himself.