Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 11: The Golden Shakeoff Caper

Yeah, I know that we mentioned the other day that we had subjects that we wanted to talk about in a podcast, but I also know that you didn’t even remotely think that we’d actually, you know, do one.

Well, the joke’s on you, because here’s Episode 11: The Golden Shakeoff Caper! In which we discuss:

• The ComiXology buyout by Amazon (in which I reference a piece I wrote about ComiXology’s licensing and lack of ability to back up your comics)
• The San Diego Comic-Con hotel registration process, and the anxiety-provoking processes around attending SDCC in general
• Deadpool #27
• DC’s new weekly comic, Batman: Eternal #1

And here is our usual disclaimer: this episode was recorded live to tape, meaning that other than adding the intro and outro music, it is presented exactly as we discussed it, with every, “um,” “uh,” cough and burp. Further, this podcast is not safe for work. Be advised that we liberally use explicit and vulgar language, although if you weren’t tipped off by the fact that our title this week includes the phrase, “golden shake-off,” you need more help than a friendly warning. Either way, use some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:15 — 53.4MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

San Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

It’s All Over Bar The Shouting: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Registration Over; Sold Out

So public registration for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con occurred today, and luckily, we did not need to be a part of it. As attendees last year, we were eligible for the pre-registration that took place in early February, and were fortunate enough to be able to score tickets for the full convention in fairly short order.

So today I was able to watch the madness, desperation, excessive glee and futile cursing happen by way of watching the #SDCC hashtag feed on Twitter, and it looked like a very similar experience to the one we went through for the pre-registration, albeit this time, the entire free fucking world could be involved. I saw a healthy number of tweets from people in Australia and New Zealand complaining that they needed to be up at 4 a.m. local time… and yet no complaints that they needed to Raid away swarms of hairy poisonous spiders to get to their computers to try to register. You will see me dead before you see me in Australia wearing less than a beekeeper’s suit and a Ghostbuster’s proton pack is what I’m saying, but that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we saw the normal complaints that one sees on Twitter during SDCC registration:

• The Web site told me not to refresh, but I did, and now I’m at the end of the line! SDCC sucks!
• The Web site told me not to refresh and I didn’t, but I think if I did, I’d be at the front of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I tried to register from an iPad at Starbucks and my Internet quit! SDCC sucks!
• I forgot about registration until 9:02 Pacific Time and when I logged in I was at the back of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I’ve never tried to register for Comic-Con before, have made no plans on how to succeed at this task, and can’t understand why I can’t just do this in ten seconds even though there are thousands and thousands of other people trying to buy the same ticket as me! I should receive preferential treatment! SDCC sucks!

The fact of the matter is that attending SDCC is, and has been since at least 2009, serious fucking business. I have written before that my co-Editor Amanda and I book backup hotel rooms in August of the year preceding SDCC. When we need to register, we do it from two separate locations, both with independent power supplies and wired Internet connections, and maintain constant communication to increase our odds of success. And we have made the pact that, so long as we can obtain at least Thursday and Sunday passes, we will attend SDCC, if only to make us eligible for whatever pre-registration is available the following year, so we get two bites at the registration apple. And I have said before that this might sound obsessive, but there are two types of people in this world: people who scoff at making paranoid, obsessive and redundant plans regarding SDCC registration, housing and transportation, and people who actually attend Comic-Con.

Two Hours In The Tank: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Pre-Reg Is Over

Pre-registration for the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con started at noon Eastern Time today for those who attended last year’s convention. It used a pretty radically different methodology to handle the sale than in previous years, but ended with the same result: with some people thrilled with the results, some people disappointed with what they were able to get, and yet others screeching with rage and hatred over glitches, technical roadblocks, and complete and utter frustrating failure.

Delayed And Limited Gratification: SDCC 2014 Pre-Registration Delayed Until Early 2014

Very little time here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office today. I am here alone with Parker, a cat who was neutered earlier today. And Parker is treating me in exactly the manner one would expect to be treated by a creature whose testicles I had removed by fiat. So I need to keep an eye on this little fella, who is currently only seemingly motivated by contempt towards me and the urge to lick his Hot Zone, in violation of doctor’s orders, to try and grok what terrible thing has happened to him.

However, there is one tidbit of San Diego Comic-Con news I’d like to report: pre-registration for next year’s convention for people who attended this year has been pushed back until after the new year.

Safe To Travel: San Diego Comic-Con Preregistration Not In November

For people who attended San Diego Comic-Con this year and have been waiting for word on when the pre-registration for next year’s SDCC would be coming off, all we’ve known since about August is that it will be happening “sometime between November 1 and December 31, 2013.”

Which was, and is fine – if the people at SDCC handle it even remotely like they did for the 2013 convention (which happened in August, 2012), all you need is access to a couple of computers with access to reliable high-speed Internet (at a couple of different locations in case one is hit by a bolt of lightning or a meteor or something), nerves of steel and an adamantium bladder so you don’t have to leave the screen until the deed is done. So they can do it pretty much whenever.

However, we are now less than one week away from American Thanksgiving, and there hasn’t been a lot of details released about exactly when this pre-registration is gonna happen. And if it happened during Thanksgiving weekend, it would be an apocalypse.

It would be an apocalypse because many of us travel to visit our parents during Thanksgiving, and have you seen your parents computer? Can you imagine trying to log into the pre-reg Website, competing against thousands of other people, on a malware-packed laptop rocking Microsoft Vista (Service Pack Yeah, Right)? Using a browser with about thirty different third party search bars on it? Over first generation “high speed” 512 KbS DSL? It would be easier and faster to start randomly sucking dicks at the bus station and hoping that some kind soul will pay you in SDCC passes.

Well, fear not. Because even though we still don’t know exactly when pre-registration is gonna happen, we do know that it won’t happen until after Thanksgiving.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part 2: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary Panel

And finally, here is the last of it. The last panel we attended at San Diego Comic-Con on Sunday, July 21st, before the convention-closing screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s musical episode, Once More With Feeling: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary panel, featuring classic Marvel writer Roy Thomas, current writer Brian Michael Bendis, and artist John Romita, Jr.

There wasn’t anything revealed that you could particularly call “news” at this panel. Hell, there wasn’t even a hell of a lot of information about the creations of The Avengers, The X-Men, or any of the rest (although we did learn that Thomas made The Vision an android because hey! Stan Lee says stuff sometimes!). But what we did get were some cool and inspirational stories of what it was like to be at Marvel right around the time when Fantastic Four was breaking, what it was like to grow up around one of the premier Spider-Man artists of the late 60s, early 70s, and what it was like to grow up in Brian Michael Bendis’s broken home! Well, I guess some stories are inspirational only in their aftermath.

But even if the panel didn’t have anything new to say about the modern world of comics, I can think of worse ways to close out the convention than to hear about what the world of comics was like when legends were being created every month, when characters who would literally change some of our lives were being spitballed to meet a deadline on a Sunday afternoon, and when a man could get a gig writing some of the most legendary books in Marvel history by filling out a workbook on his lunch break.

And even if you weren’t there, you can check some of it out right here. We have a few videos of some of the cooler stories – not the best videos we’ve ever shot, but you can see who’s talking and get the whole stories – right here after the jump.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part One: DC’s Meet The Publishers Panel

We are coming up on the final bits and pieces of coverage we took from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con – yes, I know the convention ended eight days ago, but it turns out we had a lot of video to sort through, and a significant percentage of that video needed extensive processing on an actual computer in order to make it into something that YouTube would recognize as a video file, as opposed to some form of data wad, or perhaps a Word file detailing our manifesto and list of demands.

But the computer has done its work and dinged like a toaster oven (as we all know computers do), so we are finally proud to present a series of videos from DC Comics’s Meet The Publishers panel, held on Sunday, July 21st and featuring Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. And you can say what you want about, say, DiDio (God knows we do, repeatedly), but there is no denying that the guy runs an entertaining panel with an infectious enthusiasm, which even Lee gets caught up in.

This was a fun panel, and we’re happy to bring you, a day late and a buck short, a small piece of it, along with some art that was shown to crowd at the panel. You can check them out after the jump.

Last Gasps From SDCC 2013 – Best Of Cosplay From Comic-Con Video

The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office received a giant package via UPS yesterday containing all the books, action figures, t-shirts, games, and other assorted loot we acquired at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. It’s a fairly large haul, too large to have wanted to hump it back on our own through the airports. You try explaining what a “reversible baneling/zergling” is to the TSA and see if they don’t decide to put you through an “enhanced pat down”. So, it was nice to open the box and relive the very recent memories of the past week. In particular, I thought this delivery was well timed because I had been spending the morning going through my photos from the con and noticed that…I hadn’t taken very many. My photo ratio from SDCC seems to lean more heavily on the side of fish tacos, beet agua fresca, and blurry Brian Michael Bendis photos (don’t ask), than on one of the backbones of the San Diego Comic-Con experience, the cosplayers. This was disappointing to me, but not entirely surprising. With all the spectacle with which you are constantly bombarded, you reach a certain point where you stop snapping pictures and go, “Oh, cool. It’s Deadpool and Supergirl together. Sure. That makes sense.” And you let it wash over you. You shuffle step forward against the tide of people trying to get into the Hasbro merch booth to get the most recent Boba Fett and Han Solo in carbonite, or Derpy Pony, or whatever it is this year that is making attendees nutty and just keep trying to take it all in until you eventually pop out on the other side of the convention floor. And it’s good. After 7 years of snapping photos and giving yourself whiplash to swivel around and catch the latest in Hello, Kitty! Darth Vader costuming, sometimes it’s nice to just give in and get carried along with the festivities.

But, that doesn’t help you, the Crisis On Infinite Midlives readers, who depend on us to bring you pictures of the Nerd Prom To End All Nerd Proms, to document the spectacle that you could be there to see. Fortunately, that’s where the good people at Sneaky Zebra come in. They’ve created a video that showcases some of the best cosplay from this year’s convention, from steam punk Batman villains to Transformers to, well, maybe you should just see for yourself. Check it out, after the jump!

No Extinction: Avatar Press SDCC 2013 Panel

And here we are: our final article covering San Diego Comic-Con 2013 (except for a bunch of video that my high-toned, dedicated video camera seems to have mangled, unless my actual computer here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office can do anything to salvage them), five days after the convention ended and more than a week after the actual panel occurred. But what the hell; given my crippling hangover and intestinal issues born from the fried chicken sandwich and fries I washed down with five black IPAs at a bar last night, it feels like I’m still at SDCC. So let’s just plow ahead, shall we?

The Avatar Press panel on Thursday morning, July 18th, with Avatar Founder and Editor-In-Chief William Christensen and World War Z and Extinction Parade writer Max Brooks, was the first panel we hit during SDCC 2013, and in some ways it set the tone for the whole convention. The room wasn’t full, but there was a healthy crowd for a comic book related panel on the most off day of the convention. Not that there are any off days at SDCC anymore, but if there is a day that qualifies, it’s this mid-week opening to the full-blown festivities. Unlike Preview Night, the whole convention center is open, and cosplayers are more plentiful, all of which draws people off the floor and makes it at least tolerable to move around; there’s nothing like a set of jugs in a spandex Power Girl suit to peel off the rubes so you can get where you’re going.

But where we were going was a panel, and we were going there later than we should. Which meant we could get a seat up front and to the side… right in front of the projector many panels use to put up new art for display. Which meant that, as a six foot tall gentleman, I spent the panel hunched over like Frankenstein’s delivery boy to stay out of the projector light, scribbling notes almost on my side as if trying to write “I am having a stroke” for the paramedics, just in case Christensen and Brooks put some new art up on the screen.

Which they did not. Every table at every panel at Comic-Con has a posted sign for presenters, reminding them that members of the crowd might be younger than 18. And every fan of Avatar comics knows that there is very little art that they could project that would be appropriate for children. There is very little Avatar art that would not make children long for the sweet release of death, or at least blindness, to tell you the truth. Avatar books are for adults, and that is on purpose.

“I just do books I want to read,” Christensen said. “It will always be intense work for adults.”