The weekend of chunky guys dressed like Colossus and hot women dressed as Slave Leia has come to an end. I myself had a great time, spent with hermanos from this very site and a whole bunch of guys from Funnybook Babylon. Sadly, Thomas “Wanderer” Wilde deemed himself “too broke” to consider joining us and Hoatzin would have probably involved a gigantic plane ticket paid in rare diamonds, since he’s from Europe. I don’t know. I really have no grasp on how that type of thing works. Besides, Hoatzin seems to have vanished from our planet. What happened to that guy?

This one movie sent the other movie into space.

Day One

Last year I got to New York the day before the con started, which allowed me enough rest and whatnot. This year I had to come in the first day of the event and kill time until David Uzumeri came in from Canada, since he was in charge of dealing with the hotel. I walked straight from the Port Authority bus terminal to the Javits Center, which tired me the hell out.

After getting my swanktastical press pass, I met up with hermanos and Joseph of FBB. They were at a panel starting up that was a screening for a new Will Eisner documentary. Since I was tired from all that walking, I decided to stick around and watch it. I found it interesting in the sense that I honestly didn’t know all that much about Eisner, which is almost a sin if you’re a comic fan. The four of us (David U. showed up towards the end) mostly agreed that while it had some fantastic stuff in there, such as taped conversations between Eisner and guys like Kirby, the sum of it was incredibly dry.

Shortly after, we went to the panel on online journalism, with guys from Newsarama and CBR there. It wasn’t as good as the comic blogging panel from last year and mostly focused on arguing over criticism vs. getting press releases. Once that was done with, I was rested up enough to do some wandering.

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It still surprises me that Double Dragon died out completely. You’d think we’d see a remake or sequel for the Wii or PS3 around this time, but nothing. No flashy resurrections like Ninja Turtles or Transformers. It just died, unless you count the re-release on the Gameboy Advance.

The game’s story was pretty basic. Billy and Jimmy Lee are two brothers with identical fighting skills. In a slightly decrepit future, their mutual girlfriend Marian is shot by a machine gun-toting cyberpunk and taken away. The brothers have to fight through legions of punks before saving Marian. In the NES version of the game, they couldn’t get the 2-player co-op to work, so they just made Jimmy Lee evil. Ignore that.

Several sequels were made, each playing up the same formula. Marian gets kidnapped and the brothers beat up street gangs in retaliation. Some of these games added weird mystical stuff to the series, like demonic gymnast crime bosses and evil mummies. There was a fighting game made for the Neo-Geo, but I never played it. Around then, the series took a turn for the worse.

A cartoon series was released and it was pretty bad. Instead of plainclothes martial arts vigilantes, the Lee brothers were full-blown superheroes. This led to a movie with a similar plot that was atrocious. In the videogames, the brothers teamed up with the Battletoads in a completely random crossover. Double Dragon 5 was released, but in actuality, it was a lame one-on-one fighter tie-in to the cartoon.

Back in 2002, SNK Playmore was set to release a follow-up fighting game called Rage of the Dragons, but the licensing fell through. Hence, the characters became Billy Lewis, Jimmy Lewis, Mariah and Abubo (rather than Abobo).

This comic, released by Marvel, came out in 1991. This is several years before the cartoon and the movie and the game where they fight a giant space rat named Big Blag. Instead, this is right around the time when Double Dragon 3 was released on the NES. Despite that, the series strays from loyalty to the games. Yes, Billy and Jimmy beat up punks and Marian is there, but besides that, the comic goes out into left field to add color. It’s more similar to the cartoon in ways, with the mystical superpowers and off-the-wall villains. The comic doesn’t even have Abobo in it!

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New York Comic Con has come and gone. Fuuuuun shit.

First, let me just go over last year’s show. I only showed up for Saturday. It was the first year of NYCC in the Jacob Javits Center, so they had no idea what they were doing. Me and my friend got there at about noon and already the place was pretty packed. You could barely move through the aisles and if you could, you couldn’t stop. We were packed like sardines.

Eventually, the fire marshal made a stink about the maximum occupancy on the floor. He was threatening to close the place down. Instead, they made a line into the convention floor that wouldn’t allow anyone – not even those with tickets – onto the convention floor unless someone in there exited first. For a few hours, this made things unbearable. Towards the latter hours, many of the people on line just plain left and things were a bit better.

The people behind the Comic Con insisted that they would fix the whole overpopulation problem. For one, they would limit the tickets. For two, they’d allow more room. Since I had a good time last year, I decided to go all three days. This time, I brought hermanos and Riskbreaker with me.

This is our story.

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I’m not dead!

I’ve basically been grinding for the last week on a game for work. Check out Games Radar this weekendish for my Dead Rising guide. I had one short short deadline, so I went Quick ‘n’ Dirty with it. It’ll get you through the game and show you the highlights. Getting 100% is up to you.

Now that I’ve got this bear off my back (though I have another arriving in the mail later today! hooray for getting paid to play games!) I can get back to my labor of love: comics!

What happened while I was busy? Looks like Marvel let Civil War slip hard, pushing the ending back to Feb 07 at the earliest. Mark Millar says it’s McNiven’s fault and that he only had a few weeks lead time.

“So, what?” say the fans. “Why didn’t you launch later?”

Tom Brevoort gives an interview about it and says this interesting piece:

The whole infrastructure of comic book retailing is changing, and I think what you’re starting to see is the beginning of the movement away from a monthly magazine publishing model over to something more akin to a book publishing model. This is very distressing to a lot of people who’ve grown up with the monthly model as a bedrock concept. But ever since we retreated almost wholly to the Direct Market in terms of the basic comic book product, there’s no compelling reason for the monthly release schedule outside of the need for retailers to have a predictable cash-flow that allows them to keep their doors open.

Insult or nugget of truth? Probably both! I’d have no problem with Marvel switching to trades only, with multiple teams releasing multiple books staggered so that you get a new 128-144 page story every couple of months. It’d effectively kill megacrossovers, but you could still do event comics.

Make the comics industry behave like a real publishing industry and we’ll be on better ground.

And what’s this? Mark Bagley is leaving Ultimate Spider-Man with #110? Bags is one of the top three Spidey artists, easy, so I’m sad to see him go. USM has always been a good looking book and he’s leaving behind some huge shoes to fill.

I’ve got two drafts in the works. First is an examination of Superboy #91 and the second is my list of Top 5 Black Women, to go along with my list of Top 5 Black Men. Also on the docket is my love of Jim Lee and the X-Men. Gavok’s off for a week, so I need to throw 4l on my back and keep up regular updates! His What If countdown, which you should be reading if you aren’t, will return when he does.

However, I recently got the final volume of Ed Brubaker’s Catwoman. It’s the last book to feature Cameron Stewart on art and it’s called Catwoman: Wild Ride. Give it a look, if only because it features this classic scene from Catwoman 22 reproduced below (and without permission, I’m sorry!) with Robert Mitchum Slam Bradley. I tell you what, man, it’s the cigarette throwing what does it. Slam has style. If you like this scene, do yourself a favor and check out the rest of the series. It’s beyond excellent.

In the meantime, check out Slam going toe-to-toe with Batman and I’ll probably see you tomorrow once I get some sleep!

(There’s a couple guys out there who’ve offered me guest articles… hop to it! I’d be glad to run them. Hoatzin/Rad, I’m calling you out, man. We need some Scrooge McDuck up in here! If anyone else wants to talk, the e-mail is at the top right!)