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’s a good time to be Gavok because in just a couple days, I’ll be going to the WWE Royal Rumble in Madison Square Garden. The event has always been my own little “Wrestling Christmas” and I look forward to it every year. I felt that I needed to prepare in my own little way.

Like I recently acquired the DVD set of all 20 Royal Rumble shows in a big, white cube. Considering I also have a collection of the first 20 Wrestlemanias sitting around, gathering dust, I figured I would watch them all in chronological order. Right now I’m in the middle of Wrestlemania 9 (taking place in 1993). I figure by the time I’m completely caught up, it’ll be time for this year’s Wrestlemania.

That at least explains why I’ve been kind of lax here lately, though it’s hardly noticeable with the good job hermanos and Hoatzin have been doing. I knew I needed to do another Wrestlecomic article. I could cover the Chaos Comics WWF stuff from the late-90’s, but I think I’ll wait until I reach those years in my Royal Rumble/Wrestlemania watching to dive into that. I found a guy selling a manga from what appears to be the same people behind the Hulk Hogan manga, making a big deal about a huge battle royal featuring a bunch of big 80’s wrestlers.

I got the idea that this was some big all-star crossover fight that would last for an entire comic, so even if I couldn’t read any of it, I could at least follow what was going on. When I got my book, I discovered that this battle royal was extremely brief. I tried pretending I could follow what was going on in the manga, but it wasn’t working. I know when I’m beat. At least the Engrish cover refers to the story as “Super Real Fiction!” which, now that I think about it, is a strangely accurate description of professional wrestling.

So the manga thing was a bust. Now what? I decided that if fishing in the past wasn’t going to work, I’d see what’s going on in the present. I picked up a comic called Headlocked: Work of Art, written by Michael Kingston and drawn by Randy Valiente.

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