Category: Comics

Some San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) 2013 Links

My friends and I compiled some useful links for those attending (or not attending) San Diego Comic-Con 2013.

Friends of Comic-Con International Forum — The unofficial forum for SDCC.

Tehlilone’s Compiled List of San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Exclusives — Incredibly complete and arguably more useful than what CCI posted on their own site.

Outside Comic-Con — Compilation of events and food trucks surrounding SDCC 2013. Some are paid admission or may require a pre-registration for a free ticket.

deviantArt’s Official Comic-Con Group — Mostly promoting dA’s involvement in SDCC.

Cosplay.com San Diego Comic-Con Forum — Seems like most groups or gatherings at Comic-Con get assembled through other networks but there are a few themed groups coordinating on Cosplay.com.

Any my own small contribution, a Cosplayers Twitter List. Just a handful of cosplayers and cosplayer related Twitterers who may (or may not) be at Comic-Con, but it’s a start.

Comic-Con 2008

Avengers Cosplayers It’s been over a week since Comic-Con concluded and I’m still catching up on trying to do a write up. I finished sorting and posting my pics on Tuesday. The galleries are available under the San Diego Comic-Con category on my photo site. There weren’t that many pics this year since my schedule was split between parenting duties and show time. It’s certainly a different experience having a baby in tow this time around. In some ways it reminded me of my first attendance when I had poor time management and everything felt a bit rushed. Lessons (hopefully) learned for next year.

Content-wise, it was a really good year. After blowing most of Saturday last year, I decided to join in on a block of panels this year (with my mom in her first SDCC attendance!) including Futurama, The Simpsons, Dean Koontz, Dollhouse and BSG. Not knowing much about Dean Koontz’s novels, I found him to be the most surprising entertaining. I guess a good storyteller can both write stories as well as talk about them to an audience. Overall, Futurama was my favorite of the set of panels with the voice talents of John DiMaggio, Maurice Lamarche, Billy West and Katey Sagal on hand to liven things up.

In the exhibit hall, Paramount returned with their free t-shirts but added a collection of Star Trek items including posters, construction crew badges by email and drawings for goodies. Warner Bros. beefed up their bag selection, held the usual group autograph sessions and had a lifesize Watchmen Owlship on display. Fox had what was probably the most useful schwag: a poster tube with strap. Everyone was giving away bags but I think Fox had the lock on the popular poster tube. Now if only someone will start giving out art portfolios next year.

More convention notes after the jump…
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Go Ape!

What does Battlestar Galactica have to do with Planet of the Apes and what does Planet of the Apes have to do with The Incredible Hulk?

If you’ve not yet seen the Battlestar Galactica mid-season cliffhanger “Revelations”, you’re missing out. While not the most emotionally moving episode nor the most action packed, it does reveal a lot to the show’s characters as the clandestine final four of five cylons are brought out to the open. The results range from shocking to devastating to the Galactica crew. More importantly, its final minutes hit hard with an unexpected final revelation.

Spoilers after the jump…
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The Favorite Hero I Never Collected

Iron Man Now PlayingFirst, I’ve got to say that the Iron Man movie is fantastic! It’s been a while since I’ve been compelled to see a movie a second time and IronMan has certainly given me motivation to do so. In some ways, it’s a pretty standard superhero story: hero is transformed from who they were, hero experiments to determine his capabilities, hero has some early trials, hero has a showdown with a Big Bad. It’s intelligently written, there’s a lot of smaller dialog that just flows (maybe improvised?), and the action is not the over-the-top hyperkinetic style that has plagued a lot of actioners these days. Plus, the suit of armor is nicely detailed and at least movie-plausible in how it’s functioning. Watching Robert Downey Jr. spring into action as Tony Stark in the armor sent a thrill like I was seven years old again.

As a kid, I loved the idea of Iron Man. He was like a pocket version of the giant Japanese robot toys I collected. While it would be great to have a giant robot and fight against giant monsters, it just seemed more practical to have a briefcase with power suit easily on hand. I mean, I could never hope to have a Mazinger or a Combattra in my closet… but IronMan armor could work! Yes, it would fit right next to my t-shirts and Luke Skywalker Dagobah fatigues. I would pour over the Marvel Universe entries for IronMan and all the other powered armor heroes and villians: Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, Guardsmen and so on. My quest for fictional stats would even spill over to ever loosely associated tech like the Avenger’s Quinjet, Ultron and Alpha Flight’s Guardian. When I wasn’t reading about Iron Man, my Mego and Secret Wars series figures got a lot of use, right up there with Spidey.
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Spidey Catch Up for March

This past weekend I caught up with my Spidey comics reading including ASM up to 553 and Ultimate 119. I deliberately stayed clear of picking up any comics at WonderCon since I’ve got a subscription with my shop and it was a few weeks since I last visited.

Brand New Day continues to bug me. The artwork is fine. I actually rather like Salvador Larocca’s more realistic style and prefer it to some of the other artists’ work. “Spidey’s Braintrust” of Bob Gale, Marc Guggenheim, Dan Slott and Zeb Wells are doing a good job at trying to restore a classic Spidey story feel. The bits and pieces do harken back with the right verbal punches, JJJ squirming to get out of the hospital, things just no going right for Peter one way or the other… but all together it’s hard to get invested in Brand New Day.
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WonderCon

WonderCon 2008 Show Floor The California convention season got started for me this weekend with WonderCon. WonderCon is produced by the same group that handles Comic-Con and the Alternative Press Expo (APE). After existing in Oakland for a number of years, it migrated over to San Francisco’s bigger venues. Unfortunately, it’s coincided with the Game Developers Conference the past two years and has been squeezed into Moscone Convention Center‘s South Hall after a turn in the newer and visually impressive West Hall. The South Hall fits well but the layout makes the overall show feel cramped and the location for some of the smaller panel rooms is not ideal for good foot traffic.

WonderCon has become mostly a TV and movie panel show for me while I concentrate on shopping and autographs at Comic-Con. Compared with the insane lines at Comic-Con, it’s relatively easy to get a good seat and see actors, writers and directors of current and upcoming genre shows. This year had well known television shows and movies like Get Smart, X-Files 2 and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles represented. Actors and creators like Steve Carell, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Chris Carter and Anne Hathaway took the time to show up and answer audience questions. It was a nice, relaxing weekend.

Pictures from the panels and the exhibit hall are available for your enjoyment.

iPhone Web Apps

While I’m writing posts, I’ll update on my Comics DB web app. I’ve started to do a mock up of a user interface for iPhone. Not that I did a huge amount of investigation, but the most serious choice for a framework looks to be Joe Hewitt’s iUI. It’s a combination of JavaScript and CSS which neatly transforms simple HTML elements into nice iPhone-like menus.

I really need to put more time into this as I’d like to get it up and running in time for field use at WonderCon next month.

A Day with 30% Recycled Materials

I finished reading the latest issues of Amazing Spider-Man, the end of the One More Day story line and the first three issues of Brand New Day. From this post title, maybe you can get the drift that Brand New Day brings back a lot of old Spider-Man themes and accents. Initially I was pretty disappointed with end of One More Day. Not just what was done but how it was accomplished. Brand New Day has at least turned my feelings lukewarm. Strangely, this arc was enough to prompt me to actually send mail to Marvel for the first time. When I suffered through the ’90s Clone Saga, I was so disgusted near the end that I just stopped collecting for a few months and started reading the coincidently revamped Green Lantern. This time, since it feels like as much of a reboot as Spidey has ever had (let’s not think about Chapter One), I felt the urge to comment.

Here’s what I wrote:
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Quick Progress

The long Thanksgiving weekend was a good opportunity to make some progress with my comics database web application. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get something more or less fully functional running in a few hours spread across the weekend.

I ultimately decided to just go with CakePHP. For the reasons listed before, it ended up making to most sense based on what I’ve already had experienced with and what seemed to be installed by default with my ISP. I just followed the Cake Blog Tutorial, recasting blog postings into comic book titles with the appropriate field changes. Some retyping of code and minor editing of values and voila! a complete web application was born.
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