§ Nice Art! Spanish artist David Lopez will be doing a new series for Panel Syndicate, the online comics portal run by Brian K Vaughan and Marcos Martin. Blackhand Ironhead starts in a few weeks, he reports, after teasing a logo and some art. Unsurprisingly, it looks fabulous – another social SF series, which Panel Syndicate has thus far specialized in.
H/t Smash Pages
§ Ladies and gentlemen! Start your browsers! Returning Registration for the San Diego Comic-Con opens in mere days, kicking off Con Anxiety season:
Comic-Con 2017 Returning Registration commences on Saturday, March 11, 2017! The Expo Logic waiting room opens at 8:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST). Attendee badges will go on sale shortly after 9:00 AM PST. Your unique registration code, the Expo Logic waiting room link, and instructions on how to participate will be available in your Comic-Con Member ID account at least 24 hours prior to the sale. Starting March 10, 2017, you may log in to your Member ID account and select the “Registration Info” tab to view your personal registration code and link to the waiting room.
Remember, if you want to go you need a Member ID!
§ Speaking of Comic-Con, Rob Salkowitz summarizesa chat he had with Comic-Con’s David Glanzer; no real bombshells, but with the contract to hold the con up in 2018 the biggest issues it hotel rooms: San Diego hotels want to lower the number of hotel rooms available to “attendees” and charge way way more for the rest.
§ Logan opens this week and it looks to be the best reviewed superhero movie in a while. Abraham Riesman looks at Old Man Logan, by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, which highly influenced the film and subsequent appearances of Logan:
In other words, “Old Man Logan” is something of a turducken of terror for the Marvel mythos. At the same time, the story arc — written by Scottish provocateur Mark Millar and penciled by action-scene master Steve McNiven — filled with a remarkable degree of passion and reverence for the company’s eight-decade-old legendarium, providing a vision of Wolverine built on the creators’ admiration for one of their employer’s greatest characters. Thanks to frustrating copyright disputes and the wishes of Logan auteur James Mangold, the filmic offspring of “Old Man Logan” isn’t quite as nutso as the source material, but its influence is raw and apparent to anyone who’s read the story. Without it, Hugh Jackman’s swan song would be very different.
§ At the Seattle Weekly, Danny Sullivan attempts to apply the thinking of philosopher Michel Foucault to comic cons and fandom.
His basic claim is that groups are defined by sharing a discourse—a set of ideas and points of reference that in turn define what knowledge is for the group. As he puts it, “A discursive practice may form … the basis of which coherent (or incoherent) propositions are built up, more or less exact descriptions developed, verifications carried out, theories deployed. They form the precondition of what is later revealed and which later functions as an item of knowledge or an illusion, an accepted truth or an exposed error.” In other words, the ways groups talk about common topics help determine the conclusions they arrive at and change their understanding of it on the deepest level.
Anyone who ever saw people arguing about the best Star Trek in a diner can attest to the truth of this.
§ This sounded like a kind of juicy comics crime story but it’s more like an episode of Storage Wars. It seems two investigators for the Harris County TX DA’s office found a storage unit that was part of the evidence against an embezzler. The unit was crammed with valuable collectibles – including comics – and they couldn’t resists lightening the load a bit. one was later caught selling the comics at a Chicago convention, and one is now testifying against the other.
“About 100 comic books were removed by me and Mr. Deutsch,” Blevins said. “Mr. Deutsch also took a hockey jersey, an autographed baseball card and a signed baseball.” Deutsch is facing a possible sentence of life in prison, accused of stealing more than $200,000 worth of evidence from a suspect who was later convicted of embezzling $9 million from Tedano, an international crane company. The suspect in the underlying case converted that staggering amount of money into an outrageously long list of collectibles and memorabilia, including a signed Muhammad Ali robe, a copy of the first edition of Playboy and a $900,000 comic book, the first Batman.
§ Zack Snyder has been finding joy in life of late by showing footage of Jason Momoa swimming. Since it is in Momoa’s role as Aquaman in the upcoming Justice League film, we can all share that joy and watch this on loop a few hundred times.
§ Well I’ll be! The biggest comic con in the littlest state has bagged the BIGGEST guest! NORMAN REEDUS COMES TO RHODE ISLAND COMIC CON
The con isn’t until November 10-12, but organizers are already shouting out about guests including Reedus, Sebastien Roche, David Mazouz, Steve Guttenberg and wrestler Rey Mysterio. Will there be cartoonists at the comic con, you may be asking? Fear not, the answer isYes! Larry Hama and Katie Cook and a few others so far.
