SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part 2: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary Panel

And finally, here is the last of it. The last panel we attended at San Diego Comic-Con on Sunday, July 21st, before the convention-closing screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s musical episode, Once More With Feeling: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary panel, featuring classic Marvel writer Roy Thomas, current writer Brian Michael Bendis, and artist John Romita, Jr.

There wasn’t anything revealed that you could particularly call “news” at this panel. Hell, there wasn’t even a hell of a lot of information about the creations of The Avengers, The X-Men, or any of the rest (although we did learn that Thomas made The Vision an android because hey! Stan Lee says stuff sometimes!). But what we did get were some cool and inspirational stories of what it was like to be at Marvel right around the time when Fantastic Four was breaking, what it was like to grow up around one of the premier Spider-Man artists of the late 60s, early 70s, and what it was like to grow up in Brian Michael Bendis’s broken home! Well, I guess some stories are inspirational only in their aftermath.

But even if the panel didn’t have anything new to say about the modern world of comics, I can think of worse ways to close out the convention than to hear about what the world of comics was like when legends were being created every month, when characters who would literally change some of our lives were being spitballed to meet a deadline on a Sunday afternoon, and when a man could get a gig writing some of the most legendary books in Marvel history by filling out a workbook on his lunch break.

And even if you weren’t there, you can check some of it out right here. We have a few videos of some of the cooler stories – not the best videos we’ve ever shot, but you can see who’s talking and get the whole stories – right here after the jump.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part One: DC’s Meet The Publishers Panel

We are coming up on the final bits and pieces of coverage we took from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con – yes, I know the convention ended eight days ago, but it turns out we had a lot of video to sort through, and a significant percentage of that video needed extensive processing on an actual computer in order to make it into something that YouTube would recognize as a video file, as opposed to some form of data wad, or perhaps a Word file detailing our manifesto and list of demands.

But the computer has done its work and dinged like a toaster oven (as we all know computers do), so we are finally proud to present a series of videos from DC Comics’s Meet The Publishers panel, held on Sunday, July 21st and featuring Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. And you can say what you want about, say, DiDio (God knows we do, repeatedly), but there is no denying that the guy runs an entertaining panel with an infectious enthusiasm, which even Lee gets caught up in.

This was a fun panel, and we’re happy to bring you, a day late and a buck short, a small piece of it, along with some art that was shown to crowd at the panel. You can check them out after the jump.

Last Gasps From SDCC 2013 – Best Of Cosplay From Comic-Con Video

The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office received a giant package via UPS yesterday containing all the books, action figures, t-shirts, games, and other assorted loot we acquired at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. It’s a fairly large haul, too large to have wanted to hump it back on our own through the airports. You try explaining what a “reversible baneling/zergling” is to the TSA and see if they don’t decide to put you through an “enhanced pat down”. So, it was nice to open the box and relive the very recent memories of the past week. In particular, I thought this delivery was well timed because I had been spending the morning going through my photos from the con and noticed that…I hadn’t taken very many. My photo ratio from SDCC seems to lean more heavily on the side of fish tacos, beet agua fresca, and blurry Brian Michael Bendis photos (don’t ask), than on one of the backbones of the San Diego Comic-Con experience, the cosplayers. This was disappointing to me, but not entirely surprising. With all the spectacle with which you are constantly bombarded, you reach a certain point where you stop snapping pictures and go, “Oh, cool. It’s Deadpool and Supergirl together. Sure. That makes sense.” And you let it wash over you. You shuffle step forward against the tide of people trying to get into the Hasbro merch booth to get the most recent Boba Fett and Han Solo in carbonite, or Derpy Pony, or whatever it is this year that is making attendees nutty and just keep trying to take it all in until you eventually pop out on the other side of the convention floor. And it’s good. After 7 years of snapping photos and giving yourself whiplash to swivel around and catch the latest in Hello, Kitty! Darth Vader costuming, sometimes it’s nice to just give in and get carried along with the festivities.

But, that doesn’t help you, the Crisis On Infinite Midlives readers, who depend on us to bring you pictures of the Nerd Prom To End All Nerd Proms, to document the spectacle that you could be there to see. Fortunately, that’s where the good people at Sneaky Zebra come in. They’ve created a video that showcases some of the best cosplay from this year’s convention, from steam punk Batman villains to Transformers to, well, maybe you should just see for yourself. Check it out, after the jump!

No Extinction: Avatar Press SDCC 2013 Panel

And here we are: our final article covering San Diego Comic-Con 2013 (except for a bunch of video that my high-toned, dedicated video camera seems to have mangled, unless my actual computer here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office can do anything to salvage them), five days after the convention ended and more than a week after the actual panel occurred. But what the hell; given my crippling hangover and intestinal issues born from the fried chicken sandwich and fries I washed down with five black IPAs at a bar last night, it feels like I’m still at SDCC. So let’s just plow ahead, shall we?

The Avatar Press panel on Thursday morning, July 18th, with Avatar Founder and Editor-In-Chief William Christensen and World War Z and Extinction Parade writer Max Brooks, was the first panel we hit during SDCC 2013, and in some ways it set the tone for the whole convention. The room wasn’t full, but there was a healthy crowd for a comic book related panel on the most off day of the convention. Not that there are any off days at SDCC anymore, but if there is a day that qualifies, it’s this mid-week opening to the full-blown festivities. Unlike Preview Night, the whole convention center is open, and cosplayers are more plentiful, all of which draws people off the floor and makes it at least tolerable to move around; there’s nothing like a set of jugs in a spandex Power Girl suit to peel off the rubes so you can get where you’re going.

But where we were going was a panel, and we were going there later than we should. Which meant we could get a seat up front and to the side… right in front of the projector many panels use to put up new art for display. Which meant that, as a six foot tall gentleman, I spent the panel hunched over like Frankenstein’s delivery boy to stay out of the projector light, scribbling notes almost on my side as if trying to write “I am having a stroke” for the paramedics, just in case Christensen and Brooks put some new art up on the screen.

Which they did not. Every table at every panel at Comic-Con has a posted sign for presenters, reminding them that members of the crowd might be younger than 18. And every fan of Avatar comics knows that there is very little art that they could project that would be appropriate for children. There is very little Avatar art that would not make children long for the sweet release of death, or at least blindness, to tell you the truth. Avatar books are for adults, and that is on purpose.

“I just do books I want to read,” Christensen said. “It will always be intense work for adults.”

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It: Marvel’s SDCC 2013 Ultimate Universe Panel

So yes: the Marvel Ultimate Universe panel, held on Friday, July 19th at the San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve mentioned it a few times over the past few days, not because there were any Earth-shattering revelations at the panel (you know, beyond the question as to whether the Ultimate Universe has any future at all beyond the next few months), but as an example of how difficult it can be to truly cover any of these panels direct from the convention. When you get back to the hotel from a long day on the floor, and you’re staring at four pages of handwritten notes, one bar of $15-a-night WiFi, and your eyes look like you’ve been on a three-day meth jag in a smoke-filled room, it’s hard to sit in front a a keyboard and whip together anything that makes any sense at all.

But from the comfort of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, it seems, in my opinion, like the subtext of the panel is that Marvel intends to kick the living shit out of the Ultimate Universe for a while, blowing some stuff up really good, before either spiking the concept of the Ultimate Universe as a whole and somehow folding it into the 616, or at least finally and officially turning it into some kind of a defacto Earth 2 for the Marvel Universe, with people traveling back and forth just as often as they did in the DC Universe back in the 60s and 70s.

So in short: it looks like Marvel intends to totally fuck up the Ultimate Universe. Must be a year with a San Diego Comic-Con.

Convalescence

San Diego Comic-Con is a hell of a thing. It is something that any genre geek working a job that coughs up two weeks vacation and pays enough to allow you to drink anything higher-end than Country Club Malt Liquor aspires to attend. Attendance requires almost a full year of planning – if last year was any guide, then the presale for next year’s passes for this year’s attendees will be in two or three weeks, and we’ll be booking our backup hotel room by the end of August – and attendance, which is something that one ostensibly does for fun, is completely and utterly physically crippling.

I am writing this at 6:14 a.m. Eastern time. This time yesterday, I was sleeping through 3:14 a.m. Pacific time. Today, however, I have been up for an hour, having awakened with a terrible stitch in my side from sleeping in my own fucking bed. I have a recurring, rolling fever that is giving me something that feels remarkably like the douchechills, and my lower body, after five days of almost nonstop walking, feels like I forgot to keep up on some Winter Hill Gang bookie’s vig. I have the remainder of the week off of my day job because I have long since learned that five days at Comic-Con plus two days travel requires six days of recovery time – two weeks would really be better, but I want to keep that job that allows me to take off for two weeks at a time – in the middle of a crunch delivery time, no less – to gawk and cosplayers and buy odd comic books, exclusive action figures and t-shirts that the the mechanics of the video game Portal to make off-color jokes.

And make no mistake: I obtained all of those things… and they are being shipped to me via a very expensive UPS transaction. Because if I’d had to physically haul all of that through the airline system yesterday, I’d have shattered like old carnival glass.

On The Road Again

Comic-Con is well and truly over now, and we are packed and preparing to flee the city before the workmen pull down the Comic-Con trade dress from the convention center, thus exposing San Diego for what it truly is: a simple midsized American city with a heavy military presence, and a climate tailor-made for junkies, crackheads and homeless alcoholics.

We will be in the air most of the day, but we’ll try to post more photos and videos later this evening, once we are safely reensconced in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office in Boston.

We Have Walked Through The Fire

The annual goodbye party for the San Diego Comic-Con – a screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s season six musical episode, Once More With Feeling – concluded about an hour and a half ago.

And, as last year, the proceedings started with Nicholas Brendan live on stage, singing his old, “Wicca good and I’ll be over here,” in shades and a douchebag Fedora, continued with repeated and rousing denunciations of Dawn as the ruiner of all things good and fun (and at least one loud “Fuck off!” after Dawn sang, “Does anybody even notice?” – you’re welcome, Fandom), and ended, as always, with a bittersweet run for the doors.

Comic-Con is now officially over, which is always a strange feeling. As Amanda and I say every year: we wish it would never end, but if it didn’t, we don’t think we could take anymore. We are exhausted, and we still have panels to write about and video and pictures to upload. Not to mention a cross-country flight to pack for.

But those things can wait. Because we have, after all, survived, and that requires a little celebration. Which means that this is the end of our broadcast day.

So while we do that celebrating (we are posting this from my phone at the Hyatt bar) and packing…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Joe’s Comics. And Joe’s Movies. And Joe’s TV Shows: SDCC 2013’s Spotlight On J. Michael Straczynski

We attended several panels yesterday, and will be writing up more extensive write-ups of at least one of them later or tomorrow (Robert Kirkman’s Skybound panel in particular was interesting), but in the meantime, I wanted to put up something that was interesting, but not particularly comics newsworthy.

Every year of the eight we have attended San Diego Comic-Con, J. Michael Straczynski has hosted a Spotlight panel, where he talks about some of the stuff that he’s working on, but mostly spends his time answering any and all questions posed to him. Be they inquiries about the infamous “Spider-Man Sells His Soul To The Devil To Get Younger Poontang” story in One More Day, or the reasoning behind taking on the controversial Before Watchmen books, to whether or not he liked The Hobbit, he will answer any question… provided it isn’t posed by some naive foreigner.

And you can see this for yourself, as we took video of big chunks of Straczynski’s panel this year, and have included those videos here. But now, a disclaimer: some of these videos may or may not have minor hitches in them. I’m seeing them on my two-year-old tablet via shitty hotel WiFi, but then again, on this rotten, overloaded connection (that only cost me $14.95! For 24 whole hours! And, due to the three hours it took to upload a handful of minute-long video clips, prevented me from publishing this last night as originally intended!), Web pages chug when I try to load them in Lynx. So your mileage on a wired connection may vary. If you find them distracting, I apologize.

Either way, you can check them out (and learn his criticisms of The Bible’s literary merit) after the jump.

Spandex Is The Fabric Of The Future: DC’s SDCC 2013 Trinity War Panel

I have been hearing about DC Comics’s The Trinity War crossover for what feels like every week since DC launched the New 52 Reboot. God knows that DC wanted to tease the Goddamned thing right out of the gate, what with sticking Pandora (or, as we knew her at the time, “The Hooded Woman,” or perhaps, “The Obvious McGuffin,” and sometimes, “The Stalking Chick With Psoriasis Seriously What’s With The Hood Is She Hiding A Third Eye Or Some Kind Of Suppurating Nipple On Her Forehead” (at least in our Home Office).

Well, we are almost two years into the DC reboot, and now we finally have our war. It started in last week’s Justice League #22, with Shazam (nee: Captain Marvel) tossing half a beating on Superman before Superman apparently wiped out Doctor Light’s head with a stern gaze, and it will continue through just about all the main Justice League related titles, including the upcoming miniseries Trinity of Sin and then dealing with the fallout in September, during Villains’ Month, in the Forever Evil miniseries. That’s a lot of story considering how long its taken to kick the damn thing off.

But kicked off it has, and since it started one week before the San Diego Comic-Con, that means that DC was ready to talk about it. And talk about it they did, in a dedicated panel discussion yesterday, moderated by VP of Marketing John Cunningham, with writers Geoff Johns, Jeff Lemire, and Ray Fawkes, and Group Editor Brian Cunningham. And quite a panel it was, teasing that the Trinity War might tear the various Justice Leagues apart, allowing the villains to win, and for John Constantine to gain the powers, and costume, of Shazam.

Wait, what?