K-Squared Ramblings

Kindle DX: A Digital Comics Platform?

Amazon has announced the Kindle DX, a new version of their e-book reader with a 9.7-inch screen. Unless I’ve got my numbers wrong, that makes it larger than the standard manga page, though not quite as big as the standard American comic book page. And it’s only 1/3 of an inch thick, comparable to a typical trade paperback.

This could be the first e-reader device suitable for simply taking comics formatted for the printed page and transferring them to a tablet. No need to break it down and show one panel at a time like most iPhone or Android comics. No need to zoom and pan. Just transfer the whole page.

Sure, it’s only black and white, but there are plenty of comics produced in B&W, or reformatted for printing in cheap collections like Marvel Essentials or DC’s Showcase Presents series.

Imagine 30 years of Justice League of America or Spider-Man in the space of the latest trade.

The only drawback is the steep price tag: at $489, I’m not picking one up anytime soon.

(Reposted from Speed Force)

Next for Geoff and Ethan: Vibe: Rebirth!

Apparently preliminary buzz is so good on Flash: Rebirth that DC has already announced the next character getting the Rebirth treatment: Vibe from the 1980s “Detroit-era” Justice League.

• After Flash, It’s Vibe: Rebirth
• Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver talk ‘Vibe: Rebirth’

From the first link, Dan Didio explains:

It was really a melding of events. First of all, with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Green Lantern all leaving the Justice League, Dwayne McDuffie wanted to try and bring back some of the feel of the Detroit-era League. And what character is most associated with that League? Vibe! Plus we had some very positive fan response to his appearances in Trinity. And orders for Flash: Rebirth have been phenomenal. We want to strike while the iron is hot, so I asked Ethan if he’d be interested, and he just jumped at the opportunity. Literally, he jumped. I could hear the thump on the other end of the phone.

It makes sense in a twisted sort of way.

Update: This is, of course, an April Fool’s joke! Happy April 1, everyone!

Why Las Vegas is a BAD idea for Comic-Con

It seems as though every year, around the time of hotel registration for Comic-Con International, people start clamoring for the con to move from San Diego to Las Vegas. More hotel rooms! A bigger convention center! Gambling! Strippers!

It makes me want to headdesk.

Now, I don’t hate Vegas. I’m not ZOMG in love with it, but I’ve been there more than once and I don’t think it should be removed from the face of the earth. What I believe about Vegas is that it is a law and a destination unto itself, and that everyone should be able to choose whether they go based on the merits of the place, not on the merits of what else might be going on there that isn’t a usual part of the location. Please keep this in mind as I present my list of Reasons Not to Move CCI to Las Vegas:

1. Weather. San Diego may be incredibly hot some years, but it’s coastal. There are breezes a lot of the time, and it’s often quite bearable. Vegas is inland desert and is 99% guaranteed to be nasty hot in July/August. Part of the crazy fun of CCI is seeing costumes on the street, which would become darn near impossible for a lot of people given the temperature.

2. Distance. I’m not talking about the distance for people to get there (though I will in a bit), but the distance between things. It can take over half an hour to get from the front door of one hotel to the front door of the next one over. In San Diego, it’s pretty easy to leave the convention center, go find food that’s not jacked up in price for an inferior product, and come back. In Vegas, unless you take the monorail, that’s a pipe dream, especially given that the convention center is off the Strip and not really near a lot of hotels. Keep reading for more. Read the rest of this entry »

Comic-Con Hotel Booked – Sort Of (2009)

Well, I jumped into the fray of the Comic-Con International hotel reservation system and made it across to the other side, getting through by phone after 1 hour and 20 minutes. I never did make it past the “waiting room” page online.

The weird thing about the phone reservation system is that I don’t actually know which hotel we’ve gotten yet. They took my name, contact info and top 3+ choices (I gave them 5), then handed the info to their processing center. They’ll call back (later, I assume, after the rush is over) to let me know which hotel I got. I do have a backup that I reserved directly, but the convention discount is significant, especially when you add up four days.

It was interesting watching commentary streaming by on Twitter (search for “comiccon,” “comic-con” or “comicon”) as people started out commenting, then complaining, and eventually celebrating (after about an hour) when they finally got through. Or really letting loose when the system dropped them.

Update: Got an email confirming our reservation. It’s farther out than the backup, but it’s ~$100 cheaper (over the course of 4 days – possibly more, depending on how much the other hotel charges for internet access) and there’s a shuttle. Now to weigh ~$100 vs. walking distance and figure out which room to keep and which to free up for someone else who needs one.

Cross-posted at Speed Force

WonderCon 2009: Saturday Con Report

Continuing the write-up of our late-February vacation and trip to WonderCon in San Francisco, we left off with Friday at the con.

Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.

Originally we’d planned to only go to the convention on Saturday, and pre-ordered one-day tickets. Then WonderCon published their schedule, and most of the stuff we wanted to see turned out to be on Friday. So we juggled our schedule around, and bought a second set of one-day tickets.

On the plus side, it ended up being slightly cheaper than getting three-day tickets and not using them all three days (which is what we did last year). On the minus side, it meant we had to pick up our badges twice. (I asked on Friday whether we could pick up both badges at once. We couldn’t.)

Day 5 (Feb 28): Saturday at WonderCon

The crowds outside were slightly bigger, but I don’t think we had much of a line, since we arrived about an hour after the floor opened. The first real hint of fandom was a group of people dressed as Jedi and a pair of life-sized R2D2 robots on the mezzanine. Then another group of people dressed based on what I assume was an anime or video game. Then we were down the escalator, across the hall, and walking to pick up our badges again.

Costumes

While we were still getting our badges ready, we spotted a trio of women in Battlestar Galactica costumes. Katie leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t that a Six?” and then one of us realized that the two with her were dressed as Starbuck and Boomer/Athena.

There were a lot more people in costumes on Saturday. If last year’s big theme was G.I. Joe, this year it was clearly Watchmen. I remember seeing the occasional Rorschach at cons a few years ago, but this year they seemed to be all over the place. I saw at least two Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectres as well (one with a somewhat more modest costume), at least one Comedian, a Laurie Silk Spectre and even a Doctor Manhattan (a brave soul who had painted himself blue and walked around in a bald cap and a speedo). The weird (or perhaps not so weird when you think about it) thing is: They were all based on the movie versions of the costumes.

I have a lot more cosplay photos up at my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set.

The Main Floor

Actually, there were a lot more people on Saturday, period. I ended up skipping the DC booth swag line, because it was at least four times as long and not noticeably moving when I walked by. It was made worse by running past the gaming area and, as near as I could tell, through an area where the 501st Legion (or perhaps another Star Wars fan group) seemed to be doing photo ops. Speaking of which, it’s weird: 10 years ago, someone with a Star Wars Stormtrooper costume was impressive. These days, they’re so common that I hardly even notice them.

The autograph area in particular was very crowded, partly because they had big names like Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. I don’t think I ever had to resort to shuffling on Friday, but it happened a lot on Saturday.

In many ways, WonderCon resembles San Diego Comic-Con before it went insane. Actually, I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to attend a comic/pop culture convention in California, but has gotten sick of the crowds and the hotel rush and the lines and not being able to get into the events you want and everything that has made Comic-Con International so frustrating over the last few years.

What I did find frustrating about this year’s WonderCon, though, was that several people I would have liked to meet (or at least hear speak at a panel) ended up not coming because MegaCon was the same weekend. I’m not sure, but I suspect there was a regional divide, with most west-coast people going to San Francisco, and most east-coast people heading to Orlando, Florida instead. Ultimately I only added two signatures to Comic Book Tattoo, and no one involved with Flash: Rebirth was there at all.

Panels

The only panel I really wanted to make sure I attended was the DC Universe panel, though it was more a matter of obligation (Speed Force). It turned out to be mostly rehashing the previous day’s DC Nation panel. I will say one thing for Dan Didio: he certainly brings energy to the room for his panels. I expect I probably would have paid a lot more attention instead of using my phone to read about the scans_daily meltdown.

Katie caught a writing workshop run by David Gerrold, which she found quite helpful, and got into the giant room for Star Trek.

Now, the Esplanade Ballroom never managed to be as tough as the infamous Hall H in San Diego…but Star Trek was absolutely packed. Everyone’s seen the latest trailer by now, but it premiered at this panel, and Katie remarked afterward that it was the first trailer that made the movie actually look interesting, like it had an actual story and not just a bunch of ships blowing up. On the downside, no one asked Zoe Saldana any questions during the Q&A period — they were all directed to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto.

The plan, originally, was for me to catch up with the panel for 9 in the same room. I made it about halfway through, because of the crowd issue. It wasn’t that there were no seats. It was that five million people (well, it seemed like it) left the room after Star Trek, and after crossing that torrent, I had to ind the line…and trace the line to the end. That turned out to be out the front door and down along the entire side of the convention center almost to the very back. It stayed still for a few minutes, then started moving more-or-less smoothly. As I made it up to the doors, a woman handling crowd control assured us, “There’s plenty of room, they all left after Star Trek because they’re crazy.” There was no hope of figuring out where Katie was sitting (quite near the front, as it turned out, since she got to move up when so many people left between panels), so I just grabbed an empty chair near the end of an aisle.

Anyway, Nine was just Elijah Wood and animation director Joe Ksander talking about making the film and occasionally showing clips. Someone asked Elijah Wood to compare his character to Frodo Baggins, and he remarked something along the lines of, “I’m going to be hearing this for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”

Wrapping Up

After 9, we met up again and did a final circuit of the floor, checking for anything either of us wanted to show the other, or anything one of us might want to pick up. We ended up at the SLG booth examining The Map of Humanity for something like 20 minutes, trying to spot all the real-life and fanciful place names and where they were located. (Hollywood showed up in about 5 places.) We bought a copy.

Then it was back to the hotel to drop off all our stuff and get ready to meet up with my brother and his fiancee for dinner. They took us to a fantastic Indian restaurant called Mehfil that was somewhat off the beaten path as far as the convention was concerned. Afterward we tried to go to a nearby pub, but it was really crowded (it was Saturday night, after all), so we started looking for another place to go. We ended up walking through the area where Wikimedia has its offices. Eventually we ended up back at a frozen yogurt place in Metreon, a shopping mall across the street from the Moscone convention center, and we hung out there until closing.

Coming up next: Sunday in San Francisco.

WonderCon 2009: Friday Con Report

Continuing the tale of our late-February vacation (starting with Cambria and Hearst Castle and moving on to Monterey and Carmel, we catch up to San Francisco itself and two days at WonderCon.

Note: If you want to skip straight to the photos, head over to my Wondercon 2009 Photo Set on Flickr.

We’d been to WonderCon once in 2008 and had a great time, and while we weren’t planning to make it an annual trip, the timing worked out such that we’d be in San Francisco the right weekend anyway.

Staying in San Francisco: The Mosser

Last year we stayed at the Mark Twain, which was okay, but this year on my brother’s recommendation we stayed at the Mosser Hotel. It was quite nice, although the rooms were still extremely small by modern standards — small enough that instead of an actual desk, there’s a fold-out desk on the armchair. There’s also a flatscreen TV with both pay-per-view and video game rentals, and an AT&T wireless hotspot accessible from the room. The staff was nice, and the location was perfect. We were in a decent area of town, near restaurants, 5 minutes from the Moscone Convention Center one way, 5 minutes from a BART, MUNI & cable car station the other way, and right across the street from the official convention hotel.

Day 4: Friday (Feb 27) at WonderCon

After Thursday’s long drive, we slept in Friday morning and made our way to the convention center around 11:00. The “line” to get to the registration area moved quickly enough that it might as well not have been a line, and there were only a few people in front of us at the badge pick-up windows, so we made it through the whole process in only a few minutes. Then we stood in line for 45 minutes waiting for the hall to open at noon. Oh, well!

We started by making a beeline to the BOOM! Studios booth to pick up several copies of the Farscape #1 WonderCon exclusive variant — one for us, and several more for people at the Terra Firma message board. Series writer Keith R.A. DeCandido was there signing them, and we chatted a bit with him and with another Farscape fan. After that I got in line for the DC booth, and Katie went off to explore. I picked up a bunch of random swag from DC, some of which I want to keep and some of which I’ll probably offer to people on Speed Force.

Next I headed over to Artist’s Alley to track down some of the artists connected with Comic Book Tattoo for signatures. I’d gotten a few of them (including Tori Amos herself!) at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, but took the massively heavy lead weight book back to my hotel room at the first opportunity, not thinking that I could catch up with more of the creators. So now I’m trying to fix that.

I found David Mack first, and he had a whole spread of Kabuki material. As we talked, I admitted that I’d never read any of it, and he not only offered me a few issues of the latest series for free, he signed them!

I wandered the floor a lot, picked up some cheap trades, scarfed down a small pizza and eventually went up to a panel on “The Real Archeology Behind Indiana Jones.” It was run by an archeology professor from some college out near Lake Tahoe, and he had this talk about the major artifacts in the four films — what is known about the Ark of the Covenant, where people are looking for it, (or in some cases, claim they’ve found it but won’t let anyone see) — the actual stories behind the Sankara stones and the Thugee cult — legends around the history of the Holy Grail, and where people think it might be — the history and legends of the various crystal skulls, none of which can be verifiably traced to an actual excavation.

Then I hit DC Nation, Katie hit panels on 2D visual effects and the shift from a cowboy metaphor to a super-hero metaphor in US Politics (all those Obama-as-Superman images), we met up at the BOOM! panel, and finally went to the Wonder Woman screening.

Friday was, overall, really laid-back. The crowds were light, people in line were patient, and there weren’t even too many people in costumes. Even DC Nation was relaxed, though that’s probably in large part because Dan Didio was at Megacon and Ian Sattler was running the panel.

Wonder Woman

We had no trouble getting into the Wonder Woman screening, and managed to get seats maybe 10 rows back. I noticed a woman I recognized in a WW outfit (someone I’d seen as WW at other cons). Oddly, they kept calling it the movie’s premiere, even though it had premiered at New York Comic-Con a few weeks earlier, so at best this was the west coast premiere. Still, the movie was very good and amazingly epic for a 90-minute animated film. (Reviews are all over the place now that the DVD is out, so I’ll skip the details.)

After the screening there was a discussion panel with producer Bruce Timm, screenwriter Michael Jelenic, actress Virginia Madsen (Hippolyta), director Lauren Montgomery, and executive producer Gregory Noveck. They talked about making the film for quite a while, then took audience questions until their time was almost up.

Then they ran the trailer for the next DC animated project: Green Lantern: First Flight. I’m not a huge Green Lantern fan, but this looks suitably cosmic in scope and sci-fi in tone, and frankly, that’s they way I prefer the character, so it looks promising!

Evening

After the discussion, we cleared out. Neither of us wanted to watch a bunch of Star Wars fan films at this point (I would have 10 years ago, but these days? Not a priority.), and we were hungry. So we headed back to the hotel to change and went out to look for someplace to eat dinner. We ended up at a very good steak restaurant in the Marriott, then went back to the hotel where stayed up way too late uploading photos and dashed off a first impressions post of the con.

Update: On the way out, though, we stopped at the mezzanine walkway, which has a long glass-enclosed view into the main floor. It was eerie to see all the booths set up, fully lit, but with covers thrown over tables, and the aisles empty except for (as far as I could see) one person.

Continued in Saturday at WonderCon.

Reading Comics on the Phone: Hexed on the G1

There’s been a lot of talk about digital distribution of comics lately, what with declining print sales and shrinking distribution channels. In particular, the idea of comics on the iPhone has produced a lot of discussion, with iVerse Media distributing a number of comics from small publishers like IDW and Boom through the iPhone Marketplace. Not having an iPhone, I haven’t been able to check them out, but they’ve just released their first comic for the Android operating system, which runs my current phone, the T-Mobile G1.

I figured, hey, this one’s free, why not check it out?

Finding and Downloading

The first problem I had was finding it. But that’s mostly the fault of the Android Market, which can only be browsed by hierarchy and sorted by date or popularity. Fortunately, there’s a search function, so I just searched for “Hexed” and it turned up immediately.

It took a while to download even over 3G, so I let it sit and came back to it when I had time to take a break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not In New York

Launchpad, originally uploaded by Kelson.

We went out to the “Great Park” yesterday to see if we could go up in the balloon. It turned out to be completely booked or the day (there was some big ice skating event going on) but we got in some photos on the ground, including a couple of pics with our copy of Scott Pilgrim 5 to submit to the contest.

More photos: OC Balloon set on Flickr.

Comicbook.com Power-Up Plugin for Wordpress

I’ve put together a simple plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs that adds a “Power Up” button to your posts for submission to Comicbook.com (a Digg-like site or comics-related news).

No configuration needed – just install it and activate it.

Yeah, I could have just pasted the code into my theme template, but I like to keep functional changes separate in case I ever decide to switch to another theme.

At present it will only show on individual posts. It won’t show on pages, or the front of the site, or any sort of archive page.

You can see it in action on Speed Force.

Download:
ktv_comicbook_powerup-0.1.zip

Upcoming Coolness

Some entertainment stuff I’m looking forward to this year:

Movies: Coraline

YouTube also has the trailer in HD.

I discovered Sandman late, borrowing the trades from one of my (younger) brother’s friends around 1998 or so, then immediately tracking down my own copies. I lucked out and got a complete set on eBay for something like $70. Since then I’ve devoured most of Neil Gaiman’s work, be it in comics, prose, or movie form. The original novel of Coraline was very good, and it’s been adapted by the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is among my favorite movies…and what I’ve seen of the film suggests that they get it. It’s hard to believe it’s only two weeks away!

Other movies: Oddly enough, I’m only mildly interested in Terminator: Salvation, Transformers 2: Can’t Remember the Subtitle, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the films have been steadily deteriorating after peaking with #3, IMHO), Star Trek, and Watchmen. I’ll probably see all of them, but none of them have me nearly as excited.

Comics, books, music, etc. after the cut: Read the rest of this entry »

Critical Miss

Take a look at this press release for the Los Angeles Science Fiction and Comic Book Convention and see if you can figure out what’s missing: Read the rest of this entry »

Sex-Linked Brand Names

DC Comics recently canceled its Minx line of graphic novels aimed at teen girls, leading to much discussion amongst comics bloggers. I don’t want to talk about why the line folded, but why the line existed in the first place. Why did DC create an entirely new brand in order to go after this audience?

A big advantage to creating a new label: no preconceptions. Prospective readers won’t look at the cover, see a DC logo, and wonder where the super-heroes show up and rip off people’s arms. And they won’t see a Vertigo logo and assume that it’s a “mature readers” book. On the downside, a new label has to build its credibility from the ground up, instead of starting with name recognition.

This got me thinking: an established brand associated with customers of one gender creates a new brand in order to target the other half of the population. Where else have I seen this?

I own a jacket labeled Claiborne, which is of course made by the Liz Claiborne company.

Mervyns sells (or used to) H&H Men clothing, which was clearly a variation on their Hillard and Hanson brand.

All the examples I could think of (other than Minx itself) were companies that had traditionally been aimed at women, but were adding lines aimed at men. It made me wonder: is it the names? Do men feel odd buying a product named “Liz,” while women are used to buying brands named after both men and women? (Sara Lee notwithstanding.) Maybe it’s the stigma of a man participating in something perceived as feminine? Sort of like the assumption in children’s TV that boys will only watch shows about boys, while girls will watch shows about girls or boys (so they make shows about boys instead of girls, figuring they’ll get a bigger audience).

Then Katie pointed out LEGO Belville, the line aimed at girls which entirely misses the point of LEGO by making as much of each set prefab as possible. And pink. On the plus side, unlike Claiborne, Belville doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s a LEGO product.

That makes it more like Men’s Vogue, a copy of which is sitting in the lunch room at work. In this case they’d have to call it something different (unlike a clothing line) because it’s not just a brand, but the title of the magazine.

I still think the craziest example of this has to be Men’s Pocky. It’s a cookie. One which I’d hardly consider a “girlie” cookie, but maybe it’s more associated with girls in Japan. I still can’t figure out whether it’s a case of cultural translation or deliberate absurdity.

On Original Ideas

Newsarama’s Ambidextrous column has a post on Original Ideas and Influences. Brandon Thomas talks about coming up with ideas only to find out someone else has already written them, and about how easy it is to unconsciously incorporate concepts you’ve been exposed to as you write your own material.

Something to consider in the next plagiarism scandal.

New Browser: Google Chrome

Google Chrome seems to be a multi-threaded open-source browser based on WebKit (with some code from Firefox as well), focusing on making a browser that will work well with web applications.

It’s got built-in support for the Gears API (not surprising). And, like Firefox 3, IE8, and Opera 9.5, it’ll do full-history search & auto-suggest in the location bar. Interestingly, they’ve adopted a couple of UI elements from Opera, including thumbnails of your most-visited pages when opening a new tab (like Opera’s Speed Dial, though in this case the list is automatically generated from your browsing behavior), and putting the tabs above the main toolbar — something that Opera has taken a lot of flack for.

According to the blog post, the first preview release should be out for Windows tomorrow, with Linux and Mac following.

Oddly enough, I found out about it through comics blogs (A Distant Soil, specifically), not tech blogs, because Google hired Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) to explain what makes the browser different in comic-book form.

Manhunter: Serenity

Let’s play a game! It’s called: Count the Serenity/Firefly references in this Matthew Clark cover for Manhunter #36!

You’ll have to click on it for the larger version to see some of them.