SDCC 09

So my last entry in this bad boy was May 1st? Damn. Well, alright.

Last week, as most of you know, was Comic-Con. It went by pretty damn quick, and I don't know whether that's a good thing, or bad thing. Either way, it was absolute blast. The majority of my time was spent with my fellow Caballeros/Castaways, and there were a few other friends I had at the con that I didn't even get to hang out with.

I'm crunched for time, so I'm just gonna write down some things and hope it all just happens to make sense. Deal?... ok

Thursday, I had to wake up at 5am, get ready, and make my 7:50am flight. Thankfully, I didn't have any delays, and got into San Diego by about 9:15. Got to the hotel, the Hilton-Bayfront, which is right across the street from the convention center, at about 10, and started my day.

That fuckin' line for Hall H (re Twilight) was so fuckin ridiculously long that it snaked around the convention center, and even behind it.

LongBox Digital Comics panel.

Quiet lunch by myself at Petco Park's Park in the Park.

Tron 2 scavenger hunt. It was awesome! Really, all you need to know. That, and Daft Punk. Sweet.

Really fuckin good Thai-dinner.

Friday. Darwyn Cooke panel. Batman panel. Dinner at Hooters.

Saturday. Roamed exhibit hall. DC panel.


Pop Candy meet-up. I talked to Whitney incessantly about Justice, Crookers, and The Bloody Beetroots. Especially JUSTICE. If you've never read Whitney's blog, then that's just a shame, really... kidding. Well sorta. Anyway, she was gracious enough to put this picture here as part of her recap of the party. You can find that here.

Later Saturday night, I went to the PopculTour party for the CBLDF at Onyx/Thin. I missed Paul Pope's DJ set, and was to drunk to realize Murs was performing down stairs, and not up on the main stage. Oh well. Me, Nick, and Mike still had a good time dancing upstairs on the main floor. Me also trying to get the attention of one of the girls dancing in a circle as well as the one really hot girl off to the side. The only thing there is I couldn't if the girl was talking to a guy whom I wasn't sure if she had come there with. Again, oh well. Still had a grand time. Even got to talk with Paul, and Murs. Took a picture with Murs, too.

Sorry if these pictures appear too big, but these are lifted from my facebook, and I still haven't uploaded them to my flickr.

Sunday was spent mostly roaming the exhibit hall, and saying goodbye to friends as I went along. Even saw Whitney again, and yes, I plugged Justice, again. What else is new, right?

Some cool comics I got: To The Power Against #4 (Carrie and Stephanie's comic series), Phonogram fanzine, CoolJerk mini-comic... I tried to keep my wallet in my pocket as much as I could this time around, as you can tell.

Other swag: I got Jamie McKelvie to add another sketch to my noir sketchbook: this time in the form of Phonogram's David Kohl. Haven't scanned it yet, sorry. "Flynn's Arcade" token from Thursday night, as well as a "Flynn's Arcade" t-shirt, and a "Flynn Lives" poster.

A fun time with Caballeros/Castaways, in no particular order: Mike, Nick, Carrie, Stephanie, Randy, David, Jen, and Janine... okay so the last two aren't technically Caballeros, but they are definitely cool people. David and Jen went to the con on Thursday dressed as Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers. There are some really cool pictures that Bryan Lee O'Malley took with them. If you know David and Jen, you know which one they are.

I hitched a ride with Mike and Nick up to Irvine so I could hang out with my ol roommie, Niks for a day and a half. Saw The Ugly Truth on Sunday night, then had lunch on Monday at Pink's Hot Dogs, then 500 Days of Summer on Monday at the ArcLight.

There are so many pictures taken, and so much more word I can use to describe how awesomely wonderful last weekend was, but I am super pressed for time. Maybe I'll get to it, maybe not. But here are some links to a couple write-ups I didon my Examiner page. Check it out!

DCU Editorial panel from Saturday.

Batman- New Dynamic panel from Friday.

My write-up of Darwyn Cooke's spotlight panel from Friday/ review of his adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker novel, The Hunter.

Later ya'll! I'm off to Tahoe!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: SDCC '08 Pt. 2

Check out my Flickr for photos from SDCC.

Attending San Diego Comic-Con requires an awful lot of energy, and especially more so if you go out after each day’s events inside the convention. By Friday morning of the con, my level of energy was pretty low. In fact, a little lower than I would have liked considering I had just come from spending a few days in New York. But, hey, it’s Comic-Con; you gotta suck it up for Comic-Con, right?

Although there wasn’t really any official Caballero meet-ups with the members of the former Brian K. Vaughan forum (now part of the current Tony Harris forum), I did get to hang out with a number of them here and there throughout the course of the weekend.

On preview night, I had dinner with Carrie and Stephanie and their friends, where Carrie her Ghost Whisperer-comic writing partner, Becky, and I geeked out on Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

Thursday night, I hung out with some friends from San Francisco that I hadn’t seen in quite a while, including my friend David Brothers, who was part of the comics-blogging panel at the end of the day, as well as the Japan-bound Mindy Owens. David may have complained about the lasagna having a little too much meat for him, but I think I was hungry enough, that there was probably too little for me. Anyway, twas a good meal.

Also got to hang out with Mike (Lagomorph), and Nick from the board on Friday night for dinner, before parting ways: they went to the Oni Press party, whereas I went back to the convention center for the tail end of the Eisners, before calling it quits for the night.

On Thursday I had a quick lunch with Capntightpants (David, I swear, I don’t know what it is, I just happened to know a swell of Davids) and his girlfriend. And then I also met up with them for the Joss Whedon panel on Friday. It was a packed panel, one in which I barely made it into, and right on time. Joss actually brought out his family that he worked with to create Dr. Horrible, as well as the cast of Dr. Horrible. The panel was awesome to say the least.

In fact, had I made it into the Watchmen panel, I definitely would not have made it into Whedon’s panel. To which, I was so fuckin close to getting into the Watchmen panel before being turned away because Hall H had reached capacity. And despite not making it into the panel, I had found a fellow complainer in Whitney Matheson when she told me that she didn’t get into the Watchmen panel either while we waited for the Entertainment Weekly: Filmmakers panel later in the day. Although we shared that in common, the fact that she still got to meet Zack Snyder, and I didn’t… well, one of the perks of being a member of the press.

To start things on Saturday morning, I went to the Black Panel, and there I found out about Method Man’s graphic novel, which I still gotta check out. Someone was dressed as Captain America at the panel, and I wish had gotten a photo of him, too. But I did take a picture of this person as bumblebee. Absolutely awesome! I missed out on getting into the writers of The Office panel, but I did make it into the Grant Morrison and Gerard Way panel, which was… well, do you need to know anything else other than Grant fuckin Morrison? And my favorite quote from the panel came from Gerard: "I don’t know what a Grammy means anymore, but I know what a Eisner means." Gerard and Gabriel Ba, of course having just won the Eisner for Best Limited Series the night before.

I ditched the last few hours of the con on Saturday to go to the Whitney Matheson / PopCandy meet-up at the Marriot’s roof-top Altitude bar, and for those PopCandy readers that rsvp’d for the meet-up were given Whitney’s Twitter-mini-comic. Online version found here!

I don’t leave any comments, and mostly ghost through the comments on Whitney’s blog, and didn’t rsvp for the meet-up, but being the kind and super-cool person she is, Whitney handed me the Twitter-mini-comic to me anyway.

After the meet-up, I grabbed a quick dinner by myself before crashing in my bed in my hotel. That is until I woke up around 11:30, and on the verge of stir crazy. Luckily, Lagomorph (who was still recovering from the previous night) was also getting a little stir crazy, and we met-up at Lime, and hung out for a few hours.

Sunday morning, I went to the Jack Kirby panel, and the last DC Comics panel of the weekend. It was actually the first DC panel I had gone to all weekend. It was a good one to go to since at the end of the panel, DC announced that Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert are gonna be doing a little Batman story early next year. After that panel, I spent the final day of the con roaming around the exhibit hall. Where I got a cute little sketch of Nightwing from Art Balthazar. I still have to scan it, though.


At the airport, a few San Francisco friends had their flight delayed, including my friend Aaron Farmer. I showed him my Noir Sketchbook, and since his flight delayed, he did me this sketch of a noir Starscream. Epic.

There’s a bunch of other things I did while in San Diego that I’m sure I didn’t even get to in these recaps that I’m just remembering now, like the Ed Brubaker panel, or Geoff Johns panel, the Boom Studios Drink Up / Gay Pride Party. Like that Starscream sketch, the whole con was just absolutely epic!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: SDCC '08

Well, this month has been a blur. I went and visited New York for the first time a few weeks ago (which I’ll elaborate more on in a later post), and had just gotten back from San Diego for Comic-Con. In general, the San Diego convention really does seem to get bigger with each and every passing year. Says the guy who has now attended SDCC a grand total of two times.

Preview night seemed to have gotten bigger from what I remember. I wish I had gotten to swanky booth# 2207; otherwise known as Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart, and David Bullock’s booth, as they had a few giveaways, including some postcards and such to promote Darwyn’s new work at IDW, and David was giving away limited prints of the first issue cover of the Sentry mini series that he’ll be doing covers for at Marvel. In fact, I didn’t even get a chance to say hey to David all weekend until the last hour or so of the convention on Sunday, the whole weekend was just that crazy. However, I was able to get to write in one of the three notebooks that were available to everyone to write their thoughts and feelings to and about Michael Turner. As most of you that are reading this may or may not already know, one of my best friends, Justin, had suffered from Osteosarcoma, and I actually shared this bit of information with someone from the Aspen booth when he approached me while me and some other folks were writing in the notebooks. It wasn’t til near the end of our little conversation that I realized that I was talking to Vince Hernandez, Aspen’s editor in chief. I thought putting those notebooks out for everyone to write in was a lovely idea, and as the rest of the con played out the rest of the weekend, I smiled each time I passed by the Aspen booth and saw more people writing in the notebooks.

Also, I got to bug and pester Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie for the better part of the weekend at their section of the Image booth. To which, I got Phonogram and Suburban Glamour t-shirts they had for sale, a postcard each promoting Kieron’s Busted Wonder web-comic, and the upcoming second series of Phonogram, as well as getting Jamie to add to the noir sketchbook on Saturday.

But before Jamie did his Astrid sketch, I got a noir sketch from Amanda Connor of The Pro. Although getting a sketch from her took a longer considering the amount of people she had to get through before even getting to mine. But it came out great. Then after Jamie’s sketch, I handed the sketchbook to fellow Caballero, Stephanie, also of Conjoined Comics. She sketched me Emogician, a creation of her and other Caballero, Carrie’s mini-comic creation.

Then on the con’s last day, I got a quick sketch of Ampersand by Pia Guerra while at the DC booth. Of course, I just had to congratulate her on the pair of Eisners she won two days earlier. One for winning Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller and Inker team with Jose Marzan Jr., as well as for Y: The Last Man winning Best Continuing Series. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the beginning of the Eisners, and didn’t see those two categories announced, but Pia did tell me she had a good time celebrating the win after the ceremony, and that although she and Brian (or BKV to some of you) hadn’t yet actually talked to each other about the win, they played phone tag with each other’s voicemail.

Well, I think that’s where I’ll leave things for now, because as I said earlier, this convention was just too big to try to worm my recap of it only into a single post. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll have more good times to share, which of course, will include photos, too.

Comic-Con 08 or BUST!!

I was planning to blog about turning in my keys, and finally moving out of 11E in the city, and back to San Jose. But fuck all that emo shit! I wanna go to Comic-Con!

After reading just a few tidbits of my fellow Caballeros' SD Comic-Con stories that transpired last weekened, I'm makin the proclamation right now: I AM GOING TO COMIC-CON IN SAN DIEGO IN 2008. No "ifs, ands, or buts about it!" I am going!