Comic-Con, family vacation, and more
Jul. 28th, 2004 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraGreetings from my summer vacation! Am in SoCal. Got really back online Monday after 9 days of dialup and *caught up on lj first, before reading my chatlistmail*. Not sure what that says ::grin::.
Before I go off on vacation-logging, a news brief on my apartment situation: we had applied for a place before I left (two weeks ago now) but that fell through when the current tenants changed their minds about moving out. As I'm here and not there I've rather abandoned![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sofer to carry the burden of the search alone, which I feel bad about, but she is mighty in the making of appointments and I hope there'll be more progress to report soon. Breaking news! Apt in same building as first, same layout/price, this one cat free unlike the first two substitutes they offered. Woot!
What I've been up to, pre-Con:
Thursday 15 July: Fly in. Plane late. Read most of Fool On the Hill on the plane. Fun read.irilyth and I watch the Wonderfalls pilot. Neat concept, and the main character looks kind of like Jennifer Connelly back in Labyrinth, only more upset.
Friday: Laze around Josh's house reading Bone and Dykes to Watch Out For while he's at work. Watch another Wonderfalls. MC keeps being upset a lot. Drive down to my parents' house. Watch Spirited Away which Josh has somehow not seen, or maybe that was another night.
Saturday: We go to the beach and make a sand stegosaur. I lecture Josh about sunscreen and he displays a phenomenal ability to not lose his glasses while frolicking in the waves. This still impresses me.
Sunday: Spiderman 2! Yay! We teach my family to play Carcassonne, or maybe that was another night. Also dinner at ultragood Mexican restaurant El Agave, including excellent steak-with-avocado and yummy but mysterious black stuff revealed to be corn fungus.
Monday: Waterpark! A number of new rides at Wild Rivers since I've been there last (in HS sometime), including two with great concepts: one where you shoot down a short steep tube into a bowl which you circle around two or three times before falling through a hole in the bottom into a pool below - like being the coin in one of those coin-donation funnels, sort of, only it's a flat-bottomed bowl. The other a fun flume ride on a multi-person sled with a short flat stretch at the bottom and then another hill, so you come down and down and down and across and up! and back down, and if you get lucky, back up! again a little bit and down again, which we did the first time. In the minus column my dad banged his elbow badly early in the day which swelled up to amazing and grotesque proportions. The parents found it interesting being among the oldest people there.
Tuesday: Tired all day from the waterpark. Had a very nice evening with my oldest-friend-I-am-still-friends-with TK, who is taking the bar this week (good luck!!) but was still able to squeeze in time to see me. Also there were Krispy Kremes, including a warm fresh one, mmmmm.
Wednesday: Comic-Con preview night! I pick up my pass (nontrivial line) and wander around the main floor gawping at Return of the King costumes and the life-sized X-Wing and the fact that there are like a thousand booths here. (No, *really*... estimating from the exhibitors list suggests 800+.) Purchases: the Belondweg Blossoming trade, the last three issues of Zot! I was missing, Serenity Rose 4.
Thursday: Panel with China Mieville! They argue about literary technique vs straightforward storytelling and the literary value of SF and whether reading for entertainment can be "incomplete" reading if it means overlooking underlying stuff that's going on in the work. Mieville a) has a sexy accent and b) makes blunt, to-the-point comments and c) dislikes Harry Potter. I queue for his signing afterwards and get to very briefly discuss whether he would like to see movie/comic/game adaptations of his work ("yes") and the gaming influence on his work
Afterwards I hop around between: the very end of the Dark Horse panel (I fail to spot any Blade of the Immortal giveaways), the "people of color in sf" panel, a random Matrix-esque indy film short, the beginning of the "Ringers" panel which is having technical difficulties, so I end up hearing Peter S. Beagle tell the "it's a knick knack Patty Black" joke to kill time. And then saw a really funny clip from the movie in which Andy Serkis surprises a fan. I find the Flight booth and get to meetcovielle and mudron and fartsofire and mao and stammer about how totally cool their work is. The Star Wars fan film awards are fun, although I can't make out what they're saying in some of them.
Purchases: Flight, I Like Girls, Street Angel 1&2, PS 238 6. Sketches: Dan Shive,mao, covielle, Aaron Williams, Darren Bleuel.
Friday: Unknown Treasures of the Small Press panel, where I take notes on things I'm not actually going to buy but pick up a free copy of "Death Takes a Holiday". So far everything I've bought has been stuff I was already familiar with, series I was already reading. I want to break out of that, take advantage of being at comic-con to get turned on to something new, but I don't want to spend money on something I might not like, I prefer to borrow books from friends or the library and only buy things I'm sure I want to reread. (Only that's harder with comics, I doubt the library would have this stuff.) But then the last thing I need is more comics I *like* that I'm going to keep wanting to buy the new issues of.
"Crossing Boundaries and Mixing Categories", part of the ongoing academic conference series of panels, features a talk on "the evolution of chemistry in popular culture: the changing role of chemistry in the origin of superheroes" that's really neat. I then become a media sheep and find a seat in the Huge Room for a panel on Pixar's The Incredibles and Iron Giant guy Brad Bird. The scenes they show look really good, humor and a nice style to the animation. But I'm really there in anticipation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask panel, which is as funny and interesting as you would expect from a Gaiman panel, only the scenes from the movie, disappointingly, fail to grab me. Of course I'll still want to *see* it, it just, I don't know. The music was all odd or something.
I wait in too long a line for an Incredibles bag and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy promotional towel, which they *said* was going to say "Don't Panic" but just had the title on it. I decide to skip the Eisner awards and go home and spend time with my family, as it's my last chance more or less to see my dad before he gets on a boat on Sunday, brilliantly buying Saturday badges before I leave for my mom,cereph, and irilyth so they won't insist on going as early Saturday morning. In a fine turn as Mr. X that night I evade the collective forces of Scotland Yard and then narrowly lose the Bean Game to the only other member of my family who remembers the rules between games ::grin::.
Purchases: The Comics Arts Conference cd of papers presented, $1.
Saturday: I dragirilyth to an academic panel on "The Comics of Comics", in which several people open their talks with "in contrast to Scott McCloud" or "where Scott McCloud is wrong in saying". I keep hoping Scott McCloud is in the audience and will start an argument. Alas. We head to the Cartoon Improv, perhaps the highlight of the con, where Sergio Aragones faces off against Jeff Smith and Scott Shaw to play improv games on paper. Like asking Jeff Smith to draw Fone Bone, and then asking him to repeat the drawing blindfolded, or having one guy describe a drawing to another guy (who's trying to draw it based on the description) until he can tell what it is, or making Sergio keep adding elements to an already-overcrowded drawing. Meanwhile, my mom and sister are in the Even Huger Room finding out the title of Episode III and failing to get a preview.
Complex panel-hopping ensues as Josh and I repeatedly part ways and meet up again. I catch the second half of the CAC panel "Gendering Comics" including a paper from Swarthmore's own Justin Hall [ETA: okay, maybe it is not the same Justin Hall. I can't tell! It might be! Or not!], who I fail to say hi to as he stays talking with another panelist afterwards before abruptly ducking around a corner, probably into the men's room although possibly to change into his super-identity or something. At some point I'm at the Cartoon Voices panel where they're doing a cold reading of an old Superman radio script, and at some point at the "Comics: The New Mainstream" panel where I get to hear David Brin slamming manga ("girls like it because it focuses on mood and comes from the Orient but it's a dead end for comics because the Western tradition has plots"), Colleen Doran being somehow very personally grating while contributing useful information to the panel (manga artists turn out 100s of pages a month while American artists do 28, so the plots are a lot more spread out in manga and compressed in American comics), and Eric Shanower being shy and cute and "I just stay in my little world and write my comic and don't worry about this". I'd love to read Age of Bronze if I could get it through the library. Oh, and some guy in the audience foaming at the mouth to argue with Brin.
Second half of the Ray Bradbury panel - it turns out he's still alive, but is tremendously old. The moderator would basically ask him to tell a particular story and he would tell it. And then in the Q&A the moderator had to repeat/rephrase all the questions for him. Despite all this Bradbury is perhaps the best speaker I saw at the con, his stories were all so well phrased and moving and yeah.
We went down to the main floor but couldn't get halfway to what we were looking for through the crowds before heading back up for a panel with Aaron McGruder of Boondocks about his new graphic novel, which was interesting but was getting a little social-justicy when I skipped out for Gays in Comics (colleencoover! and Justin Hall again) which I then skipped out of for Michael Chabon talking about the Escapist and other projects. That was neat.
After dinner we came back for the Masquerade, emceed by Phil Foglio. Does he look like his characters, or do they look like him? Either way, I was struck several times by some facial expression he'd make that was just like something from his comics. Ahahahahha. The Masquerade was fun including a skit where the LOTR cast danced to the Friends themesong and some scantily-clad fairies. The audience had gone wild for a kid who did a dance routine as "Beast Boy" and kept chanting that the whole rest of the show; I countered with occasional shouts of "police box!", a supporting prop from a Doctor Who entry that I felt had stolen the scene ::grin::.
Purchases: Nothing?? Sketches: Aaron A, who was finally there. Fred Gallagher.
Sunday: Went to a slideshow by painter Donato Giancola about influences in his art from Titian and Rembrandt and stuff. The start of the "Fantastic Fiction for All Ages" panel which was looking pretty boring plus someone had already recommendedblackholly so I didn't need to stay around to ask a question about Tithe ::grin::. The CAC "Modern Superhero" panel (okay, yes, I like the academic-blather panels, I went to a *liberal arts college*, okay?) with interesting talks about the superhero as able to dominate threatening machines and fight corruption. We decided to skip seeing the unaired Wonderfalls episodes and went and bounced around the main floor hunting down booths I meant to visit, and I spent way too long not making up my mind whether I should blow my budget on art. Actually I didn't have a budget but I calculated one to determine if I was blowing it, which I was, but which I did anyways because they were just so pretty. I ended up buying a Giancola print I had seen in the slideshow and an art-nouveau-ish poster, putting me about 50% over budget, but in this whole giant con, looking at all sorts of fantasy art and stuff, these were the two things that really grabbed me. The Giancola painting "looks like real art" in having classical technique and stuff, it's not the sort of feathery fairy-drawing that was all over the con, but there's a neat fantastic city in the background. The poster just has these *eyes*. I would look up who did it but I don't want to pull it out of the tube.
Purchases: Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's life, discoveries, and the century he shaped, which I had been trying to buy since Friday but the guy kept not being in his booth. The author is a nuclear engineer who tried (he said) to actually cover Bohr's theories and not just his personality, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how he went about it. Small Favors 8 (full color), Sheila and the Unicorn (a collection of strips). Sketches: Colleen Coover, Roberta Gregory.
And that is the con (my god this is a long post!)
Before I go off on vacation-logging, a news brief on my apartment situation: we had applied for a place before I left (two weeks ago now) but that fell through when the current tenants changed their minds about moving out. As I'm here and not there I've rather abandoned
sofer to carry the burden of the search alone, which I feel bad about, but she is mighty in the making of appointments and I hope there'll be more progress to report soon. Breaking news! Apt in same building as first, same layout/price, this one cat free unlike the first two substitutes they offered. Woot!What I've been up to, pre-Con:
Thursday 15 July: Fly in. Plane late. Read most of Fool On the Hill on the plane. Fun read.
irilyth and I watch the Wonderfalls pilot. Neat concept, and the main character looks kind of like Jennifer Connelly back in Labyrinth, only more upset.Friday: Laze around Josh's house reading Bone and Dykes to Watch Out For while he's at work. Watch another Wonderfalls. MC keeps being upset a lot. Drive down to my parents' house. Watch Spirited Away which Josh has somehow not seen, or maybe that was another night.
Saturday: We go to the beach and make a sand stegosaur. I lecture Josh about sunscreen and he displays a phenomenal ability to not lose his glasses while frolicking in the waves. This still impresses me.
Sunday: Spiderman 2! Yay! We teach my family to play Carcassonne, or maybe that was another night. Also dinner at ultragood Mexican restaurant El Agave, including excellent steak-with-avocado and yummy but mysterious black stuff revealed to be corn fungus.
Monday: Waterpark! A number of new rides at Wild Rivers since I've been there last (in HS sometime), including two with great concepts: one where you shoot down a short steep tube into a bowl which you circle around two or three times before falling through a hole in the bottom into a pool below - like being the coin in one of those coin-donation funnels, sort of, only it's a flat-bottomed bowl. The other a fun flume ride on a multi-person sled with a short flat stretch at the bottom and then another hill, so you come down and down and down and across and up! and back down, and if you get lucky, back up! again a little bit and down again, which we did the first time. In the minus column my dad banged his elbow badly early in the day which swelled up to amazing and grotesque proportions. The parents found it interesting being among the oldest people there.
Tuesday: Tired all day from the waterpark. Had a very nice evening with my oldest-friend-I-am-still-friends-with TK, who is taking the bar this week (good luck!!) but was still able to squeeze in time to see me. Also there were Krispy Kremes, including a warm fresh one, mmmmm.
Wednesday: Comic-Con preview night! I pick up my pass (nontrivial line) and wander around the main floor gawping at Return of the King costumes and the life-sized X-Wing and the fact that there are like a thousand booths here. (No, *really*... estimating from the exhibitors list suggests 800+.) Purchases: the Belondweg Blossoming trade, the last three issues of Zot! I was missing, Serenity Rose 4.
Thursday: Panel with China Mieville! They argue about literary technique vs straightforward storytelling and the literary value of SF and whether reading for entertainment can be "incomplete" reading if it means overlooking underlying stuff that's going on in the work. Mieville a) has a sexy accent and b) makes blunt, to-the-point comments and c) dislikes Harry Potter. I queue for his signing afterwards and get to very briefly discuss whether he would like to see movie/comic/game adaptations of his work ("yes") and the gaming influence on his work
Afterwards I hop around between: the very end of the Dark Horse panel (I fail to spot any Blade of the Immortal giveaways), the "people of color in sf" panel, a random Matrix-esque indy film short, the beginning of the "Ringers" panel which is having technical difficulties, so I end up hearing Peter S. Beagle tell the "it's a knick knack Patty Black" joke to kill time. And then saw a really funny clip from the movie in which Andy Serkis surprises a fan. I find the Flight booth and get to meet
covielle and mudron and fartsofire and mao and stammer about how totally cool their work is. The Star Wars fan film awards are fun, although I can't make out what they're saying in some of them. Purchases: Flight, I Like Girls, Street Angel 1&2, PS 238 6. Sketches: Dan Shive,
mao, covielle, Aaron Williams, Darren Bleuel.Friday: Unknown Treasures of the Small Press panel, where I take notes on things I'm not actually going to buy but pick up a free copy of "Death Takes a Holiday". So far everything I've bought has been stuff I was already familiar with, series I was already reading. I want to break out of that, take advantage of being at comic-con to get turned on to something new, but I don't want to spend money on something I might not like, I prefer to borrow books from friends or the library and only buy things I'm sure I want to reread. (Only that's harder with comics, I doubt the library would have this stuff.) But then the last thing I need is more comics I *like* that I'm going to keep wanting to buy the new issues of.
"Crossing Boundaries and Mixing Categories", part of the ongoing academic conference series of panels, features a talk on "the evolution of chemistry in popular culture: the changing role of chemistry in the origin of superheroes" that's really neat. I then become a media sheep and find a seat in the Huge Room for a panel on Pixar's The Incredibles and Iron Giant guy Brad Bird. The scenes they show look really good, humor and a nice style to the animation. But I'm really there in anticipation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask panel, which is as funny and interesting as you would expect from a Gaiman panel, only the scenes from the movie, disappointingly, fail to grab me. Of course I'll still want to *see* it, it just, I don't know. The music was all odd or something.
I wait in too long a line for an Incredibles bag and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy promotional towel, which they *said* was going to say "Don't Panic" but just had the title on it. I decide to skip the Eisner awards and go home and spend time with my family, as it's my last chance more or less to see my dad before he gets on a boat on Sunday, brilliantly buying Saturday badges before I leave for my mom,
cereph, and irilyth so they won't insist on going as early Saturday morning. In a fine turn as Mr. X that night I evade the collective forces of Scotland Yard and then narrowly lose the Bean Game to the only other member of my family who remembers the rules between games ::grin::.Purchases: The Comics Arts Conference cd of papers presented, $1.
Saturday: I drag
irilyth to an academic panel on "The Comics of Comics", in which several people open their talks with "in contrast to Scott McCloud" or "where Scott McCloud is wrong in saying". I keep hoping Scott McCloud is in the audience and will start an argument. Alas. We head to the Cartoon Improv, perhaps the highlight of the con, where Sergio Aragones faces off against Jeff Smith and Scott Shaw to play improv games on paper. Like asking Jeff Smith to draw Fone Bone, and then asking him to repeat the drawing blindfolded, or having one guy describe a drawing to another guy (who's trying to draw it based on the description) until he can tell what it is, or making Sergio keep adding elements to an already-overcrowded drawing. Meanwhile, my mom and sister are in the Even Huger Room finding out the title of Episode III and failing to get a preview. Complex panel-hopping ensues as Josh and I repeatedly part ways and meet up again. I catch the second half of the CAC panel "Gendering Comics" including a paper from Swarthmore's own Justin Hall [ETA: okay, maybe it is not the same Justin Hall. I can't tell! It might be! Or not!], who I fail to say hi to as he stays talking with another panelist afterwards before abruptly ducking around a corner, probably into the men's room although possibly to change into his super-identity or something. At some point I'm at the Cartoon Voices panel where they're doing a cold reading of an old Superman radio script, and at some point at the "Comics: The New Mainstream" panel where I get to hear David Brin slamming manga ("girls like it because it focuses on mood and comes from the Orient but it's a dead end for comics because the Western tradition has plots"), Colleen Doran being somehow very personally grating while contributing useful information to the panel (manga artists turn out 100s of pages a month while American artists do 28, so the plots are a lot more spread out in manga and compressed in American comics), and Eric Shanower being shy and cute and "I just stay in my little world and write my comic and don't worry about this". I'd love to read Age of Bronze if I could get it through the library. Oh, and some guy in the audience foaming at the mouth to argue with Brin.
Second half of the Ray Bradbury panel - it turns out he's still alive, but is tremendously old. The moderator would basically ask him to tell a particular story and he would tell it. And then in the Q&A the moderator had to repeat/rephrase all the questions for him. Despite all this Bradbury is perhaps the best speaker I saw at the con, his stories were all so well phrased and moving and yeah.
We went down to the main floor but couldn't get halfway to what we were looking for through the crowds before heading back up for a panel with Aaron McGruder of Boondocks about his new graphic novel, which was interesting but was getting a little social-justicy when I skipped out for Gays in Comics (
colleencoover! and Justin Hall again) which I then skipped out of for Michael Chabon talking about the Escapist and other projects. That was neat.After dinner we came back for the Masquerade, emceed by Phil Foglio. Does he look like his characters, or do they look like him? Either way, I was struck several times by some facial expression he'd make that was just like something from his comics. Ahahahahha. The Masquerade was fun including a skit where the LOTR cast danced to the Friends themesong and some scantily-clad fairies. The audience had gone wild for a kid who did a dance routine as "Beast Boy" and kept chanting that the whole rest of the show; I countered with occasional shouts of "police box!", a supporting prop from a Doctor Who entry that I felt had stolen the scene ::grin::.
Purchases: Nothing?? Sketches: Aaron A, who was finally there. Fred Gallagher.
Sunday: Went to a slideshow by painter Donato Giancola about influences in his art from Titian and Rembrandt and stuff. The start of the "Fantastic Fiction for All Ages" panel which was looking pretty boring plus someone had already recommended
blackholly so I didn't need to stay around to ask a question about Tithe ::grin::. The CAC "Modern Superhero" panel (okay, yes, I like the academic-blather panels, I went to a *liberal arts college*, okay?) with interesting talks about the superhero as able to dominate threatening machines and fight corruption. We decided to skip seeing the unaired Wonderfalls episodes and went and bounced around the main floor hunting down booths I meant to visit, and I spent way too long not making up my mind whether I should blow my budget on art. Actually I didn't have a budget but I calculated one to determine if I was blowing it, which I was, but which I did anyways because they were just so pretty. I ended up buying a Giancola print I had seen in the slideshow and an art-nouveau-ish poster, putting me about 50% over budget, but in this whole giant con, looking at all sorts of fantasy art and stuff, these were the two things that really grabbed me. The Giancola painting "looks like real art" in having classical technique and stuff, it's not the sort of feathery fairy-drawing that was all over the con, but there's a neat fantastic city in the background. The poster just has these *eyes*. I would look up who did it but I don't want to pull it out of the tube.Purchases: Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's life, discoveries, and the century he shaped, which I had been trying to buy since Friday but the guy kept not being in his booth. The author is a nuclear engineer who tried (he said) to actually cover Bohr's theories and not just his personality, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how he went about it. Small Favors 8 (full color), Sheila and the Unicorn (a collection of strips). Sketches: Colleen Coover, Roberta Gregory.
And that is the con (my god this is a long post!)
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-29 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-10 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 02:58 am (UTC)...I don't suppose Beagle mentioned anything about the alleged Last Unicorn film? (he said plaintively)
Some day when you don't have anything better to do you can come stay in my guest room and read through my comics collection. And most of it is old enough that you don't have to worry about getting hooked 'cause it's no longer being published.
I can't remember: have you read some Age of Bronze and you were just saying you would read new issues as they came out if they were available at the library, or have you not read it at all? 'Cause it's well worth reading, even though I'm not getting the individual issues. (I got the first TPB, and expect to get future volumes.)