san diego comic con
Pre-registration opens for Comic-Con International
Comic-Con International has opened pre-registration for those hoping to attend the July 12-15 convention. That’s right, pre-registration.
Seeking to ease the online process for purchasing badges, organizers this year are requiring prospective attendees to sign up for a free Comic-Con Member ID that they will use to log into the system once registration actually opens.
Having a Member ID doesn’t ensure your entry into Comic-Con; anyone with a valid and unique email address can get one. However, everyone — attendee, volunteer, professional or press — who intends to purchase or apply for a convention badge must first have a Member ID.
More information can be found on the Comic-Con website. You can sign up for a Member ID here; the video below will walk you through the process.
- January 11, 2012 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Comic-Con co-founder Richard Alf passes away
Richard Alf
Passings | Richard Alf, who as a teenager fronted the money for the first three years of San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con, the annual event that later became Comic-Con International, passed away Wednesday from pancreatic cancer. He was 59. Alf, who co-chaired the first convention in 1970 and became chairman the following year, later opened Comic Kingdom in North Slope, a business he sold by the end of the decade. [U-T San Diego, Mark Evanier]
Conventions | iFanboy, San Francisco’s Isotope Comics and Grant Morrison are teaming up for MorrisonCon, which will feature “A once in a lifetime opportunity to see Grant Morrison and 9 hand picked comic creator superstars, all together for one weekend, one time only.” They’ve released few details so far, but the website says it’ll occur next fall. [MorrisonCon]
Awards | Comic-Con International is now accepting submissions for the 2012 Eisner Awards, which will be presented in San Diego in July. The deadline for submitting materials for consideration is March 6. [CCI]
- January 6, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Charges dropped against Susie Cagle in Occupy arrest
Susie Cagle
Legal | Cartoonist Susie Cagle, who was arrested last month while covering Occupy Oakland, says she has been cleared of all charges by the Oakland Police Department. The Society of Professional Journalists sent a letter to the Oakland police condemning the arrest, which ultimately assisted in getting the charges dropped. The letter called out the department’s crowd management policy, which says, “Even after a dispersal order has been given, clearly identified media shall be permitted to carry out their professional duties in any area where arrests are being made, unless their presence would unduly interfere with the enforcement action.” [Fishbowl LA]
Conventions | San Diego City Council approved a plan to have San Diego hotels pay for a $520 million convention center expansion. The plan moves to a second hearing in January and requires a vote of two-thirds of the hotels that cast ballots for approval. [NBC San Diego]
- December 9, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by JK Parkin
Judges announced for 2012 Eisner Awards
Eisner Awards
Comic-Con International has announced the judging panel for the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, which includes Comic Book Resources and Robot 6 contributor Brigid Alverson.
The six-person committee will meet in San Diego in late March to select the nominees to appear on the Eisner ballot, which then will be voted on by comics industry professionals. The winners will be announced July 13 during an awards ceremony at Comic-Con.
Besides Alverson, who also writes MangaBlog and contributes to Publishers Weekly and MTV Geek, the judging panel includes: retailer Calum Johnston, owner of Strange Adventures: Comix & Curiosities in Nova Scotia; Jesse Karp, librarian at the LREI independent school in New York City and instructor of a graduate-level course on graphic novels at the Pratt Institute; veteran cartoonist Larry Marder, creator of Tales of the Beanworld, former executive director of Image Comics and former president of McFarlane Toys; author and educator Ben Saunders, professor of English at the University of Oregon; and Mary Sturhann, longtime secretary on the board of directors of Comic-Con International.
- December 1, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | More on Marvel layoffs; CCI plans Balboa Park event
Marvel
Publishing | Heidi MacDonald and Tom Spurgeon offer commentary and context regarding last week’s layoffs by Marvel. [The Beat, Comics Reporter]
Conventions | San Diego City Council President Tony Young and Comic-Con International staff are working together on a “marquee event” at Balboa Park that around the time of Comic Con. While convention organizers are interested in a Balboa Park event, they don’t support Yong’s original proposal, a nationally televised parade that would kick off or end the con, saying that the logistics, traffic and crowding would be problematic. [Sign On San Diego]
Conventions | Ohio State University’s student newspaper covers this past weekend’s Mid-Ohio Con. [The Lantern]
- October 24, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
What Are You Reading? with special guest Janice Headley
Big Questions
Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading?, our weekly column where we successfully answer the question in the title. Our special guest this week is Janice Headley, events coordinator, publicist and “ambassador of awesome” for Fantagraphics.
To see what Janice and the Robot 6 crew have been reading this week, click the link below.
- September 11, 2011 @ 02:55 PM by JK Parkin
SDCC ’11 | Jaime Hernandez on how the hell he’s going to top his last two Love and Rockets stories
The San Diego Comic-Con is the gift that keeps on giving, this time in the form of an interview with Love and Rockets co-creator Jaime Hernandez by CBR’s Kiel Phegley. Ask anyone who’s reading the series in its book-formatted New Stories incarnation — including this autumn’s #4, which picks up where last year’s massively acclaimed “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers” storyline left off — and they’ll tell you: Jaime’s making some of the best work of his career, some 30 years after L&R made its debut. Unfortunately, that left him floundering when it came time to come up with a story for next year’s volume:
I almost blew my wad on these last two issues. I was so proud of it, and I wrapped up so many loose ends, and I was so proud of myself. And I said ‘Okay, now it’s time to do a new issue’…and I was blank. I swear, I was blank! I was actually looking out the window, looking for something, some kind of inspiration, you know? That happens to me once in a while, but this time — I mean, big! I was just wandering around, asking my wife, ‘Do you need me to go do something out in the back yard, or…?’ I just felt like the most useless human being. It’s what I always call the post-comic withdrawal, where after I’ve just gone BANG on one issue, after it’s done, I feel so useless. I need to do something, but it’s like nothing’s there. It always comes, but I can’t make it come. It’s an organic thing with me, where it comes when it comes. Luckily, it’s always come within the deadline.
Watch the entire fascinating interview, which reveals a lot about Jaime’s creative process and his desire to do comics outside his usual “Locas” world, above.
- September 8, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
SDCC ’11 | How comics learned to stop worrying and love the Con
San Diego 2011 was all about playing the game, about recognizing that Comic Con isn’t gonna be what any of us wants or needs or cares about, it’s instead going to try to be a little bit of what everyone who comes there cares about. All the starfuckers just there to see someone who was on TV one time, all of the PR flacks looking for the next big thing or trying to sell us the next big thing, the toy makers, the funny t-shirt hawkers, the deep discounters, the booth-babes, and even the comics folks—this is the year we all just sucked it up and realized that we were all gonna be in this together, and it’s gonna be in the same old San Diego convention centre in the same old gaslamp, and we’re all just gonna get used to it. So we did. We’re all playing the game now.
–from retailer/blogger/TCAF organizer/Wallace Wells inspiration Chris Butcher’s excellent report on this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. It’s an entertaining blend of photo parade, personal anecdotes, and astute analysis of the comics presence at the show.
Butcher contrasts San Diego with other shows he’s worked at “where 100% of the audience was potentially interested in 100% of what I was selling,” as opposed to even a good year at San Diego, where most attendees are there for something other than buying comics, let alone the specific comics and comic art he was selling as booth manager for Street Fighter publisher UDON and representative of Toronto retailer The Beguiling’s original art sales wing. He also notes that no single book garnered “book of the show” accolades of the sort that previously greeted such works as Blankets, Kramers Ergot, and the one-volume Bone, and that even publishers with a killer suite of products and announcements walked away from the show playing second fiddle to the usual churn of Hollywood advance buzzmaking and Marvel and DC announcements (which were themselves fairly subdued this year).
But! Butcher says it was the best San Diego he’s been to in a while, which is reflective of what I’ve heard from most of the comics-centric attendees this year. Whether it’s due to Hollywood’s lowered expectations for the show and the consequently lessened obnoxiousness from that aspect of the show; the establishment of offshoot events dedicated specifically to comics; recalibrated expectations and/or wholesale retreat from the con by some of its more outspoken alternative-comics detractors; or simply renewed attention to its still-fine line-up of comics publishers, retailers, creators, and programming; the show went over better this year among comics folks than at any time in recent memory, lack of a “book of the show” be damned.
- August 11, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | Why the new Spider-Man matters; a look at ‘work for hire’
Miles Morales
Comics | In a post subtitled “Why the new biracial Spider-Man matters,” David Betancourt shares his reaction to the news that the new Ultimate Spider-Man is half-black, half-Latino: “The new Ultimate Spider-Man, who will have the almost impossible task of replacing the late Peter Parker (easily one of Marvel Comics most popular characters), took off his mask and revealed himself to be a young, half-black, half-Latino kid by the name of Miles Morales. When I read the news, I was beside myself, as if my brain couldn’t fully process the revelation. My friendly neighborhood Spider-Man was … just like me? This is a moment I never thought I’d see. But the moment has arrived, and I — the son of Puerto Rican man who passed his love of comics to me, and a black woman who once called me just to say she’d met Adam West — will never forget that day.”
The New Yorker, meanwhile, posts the opening on an essay from the year 2120 that looks back at the cultural significance of the new Spider-Man. [Comic Riffs, New Yorker]
Legal | Analysis of the Kirby estate/Marvel case continues, as both Modern Ideas and Copyhype look at the concept of “work for hire” in light of the ruling. [Modern Ideas, Copyhype]
- August 5, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
SDCC ’11 | A whole bunch of artwork from the Oni Press panel
Black Metal 2
As I was going through the folders I’d set up on my hard drive for my yearly trek to the San Diego Comic Con, seeing what needed to be cleaned out and what was still on my “to do” list, I realized I was sitting on a huge stockpile of art that Oni Press had given me after their panel on Friday. I’d asked Oni’s Cory Casoni for the artwork they showed from Rascal Raccoon, the new book they announced at the show, and he gave me everything they showed during their presentation.
And there was a lot of stuff. Granted, a lot of it you’ve probably seen before — Chris posted some preview art from Power Lunch last week, for instance, and they had a lot of pages from The Sixth Gun that came from various issues of its run — but I figured why not share it all? And this seemed the week to do it, since they showed a lot of pages from Phil Gelatt and Tyler Crook‘s Petrograd, which hits shops this week.
So, after the jump, you’ll find the covers for some upcoming books like the second Black Metal and Spell Checkers volumes, as well as pages from One Soul, Petrograd and many other Oni books. For more on the panel itself, I’ll direct you to John Scarff’s report over on CBR.
- August 2, 2011 @ 11:05 AM by JK Parkin
SDCC ’11 | Brian Ralph’s San Diego Comic-Con diary
I’ll admit it, it’s a bit of a shock to see a Brian Ralph comic that isn’t about some deceptively adorable character adventuring their way through an impeccably rendered rubble-strewn environment. Then again, is surviving the San Diego Comic-Con really all that different? The Daybreak cartoonist and alumnus of the influential Fort Thunder collective is chronicling his experience at Comic-Con International 2011 in diary comics form for The Comics Journal all week long. Day one’s a doozy, a journey from misery to triumph and back to misery in the space of a few panels. Look out for the cameo appearance from Drawn and Quarterly’s staff supercouple Peggy Burns and Tom Devlin, who emerge as a sort of obscenity-spewing Statler & Waldorf.
- August 2, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | Flashpoint gets real? 31,000 flock to Otakon
from Flashpoint #4
Publishing | Popular comic-book guest star President Barack Obama will make a brief appearance in this week’s Flashpoint #4. DC Comics Executive Editor Eddie Berganza told USA Today that the inclusion of the actual President, rather than a fictional counterpart, signals that the danger is real — something that will get pushed as the publisher prepares for the September relaunch. [USA Today]
Publishing | Fantagraphics announced the lineup for the first volume of its EC archives series, which will collect Harvey Kurtzman’s war stories. [Fantagraphics blog]
Conventions | More than 31,000 anime and manga enthusiasts flocked to Baltimore over the weekend for Otakon, one of the biggest fan-oriented anime conventions. There were a few anime and manga licenses announced, but mainly it was a meet-and-greet for fans and publishers. [Anime News Network]
- August 2, 2011 @ 07:07 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
SDCC ’11 | Listen to 15 panels and the Eisner Awards
CBR's Jonah Weiland accepts the Eisner
Jamie Coville regularly attends a whole bunch of comic book conventions and records various panels (with the panelists’ permission), then posts them on the internet as podcasts. He’s now posted several from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, including the Dwayne McDuffie and Gene Colan tributes, several spotlight panels, the Eisner awards and the Indie Comics Marketing 101 panel (featuring Sam Humphries, Ben McCool, Chip Mosher, Laura Hudson and me!). He’s also got pictures from them posted on Picasa, which is where the above photo of our beloved leader comes from.
You’ll find the full list of available MP3s after the jump, or head over to Jamie’s site for his complete archive.
- August 1, 2011 @ 07:06 AM by JK Parkin
What Are You Reading?
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3 Century #2
It’s time once again for another round of What Are You Reading?, kids. Today we welcome special guest Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, creator of Necessary Monsters, The Last Sane Cowboy and more.
To see what Daniel and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below.
- July 31, 2011 @ 02:26 PM by JK Parkin
SDCC ’11 | Gilbert Hernandez to return to Palomar in Love and Rockets: New Stories #5
CBR and Comics Should Be Good contributor Sonia Harris’s report from the Love and Rockets spotlight panel — in which all three of Los Bros Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario, analyzed one another’s work with moderator Kristy Valenti of The Comics Journal — is pure L&R-nerd heaven for a whole bunch of reasons. But not least among them is the revelation that Gilbert will be returning to the streets of Palomar, the tiny fictional Latin American village in which the bulk of his acclaimed stories for the series were set for years, with next year’s Love and Rockets: New Stories #5 from Fantagraphics. It’s a welcome surprise — emphasis on surprise, given how Beto has talked about his Palomar-based material lately.
Gilbert left the village behind years ago, with the end of the first volume of Love and Rockets in 1996. Subsequent stories were set in the same world, but shifted to Los Angeles and largely centered on the American sisters of Palomar matriach Luba, who moved to the States along with several other Palomar characters. Since L&R Vol. 2 wrapped up in 2007, the bulk of Beto’s work has come in the form of “adaptations” of the Z-grade movies that Luba’s psychologist-turned-actress sister Fritz has starred in within the Palomar world. The resulting material has been much more genre-based than the naturalistic/magic-realist Palomar comics, and absolutely suffused with graphic sex and violence. The move has left critics divided, but Hernandez told our own Chris Mautner that he wouldn’t have it any other way: “The Fritz series frees me of any obligation to be a do-gooder cartoonist, something most regular L&R readers probably don’t want to hear. I felt straight jacketed with ‘Palomar’ and the like after a while, really. I have a lot more going on in my imagination than I’m expected to utilize.”
On the panel where he announced his return to the town, he was appropriately enough a bit more conciliatory about his older work. “People always compare my [current] stuff to the ‘Palomar’ stuff, but lately, my stories have been just a little colder edged because I’m more interested in that,” he said, later adding that creating the “Fritz-verse” of movie-based comics enabled him to go wild without stuffing too much weirdness into “Palomar” for it to work properly as a setting.
As for what, specifically, is in store for Palomar’s residents, Hernandez hinted that the story will involve the legacy mothers leave their daughters — which, if you know your Beto, is enough to make you very excited and very nervous.
- July 28, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Sean T. Collins