Fine, fine, fine: I’ll do a NY Comic Con recap post.
Just like every convention that rolls around you can believe that its met with both excitement and fear for comics people. This is hardly a unique sentiment; from the comics retailers, to the professionals, to the reporters, everyone feels it. So, this year, with my MTV News press credentials and the many retailers and pros making the offhand comments about my last name and what I do–I knew this would be a special convention for me. And it was far and away the best one yet.
Starting on Thursday, I met up with Ben McCool and Nikki Cook at the CBLDF party at Side Bar in Union Square. Where we found the turkey burger sliders to be incredibly edible, and drank Guinness that for some reason was a dollar more than usual. While there I got to catch up with the recently departed Laura Hudson, who left New York to drive cross country to Portland, Oregon where she now lives. I’m happy that she loves it there and its always nice to see her, but her not being around is definitely missed. Like when Kiel left, there’s been a void for me in the comics “scene,” (God, I hate that phrase), without the two of them being around.
Wolverine film producer Jeff Katz soon met up with us, and whenever he is in town its massively entertaining. He is the quintessential producer, but not in that stereotypical way you think of a producer. He’s not fake, he has no fear in anyway of being straight with you to your face. He’s an incredibly forward thinker, and as a former VP of Production for Fox, is responsible for bringing a lot of the comics to screens. On Friday, I would hang out with him during a screening of the Wolverine video game, which looks positively, (heh), to use one of Jeff’s words: “badass.”
Bossman Rick Marshall joined us and promised that he would only stay for one beer, which turned into several beers (always does). We had a hilarious time with Katz, and Chris Ullrich (who gets more and more motor-mouthy and hilarious the more he drinks). We all retired fairly early, being that Friday was the first day of the convention and it was sure to be a long weekend.
Friday, I got to the con at about 11 and discovered the power of the skybox. Which makes the entire experience much easier to deal with especially when you have the God-like ability to stand above the eight foot Wookies, Slave Leias, and Poison Ivys with painted on outfits like those Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. The skybox is remarkable when deflecting the Con Sars as you don’t have to deal with the floor–people come to you. Even though most the interviews I did were on the Con Floor. Friday was a slow day, I got to pretty much do whatever–essentially get in contact with people and set up interviews so I wandered the con floor and caught the most number of panels I could. Apparently, my friend Colin found a picture of me picking my nose at the X-Men panel, but thankfully Marvel’s flickr account has deleted the picture. Thanks, Agent M.
Friday evening got busy, but eventually we reconviened to a place of drinking in Hell’s Kitchen and had a fine time of it. Where we mostly talked about the news of the day. I finally found myself Secret Warriors #1, and I think that book is going to be alot of fun. Though I think the news of the convention was Brian Bendis’s Powers coming to FX, what I was pleasantly surprised with was Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham taking over Fantastic Four. I’m a huge supporter of Hickman, because I think he brings a really fresh conspiracy based thought process into comics (this is at least evident with his Image series of books) and I really like his comic book design sensibility, combine that with Eaglesham who is probably one of the top five most iconic super-hero artists working today and I’ll be reading FF. I’m actually seriously fired up about this prospect.
The highlight of Friday though was meeting Method Man and seeing him totally nerd out to Rob Liefeld’s booth being directly below the MTV skybox. You had to see it: up at the box, he was looking out over the con floor and looked down to see Rob Liefeld signing, the crowd around Liefeld was going wild seeing Method in the skybox. He sprinted, and I’m not exaggerating, was out the door and down the stairs in five seconds flat to shake Liefeld’s hand and promptly nerd-the-fuck-out. Had to be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Saturday, was the busiest day. I interviewed Matt Fraction, where we talked about Iron Man 2 stuff, and finally met his wonderful wife, Kelly Sue. Fraction, to quote Caleb Goellner, “Is someone you just want to hang out with, to come over and read comics together.” He’s just one of those guys that everyone wants to be friends with, at least in comics, and Kelly is a sweet heart. I was in no way surprised by either of these results.
I was mostly running around the entire day, talking to creators, I went to a dumb ass Star Wars panel to see if there was any talk about the live-action tv series, but there wasn’t. Though they did have the cast of Fanboys on the panel, which was cool, and apparently the movie is out to many people’s surprise. It doesn’t have a lot of support from the production house, but it looks funny as shit and is definitely worth checking out.
Alot of it was spent prepping for some video interviews, including enjoyably watching our producer Josh Horowitz pursue Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick for an interview. Which was the prevailing arc of the entire weekend in terms of Josh’s plans.
After covering Rick’s panel with Radical Publishing, Brian, Rick and I hung out until we figured out what to do with ourselves for Saturday night. I was texting about six different people to figure out what we were doing when it was decided that we would go to Sweet and Vicious for the Dark Horse Comics party. Brian, Rick and I got something to eat and talked about video and other events that MTV was covering and the overall mystique that comes with saying you’re from MTV News as opposed to the various sites the three of used to work for. We took the 6 train down to Spring Street and walked over to Sweet & Vicious, which wasn’t really a party just where the Dark Horse people were drinking with a ton of metrosexual hipsters and Gawker-lites like to hang out. So after a couple of Sweet & Vicious patented margeritas eight of us trucked off to the C.B.’s party. Rick had bailed after the first two or so drinks at Sweet & Vicious because it had gotten too crowded for him, which I have to agree was a reason why the eight of us left in the first place to head to the Marvel party. Which was not as busy as people were telling us it was.
While at C.B.’s party I had some great conversations with David Mack, and Daniel Way (author of Wolverine: Origins and Deadpool). Saw Jonathan Hickman in passing and congratulated him on FF and Secret Warriors but didn’t get to talk all that much. Before we knew it we were several beers in and it had gotten quite late and it was time to retire, as Brian and I both had to be back early Sunday morning.
I got in Sunday morning around 11am, which was later than I wanted. Right when Brian was interviewing Run DMC, and just before Josh interviewed Joss Whedon. Which prompted me to say that I wanted to stick around for it.
Easily the highlight of the entire weekend was meeting Joss Whedon. The rest of the day would be chock full of meeting creators that had a profound impact on my life. From Greg Rucka, to Josh Schwartz, to Joss Whedon. I literally could not breath when he was in the skybox. When he emerged from the interview with Josh, three of us couldn’t restrain ourselves from getting a picture with him. When he departed it was alot of discussion about how we had just flubbed professionally in the name of fanboyism. Though since that was a running theme of the convention in terms of our on-air interviews, I chalked it up to being totally unable to not nerd-out over our icons, as we wouldn’t be where we are now if we hadn’t been fans of people like Whedon early on. Otherwise we wouldn’t have pursued this area of entertainment reporting if we didn’t like the genre Bendis, Whedon and others engaged in.
The second occurrence of my disgusting nerdism occurred while running out to interview Christos Gage, Steven T. Seagle was signing at the Image booth directly below the skybox (and next to Liefeld) and noticed that I was holding a copy of It’s A Bird and pointed at me. This would be the first time I would meet him. It went like this:
“Hi!” I exclaimed, still stressing out because I had to interview Chris Gage in five minutes and had to run over to the Marvel Booth and dodge a sea of strollers and Jedis.
“Where’d you get that?” Seagle said pointing at my copy of his book. ”I can’t find a copy of it anywhere around here, and I’ve run out.”
“I bought it…[stuttering badly] at the…Union Square Barnes and Noble…in 2005.”
“Ha! Well, do you want me to sign it?”
“Sure!” and he did so, mentioning the new book he and Kristiansen are doing with First Second called Genius. He’s doing a massive graphic novel with Vertigo with artist Tara McPherson and will open a play in a space on 50th and Broadway. I excused myself quickly, because I had to interview Chris, but I promised I’d swing by and see him at the Man of Action booth in Artist’s Alley.
After talking with Gage, I finally had time to go shopping. I got some truly awesome stuff. Including Scott Pilgrim vol. 5, Sandman Mystery Theatre vol. 6: The Hourman and The Python, Scud the Disposable Assassin (Clutch grab of the Con!) and Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid. As well as a plethora of beautiful artwork from David Mack.
Overall this convention was quite literally the best convention I’ve had yet. There are, of course, more people I wanted to see but didn’t get the chance. I met new people, forged friendships with people I really respect and caught up with some of my favorite people. That, despite all the stress, the not sleeping and the running of your liver into the ground is the purpose of Con, to hang with people you only see at most twice a year, and makes all of the running around and sickness worth it. And that’s why we all come back every year.
