My fourth New York Comic Con came to an end last weekend, so naturally, I’m compelled to tell you about it. While the earlier years were more based on seeing a million panels, scouring the trade floor and hanging around the Marvel and DC booths to get signed comics from whoever was nearby, I mostly went in a different direction this year.

I’ve been wanting to take this picture for quite a while. Would have been better with Esther there and maybe a fourth person with a question mark pasted over their face. If fighting games has taught me anything, always give the extra spot to the random select button.

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I screwed up and didn’t prep for the Pretty Girls post I wanted to do today, and then went down my schedule and whoops the next three would’ve required reading, scanning, and digging books out of boxes. So a brief skip week.

In exchange, go read this exclusive 10-page preview for Adam Warren’s Empowered 6 I wrangled at Comics Alliance. It’s really very good.

Book drops next week. Look for a review, maybe on release date????

(I also talked about DC Entertainment being in transition, but Empowered > biz talk, sorry y’all.)

Over at Rich Johnston’s blog, some b-team scrub named Ryan Mullenix wrote up a post in response to Chris Sims’s piece on the racial politics of DC’s current style. Sims’s piece was good, and I liked seeing frank discussion of racial issues on a big-name site. Mullenix’s piece… well.

I did it better a year and a half ago.

I’ve got a gang of problems with the piece. There’s no citations, no context, nothing that explains what was going on in the books, no creative teams, no historical context, and nothing worthy of examination. It’s a loose collection of anecdotes piggybacking on a pretty good piece in an attempt to troll for hits. It’s lowest common denominator work at best, and cynical hit-whoring at worst. If you can’t even spell somebody’s name right… well, the craft shows.

These lists do no one any favors. All they do is arm people for crappy, hysterical battles where both sides are too busy shouting to do any listening or learning. “Well CASSANDRA CAIN is ASIATIC!” You couldn’t get any more specific than that, man? What’s more, you couldn’t find something better than some outdated way to say “asian?” Is Cass Cain a member of the Nation of Gods and Earths? You couldn’t take the time to figure out which type of Latino Kyle Rayner is? You couldn’t spell Teth-Adam correctly?

Johnston says that Mullenix “seems to find a striking overall theme.” I think he found the exact sort of thing that makes talking race online such a pain in the neck. I think he found a surefire, cynical, and effective way to log some fat hits for advertisers. I think that he didn’t say anything worth reading. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m wrong.

But people who don’t know anything should speak when spoken to.

I wrote about Brandon Graham’s King City for Comics Alliance.

It’s dumb, but I’ve been trying to write about King City for ages. The last time I tried was around issue 4. I think the final text on CA is a mixture of ideas and sentences from three different drafts from several months worth of starts and stops. I finally got focused and put some elbow grease into it, using issue four as the lynchpin, and I think it turned out pretty okay.

The thing is, King City may well be my favorite ongoing comic right now. It’s a book I save to read until several days after new comics day, in part because I know it is going to be fantastic and in part because it makes everyone else making comics look lazy. It’s that serious. Graham is filling each page with amazing ideas and the briefest of thoughts and it all works. It hangs together. Reading King City is like playing Jenga with ideas and concepts, but it never tips over. It stays upright. The oversized floppy format, the black and white art, the page count, the backups, the back cover, the whole book works. It’s cluttered and messy and it all works.

(I haven’t been able to get “Sometimes her cigarette smoke smells like flowers” out of my head since I read it.)

I didn’t want to screw it up when I wrote about it. This is the book that everyone should be reading. It’s your stepping stone to a world of great comics. And like, writing it up and doing a halfway job on it? That’d just be sloppy. I wouldn’t do it justice. I think the CA piece comes as close as I can right now. I may write about it more later on, as the series lumbers toward its conclusion.

One more thing.

I love this comic, man. Y’all should be reading it.

“NO ESCAPE!”

We’re taking a break from the Fourcast! this week, due to Wondercon hitting on our recording weekend and being unable to record the podcast panel (I’ve never seen so many wires in my life). We’ll be back next week with something interesting for y’all, though, please believe.

In the meantime, some minor self-promotion! You can find me posting a few times a month at Comics Alliance, and I’m part of the new team at iFanboy, too. I’m going to be posting once a week for now, doing a series of linkblogging posts called Pay Attention! I’ll run down news you might have missed, interesting sites, blah blah blah.

Now I can finally stop pitching rocks in Hamsterdam! Hurrah!

Podcast will be back next week!

I wrote a bit about Milestone Media in honor of the release of Milestone Forever #1 this week. It’s a brief history and essay on its impact, a lot of which gets forgotten nowadays.

A brief excerpt:

Oh, you knew it was coming, didn’t you? It’s Black History Month, baby, pay attention!

Milestone was never the “black” comics company. Its creators, like its characters, were a multicultural blend of various races and ethnicities. It stands to reason that when your company is composed of a variety of types of people that your books will reflect that reality, doesn’t it?

In the case of Milestone’s comics, that is definitely true. “Blood Syndicate”‘s cast was composed of black, white, Chinese, Korean, canine, Latino, and alien characters. In fact, in a move that is still amazingly rare, “Blood Syndicate” featured Latino characters of different Latin ethnicities. A Puerto Rican, a Dominican, and a Salvadoran in the same book? That’s incredible, because most companies just stop at “Generic Hispanic Character.”

It’s nice that mainstream comics are making a play at paying attention to people who aren’t white dudes again, but don’t forget that before Batwoman, before Steph Brown, before Jaime Reyes, and before Luke Cage was on the Avengers, there was Milestone. Give credit where it’s due. Pay attention.

There’s this Malcolm X quote I like. He said, “You can’t drive a knife into a man’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress.” If you’re doing something now that isn’t as forward-thinking (or equal, or normal, or whatever) as seventeen years ago? That ain’t progress, doggie. That’s playing catchup to everybody else. It’s nice that you’re trying, but either do better or go home. I’m not going to congratulate you for finally doing what you’re supposed to have been doing for decades. That’s like congratulating parents for paying their rent. Newsflash: you’re supposed to be doing that.

And that’s about as negative as I’m willing to get over race & comics this month. I’m tired of fighting.

Go give that post a read. Denys Cowan comments below and he dug it, which basically made my day.

Mommy, where David went?

I’ve been everywhere but here over the past week and change. Where was I? I was at work, mostly, trying to button up a project before the holidays. That stopped me from posting here, but it didn’t stop me from contributing, in one way or another, to three other sites. Oops!

–Comics Alliance has been doing it’s end of year Best/Worst lists. I contributed a blurb on Pluto for the number six spot on the Best list. On the Worst side, I talked a little about Spider-Man: One More Day.

-I helped Friend Graeme hash out a couple of his picks for ten of the decade’s best sci-fi comics.

-Tucker Stone and The Factual Opinion gang are doing their music countdown and I pitched in with the voting and writing up. The intro is here, and I wrote up Ou Est Le Swimming Pool’s “Dance the Way I Feel” and the Clipse/Kanyeyo collabo “Kinda Like A Big Deal” for the first half of the top fifty list. I’ve got a couple in the top 25, I think. Spoilers! I also dug up sixteen mixtapes you shoulda heard, ranging from Jeezy to Ice Cube to Michael Jackson.

I’m going to be posting pretty regularly over the next two weeks, I think, but nothing like what I’m planning for my writing in 2010. We’ll call it “Operation: Suicide By Blog” for now. Look for it January 4th.

Now you’re all caught up and I have over two thousand unread items in Google Reader. Hustler for death, no heaven for a gangster.

I’ve started writing for AOL’s Comics Alliance. I’m going to be doing a few pieces a week, as of this week, and you can check out my posts here. So far, I’ve written about Astro boy vs Pluto and done a brief history bit on the pulps, with an eye toward DC’s Batman/Doc Savage Special.

Bookmark it, RSS it, do whatever the kids do these days. Twitter it, I guess. Put it on Friendster or AOL Chat or whatever.