Report from the Toronto Comicon

I drove into Toronto yesterday for the annual Paradise Comicon, the same show I attended last year, but in a bigger venue this time. I got there late for the start of DC’s “One Year Later” panel, so I skipped it and wandered around. I’ve noticed that I always start cons with the same feeling of having made a mistake in coming, “What am I doing here? I don’t really have anything to buy. I could’ve taken that money and gone and seen a movie.” The first few tables I looked at didn’t do anything to allay that feeling, but I eventually started seeing good deals on things I wanted here and there. I picked up the new 100 Bullets paperback and some other odds and ends, but on the whole, it wasn’t a big con for buying, and in the end I only spent about fifty or sixty dollars, which is a relatively small amount considering I had a hundred dollars more than that in my pocket itching to get out.

The highlight of the convention was the number of creators I got to talk to. Most were from the DC stable and they started to trickle back in after the OYL panel ended. I started off by talking to J.G. Jones as he sketched, and he was among the most pleasant of the people I spoke to. He was soft spoken, with an accent I couldn’t place, and he was genuinely appreciative when I told him I liked his work. I mentioned a panel arrangement he’d drawn in The Hiketeia, and said that I liked the figure work in this panel in particular, and he lit up and we talked Wonder Woman.

I walked over to Michael Lark’s table and spent some time looking at some original art pages he had out. I talked to him a little about his technique and the work he’s doing on Daredevil right now, but he seemed involved in his commissions, so I moved on.

I saw Dave Johnson gather his stuff and leave his table and I remembered that he was part of a panel on cover art that was starting soon, so I headed to that. The panel also featured Arthur Suydam, J.G. Jones, and Mike Mayhew. While some of the questions were interesting, Mayhew talked a lot and overwhelmed the other panelists. For much of the panel I wished he’d let the others talk, but then towards the end I asked an unnecessarily complicated and directionless question (as I manage to do at every panel I attend) and while the other panelists were quiet Mayhew was all over it, and then I was thankful for him being there. As well, the moderator asked him at one point about when he swiped the king of Spain’s photo to draw Magneto, and that led to a funny recounting, so it wasn’t all bad.

Back on the floor, I got Brian Azzarello to sign my new 100 Bullets book, and I talked to him a little about the series. I’m not particularly big on signatures, but it’s a great way to start up a conversation with someone when they’re behind a table. Azzarello was standoffish at first, but warmed up as we talked about the various books. I told him that I liked “The Counterfifth Detective” the best out of the books I’d read, and he joked that he may have overwritten that one. I also got Trish Mulvihill to sign the book on Brian’s suggestion, but like an idiot I missed the opportunity to pick her brain on colouring, an aspect of comics I’ve only recently begun to pay real attention to.

Walking by the ACTOR booth I saw George Perez, but he was busy with other people, so I didn’t get a chance talk to him. I spoke a little with Dave Johnson as I got him to sign my 100 Bullets book, before heading over to Greg Rucka’s table. I came in on the middle of a discussion on U.S. foreign policy, during which I got to talk with him about Queen & Country and the bits I liked most when I read A Gentleman’s Game recently. I got him to sign my favourite issue of Gotham Central, and on his suggestion I passed it over to Michael Lark who signed it and then defaced the cover. I’ll show you what I mean when I get my scanner back up. Thanks for nothing, Lark.

My favourite person to speak to, by far, was Jimmy Palmiotti, who is just as affable and good natured as his image suggests. I’d taken a few photocopies of the story me and Des are getting published with me, but I didn’t see much of an opportunity to show them to anyone, so when I saw Jimmy I thought I’d ask him for some tips on inking. He went through the pages almost panel by panel and told me what was working and what I could improve. The advice he gave was useful and honest, and though he joked the whole time, everything he said was substantial. It was the most human conversation I’ve had at one of these things. He finished by saying, “This is good work, not Marvel or DC good, but you’re only going to get better.”

The only real disappointment of the day came at the end when I went to see Darwyn Cooke, and got to his table just in time to see him packing up his stuff to leave. I took one final round of the floor, debated on buying a few more trades, and then left. I enjoyed the con more this year than last, mainly for the good conversations I had, both with the big names, and with some of the people putting stuff out independently, as well. The crowds seemed smaller this year, and the pros were more accessible than last. Virtually no one that I talked to had a lineup, and with those that did, if I wandered and came back the line would be gone. Vancouver doesn't get big conventions like this, but having experienced these two now, I might make my way down to Seattle for Emerald City if I'm on the west coast next year.

The telephone, the H-bomb, and some thoughts on Murderball

While I wrote a few days ago about possibly losing my internet access this week, the observant reader will notice that I am still online. I managed to work something out with my departing roommate to keep the cable on until the end of the month. My second departing roommate, on the other hand, who was responsible for the phone bill, neglected to follow through on a similar request, and so I am without a telephone until next week. Anyone wanting to talk will have to come to my house, or resort to the carrier pigeon network I set up earlier this year. To all those who mocked me, who's the idiot now, jerks?

(I know that this item doesn't concern the majority of you reading, but it did give me the chance to post those great Nextwave panels).
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I finally got to read the second volume in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series, and while I was hoping to pick up the third book from Mr. O’Malley himself later this week at the Toronto Comicon, the release appears to have been delayed until the end of May, so I’ll comment more once I’ve read that installment. To save you the suspense, the rest of the world is right on this one, the books are very good and you should pick them up. Everyone I’ve loaned them to has enjoyed them as well. In the meantime, here's one of my favourite pages from the one I just read:

I like this page because it features a character who is clearly a thinly veiled version of my friend Paul H, also sometimes called H-bomb*. Aside from minor differences like sexual orientation and lack of glasses, this character is obviously Paul, all the way from his beard, to his understated delivery, to his beard. You may scoff, but Paul spent last year living pretty close to Toronto, and I have no doubt that he was stalked by Bryan Lee O'Malley and included in this book.

*By "sometimes" I mean just this one time, right here.
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We watched the documentary Murderball a couple of weeks ago, and while it’s not as good as the rave reviews suggest, it is worth a couple of hours of your time. The movie follows the U.S. national wheelchair rugby team through a few tournaments, and explores the players’ lives in the process. Despite being named after the sport’s nickname, the movie features surprisingly little game footage, somewhere around nine minutes in total. Moreover, the footage that the filmmakers include is cut so rapidly that one never gets a sense of the game, leaving the impression that the game may not be especially exciting to watch.

However, the lack of gameplay scenes comes out of the fact that the movie isn’t so much about the sport as about the effect the sport has on the lives of the players. The team members are all quadriplegics, and they describe the difficulties of first two years after losing full physical functioning. They all indicate that the sport restored a sense of efficacy to their lives. The sound bite from the film that stands out is, “I’ve done more in a chair than I ever did out of one.”

The movie’s focus, in large part, is in showing how effective these men are, and in effect, how masculine. The filmmakers strive to show that the players lead normal lives, and their definition of normality is tied into their definition of masculinity. The movie’s concern with masculinity manifests in numerous discussions of the players’ sex lives, scenes of male bonding, and with a focus on the film’s poster boy (literally) Mark Zupan, with his shaved head, beard, and tattoos. Most tellingly, in the end of movie montage, the captions let us know what all the players are up to now, and almost every one has to do with them finding a girl. In the filmmakers' eyes, getting married and settling down is the final evidence that these men fit in. The issues behind such a viewpoint extend beyond the movie, and I won't go into them here, but I do note that the attempts to portray the players as rebels contradict the filmmakers' desire to slot them into normal social roles.

The most interesting aspect of the movie, for me, was the treatment of Joe Soares, a former U.S. player who responds to getting cut from the national team by going to coach Team Canada. In many respects, Soares is an elder statesman of the game, but the other players respond to his defection with open venom and accuse him of betraying his country. Moreover, the filmmakers frame Soares in such a way as to make him as loathsome as possible. From the way they shoot him, to the way they cut his conversations, to the details they include about his personal life, the filmmakers make Soares into an irrational, unlikable antagonist. Their efforts to make the audience hate Soares are so ham-handed that at one point in the movie (while Joe is barking at his kid to stop goofing off, I think) I turned to the others and said, “This is character assassination.” One of the subplots in the movie is the rekindling of a friendship between the aforementioned Zupan and his best friend, Chris Igoe, whose drunk driving led to Zupan’s partial paralysis. In subsequent interviews, Igoe says that he initially resisted being in the movie because he was afraid of being cast in an unfavourable light, but agreed to appear after discussing what the filmmakers had put together and seeing that Soares was clearly going to be the bad guy in the movie.*

What I found interesting about the deliberate villainizing of Soares wasn’t the obviousness, or the fact that it was done, but that I may not have spotted it if he had gone to coach a team other than Canada. If he had gone to coach Team Australia, I may have hated him too. The film is the standard American narrative of the somewhat bad boy Americans who play by their own rules against the impersonal foreigners, a narrative I buy into every time I watch one of those movies. In this instance, however, the foreigners were us. As a Canadian, I viewed Team Canada as the heroes of the movie, even though I recognized that they were clearly being presented as the robot-like, monolithic opposition. I said to the others at one point, “In this movie, we’re the Russians,” and we imagined audiences muttering, “Dirty Reds.”

Watching this movie was a new experience because I was so clearly not the intended audience, but only by a chance of geography. In the climactic showdown, (highlight for SPOILERS) when the U.S. loses to Canada, we were euphoric. The U.S. players were on screen crying, but the scene loses its emotional punch because the end wasn’t a loss for us, but a win. Being part of the antagonistic group in a film got me wondering how Russian viewers felt when watching Ivan Drago get pummelled, or Arabic viewers when watching True Lies, or German viewers watching any movie ever made. Most movies need antagonists, but what happens when you’re the bad guy?

* "I didn't have any idea about how I was going to be portrayed," says Igoe, speaking as the guy who put his pal in a wheelchair at 18. "Because of that, I was very, very, very reluctant to be involved in any of it. I obviously assume the worst, because I'm obviously very protective of what could have happened. This is something that's extremely intimate, one of the worst things in my life. But I didn't know who Joe was at this point. I didn't know that they had this other… antagonist, or someone else who could be the antagonist in this thing, so, when that was explained to me, I felt much better about being in it." (source: The Austin Chronicle)

I know where you can buy Rex Kwon Do's pants

Constant readers here may have noticed that I've been reticent in giving details about my new job (said readers may also note my insistence in calling it a "new job" after two months of employment). I'm still not ready to spill the beans, but suffice it to say that as a result of this job I am now a part of the problem.

Compare:

(Second image via this page. First image: don't ask)

British accents, Sean Connery photos, and the monkey on my back

Two of my roommates are moving out today and the cable is under one of their names, so unless I get things sorted, I'm going without the internet until I move into my new place at the end of the month. I've been telling people that in all likelihood I will die without being online for that long, but no one believes.

The other day me and John were talking on the phone about Layer Cake and in discussing the accents we had this exchange:

John: Some British accents really grate on me, like the one on that blonde girl in the movie, the one that used to be Jude Law's wife.
Davinder: Was she?
J: Yeah, her name's Selma Blair, I think.
D: I don't think that's it.
J: Maybe not; he cheated on her with the nanny.
D: Is it Sienna Miller?
J: Yeah, that's her name... Wait, did you just look that up?
D: Yeah
J: You're going to die without the internet.

John gets it.
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I got another illustration of my (over)reliance on the web this morning when I ran across an old James Bond promo photo at /film. I thought the image might make a cool desktop, but the image they had was too small, so I went looking for a bigger one. I found it in about ten seconds:

But then continued on to look at other search results, and I found more Sean Connery photos that I liked:

James Bond will stand on your desk...

...and then kill you with a hat. It's not just a license to kill, it's a license to humiliate and kill.

But just so Mr. Connery doesn't get a swelled head (he's a regular reader here), remember that he did this movie too:

In the end I spent about twenty minutes looking at Sean Connery photos, because that's how easily I get sidetracked. Losing the internet might be good for all the time that it gives me, but I'll be so behind by the time I get back on. If I'm not blogging next month it's because I've wasted away.

I hope Billy Joel is getting a piece of this

Who says the right can't rock out? I saw this video at YouTube called "Bush was right," and I had to share. "France: wrong! Zell Miller: riiiight!" That's rock and roll, baby.

EDIT: So the stupid link has been broken for four days and I didn't notice. It's fixed now, but after watching the video you'll wish it was still broken. I was wondering why no one commented...

The speed of life

(via The Grand Comic Book Database)
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I woke up yesterday and the house smelled like fish. Sometimes I wish I could put cameras up around this place so I could see what goes on when I’m not looking.
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I haven’t updated in a while, mainly because my schedule has been kicking my ass. Most of my time is, of course, being taken up by my crappy new full time job. The job (which I'll go into detail about in a future post) has a pretty relentless pace too, so I don't have as much time to muse on things to post here. Clearing off debts and paying bills on time is immensely satisfying, but I’m getting nostalgic for the freedom of unemployment.

Side note: I’ve been mentioning to others recently that I think the five day work week is central to the perpetuation of the capitalist system. Two days off is just enough to recharge you for another week; you need three days of rest before you can start thinking about revolution. I’ve decided that I’d be happy with a job that paid a little extra and let me work only four days a week.

Side note to that side note: last week I applied for a position that paid about I’m making now, but only required five hours of work, five days a week. I sent the application off and began dreaming about what I’d do with all my spare time. The next morning, my inbox already had a reply from the company in it. I thought it would be an automated response, but when I opened it I found a four paragraph letter from their HR person detailing all the reasons I was unqualified for the position and telling me to feel free to apply again once I’d bought a clue. While I appreciate the personalized touch, I think I’d have been happier not knowing.

Back to the main topic: my schedule has also been a mess because of car troubles this week. I came out to the garage on Monday and found my passenger side window smashed in, which was a real kick in the nuts to start my day. I called around for a ride but eventually wound up taking the bus to work and getting there late. I probably could have gotten in on time, but I took about twenty minutes to feel sorry for myself before I left home. I spent the rest of the week waiting for the insurance company to call back, taking the bus to work, and walking the 5k home in the evenings to save on transit fares. I was beginning to kind of enjoy the trek home in the dark, but I eventually went and got the damned window repaired on my own.

The other thing eating up my time this week was a drawing submission I did to a magazine. In an email exchange, the magazine people suggested I do an image that fit their subject matter, something with a break-dancer perhaps. I took the idea and as per my usual method I spent a couple of days researching, a couple of days doing rough concepts, a couple of days avoiding the whole thing, and then and buckling down for a day to knock out an illustration that looks like it should’ve taken me an hour. Drawing is problem solving, and the solution always looks easy when it’s done.

All of that is done now (well, except the job), so I’m back to trawling the web for nonsense. Somewhat more regular updates will follow.