Riches Beyond Imagination

There is exactly one week a year I don’t visit my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me, if I want to show them photos, to bring the memory card labelled “SDCC” and not “SCAT,” and that is the week of San Diego Comic-Con.

And during that week, my new books don’t go anywhere. They sit in my pull box, patiently waiting for me to return from the West Coast, only to be joined by the following week’s new comics on that following Wednesday.

And today is that following Wednesday. Which means that this… oh God in heaven, this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And I’m not gonna lie to you; I have simply almost no Goddamned idea which of those books are from last week, and which are new books. I know that that’s a new Hawkeye annual there, and a new issue of Constantine where John apparently becomes (groan) Captain Marvel, plus a new release of Clone, which I discovered at the Skybound panel at SDCC, and a ton (almost literally) of other cool stuff!

But you know how this works: before we can review them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It: Marvel’s SDCC 2013 Ultimate Universe Panel

So yes: the Marvel Ultimate Universe panel, held on Friday, July 19th at the San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve mentioned it a few times over the past few days, not because there were any Earth-shattering revelations at the panel (you know, beyond the question as to whether the Ultimate Universe has any future at all beyond the next few months), but as an example of how difficult it can be to truly cover any of these panels direct from the convention. When you get back to the hotel from a long day on the floor, and you’re staring at four pages of handwritten notes, one bar of $15-a-night WiFi, and your eyes look like you’ve been on a three-day meth jag in a smoke-filled room, it’s hard to sit in front a a keyboard and whip together anything that makes any sense at all.

But from the comfort of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, it seems, in my opinion, like the subtext of the panel is that Marvel intends to kick the living shit out of the Ultimate Universe for a while, blowing some stuff up really good, before either spiking the concept of the Ultimate Universe as a whole and somehow folding it into the 616, or at least finally and officially turning it into some kind of a defacto Earth 2 for the Marvel Universe, with people traveling back and forth just as often as they did in the DC Universe back in the 60s and 70s.

So in short: it looks like Marvel intends to totally fuck up the Ultimate Universe. Must be a year with a San Diego Comic-Con.