We Have Walked Through The Fire

The annual goodbye party for the San Diego Comic-Con – a screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s season six musical episode, Once More With Feeling – concluded about an hour and a half ago.

And, as last year, the proceedings started with Nicholas Brendan live on stage, singing his old, “Wicca good and I’ll be over here,” in shades and a douchebag Fedora, continued with repeated and rousing denunciations of Dawn as the ruiner of all things good and fun (and at least one loud “Fuck off!” after Dawn sang, “Does anybody even notice?” – you’re welcome, Fandom), and ended, as always, with a bittersweet run for the doors.

Comic-Con is now officially over, which is always a strange feeling. As Amanda and I say every year: we wish it would never end, but if it didn’t, we don’t think we could take anymore. We are exhausted, and we still have panels to write about and video and pictures to upload. Not to mention a cross-country flight to pack for.

But those things can wait. Because we have, after all, survived, and that requires a little celebration. Which means that this is the end of our broadcast day.

So while we do that celebrating (we are posting this from my phone at the Hyatt bar) and packing…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Turbulence: SDCC 2013 Skybound Comics Panel

It is getting late in San Diego Comic-Con, and the true fatigue hysteria is beginning to set in. I personally have not slept longer than six hours in the past four nights, and considering my diet in that time has varied wildly from gourmet triple-creme brie to greasy patty melts to tater tots, washed down with everything from Starbucks iced coffee to Stone IPA to hotel room self-brewed coffee to Coors Light, I am beginning to break down physically. And considering I am writing this with only about two hours to spare before I have to haul my shattered carcass to the convention floor to attempt to obtain some Goddamned thing called a Plush Zerg for contributor Lance Manion (and knowing Lance, this “convention exclusive” can only be obtained in the third stall of the mezzanine men’s room), I am staring goggle-eyed at a notebook full of details from yesterday’s Skybound Comics panel.

Skybound is, if you are not familiar, the personal publishing imprint at Image Comics for creator of The Walking Dead Robert Kirkman. Meaning that, if you have picked up one of Kirkman’s comics – The Walking Dead, Invincible, or Super Dinosaur, off the top of my head – it was a Skybound book. But it is not a vanity imprint by any stretch of the imagination; Kirkman has been bringing other creators into the fold to release books, including the recent Thief of Thieves. And based on what we were told in the panel yesterday, there are a variety of other books on the way, covering genres from westerns to horror to 70s grindhoue-style revenge flicks, indicating that if we wait long enough, we will eventually see the Skybound bullet on a romance comics, if not some form of furry yiff-tacular.

Jesus, I’m tired.

Joe’s Comics. And Joe’s Movies. And Joe’s TV Shows: SDCC 2013’s Spotlight On J. Michael Straczynski

We attended several panels yesterday, and will be writing up more extensive write-ups of at least one of them later or tomorrow (Robert Kirkman’s Skybound panel in particular was interesting), but in the meantime, I wanted to put up something that was interesting, but not particularly comics newsworthy.

Every year of the eight we have attended San Diego Comic-Con, J. Michael Straczynski has hosted a Spotlight panel, where he talks about some of the stuff that he’s working on, but mostly spends his time answering any and all questions posed to him. Be they inquiries about the infamous “Spider-Man Sells His Soul To The Devil To Get Younger Poontang” story in One More Day, or the reasoning behind taking on the controversial Before Watchmen books, to whether or not he liked The Hobbit, he will answer any question… provided it isn’t posed by some naive foreigner.

And you can see this for yourself, as we took video of big chunks of Straczynski’s panel this year, and have included those videos here. But now, a disclaimer: some of these videos may or may not have minor hitches in them. I’m seeing them on my two-year-old tablet via shitty hotel WiFi, but then again, on this rotten, overloaded connection (that only cost me $14.95! For 24 whole hours! And, due to the three hours it took to upload a handful of minute-long video clips, prevented me from publishing this last night as originally intended!), Web pages chug when I try to load them in Lynx. So your mileage on a wired connection may vary. If you find them distracting, I apologize.

Either way, you can check them out (and learn his criticisms of The Bible’s literary merit) after the jump.