Hitting The Floor: SDCC 2013 Preview Night

One of the biggest problems wth Preview Night at San Diego Comic-Con is that it happens at night. It’s not the biggest problem, but it’s up there.

Here’s how Wednesday at SDCC works for your typical attendee (and at this point, we still buy our own passes, as opposed to trying to obtain press credentials, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment): you get up and you have some coffee and something to eat. Congratulations! It is now, say, 9:30 a.m. Now you need to find something to do for the next four, five hours!

Calm Before The Geekstorm

You cannot find a Dunkin’ Donuts in San Diego. This is more dire than it first might sound.

We take our Dunkin’ Donuts coffee seriously in New England. There isn’t a highway offramp between Providence and Bar Harbor where you can’t find a D & D within half a mile, and it is the morning beverage of choice for everyone other than the hipster douchebags who live near Boston University or in Cambridge or maybe Brookline, and no one gives much of a fuck what those commies think anyway.

As an example: while waiting in line for the TSA security screening at Logan Airport yesterday, there was a teenaged girl, who looked as exhausted as Amanda and I felt, slurping on a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee when the security drone told her she couldn’t bring any liquids through the checkpoint. She asked the guy if there was a “Dunkies” after the checkpoint, and when he told her no, she left the fucking line and went to the back so she could finish her dollar-fifty coffee.

So when I woke up at 5 a.m. local time here in San Diego, jetlagged and hung over, I asked my magical new smartphone if southern California had heard the word of God between last year and this year, it turns our that had… but not in any way that would help me.

Sure, there’s a Starbucks in the lobby of our hotel, but as a Bostonian, I believe that Starbucks hot coffee tastes as if it were heated with napalm while being filtered through crushed Galouise cigarettes. So I trudged off toward downtown to see what other options the good people of San Diego might have for a visitor who is wishing for either coffee or a quiet death.

And, as with every year, I was struck by the feeling of calm. The calm before the Geekstorm.

Boots On The Ground, Brainstem In The Gutter: Arrival At San Diego Comic-Con 2013

Editor’s Note: The following post was written from an outdoor patio, soon after arriving in San Diego, while we had no hotel room yet, nor Internet access from which to upload it. It is probably being uploaded hours later from some friendly bar with free WiFi, with far more photographs than are described in the post itself. In fact, many of the posts you read here this week will be written in one place, posted from another, with photos and video captured rom yet other places and uploaded when more than a bar of WiFi shows up on one device or another. In short: welcome to San Diego Comic-Con.

The toughest thing about the San Diego Comic-Con is that it is in San Diego. And while this is not a problem for the Los Angeles-based television and movie people who attend the convention, making it the biggest genre and pop culture convention in the Western world, it is a problem for a couple of people running a two-person comics Web site… at least it is a problem when that two-person comics Web site is based in Boston.

There are only two effective ways to get to SDCC from Boston: fly, or go on a desperate and full-throttled whiskey bender sometime toward the end of June and hope that you emerge from the blackout there. And considering Column B has not worked out in my favor any year between 1992 and now, that meant an airplane.

The problem is that there are only two airlines that fly non-stop between Boston and San Diego (and I must fly non-stop; any longer than eight hours in the nicotine-free airline system, and I will wind up in the nicotine-free prison system): American Airlines and JetBlue. And that really means that there is only one airline possibility, because careful personal research has proven that American Airlines sucks.

The tricky part is that JetBlue changes the times of their non-stop flight to San Diego every year, and sometimes more than once a year; literally every year I have booked tickets with them prior to this year, I have received an automated phone call advising me that the time has been pushed out, sometimes by hours. So it was without too much trepidation that, back in February, I booked two tickets on JetBlue’s 7 a.m. flight out of Logan Airport, because hey: they were gonna change it. Right?

Yeah, no. So this morning, our alarm clock fired at 3:30 a.m. to get us ready for a 4:30 a.m. cab ride to Logan to get us there in time to remove our shoes and our dignity for the Transportation Security Agency’s screening process. The 7 a.m. flight left promptly at 7:25 a.m. (because hey: Logan Airport), and made record time dropping us here in beautiful downtown San Diego five and a half hours later. Unfortunately, with the time zone changes, that meant it was 10 a.m. local time. So my body was screaming for lunch while it was really breakfast time, and as of this writing, it is whimpering that it is Beer O’Clock… while we still have two and a half hours to go until we can even check into our hotel.

So with that kind of time to kill, we wandered the downtown area and took some photographs of the spectacle that will, in about 27 hours, become San Diego Comic-Con 2013. And you can find those pictures right here. Not everything is completed, and some of the hype attracters are still in the process of being constructed, but at least you can get a sense of what is coming, once things go into full blast during tomorrow’s Preview Night.

How To Survive Comic-Con Without Really Trying: 2013 Edition

We are in the final throes of preparation for heading to San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, which means we don’t have a lot of time today, but it does mean that we’re in the process of putting into place a bunch of the stuff that we’ve learned about how to survive what amounts to a six-day forced march through spectacle, excitement, a marked lack of easy-to-access Internet, crowded restaurants and line – dear God, the lines.

But as we did last year, we’ll share a few of the lessons that we’ve learned about how to survive the process. Now, since our time is limited today, I’m not gonna go back and read what I wrote back then, but simply vomit some stuff into the keyboard… which in and of itself will be good experience to prepare for a six-hour session of daydrinking in the sun at Dick’s Last Resort on 5th Avenue.

Sibling Rivalry: Hawkeye #12 Review

I normally try not to review the same title two months in a row unless it’s a big event comic – my reviews take a while to write thanks to my congenital case of diarrhea of the keyboard, and there are only so many hours in the day – but what the hell can I tell you? Hawkeye #12 is just that Goddamned good.

Seriously, I don’t know how Matt Fraction ever got this series greenlit without having photos of Axel Alonso in a compromising position with some form of beast of burden or something. Hawkeye barely appears in this book. There are exactly four panels of bow and arrow action. The closest thing to a supervillain is a Russian cocksucker in a tracksuit. The closest thing to a superhero battle and strategy is when a guy decides that he’s earned that money the Russians offered him in exchange for letting them kick the shit out of him. And this is in a Marvel superhero comic; for contrast, imagine a Superman comic that was about Jimmy Olsen getting ripped to the tits on laudanum while bemoaning his childhood by letting strange women pay him to take a dump on his chest.

This kind of superhero comic simply shouldn’t work; describing it on paper makes it sound like an inventory fill-in issue by a writer who was instructed to turn in something that doesn’t directly fuck around with the main character’s status quo. But it’s not like that at all; instead, we get a solid show-don’t-tell character study of Clint’s brother Barney, a snapshot of Clint and Barney’s childhood that uses artist Francesco Francavilla’s skills to show us a lot of information without having to waste a lot of time with unnecessary exposition, and for me, the first time I’ve ever seen a reason I can believe why Clint wouldn’t just write his brother – a Dark Avenger who stole Clint’s Hawkeye identity only weeks ago – completely off. All without seeing Hawkeye for more than a single page.

It shouldn’t work. But it does. Because it’s a superhero story about people, with some of the best pulpy art you can find anywhere.

Summer Cleaning / Demolition

It has been more than six months since we did a good, old-fashioned site maintenance and upgrade, and what with our trip to San Diego Comic-Con coming up (and the limited access to real computers that can handle much more than uploading panel reports or photos of cosplayers and weird ephemera), it seems like the time to tidy up the joint.

This is a big task, so if things go quiet here, or you see some weird renderings or odd things happening around the edges, please forgive us.

We will try to be back online and broadcasting by this afternoon.

Thanks for your patience.

New Clip From Beware The Batman, DC Nation Wonder Woman Short Preview

Rob is at a screening of Pacific Rim right now. Without me.

Now, I could be all pissed off about that, but I’m not. After all, he may have surrounded himself with giant robots and monsters, but, he left the whiskey here. With me.

So, as the whiskey and I spend the day together, we are finding our own entertainment on the Web. For example, behold the new opening sequence and promo clips from Beware The Batman:

Looks interesting. I’m not entirely convinced it will fill the hole in my heart that was left when DC/Warner Brothers abruptly cancelled Young Justice, but I think the important thing to remember here is that it’s not Teen Titans Go!, thank Christ.

So, what else is out on the Internetz?

Trinity Civil War: Justice League #22 Review

Look: I am never gonna hate too much on a comic book that gives me Superman fighting with Captain Marvel. And yes, I know that DC wants me to call him Shazam now. But I am old and crochety, and frankly? I am proud of the self-education I gave myself, back in the days of the 1970s Shazam! Saturday morning TV show, to call the character “Captain Marvel” rather than “Shazam.” Because I didn’t want to look stupid to the older comic book fans who lived on my block. And they did call me stupid when I called that guy “Shazam.” You hearing me, DC Comics? You listening me to digress like a sonofabitch?

Anyway. Justice League #22, the opening of the long-teased The Trinity War crossover event, gives me a good couple of pages of Superman and Captain Marvel tuning each other up. And as someone who remembers, as a young kid, waiting feverishly for Justice League of America #137 to show up in the spinner rack of my local corner grocery store (where they knew me by name and asked me to stop pretending the lime Ring Pops were Green Lantern power rings if I wasn’t gonna pay for one), seeing that makes me remember my youth and makes me predisposed to like a comic book.

And I did like Justice League #22… up to a point. As a kickoff point for a big crossover, it gives us a few examples of solid and believable characterization (and a few that aren’t – would someone at DC decide what kind of person Superman really is in the New 52?), it drops enough groundwork to let us believe that we’ll finally get the full story on Pandora – the mystery woman from all the initial first issues of the New 52, remember? – and if gives some good, solid, hot, sweet, superhero-on-superhero action.

If it has an Achilles’ Heel, it is that it is currently 2013. Which means that any continuity-wide story that features half of its superheros kicking the crap out of the other half is doomed to feel kinda like a lift from Marvel’s Civil War, or last year’s Avengers Vs. X-Men.

Forced Withdrawal

This is our last Wednesday before we head off to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, which is always a weird sensation. On one hand, our pilgrimage makes us heroes at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if they can housesit (and where my longbox with the first-print Silver Age Batman comics are in the house. And if we have security cameras. Which we do, you treacherous bastards.)… but on the other hand, it means that this is the end of our new comics for the next two weeks.

Believe it or not, even though the biggest Western comic book convention in the world starts on a Wednesday, you can’t find a new comic book to buy there to save your Godforsaken soul. Oh sure: if I stood in the comics retailers section of the convention’s main floor, waving around a fistful of hundreds, and screamed, “Action Comics #1 me now, bitches! And gimme that real stuff, none of that Grant Morrison shit,” I’d be beating well-stocked and willing retailers off with a stick. But when it comes to new books? It’s bubkis for you, True Believer. They just don’t haul that stuff out to the West Coast with them… not when they know that, once they get back to their home stores, they will be faced with people like me who went to the convention wanting to trade in their SDCC-Exclusive Deadpool-themed Fleshlights in for enough store credit to pay for the books they missed while in San Diego.

So it is a bittersweet feeling to have it be a Wednesday, and to come home with new comics, knowing it is the last batch we’ll be getting for a couple of week. But still, it is a Wednesday, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But if you need to take a break from new comics for a couple of weeks, there are worse ways to go out. There’s a new issue of The Walking Dead (and God, how I would like to be able to tell Robert Kirkman that I like how he wrapped the story he started before last year’s SDCC), the opening chapter of DC’s Trinity War in Justice League, the second issues of personal favorites Superman Unchained and Astro City, a new issue (finally) of Jonathan Ross’s and Bryan Hitch’s America’s Got Powers, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is (particularly with all the other prep work going into getting ready to cover SDCC): before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. And I promise: we will try to make as much time as possible to review as many of these as we can before the convention starts up. But until we can do that…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Long Con To Short Con: Boston Comic Con Releases Panel Schedule

The Boston Comic Con was originally scheduled to take place in late April, but had to be postponed for the most mundane of reasons: a mad bomber who had blown up a part of the street where the convention was scheduled to be held was on the loose, leading to a five-city cop lockdown and to most of the population of Eastern Massachusetts to scream at their televisions, “Just turn the dogs loose on the prick so I can get to the fucking bar!” You know, everyday irritations.

Well, the convention was very quickly rescheduled for August 3rd and 4th. Which was great, and we couldn’t wait to throw our support behind it… until we realized that that weekend was less than two weeks after the San Diego Comic-Con, which is an experience that normally takes us an entire week from which to recover from the fatigue hysteria.

Oh, make no mistake: we’re still going. It might mean that by mid-August we are so ravaged that we are unable to write anything more complicated than, “Comics are neat,” but we are going.

Because not only has the guest list ballooned since the reschedule, including Dan DiDio, Scott Snyder, James O’Barr, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez to name a few, but the convention has just published their panel schedule for the event. Now, make no mistake: Boston Comic Con is still a small convention as these things go – San Diego’s panel schedule fills a magazine-sized book every year, while Boston’s fits comfortably on a single Web page – but still, you need to remember that as recently as 2009, Boston Comic Con wasn’t big enough to host any panels. So following that growth path, maybe in a few years I’ll be able to attend a massive comic convention without having to spend five and a half hours on a smoke-free airplane.

So yeah, there are only a few panels over the two-day event… but there’s one or two that you won’t be able to see anywhere else. You can get the whole schedule here, but as we did with the San Diego Comic-Con event schedule, I’m gonna call out a few that look particularly interesting to us.