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?

We’ve Always Got Room For A…: The Goon Movie Panel, SDCC 2013

Editor’s Note: This article was written last night at around midnight Pacific time. It is only being uploaded now because the Internet access I paid my hotel $14 for was unable to keep a connection, what with everyone being back from the convention and presumably watching the hell out of Netflix on their iPads. The annual San Diego WiFi drought has begun in earnest.

I have attended San Diego Comic-Con for the past eight years, and today I saw cracks occur that I never remember seeing at previous conventions. First, there were the trains. The railroad tracks run right down the middle of the road in front of the San Diego Convention Center, and you learn pretty quickly to hear, then grow annoyed by, and then ignore the constant clanging of the trolley bells. The air horn of the freight trains, not so much, but the point is that generally, the trains are a loud and short term annoyance.

Generally, but not today. Both at lunchtime and at at 7 p.m. – prime time for people to be leaving the convention center – long-ass freight trains pulled up in front of the convention center and just fucking stopped. Thus blocking off the primary route between the center and the Gaslamp Village, where all the restaurants and half the hotels are, and turning the area in front of the intersection into a human clusterfuck so bumbling and useless that, if any of the local cosplayers were actually aliens, they would report to their overlords that the human race deserved to be wiped out like a termite nest.

Now I am not under any illusions that the people behind SDCC have any control over the schedule or driving of freight trains. But they do have some control over the clearing of rooms and the start times of panels, and of the three we attended today, two of them started late. With the earlier Avatar Comics panel (which I will likely write about tomorrow), the volunteer line wrangler told us that the panelists were delayed and at least kept us informed… while still preventing us from entering the room so we could sit the hell down.

But with the panel regarding the Kickstarter work on the proposed movie version of The Goon, no one told us a Goddamned thing. They lined us up in a weird accordion pattern, and when they realized that it was a much larger crowd than anyone anticipated (which seems a little odd; the project pulled in nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter, which, since The Goon is a little indie comic, should indicate that the movie version has a little interest behind it), one of the volunteers tried to get people who intended to stay through the Goon panel into the following panel to split off into a different line, which is truly unprecedented in my SDCC experience… or at least it would have been if anyone paid any Goddamned attention at all to the poor, deluded dingbat. After all, Comic-Con runs on the ability of the truly obsessed to park in a panel room all day if they want to to see something in particular. Had someone implied that people waiting for a particular panel wait in a separate line until that particular panel started say, last year outside of Hall H, they would have found the guy floating face-down in the bay with his volunteer badge choked around his nuts and “Team Jacob” hammered into the flesh of his forehead.

So instead, we all waited in the same line until someone’s shit was finally gotten together at about 6:10 p.m. – ten minutes after the scheduled panel start time. Once inside, we waited another five minutes (my notes read, “Fifteen minutes late – this is not the Superman movie panel, motherfucker”) until The Goon creator Eric Powell, computer animation studio Blur Studios co-owner Tim Miller, and Blur Studios Animator / Director Jeff Fowler took the stage, to the side of a screen showing the world’s most simplistic Samsung DVD player main menu screen.

And where most movie panels open with some hype guy whipping the crowd into a frenzy, this one opened with Powell saying, “Since this is a Goon movie…” and cracking open a can of beer, “That Kickstarter is a hell of a drug.”

Yeah, this panel was not your average SDCC movie hype machine. Which makes sense, considering it is drumming up publicity for a movie that has been in development for five years, and still exists only as a dream that was given life support by a crowdfunding drive only strong enough to create a black and white animatic story reel, all in the hopes of attracting a real movie studio’s attention.

Shit, I’d be drinking, too.

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.