Courtesy of Jamie Coville, you can listen to the audio from the Dwayne McDuffie spotlight panel at SDCC09. Here’s a link to the rest of his convention mp3s, if you’re interested. Hat tip to Dwayne McDuffie, as he found it first.
Shouldn’t all comic-cons do this direct from the microphones? It’d be nice to be able to download audio of any panel from the show after a week or so.
It’s our tenth fourcast and the last from San Diego Comic-Con 2009. As befitting an event of this magnitude, we’ve got a couple of guests.
-Esther hits us with an introduction
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental is our theme music
-Esther chats with Gail Simone about Wonder Woman, Secret Six, and other things for about ten minutes
-David talks to Graeme “iam and io9” McMillan for about twenty minutes, mulling over everything under the sun
-I came this close to taking Graeme’s “Prrrr… sexy” and turning it into a ringtone to put up on the site. Just FYI.
-C.E.Outro
Next week, we’re back to our usual format.
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And we’re back.
Yesterday, Wolverine jumped at Magneto and started clawing at him while defending Canadian health care. That’s about it, sorry to say. Let’s keep it going.
ManiacClown and I will be back tomorrow to watch the tag team match of Hulk and Colossus vs. Sabretooth and Mystique. Wait. Is that actually supposed to be a challenge?
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!
Here we are in the latter half of 2009. Finally, the five issue series they were hyping in 2007 — when they first started soliciting Ultimate Power #8 — is coming to a close. Through Ultimatum, we see the Ultimate line giving birth to the Ultimate Comics line, only it’s the kind of childbirth that horrifically kills the mother and gives us a baby caked in blood.
But where were we? Magneto attacked the entire world and now the surviving heroes are out to stop him. With one arm left, he stands defiantly before those who would slay him.
Thanks to ManiacClown for coming up with whatever it is Wolverine is ranting about. We’ll be back tomorrow to see Magneto’s rebuttal.
Day Two!
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!
I am terrified of flying, hate any mention of planes in danger, and yet I found the strip of Streaky The Supercat taking the tail off an airplane because it had the picture of a mouse on it to be the most adorable thing I’ve seen this week.
I’m pretty sure that Amanda Conner needs to be classified as a deadly weapon.
Feel free to comment with your favorite part of Wednesday Comics below.
This’ll actually be our second Watchmen contest… here goes!
This one is easy. The kind folks at M80 want to give away a copy of Watchmen on Blu-ray. At some point over the past year, probably after I bought a PS3, BR became my favorite way to watch movies. Tons of special features, top notch quality, all that fun stuff that nitpickers love. I assume the Watchmen Blu-ray will be similar.
If you want it, here’s what you’ve gotta do. Leave a comment here with your first name (your actual first name, not your fake first name for the internet) and your favorite Watchmen character. You don’t have to justify it, you just have to name it. I’m going to go through the comments on Friday and randomly pick out a winner. I’ll email you for your address, you’ll send that to me, and then you’ll get a Watchmen Blu-ray in the mail.
A couple notes– US residents only, please! Also, please make sure you own a Blu-ray player. And if you don’t put a valid email address in the comments… I’ll have to pick someone else. So don’t put nospam@nospam.com. We’re not (ever) gonna spam you.
Our Wolverine contest from last week is up, and I’ll be emailing the winners tonight. Watch your mailboxes, and look for a post later this week on the best ones.
I’m generally of the opinion that the world would be much better if I ran it. (What? Like you’re not?) This principle applies to panels, and all of the things said by all of the people on them.
It applied especially to the Sunday Conversation With Dan Didio panel at Comic-Con. I generally like these panels very much because they leave aside the usual slideshow of covers that we will be seeing in eight months to two years and the painfully awkward questions. Instead, they’re a bunch of people talking about comics. Dan Didio generally does a great job of moderating the responses from the audience, and a panel of comics professionals cuts in with funny commentary. It’s a really enjoyable panel.
One of the questions this year was, “What was a big ‘wow’ moment you’ve read in comics?” That was where the panel spiralled down from something fun into the realms of what I can only describe as extreme unacceptability. Every single reply was “When ____ got killed.” Every one.
People! Stop encouraging them! We just barely got them to stop playing darts with the members of Young Justice! Maybe it’s a question of when you started reading comics, but to me, standard character death that comes with every single big event is the most predictable and un-‘wow’ thing in the world. You can practically set your watch by it. How were any of those people shocked?
But what’s more, one of the other questions was, “What do you like to read in comics?” My answer? Fun. A lot of it. I want to have a blast when I’m reading. I want the characters to have a blast. I want the comic I’m reading to be so much fun that if you gave the reader the option of falling through the paper and joining the characters, they would do it in a heartbeat.
I don’t know if the panel was Bizarro World or if I’m truly that alone in preferring comics in which a hero’s death isn’t the most memorable event. Aren’t there so many better things to remember? And if there aren’t, shouldn’t there be?
Back in the early 90’s, the comic company Valiant struck a deal with Nintendo. Over the next two years or so, Valiant would release a multitude of series based on Nintendo franchises. There were a couple that felt natural. Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda each had their own cartoons at the time, so they would get picked up. Captain N: The Game Master would also get his own comic, though transformed due to the inability to use videogame characters outside of Nintendo. There was even a series called Nintendo Comics System that acted like an anthology of stories featuring those I mentioned and miscellaneous games like Dr. Mario and Punch Out.
Around that time, Nintendo’s Game Boy was still fresh on the scene and they wanted to do whatever they could to get the word out. Sure, advertising was easy for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Captain N was one big commercial for the console and all its games. Well, all the games that weren’t on that crappy knockoff cartoon Power Team (anyone else remember that? It had the monster truck Bigfoot, a basketball player and a talking tomato). Anyway, outside of commercials and magazine ads, how do you advertise what is essentially a lesser NES that you can carry around with you?
With the Captain N cartoon, they eventually introduced a Slimer-like character named Game Boy who was one, big, annoying Game Boy levitating around. With Valiant, they went in another direction. They gave it its own comic book.
I’m sure by now you’re already asking the million dollar question: “How exactly does a Game Boy comic work?” That’s a very good question and having found out the answer, I just had to get my hands on this 4-issue series.
Last weekend was my third Comic-Con and the first one in which I couldn’t get into the panels I wanted to. David, on the last fourcast, disagreed with my belief that the Con has grown too crowded to be effective, but I met a few people who agreed with me and we all had different theories on why the Con seemed to have reached critical mass and exploded into something unwieldy.
I had heard that Comic-Con had reduced the number of tickets sold, and when I went online to buy my own tickets, I found that the four day passes were almost sold out much earlier than last year. I thought that would make it easy to get into panels. Sadly, on Thursday I saw that the Con had gotten so crowded that any tv or movie panels had a two to four hour line and that many of the comics panels had a one hour line. Even if you were willing to wait, it was often a toss-up as to whether you got to see the panels you wanted to.
My theory is that the early sell-out of tickets meant that the Con had started attracting hardcore fans. People, like me, who had been there several times before. Not only would they target panels more specifically, they’d know to get in line early, and when that failed, get in line even earlier. Not to mention the recent recession might have driven people away from the vendors and up to the panels.
A friend of mine, Graeme McMillan from io9, thought that there were the same amount of tickets sold, but that everyone showed up this time around, instead of the regular percentage of no-shows that any event gets.
And then, of course, there were the outright cynics who thought that the Con would sell tickets to the entire population of the world if it could, and it did, and there was no use acting surprised that things were overcrowded.
Although everyone I met at this Con was wonderful, and I did enjoy seeing writers and editors close up, I feel like maybe I should hold off on San Diego next year. Granted, I won’t get a chance to get an over-sized Dr. Who bag at another Con, and I won’t see the life-sized lego replicas of Boba Fett, but I’d sacrifice that to get into the panels I want to see without waiting for hours in a line that snakes around the entire building first.
Esther and I went to San Diego Comic-con and came back with stories and a few interviews. This is just the first of two fourcasts from SDCC. Pardon the quality– the mics pick up everything, and I think we can be heard clearly, but there’s a fair amount of noise on the line. Yowza.
-We talk a little about the con in general
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental
-I interview Jason McNamara, author of The Martian Confederacy
-Leigh Walton, similarly to Jason, is another great guy in the comics industry. He does marketing for Top Shelf and is one of my favorite people to talk about comics with. He runs down Top Shelf’s line-up at the con and we nerd it out a bit over paper quality (so nice to find a kindred spirit).
-We come back to me and Esther, conversation already in progress. We talk about the Dwayne McDuffie and Darwyn Cooke panels at SDCC, discuss the future success and current failings of comics, and then ditch the podcast to go see the Women of Marvel panel.
Surprises to come! In the meantime, read the podcast boilerplate:
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