I’ve probably listened to this song 40 or 50 times over the past few days.

When I graduated college and started working in Manhattan, electroclash was pretty big, and I loved it because around that time David Bowie had really softened me up both for the post-punk/New Wave heirs to his sound specifically and theatricality and “posing” generally. I still love it and don’t go in for the backlash, because to me it was never about a scene, it was about sounds and ideas, but one criticism I did take to heart was from someone who said that the electroclash people missed the BIGNESS of early ’80s electronic pop music, particularly in terms of the vocals. I’d take that a step further and say that the big vocals wouldn’t work in electroclash because of the ironic distance that material took from the ’80s originals. Which is fine, but what you lacked is the cavernous, glistening, unabashed emotion of great ’80s pop music. There was no distance–these people were putting it all on the line all the time, investing this enormous sense of drama into pop songs that you really didn’t see with the quiet earnestness of ’70s acoustically driven pop music. It’s impossible for me to listen to songs like “Let Me Go” or “Smalltown Boy” or “West End Girls” or “Head Over Heels” without picturing some actual young human being someplace during that decade listening to these songs, feeling every note and every word, crying or swooning about what’s going on in their own lives and how it’s reflected in the music.

So anyway, that’s what I get from this song, too. Afternoon light and good memories that hit so hard they make you want to vomit, like the past is tangible and its intrusion is disorienting you. I wish the video didn’t stick quotes around the sentiment, but the beginning and end of the clip get it to a certain extent, I think. It almost doesn’t matter because you’ll see your own video in your head. It’s a good song.

* I’ve got one last Comic-Con piece up at CBR, an interview with writer Brian Reed on the upcoming video game Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.

* Everyone’s linking to Tom Spurgeon’s review of Runes of Ragnan, but only because it really deserves to be linked to by everyone.

* The end is not the end: Edward James Olmos will be directing a two-hour Battlestar Galactica movie about the Cylons’ doings in the immediate aftermath of their apocalyptic attack on the Colonies, to air after the series finale. (Via AICN.)

* AMC is developing a series based on Francis Ford Coppola’s comparatively forgotten ’70s masterpiece, The Conversation. I hope it will air, but I have a feeling they’d kill it if they had the chance. (Also via AICN.)

* Whoa, one of the people Viggo Mortensen will be running into on The Road is Omar Little?

Full gallery and little article at USA Today. It looks good. (Via Dread Central.)

* Matt Maxwell notes that in moving to San Francisco, the X-Men franchise isn’t really saying anything it hasn’t said before. The funny thing is that I think it’s saying even less than it used to. When House of M got rid of all the everyday run-of-the-mill mutants, leaving us pretty much just with the ones who fight each other for a living, I remember Joe Quesada saying he did this because the existence of millions of mutants took us away from the concept’s central persecuted-minority metaphor. This, of course, only makes sense if there are just 198 gay people or black people or Jewish people or geeks in the world. One of the many great things about Grant Morrison’s New X-Men was that the book was finally acknowledging the way minority culture could quickly become majority culture, and how maligned subcultures can indeed force the world at large to chance. Now, instead of having a franchise mapped to the explosive rise of hip-hop culture or the increasing prominence of homosexuals, there’s a couple hundred of them cowering in San Francisco.

* Douglas Wolk is back with annotations for the crackerjack Final Crisis #3.

* Writing for Topless Robot, Patrick Cooper runs down The 8 Worst Things in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I think you could probably do eighty before needing to rope in the really pretty rad Ewok TV movies. (The Gorax, yo!) A strict swap with Prince Xizor would be acceptable.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM catches a New York Times piece on a faux-Coney Island attraction called the Waterboard Thrill Ride, actually an art installation highlighting the banal awfulness of our Guantanamo Bay torture regime. Step right up.

* If you liked what I had to say about post-Comic-Con second-guessing, you’ll also like what Matt Maxwell says about it.

* No sooner does the Clive Barker Books of Blood adaptation Midnight Meat Train get buried than the viral marketing campaign for the Clive Barker Books of Blood adaptation Dread kicks off.

* Will I go see McG’s crappy new Terminator movie just because Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter are in it? Maybe.

* Jon Hastings rambles about various Crisis and Grant Morrison comics. I mean “ramble” in the best way.

* Do you think he’ll condescend to his paycheck, too?

* John Scalzi’s take on the discovery of 125,000 western lowland gorillas lines up pretty neatly with my own.

* Paul Pope posted a new cover for Heavy Liquid, but it’s gone now. Details about the new edition are still there, though.

* Sammy Harkham has unveiled the cover for Kramers Ergot 7, a bargain at any price.

* Kevin Huizenga has unveiled the cover for Or Else #5. Ditto.

* As happy as I’ll be when disco is officially reclaimed as cool (and we’re already well on our way), I’m also going to be grumpy about it, because the pleasure of reading the liner notes to a Barry White best-of collection in 1997 and suddenly “getting” the genre and loving it for years all on my lonesome is undeniable.

Well, I liked it. It was cute that since none of the actors had read the book before being cast in the movie, they work overtime to impress upon the fans just how seriously and reverently they’re treating it now that they have read it. Actually, Patrick Wilson said some interesting things about how working with a comic as source material enables you to physically see the authors’ vision of a character’s physicality in a way that normal scripts or book adaptations can’t, which gave him more insight into what Dan Dreiberg’s personality is really like. Matthew Goode, who I liked a lot as the cuckold in Match Point (spoiler alert! a cuckold in a Woody Allen movie!), was silent until moderator and crazed Lost theorizer/time-waster Jeff Jensen specifically turned to him, and then he let loose this five-minute monologue about finding Ozymandias’s accent that was pretty much your dream of what talking to an English actor would be like–at varying times he did the accents of an American good ol’ boy and a mincing British homo-secks-sewell, and he cursed up a blue streak. People were just sort of ambiently laughing out loud by the end of it. Crudup was consistently funny too.

Snyder is not his own greatest spokesman but I think he handled things pretty well. It was interesting to hear him say in person something I’ve heard other people mention he’s said, which was that he deliberately made the Dark Knight-attached trailer a creature of the modern superhero genre, song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and all, as a sort of commentary.

I liked the footage, but then, I like Snyder in general. Still, some of my friends who were skeptical about the original trailer liked this a lot better. It was basically a trailer on steroids–no dialogue, just a lot of snippets and images edited together. So you couldn’t get a sense of whether it was going to be acted like Sarah Polley in Dawn of the Dead or Gerard Butler in 300, but you did get a look at all the characters in costume and in action, sets and locales and scenes from across the breadth of the story. They all looked good, inhabited and intimidating. Tons of slow motion, as is his perhaps regrettable wont. When Dr. Manhattan blows people up they explode in showers of gore. As I think I mentioned, watching him and the Comedian run amok in Vietnam is going to get a lot of the politically based critics of 300 and Dawn of the Dead gunning for this movie too.

Maybe the best part, though, were the audience questioners, who were like a parade of High Comic-Con Ridiculousness. The second guy was dressed as Batman, the third like a refugee from the “Sabotage” video, there was a Rorschach, and there was a pair of identical twins who finished each other’s sentences and even had a stock comeback for when Snyder jokingly asked if they were related (“we’re roommates!”). The funny thing is that the room is so big that you had no idea who was up next until their faces/masks showed up on the jumbotrons. Best of all, except for this one douche in a Strangers in Paradise t-shirt who was way too impressed with himself for making crude innuendo about Carla Gugino’s breasts, all of them just got up, did their thing, and split without trying to hog the spotlight.

Someday I’m going to have to sit down with someone who was there and have them explain to me the precise pop-cultural-historical moment during which it became feasible for a man and his band to dress up like Revolutionary War pirate Scarlet Pimpernels and sing glam-rock songs about the value of being handsome and thereby become massively popular. I do not understand this moment but wish it were eternal.

I read with interest Graeme McMillan’s piece on San Diego’s Comic-Con International for the sci-fi site io9, as linked to enthusiastically by Heidi MacDonald and questioningly by Tom Spurgeon. Graeme’s good people and an old comics blogging hand, but the experience he describes was so different than my own that I all but wondered if we’d attended the same show.

The thrust of Graeme’s piece, which to be fair is mostly asserted through other people’s quotes, is that it was so hard for the press to cover this year’s show that something is clearly wrong with it–that the show has finally “lived up to the complaints” of being too Hollywood, too big, too crowded. Retail giant Chuck Rozanski says “the show is about to lose its crown as the top comics show in America,” a commenter at Heidi’s blog says “CCI does need to get its act together,” Heidi herself argues that the show is primarily for press and marketing at this point, a guy from some SciFi Channel show that isn’t Battlestar Galactica (or Ghost Hunters) says it can take fifteen, perhaps as much as twenty minutes to get into a party, and so on.

I heard plenty of press complaints about press passes not doing much and noted this in my show report; even then, fresh from the show, I was chalking up at least 50% of this to press narcissism. Now I’m leaning even further in that direction, because it seems to me that many of the complaints we’re hearing and seeing stem from people wanting to do what is no more or less than a job on more or less entirely their own terms, which strikes me as unreasonable.

This was the first show I’ve “worked,” and in order to do that properly I voluntarily made sacrifices. I did less socializing, both during and after show hours. I went to fewer “wish-list” panels, things I wanted but didn’t need to attend. I did less eating–regrettable, and I don’t recommend it, but I managed. I saved time that could have been spent schlepping to the press room or back to the hotel boat by simly popping a squat on the floor next to an outlet someplace in the Convention Center and filing half a dozen stories that way. I got to my assigned panels and events in advance, and had at least three other people scope out my main wish-list panel (Watchmen) so that I could combine working and waiting in the most efficient way possible. (I even filed a story while sitting in Hall H waiting for the presentation to start.)

And I was but a cog in the massive machine that was Comic Book Resources’ presence at the show. CBR honcho Jonah Weiland treated the thing like a small military operation, with a staff of about two dozen people; redundancies and failsafes in terms of panel coverage, personnel, and equipment; rigorously planned schedules and deadlines; prioritization of panels and events; a swing-man (me) to pick up things that fell through the cracks and chase news; off-site reporters and editorial support staff, etc. Lo and behold, he’s posted around 175 stories, plus however many blog entries and liveblog entries, with what has to be another 50 or so stories backlogged, and his traffic has now surpassed his main competitor’s.

In other words, both myself on a micro level and Jonah on a macro level made choices we deemed necessary to properly cover the Con. Had I instead attended the biggest pop-culture convention in North America–with an attendance level of 125,000 including over 3,000 members of the press–with the expectation of waltzing in and out and around more or less as I pleased, going to everything I felt like going to, filing coverage at the time, place, pace, and level of my choosing, having a full dance card of social events every night and at mealtimes, and planning to cover 400 official programming hours plus however many exhibitors and guests and unofficial tie-ins and parties and whatnot with a skeleton crew, I would undoubtedly be complaining now too.

Moreover, I did what I did with the help of CCI’s accessible and accurate panel and event schedule and floor map, and while repeatedly conducting 15-20 minute phone conversations with the organization’s spokesman, who literally every time we talked apologized for not being even more accessible. Could the Con have had a better advertised, better located, and (from what I hear) better appointed press room? Sure. Did the lack of one, or any other CCI-based snafu, affect my ability to cover the show at all? No. As much fun as it would have been to relive my salad days of flying in on the corporate account, living it up in my in-room Jacuzzi, cruising from booth to booth and panel to panel on a whim, and gallivanting around the city while half in the bag, I had to do things differently to get my job done this time around, and that’s fine. I don’t expect the CCI organization, or almost any organization that isn’t an all-inclusive vacation resort, to simply hand me my ideal experience, particularly when that ideal is an increasingly unrealistic one.

Meanwhile, I don’t know how you look at a show that had spotlight panels for Jim Woodring and Lynda Barry, a show where Drawn & Quarterly and Buenaventura Press made a good go of things, a show where a 22-year-old superhero comic AND an anthology based on the songs of the woman who sang “Silent All These Years” AND new work by the most important pure-comics/altcomix practitioners ever completely sold out, and kvetch that it’s in danger of losing its comics bona-fides.

Nor do I see why parties being too crowded is a problem for anyone other than the people hosting those parties and you, the person trying to get in.

Nor do I see any line of demarcation between shows and movies and swag that really have nothing to do with comics of old–like Lost, which during the year it premiered at San Diego had zero comics connections and was relying solely on the nerd-cred of J.J. Abrams and Dominic Monaghan; or the Lord of the Rings movies or gaming, because no matter how many adaptations or tie-ins there have been, these things were there in and of themselves not because of some tangential, tendentious relationship to comics–and the shows and movies and swag that really have nothing to do with comics of today–like The Office or Harold and Kumar, which have at least as much nerd appeal as Wanted if my friends are any indication. Once that door’s open, open it wide, I say!

Nor do I think we should even be talking about the comparatively minor issue of the CCI press-pass situation when there’s a far more pressing issue regarding the other 122,000 attendees: the sell-outs, and whether the need to be aware enough of the show to buy your tickets weeks or months in advance keeps out the kind of impulse/casual/mainstream attendee who in theory at least represent the future health of this art form.

When it comes down to it I love going to the San Diego Comic-Con; working or not, there’s nothing else like it. And I have to admit I find it distasteful to watch paid media professionals insinuate that the most egalitarian, something-for-everynerd art-to-fans showcase in the country undergo a radical restructuring because there’s a lot of stuff going on they’re not interested in or that doesn’t flatter their personal conception of what the Con is for–or worse, saying the whole affair has jumped the shark because they had a hard time getting into panels they just kinda thought it would be neat to see, and then maybe if they felt like it blog a bit about how cute Matthew Goode/Carla Gugino looked afterwards. I’m by no means saying that’s the full extent of the complaints, or whether there are other complaints that are much more valid, but this is mostly the read I’m getting based on what I know to have been possible in terms of press coverage of this show, and I am very uncomfortable with slamming the Con based on a wholly imaginary alternative.

Here’s my post-game interview with CCI spokesman David Glanzer.

And here’s a piece I did on the new video game Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion.

* Because I am now an old man, I pussied out on the midnight screening of Ryuhei Kitamura’s Clive Barker adaptation Midnight Meat Train during Comic-Con. Obviously this was a huge mistake, because Lionsgate is finishing off its thorough rogering of this film with the donkey punch of releasing it only in dollar theaters. This way they can keep within the letter of their agreement to release the movie theatrically while being maximally insulting to filmmakers and filmgoers alike. I’ll tell you, I am privy to some behind-the-scenes gossip about the goings-on at Lionsgate under its new-ish boss Joe Drake, and the joint sounds like an absolute nightmare. This is just ugly no matter how you slice it.

* Over at Tom Spurgeon’s joint, I’m part of a roundtable on comics publisher IDW’s kinda sorta decision to stop going to the San Diego Comic-Con.

* Heidi MacDonald posts her even-tempered post-Con wrap-up. She directly addresses how the show’s egalitarianism is frequently its own biggest problem, while admirably avoiding advocating policies that would reward her comparatively privileged place in the hierarchy. She does call for a press day, though, something I’ve now heard from a couple of disparate quarters. (As I mentioned in my report, I just can’t imagine how that makes financial sense for retailers and publishers who retail, but I guess it’s a thing that is done at some shows.)

* Does the fact that Ronald Reagan did not, in fact, ignite a nuclear holocaust adversely affect art made with the underlying assumption that this was a real possibility, like Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen? Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts.

* I thought Rob Humanick’s piece on The Dark Knight is different from most such reviews in what it emphasizes and how much weight it places on it.

* Top Shelf 2.0 editor and swell guy Leigh Walton bemoans the upcoming Garfield Minus Garfield book because of how it attributes authorship for a meme (to someone who came late to it, to boot).

* Jon Hastings takes a look at how Grant Morrison “rescued” DC’s Silver Age from its Bronze and Modern Age contradictions.

* Finally, Bai Ling explains [sic] the time she asked to meet the Burger King.

I have a couple more San Diego Comic-Con pieces up at CBR:

Here’s my coverage of J.G. Jones’s spotlight panel.

And here’s an interview with Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, AKA “Mario Hernandez: Browncoat!”

And here’s my coverage of Ethan Van Sciver’s spotlight panel.

Earlier this year I was a headline writer for the Onion News Network, their video shows, until other commitments forced me to drop the gig. One of the ideas I came up with in my very first batch of submissions was this:

Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet

I phrased it as “Al Gore constructs rocketship to help infant son escape our dying planet” and submitted it as an idea for the crawling text that scrolls across the bottom of the screen. It kept getting bounced back to me for reworking, and I kept tweaking the phrasing, and they kept telling me that wasn’t what they meant, so eventually I gave up, but anyway yeah, that was beginning of January, and now here it is. Neat, I guess.

* My San Diego Comic-Con articles for CBR are still rolling out. First of all I want to make extra-sure that everyone sees that I interviewed Matt Furie, creator of the hilarious Boy’s Club, which my wife and I are now quoting in every other conversation. (“That would be a yes.”) Second, here’s my report from Entertainment Weekly’s Comics Visionaries panel, featuring Grant Morrison, Colleen Doran, Robert Kirkman, Mike Mignola, Matt Fraction, John Cassaday, and Jim Lee.

* Everyone’s saying they’re sick of hearing about the San Diego Comic-Con, but for pete’s sake, why? Is reading a blog post really that arduous an ordeal? You can turn the computer off, you know. Have Bloglines mark your RSS feeds as read, I dunno. There are in fact a lot of interesting things to say about San Diego and what went on there and what was announced there, and Tom Spurgeon’s con report covers most of them.

* I’m still doing a little catching up with news that broke right before San Diego. One such announcement is that MTV is remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Listen, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I met my wife because we were the only two people at a wedding reception who knew how to do “The Time Warp,” so I feel pretty strongly about this film. I played Brad twice and MC’d when Yale finally revived Devil’s Night showings of the movie. The two years me and the other people responsible for bringing it back it was in the top ten most well-attended campuswide events at the whole school I think, and it was also completely wild – they let people into the dining hall where we did it with booze and drugs, heck, they let us onto the stage with booze and drugs, everyone dressed up and/or stripped down, it was truly bacchanalian and awesome and in tune with the spirit of the movie. Moreover, after I discovered Bowie and glam, I’ve been listening to Richard O’Brien’s excellent soundtrack with fresh ears, and that music’s terrific. Finally, there’s really no way around it, Tim Curry Is God. So a big part of me is like “fuck MTV, they ruin life, and fuck remaking Rocky Horror no matter who you are.” At the same time, however, that movie was genuinely liberating for me and countless other nerds and freaks and outcasts, and maybe updating it for a new generation wouldn’t be so horrible if that message remains intact. Then again, with its increasingly horrifying reality shows, MTV has truly given hedonism a bad name–there’s nothing subversive about a bunch of drunk people making out in hot tubs, it’s actually maybe one of the squarest things you could possibly do at this point–and I don’t trust them to get this right, like, at all. If they must do it, however, I suggest they follow my wife’s casting ideas and have Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale play Brad and Janet.

* Another pre-San Diego item: the trailer for Caprica. It looks pretty and emotional, and my hope is that starting a new series will help the Battlestar Galactica franchise refocus on ideas and emotions rather than continuity and mysteries.

* I like seeing big sites use their clout to do something other than talk about the newesthippestlatest releases, so I appreciate this interview with Frank Darabont by AICN’s Mr. Beaks, the topic of which is the simply the ending of The Mist. Because this is where we’re at as genre critics, potential political metaphors are discussed, but don’t let that stop you from reading it–there’s some stuff I had never thought of in there about how the ending was an obstacle for getting funding for the film.

*I’m kind of irritated by Rich Juzwiak’s ability to blog entertainingly about everything from R&B to America’s Next Top Model to Cannibal Holocaust. He’s done a few horror-related posts lately. First up, here’s a spoilery, animated-gif-heavy tribute to Neil Marshall’s wondrous post-apocalyptic hodgepodge Doomsday. And because I know you want it:

NOTE: This depiction of animal cruelty is okay because it’s obviously fake and stupid.

* Next, Rich did a round-up of some of the landmark films in the “POV horror” subgenre—Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project, [REC], Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Butcher. By the way, fuck Cannibal Holocaust. Torturing animals to death in real life? No, no, no, no, no, sir, fuck YOU.

* Finally, as a horror-centric sequel to his awe-inspiring “I’m not here to make friends” reality TV montage, Rich gives you “Put down the camera.”

* Finally, Curt Purcell takes an in-depth look at artist Jose Gonzalez’s really lovely Vampirella art. Seriously!

From the STC inbox:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BALLANTINE BOOKS TO PUBLISH BOOK INSPIRED BY THE WEBCOMIC GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD

Collection to be published simultaneously with Garfield 30th anniversary book

NEW YORK, NY – July 30, 2008 – Paws, Inc. and Ballantine Books, a division of the Random House Publishing Group, announced last week at Comic-Con International that Ballantine will publish a book inspired by the popular webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield.

Garfield Minus Garfield (www.garfieldminusgarfield.net) made its online debut in February 2008 and quickly became an online sensation based on a simple premise: What would Jim Davis’ Garfield comic strip be like without its lasagna-loving fat cat? Without the presence of Garfield and other characters such as Odie the dog and Nermal the kitten, the strips “create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle…Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.” (New York Times)

The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. Dublin, Ireland-based Garfield Minus Garfield creator Dan Walsh will provide the foreword to the book.

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”

Garfield Minus Garfield site creator Dan Walsh says, “When I looked at Jon and laughed at his crazy antics I thought ‘He’s just like me.’ As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one saw myself in him: millions of visitors from all over the world visit Garfield Minus Garfield and tell me they think the same thing. Now, thanks to the awesome generosity and humor of Jim Davis, Garfield Minus Garfield is going to become a book and I’m absolutely honored to be part of it.”

Ballantine Books has been publishing Garfield books since 1980, and thirty-three Garfield titles have made the New York Times bestseller list. Thirty Years of Laughs and Lasagna: The Life and Times of a Fat, Furry Legend, will be published by Ballantine Books in October 2008. This hardcover anniversary collection will include a foreword from Dean Young, Blondie cartoonist, and exclusive content from Jim Davis.

ABOUT PAWS INC.

Paws, Incorporated was founded in 1981 by cartoonist Jim Davis as a creative house to support Garfield licensing. Today, the company, located in rural Indiana, handles not only the creative angle, but also the business concerns of the corpulent kitty worldwide. Paws boasts a staff of more than 50 artists, writers, and licensing professionals.

Paws, Inc. is a privately held company and the sole owner of the copyrights and trademarks for GARFIELD and GARFIELD Characters.

ABOUT BALLANTINE BOOKS:

Ballantine Books was established in l952 by the legendary paperback pioneers Ian and Betty Ballantine. Today, Ballantine is one of America’s largest publishers of hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback books — spanning a remarkably wide variety of subjects. Publishing talented writers from every category and genre, its hardcover program is particularly strong in commercial fiction. Its impressive list of bestselling authors includes Suzanne Brockmann, Julie Garwood, Tess Gerritsen, Kristin Hannah, Linda Howard, Jonathan Kellerman, Lorna Landvik, Judith McNaught, Anne Perry, and Jeff Shaara. Visit the Ballantine website at www.ballantinebooks.com.

ABOUT GARFIELDMINUSGARFIELD.NET

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. Garfield Minus Garfield began in February 2008 and quickly gained a large following. It has been covered in such publications as Time magazine, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Garfield Minus Garfield is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

I am back from San Diego!

And here are my thoughts.

* I had a wonderful time at the San Diego Comic-Con this year and I’m happy to say so up front.

* It had been four years since I last attended, which, Jesus, that was as long as I spent in high school or college, huh? In that time I feel as though the show got bigger (duh), but also better organized, since they’ve now had several years of total pandemonium under their belts. The aisles are wider, the attendance was capped, the air conditioning was cooler yet not glacially so, there’s a FedEx in the building now, I was able to purchase at least one good veggie sandwich through an in-house vendor, and I didn’t have any significant trouble getting where I needed to go or attending the things I needed to attend. (Granted the only truly massive panel I tried to get in was Watchmen, but I got by with a little help from my friends on that one, and I knew I was gambling by not camping out anyway.) It seems to me that the Comic-Con people are, as they say, the best they are at what they do.

* I was a little overwhelmed at first in terms of my responsibilities–this was the first time I was properly working the show, for Jonah Weiland and the good folks at Comic Book Resources, and finding the balance between TCB and R&R took Wednesday evening through around Thursday lunchtime. Once I found that balance, though, it was a real blast.

* That being said, between going to panels, hunting down creators, conducting interviews, transcribing and writing pieces for CBR, saying hi to friends, shopping, getting Bowie sketches, wandering around, and occasionally bathing, something had to give, and that something turned out to be eating. I ate one and a half to two meals each day, and didn’t sit down in a chair in front of a table to do so until Saturday afternoon.

* I do want to give major props to Jonah and the rest of the CBR crew for being terrific workmates and bunkmates. Jonah in particular, besides simply paying for me to be there, gave me pretty free reign to roam around the floor and cover whatever I found worth covering, leading to a pretty eclectic mix of Collinsy articles. Any website that allows me to interview both Bryan Hitch and Matt Furie is okay by me.You can find a running list of my con reports here, and there’ll be more coming all week I’d wager, but for now, here’s what’s up there:

* Matt Furie/Boy’s Club 2

* Geoff Johns

* Watchmen and the other buzz books of the show

* Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Bá

* Brian Azzarello

* Ethan Van Sciver

* Bryan Hitch

* Comic-Con’s David Glanzer, Thursday evening

* Comic-Con’s David Glanzer, Saturday evening

* I also spoke with The Stand‘s Roberto Aguire-Sacasa for Marvel.com.

* I know I wrote a report on this, but it bears repeating: Watchmen dominated this show. The Owlship and swag bags at the Warner Bros. booth, the big panel and its excellent footage, the complete lack of any remaining copies of the book in the whole building by Friday afternoon, the giveaway t-shirts and limited-edition t-shirts, multiple Dave Gibbons panels, residual Dark Knight trailer vibes…that book was everywhere. Which was nice, actually, because of all the comics for people to get excited about, that would be in my top ten, and is without question the superhero book I’d hand to someone who’d never read one and wanted to try it.

* A while ago I noted that while goodthinkful critics everywhere hate Zack Snyder because 300 is supposed to be a parable of neocon adventurism and the Dawn of the Dead remake lacked the Romero original’s ever so subtle satire of consumerism, they’d probably have to work at it to find a reason to dislike Watchmen on political grounds given its roots in Thatcher-era British Leftism and Snyder’s stated intent, backed up by his work on 300, to stay as true to the comic as possible–not that they wouldn’t try, of course. During the Watchmen panel I realized what the line of attack will be–that the gory footage of Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian running amok in Vietnam is glorifying American war atrocities. I bet you I’m right.

* I really, really didn’t like when Jane Wiedlin and a platoon of stormtroopers presented at the Eisners. First of all, they caused a delay to the show and turned out not to be worth waiting for. Second, when they finally showed up, they entered aaaaaaaallllll the way in the back of the hall and we spent pretty much the entire Imperial March waiting for them to make it to the stage. Third–and I say this as someone who has the Rebel Alliance insignia tattooed on my arm and entered my wedding reception with my wife to that selfsame Imperial March–we were supposed to be celebrating the absolute best that comics has to offer. For that matter, Brad Meltzer and that horrible “Speedy and Halle Berry vs. rubble” issue of Justice League of America notwithstanding, a lot of the winners in their categories–Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Taiyo Matsumoto, Dave Stewart, Ed Brubaker, Fletcher Hanks, etc.–really were the best that comics has to offer. And this is how we honor them? It was like the Rob Lowe/Snow White number from the Oscars. Tom Kenny was funny and Barry Windsor-Smith wrecking shop via a written statement read by Gary Groth was too, though.

* I don’t want the show to move to Las Vegas. As you know I am an all-purpose nerd and have no problem with the Hollywood panels and presentations. I do kind of have a problem with the horrible, moneyed people who come with those panels and presentations. Watching people who view all of this as a paycheck descend into my beloved realm of nerds makes me feel like William S. Burroughs in that documentary about him where he comes across as a gruff old grandpa until there’s this one scene where he starts getting really angry and saying that gays should literally arm themselves, take over an island, force the straights out, and establish their own kingdom which they should defend with lethal force, like gay terrorists. I can only imagine that the sort of people who make me want to turn into a nerd terrorist will thrive in Las Vegas.

* I don’t know if I’ve ever sweated so much in my life. I’m including running the mile in high school gym class, the pit at Ozzfest ’98, and marathon, borderline-uncomfortably-long bouts of sexual intercourse during college. It’s lugging around about 90 pounds of electronic equipment and con guides and Bowie photo ref that does it. I apologize to anyone who had to look at or stand near me.

* Friend-wise, I wonder if that by virtue of being around comics for seven years I just know too many people to be able to see everyone I want to see. (It’s just that I’ve been around for a while, not that I’m so damn irresistable.) I had decent-length conversations with a lot of people and actually hung out with a handful–including both Tom Spurgeon and Chris Butcher, for really the first time ever in both cases, which was great–but there were at least as many people I saw for a split second or not at all, including some I fully intended to seek out and completely whiffed on doing so (Tom Neely, Rick Marshall, Batton Lash, the people at First Second–my bad!!!). Eating aside, I think maybe it was here that I made the most sacrifices in order to get my work done. (I would have chased more Bowie sketches too, actually.)

* Still, I was surprised how easy it was to bump into people I knew in a gathering at least twice as populous at any given moment as my hometown. I even met up with four different old classmates of mine I hadn’t seen in at least five or six or seven years.

* The con is in an awkward position with press passes. On the one hand they’re admirably egalitarian: Anyone with a printout of a website or a bylined article can get in, and SDCC’s spokesman told me that they consider websites and comics publications their mainstream press because we cover them 12 months a year instead of four days a year. But he also told me they issued 3,000 press passes this year, out of a total attendance of 125,000. This results in the passes being a devalued currency–they’re not even color-coded and they don’t get you in anyplace, except I think you can stand in the convention center lobby before the opening rather than standing around on the sidewalk. As a result, press are more likely than almost anyone to complain (to me and to anyone who’ll listen) about how hard it is to get into the events they’re there to cover. Part of this is the narcissism of the fourth estate but part of it is also a legitimate gripe. I have no idea how they solve this, though, short of doing a press day like E3 which would add a lot of expense for exhibitors and retailers without much direct benefit.

* Favorite celebrity sighting: I sat next to Garbage’s Shirley Manson in the Marriott lobby, which made 19-year-old Sean T. Collins the happiest boy on earth. She was gorgeous, pale, big-eyed, red-headed, stylish, and Scottish.

* Second favorite:

Guy on escalator: Nice bag!

Me, walking past with my giant Watchmen swag bag: Pardon?

Guy on escalator: Nice bag!

Me: Oh, thanks. [brief pause as I realize that guy on escalator is Patrick “Nite Owl” Wilson] Ohhh my gosh! [I then cover my mouth with my hand, because apparently I am a startled girl from the 1950s]

* Third favorite: Lou Ferrigno being denied access to the exhibit hall prior to opening because he didn’t have an exhibitor badge.

Here are some projects I heard about at the show that I’m looking forward to.

* Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s The Flash: Rebirth. Beyond the basic appreciation for that beautiful costume and wonderful power set that most superhero buffs have, I have no attachment to this character(s) or franchise whatsoever. But the same thing was true of Green Lantern before Johns and Van Sciver did Green Lantern: Rebirth and The Sinestro Corps War. I’m looking forward to liking this character, and my hope is that they can do something as expansive and fun for his mythos as this whole rainbow of Lantern Corps has been for GL.

* Darwyn Cooke’s graphic-novel adaptations of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s Parker novels. I feel like Cooke has spent his whole career waiting to get to do a project exactly the way he wants to do it, and it sounds like this is his chance. Throw in an amoral protagonist that will mitigate against Cooke’s more nostalgic side and this series of OGNs should be pretty tight.

* Darren Aronofsky’s RoboCop remake. Just think how much worse this project could have gone!

* Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen. I think Snyder has made two fantastic genre films so far, Watchmen is one of my favorite comics of all time, the cast all seem to be compensating for their earlier ignorance of the book by working overtime to pick it apart in terms of how it sees their characters, and the footage that was screened looked beautiful.

* Neil Gaiman on Batman. Every high-profile writer who works on this character earns a trial read of an issue or two from me since he’s the one character I feel an affinity for independent of who’s working on him. I seem to remember a Comics Journal interview in which Gaiman echoed Alan Moore’s retrospective dismissal of The Killing Joke as utterly irrelevant to the human experience, and since I don’t agree with either of them on that score I’m curious to see where this goes.

* Damon Lindelof’s Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk. Those two issues or three issues or whatever it was were fun, right? Are they gonna get Leinil Francis Yu off of whatever he’s doing to finish it? Will it be awkward to have this book come out while serial franchise-ruiner Jeph Loeb is doing whatever he’s doing to Ultimate Universe continuity in Ultimatum? Stay tuned!

* Mario Hernandez’s original graphic novel. The more full-time cartooning Hernandezes the better, I say.

* Mike Mignola, Fábio Moon, and Gabriel Bá’s B.P.R.D.: 1947. This is the first time since Guy Davis (and Richard Corben, now that I think of it) that artists were selected to work in the Hellboy-verse because they don’t look like Mignola, and I think that on the surface they’re the most aesthetically alien to the established sensibility of the franchise of all the artists who’ve been tapped to take on the various miniseries thus far, so it should be an interesting series to see.

* Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Perfect title for a sequel to the movie, which is named Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, by the way.

* A prequel to I Am Legend involving both Francis Lawrence and Will Smith. A better ending and better creature effects are surely in the works given how universal the cries were for same, right? Because such a movie would be really good.

*Seaguy 2 and Seaguy 3. Volume One was the best of Morrison’s creator-owned works of that period, I think. (Well, We3 was also pretty tremendous and not incidental to my decision to become a vegetarian to boot.)

Here is what I got at the show.

BOOKS

* Baobab #3, by Igort (Fantagraphics)

* Boy’s Club 2, by Matt Furie (Fantagraphics)

* Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

* Mesmo Delivery, by Rafael Grampa (AdHouse)

* Pixu I, by Gabriel Bá, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, and Fábio Moon (self-published)

* Scott Pilgrim Full-Colour Odds & Ends 2008, by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni)

* Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4, by Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics)

T-SHIRTS

* Parker (freebie!)

* Scott Pilgrim

* Sinestro Corps

* Watchmen (freebie)

And that giant Watchmen bag. I had hoped to pick up Against Pain by Ron Rege Jr. from Drawn & Quarterly and Tom Neely’s strip-collection mini, but again, whiff! Anyway, look for reviews of all those comics in the coming weeks.

* Thank you very much to Alvin Buenaventura at Buenaventura Press, Mike Baehr at Fantagraphics, Alex Segura, Pamela Mullin, and David Hyde at DC, and everyone I interviewed for your invaluable assistance. Thank you very very much to Dave Paggi at Wizard, Tom “The Comics Reporter” Spurgeon, Patrick Carone at Maxim, Chris Butcher at the Beguiling, Jason “Shaggy” Ervin, and especially Jonah Weiland, Seth Jones, and Lincoln Morrison at CBR for your hospitality and companionship. You guys made the con for me.

I did a lot of writing at San Diego over at Comic Book Resources, but I suppose the newsiest things are this piece on the sell-out of the buzz book of the show, Watchmen, and other popular books at the con, and a pair of interviews with Comic-Con International spokesperson David Glanzer about the state of the show, its potential move out of San Diego, crowd issues and so forth. I hope you like them.