Note: If you just want to look at photos, feel free to skip to my Long Beach Comic Con 2009 photo set on Flickr.

Location

It’s been at least ten years since the last time I’d been to the Long Beach Convention Center*. I didn’t recognize the building the con was in at all (and I’m sure the shopping mall across the street wasn’t there before), though the facade and lobby reminded me a lot of the San Diego Convention Center with the arched ceiling and floor-to-roof windows. It made me wonder whether they had been designed by the same architect.

With a mall across the street to the west, Shoreline Village across a bridge to the south, and Downtown Long Beach across the street to the north — not to mention the food service in the lobby not being swamped — I really regretted having brought my lunch with me. Though it probably did save time, since I had panels I wanted to see from noon until 2:00. If I’d wanted to go to, say, the Auld Dubliner (right across the street! Auughh!), I would have only had about half an hour on the convention floor that morning.

*Not counting plays at the Terrace Theater. Though the last thing I saw there was a touring production of Miss Saigon in 2003, about two days before the start of the Iraq War. Talk about timing.

Main Hall

I think the main floor was about the same size as the floor at Wizard World Los Angeles the last couple of years — or rather, the amount of floor space they used was about the same. (Last year WWLA had a large empty space in the back.) Exhibitors were clustered around the entrance, mostly indie press (I remember Boom, Archaia, and Aspen) and a large Nintendo exhibit. The center of the room was dominated by the Artist’s Alley, with dealers wrapped around it and celebrities lining one wall.

In the back, inexplicably, was a raised wrestling ring. I didn’t notice it when I went through in the morning, but in the afternoon, when they were actually holding wrestling matches, it was loud! Halfway down the hall, you could hear the *smack!* *thud!* as the wrestlers threw each other to the floor. I figure the floor of the ring and the convention center floor must have made a fantastic sounding board!

I got in about 20 minutes after the con opened for the day, so if there were any huge lines I missed them. The artists’ tables were practically empty (they came in later), and most of the action seemed to be at the publishers’ booths and dealers. There was a big line for Jim Lee, and people were lining up for Stan Lee and Berkeley Breathed signings at 11:00.

Unlike San Diego, though, I could walk around without relying on Level 18 Crowd Weaving!

I made a half-hearted effort to look for some of the Golden-Age Flash comics on my list, but I knew I wouldn’t find much. Dealers just don’t seem to bring readers’ copies of golden age books to conventions — or if they do, they’re the rarer ones (like, say, late in the run of Flash Comics) that they can charge $95 for. In the end I picked up a couple of half-priced trades from a series I’ve been meaning to read.

There weren’t a whole lot of people in costume, at least not by San Diego or WonderCon standards. Though I suppose it’s probably about the same percentage of attendees. One thing I noticed is that I’m actually tuning out a lot of the Star Wars costumes, particularly Stormtrooper and Mandalorian variations. There was a gold-painted Boba Fett who walked past me about five times, and not once did I try to take a photo.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t get any signal at all on my phone in the exhibit hall. In the lobby? No problem. On the mezzanine balcony? Just fine. In the programming rooms? Sporadic. Enough to pick up text messages, but not necessarily enough to post.

Panels: DC Nation & Mark Waid

The two panels I hit were DC Nation and “50 Questions in 50 Minutes With Mark Waid.”

I got to DC nation just before it started, and given the relative lightness of the crowd I was surprised to find it almost full. The panel started out with two announcements, one about Flash and one about Outsiders. The cell signal lasted just long enough for me to break the Flash news on Twitter.

The rest of the panel was question and answer format. I’m used to Q&A panels having a microphone set up in the audience, with people lining up to ask their question. This time, Ian Sattler walked around the room with a cordless mic, and people with questions raised their hands. I asked about plans to reissue the collections from Geoff Johns’ initial run on the Flash. A lot of them are out of print and hard to find, even online. “No plans at this time.” *sigh*

Anyway, I’ve written up the Flash news from the panel elsewhere, and CBR & Newsarama have decent writeups of the whole panel.

The Mark Waid Q&A started out with very few people in the audience, but filled in to maybe 1/3 of the room by the end. A screen up at the front of the room displayed the title, some cover art from Incorruptible, and a timer. They had a bunch of questions that had been submitted ahead of time online, and every few minutes they opened to questions from the floor.

Questions ranged from the standard (”What’s going on with X series?”) to the personal (”What’s your favorite beer?” — it’s not beer, vodka.) to the insightful. One that I found fascinating was his answer to the question, “Do you write every day?” He explained that no, he writes every other day, because he finds that he writes better if he writes one day, then takes time off to recharge. For writers, he made the suggestion that you shouldn’t necessarily follow someone else’s method of writing: you should find the method that works for you and embrace it. For his write-every-other day method, it wouldn’t do any good to beat himself up and feel guilty about the days that he’s not writing.

By the end, he managed to answer 56 questions in 50 minutes.

Signings

I looked over the guest list before coming, and decided I’d try to get things signed by Mark Waid and Geoff Johns. I’d gotten Waid to sign The Unknown #1 in San Diego largely by accident, and Johns had signed the first three issues of Flash: Rebirth. For Geoff Johns, I figured I’d bring Rebirth #4 and the variants I had since picked up to make a complete set. For Mark Waid, I figured I’d bring the first issue of The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh and dig through back issues for some sort of milestone issue. I ended up bringing Impulse #1.

Unfortunately, I had no idea where or when either of them would be signing.

Mark Waid announced a 2:30 signing during his panel, so I took the half-hour break to do some sightseeing (see below), then came back to the BOOM! Studios booth to stand in line. I got there a little late, but there were only about 10 people in line ahead of me. We talked briefly, mostly about The Unknown, and I got someone else in line to take my picture with him.

Then I figured I’d make a second pass through Artist’s Alley, now that the artists had shown up, and noticed a long line running about half the length of the “alley.”

“What’s this line for?” I asked.

“Geoff Johns,” someone answered.

Well, that solved that problem!

So I got in that line as well. At one point I talked a bit with another fan in a Flash T-shirt (he approached me with the standard, “Nice shirt!” greeting of people wearing the same logo). Somewhere along the line I found out that Peter Tomasi was also signing in the same line (it was a Green Lantern/Blackest Night thing), but I’ve never read any of his stuff that I can recall, so I didn’t have anything for him to sign. As I neared the front of the line, the guy in front of me started talking with him about the con, and how it seemed to be off to a good start — like San Diego 20 years ago, back when it was fun — and I sort of nodded and made a few comments like I knew something.

Then I was up to the front of the line, handed Geoff Johns my stack of comics, and told him I was really happy about the Flash announcement he’d made. He said it was going to be a chance for him and Scott Kolins to get back to the kind of stuff they were doing back on their initial run on the book. I said something about how I’d been worried that Wally was going to be sidelined, and he said something to the effect of, “Hey, you shouldn’t worry about that – I’m writing it!”

After the signings I went back up to the lobby, bought an iced mocha, and checked in on Twitter, Speed Force and Comic Bloc, then returned to actually make that pass through Artist’s Alley. I ended up looking at a lot of art, and bought a couple of prints.

Sightseeing

I wandered outdoors for sightseeing a couple of times, once right before that block of panels, once right after, and once at the end of the day. There’s an artificial lagoon wrapping around the Hyatt hotel and the convention center on the ocean side. You can’t really see them in the panorama shot, but in this photo I took a minute or two earlier, you can see a group of cosplayers hanging out on one of the islands.

There’s a pier-like bridge extending from the end of the lobby past the Hyatt out to the shoreline. You can just see the Queen Mary over the tops of the shops and restaurants of Shoreline Village. While there I spotted a couple of oddities: a group of people riding Segways (I decided it the group term should be a flock of Segways) and the Good Year Blimp soaring above a roller coaster and Ferris wheel.

Then there was this great blue heron standing nearly still as if it were posing. I must have spent five minutes stalking that bird, taking photos every few seconds at lower and lower zooms until I got about five feet away. It just stood there, not a care in the world, as if it were thinking, “I’m ready for my close-up!” Eventually the bird did take off, and I tried to follow it, and (amazingly) managed to get a decent shot of it in flight!

At the end of the day, I dropped my stuff off in my car, then went up to the courtyard in front of the Terrace Theater. Mostly I took pictures of the immense fountain. While I was there, there were three women who looked like they were probably there for one of the other events going on that weekend (a craft fair and a corporate training event), and a small boy who looked maybe four. As I walked past them to get to the other side of the fountain, the boy looked at my T-shirt and shouted, “Flash!” I turned around, grinned, said something like, “Yes!” and flashed a thumbs-up sign, then continued on.

End

The last sight of the con I had before getting in my car was a discarded wristband on the steps of the parking structure. It seemed to sum up the end of the day.

A couple of years ago I did my own then and now project — well, less a project than a spur-of-the moment 2007 re-creation of a 1997 photo I took of the Student Center as seen from what was then the Humanities Office Building (now Murray Krieger Hall). In this case the trees hadn’t changed much in 10 years, but UCI had flattened the Student Center complex and built an entirely new one.

Delivering light at the speed of packages! Er, packages at the speed of light!

The only problem is, their tracking system is pretty limited. It can tell you where your package is, or what direction it’s moving, but not both.

Once I even logged in and it had two status notices, one telling me my package had been delivered and one telling me it hadn’t!

I would have called about that, but they would have just directed me to Heisenberg in customer service, and he’s never certain about anything.

(Okay, it’s really the loading dock at an old Quantum warehouse, but what’s the fun in that?)

We took our annual trip down to Laguna Beach to watch the fireworks display launched off the bluffs. This time we made reservations for dinner at a restaurant we’d walked by a bunch of times, Ocean Avenue Restaurant and Brewery. Would definitely go there again.

Around 7:30 we staked out a spot on the beach, which was already crowded. At the time we got there, the daytime beach-goers were just leaving, while the fireworks crowd was just arriving. I kicked off my shoes and waded out into the surf a bit, taking pictures of seagulls and scenery. Then it became clear the tide was coming in, and we moved up the beach to an area that didn’t have any seaweed. Sure, it was 10 feet from a volleyball court and next to a group with a couple of umbrellas (which they never did take down), but at least we could rely on not getting flooded during the show.

It cooled off pretty quickly, and I went across the street to get us both some coffee at one of the two Starbucks. Yes, two. (One used to be a Diedrich.) The line was about 15 feet out the door when I got there, and it took be about 25 minutes to get through it, by which time I just ordered plain coffee so I could get out of there quickly. It had stretched to at least 40 feet out the door!

The sky grew darker, the moon grew brighter, and stars started peeking out, and finally around 10 minutes to 9, a lone firework went off. I’m fairly certain they do a test fire, because there always seems to be one firework that goes off about 10 minutes before the show gets going. Soon we could hear low booming sounds in the distance, and flashes of light started appearing over the bluffs from the next display up the coast (Corona del Mar, maybe?)

Meanwhile, the volleyball game was still going, even without any light except the moon and streetlights.

A little after 9, the fireworks started, launched out over the ocean from somewhere behind the bluffs at the northwest end of the beach. The volleyball game stopped, people rearranged themselves to be able to see, and we ended up standing and drinking coffee. I experimented with the night and fireworks settings on my camera, and tried out the video on my phone, but mostly just watched. I actually got a few decent shots.

The wind was good, blowing the smoke parallel to the beach and keeping the view of the fireworks clear. (A few years ago, it lingered, so after a few minutes we got to see smoke lit up in pretty colors.) Every once in a while, I’d look behind to see the moon and the fireworks from the next display along the coast the other way (Dana Point?), barely visible in the distance.

After the big finale, just about everyone started leaving the beach, heading for one of the few places where you can cross PCH. We stopped at a gelato place on our way back to the car, tried some flavors, and shared a two-scoop cup with one scoop of ginger and one of pineapple chocolate chip. They went surprisingly well together.

By the time we made it back to the car (parked up near the Laguna Playhouse), the traffic had died down a bit and we had a smooth drive up the canyon. After a while, we started seeing bright flashes of light over the hills, and realized even after 10:00 there must still be another fireworks show going. As near as either of us could tell it was near the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

Finally got home, avoiding the two raccoons that ran in front of the car, washed the sand off of our shoes and feet, and I started going through the photos looking to see how many actually turned out well.

(Cross-posted from LiveJournal. More photos at Flickr.)

It was the chair in our hotel room (the converted bank office with the impressive lobby). Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as scratchy as Viridian Dynamics’ “Focus Master.” (Incidentally: more Better off Ted episodes are starting up in a couple of weeks for the summer!)

Some graffiti on plywood in the Gaslamp District area:

And then there was this “You Are Under Surveillance” sign. Something about the combination of the sign, the stairway, and all the posters on the walls just looked interesting.

Garden Show Centerpiece, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Braved South Coast Plaza this Saturday, and ended up in the middle of the Spring Garden Show, which took up all the non-store space in the wing formerly known as Crystal Court. I ended up wandering the garden show for a bit.

First floor was mostly furniture and decorations. The second and third floor were mostly people selling or showing off plants of various types, tools, pots, etc., with half of the third floor dedicated entirely to orchids.

There was also this huge centerpiece in the middle of the mall. Coincidentally, I was looking through old photos from one of our trips to Las Vegas earlier that day and found the pictures of the giant flower-and-insect display in the Bellagio.

I’ve posted a few photos taken with my phone.

Catalina Inversion, originally uploaded by Kelson.

The south end of Santa Catalina Island as viewed from Newport Beach this morning around 9am. The winds have cleared out a lot of the haze that would normally obscure the island, and I had a great view of its entire length.

Interestingly, while the sky seemed clearer at 8am than at 9am, by which time a thin layer of gray haze clung to the horizon, the photos taken at 9 are sharper. It’s almost as if the dust settled during that hour, clearing above the layer and obscuring below it.

There was also a definite mirage caused by that same layer. You can tell the lower 1/3 of the island is distorted.

Moon and Venus Above Palms, originally uploaded by Kelson.

I’ve added a few more pictures to my Snowline photoset showing the unusual amount of snow in the local Santa Ana Mountains.

There’s a few more from Thursday, plus a couple of pictures I grabbed Friday morning, like the one shown above.

Update: Here’s one more, from a batch of photos I took at lunch today. More at Flickr…

First, here’s the view from the camera, at 3x optical zoom, to give you some context.  This is looking northwest from the park.  (It occurs to me I could probably have checked the direction with my phone’s GPS info.)

Everything’s flattened out near the horizon.  Near the right you can see the MCAS Tustin blimp hangars, with Santa Ana beyond them. The area I’m looking at is too small to see at web size, on the left side right near where the hill cuts in front of the horizon.

Here it is zoomed in and enhanced.

I gave it a shot with the digital zoom out to 12x, but it was way too fuzzy.  It worked out better just to crop the file and look at its native resolution.  Someday I’ll save up and get a nifty digital SLR that will save raw images instead of JPEGs, and let me swap out lenses for serious telephoto work, but for now, this is what I’ve got.

Actually, looking at the picture, I’m no longer convinced that it’s actually downtown Los Angeles.  What I can see doesn’t look clustered enough, and the buildings look shorter than I’d expect.  But I can’t think what else has a bunch of buildings tall enough to see at that distance and in that direction.

It could be that only the tops of the building are visible, in which case that black rectangle bordered in white, roughly in line with the top of the light pole, could be the top section of the Aon Center, the second-tallest building in the city and the one that’s mostly black with white corners and white around the top. But in that case the US Bank Tower (the tall round one) must be completely faded into the haze.

Or it could be Century City, which is a few miles to the west of Downtown LA, and has a couple of similar buildings (black with white outlines).  If that’s the case, though, downtown should be somewhere to the right and taller, and I just don’t see it.  And Century City would be closer to 45 miles, rather than 40.  Maybe the smog’s just thicker around downtown? Edit: This does seem more likely (see comments).

Anyway, I took some more pictures to make a panorama, which I’ll stitch together at home when I have a chance and see if it’s worth posting.

Ragged Clouds at Sunrise, originally uploaded by Kelson.

View from our back yard this morning. I had to tweak the colors a bit to approximate what it looked like to the naked eye. It’s still not quite right — there was a bit more pink in it, and maybe a bit less purple.

Sometimes it’s worth getting up at this hour.

I’ve only got the first page or so labeled for now, but the photos should finish uploading by the time I post this. I’ll fill in the captions and titles over the next few days.

This is a picture I took last summer of the balcony on our old apartment. I used it to test using Flickr’s email upload and blog-posting features to upload a picture straight from my phone.

Unfortunately, it needed cleanup. The title (and post slug) end up being the filename, which I suppose I can fix before sending, and the content seems to get posted twice. I suspect the phone is sending both formatted and plain-text versions of the message, and Flickr is reading them both.

Anyway, it’s not a bad picture, so I figured I’d leave it up instead of deleting the test post.