Why Diesel Sweeties is my favorite Webcomic.

see more hipster robot webcomics and pixel t-shirts

Besides the obvious: it being totally my sense of humor, without having to follow any real kind of back story. Not to take anything away from Achewood, because there is definitely something to that you have to acquire and that being the only criticism I would have for it.   Then, of course, there is my main stay, Act-i-vate, a collective I’ve been reading coming up on three years, and continues to be something stellar.

To the Class of 2008

I think I came pretty close to writing a commencement speech this weekend while I was in Florida for my brother’s graduation.

It came to me while on the flight down to Orlando, while listening to Moby’s tracks from the Southland Tales soundtrack and a baby girl named Abby playing on her Dad’s lap.  The music and the smiling baby matches the serenity of the flight, where looking out my window, plots of land are sectioned off and I’m smiling ear to ear; knowing what is in store for me in the coming days.  I had just finished the conclusion to Geoff’s, Dick Donner’s and Adam Kubert’s “Last Son,” storyline in the Action Comics annual, and I felt like this was the perfect time to read it, while flying, looking down at the land as I travel over it.  The utterly cringe-worthy line of thought from Margot Kidder in the first Superman movie floated into my brain: “Is this what its like for you?”

While wrapping his graduation present Thursday evening, and watching Garden State, I completely lost my shit.  I was writing his card out in a pen I had received for my college graduation, a Cross pen, and had decided to get the same thing for my brother, and suddenly I just lost it.  Balling my brains out.  I’m not sure what incited it but perhaps a combination of all of the things in that moment. My anticipation for my brother moving into the real world on the same day that I graduated five years ago, the movie and the fear of what’s in store for him in the years after college. Not that they were horrible, or my last five years were that bad (they really weren’t), but they were hard.

They’ve made me who I am today and I can honestly say now that’s pretty fucking great and only going to get better.  Though, thinking about each year, and examining the bits of those years there were things that were exceptionally tough for me and part of my “losing my cool,” last Thursday night was me being in fear of my little brother and how these next five years for him could be as tough, or could be way easier for him. I was afraid for my brother, and during that moment, I’m talking myself through things that have gotten me through these years, and before I knew I had somewhat written a commencement speech.

Let’s do this thing, and this is what I wrote in my notebook, just as we were coming into land at Orlando International Airport.

I imagined myself gathered around the keg with my brother and his fraternity brothers.

“Gentlemen, tomorrow when you’re graduating it will be the five-year anniversary of my graduation.  And if you’ll forgive my waxing the carrot, I just want to impart a bit of my utter bullshit wisdom.  Apologies in advance, as you’ll probably be hearing a lot of this kind of thing in the coming day or two but I just want to say that the days and years after tomorrow are going to be the hardest of your lives and two things that got me through these five years. One, no matter how bad it gets it can only get better; and, two: do what you want to do the rest of your life but it will not be easy, because in the end the rewards will make the struggles worth it, and appreciation of these rewards comes from your struggles, because they wouldn’t be worth anything if they were easy to get.”

Though, of course, I never got the chance to say these words to the boys, I just figured it would make good fodder for the internet. I mean: how self-aggrandizing OR self-absorbed can I get? Not nearly enough, I say to you dear reader, not nearly enough.

Excuse me a second while my brain slowly dies.

Today is one of those days where my entire body just wants to sleep for a day. I’ve been new levels of busy this month with being home for a week helping out my family, New York Comic Con, having to go to Connecticut in reaction to some unfortunate business, with barely a chance to recover.

This weekend my brother is graduating from college and I’m flying to Florida on Friday morning. With every passing day as I get closer to heading down to Orlando, I’m growing more and more giddy and more and more proud/nervous/feeling awesome.

So, before I sign off for the next week, I wanted to update with some things that are on my mind.

Wil Wheaton posted on his blog a reaction to Obama’s win last night in North Carolina, with Hillary barely winning Indiana, signifying that she should end her campaign.

The thing about all of this is that, with a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon, it’s become clear that this whole thing isn’t about Democrats or beating McCain (who is inexplicably running for Bush’s third term) or saving our country from the catastrophic failure of the Bush years. No, it’s all about her. It’s about her ego. It’s about refusing to admit that she did her best, but voters (except those encouraged by Rush Limbaugh to cross party lines and fuck with our primary) have pretty clearly said “No thanks. You’re a good senator, but we want something different now.”

In regards to this, I really wish she would just concede. She’s hurting the party and us, and considering that I don’t really have that much energy, I think Wil speaks the other side of my opinion quite well. The bottom line for me in this is: do you want more of the same (McCain and Hillary) or do you want something that could seriously change the country as a whole? In the end, I feel like in this election you’re either voting (as I am) for something completely different that probably wouldn’t have had much of a chance if things weren’t as bad as they are, or are you voting for the status quo? In essence, damning us to keeping things the way they are now, or worse? And are things now so acceptable to keep them this way? Obviously, I disagree.

Its gonna be a long day tomorrow.

Its Free Comic Book Day tomorrow, and I’ve volunteered to live blog the entire proceedings in NYC area comic stores.

Besides myself and fellow New York resident and CBR staff writer Shaun Manning, people will be reporting in from around the country on their individual Free Comic Book Days.

Keep track of all of us at CBR Live.

Why So Similar?

Is the Dark Knight Trailer a mirror of the Batman 1989 trailer? You tell me.

Link courtesy of Other Brian.

Latest in CBR Stories.

A couple of my CBR stories have been posted.  Among them an interview I did with Jason Aaron on his Hellblazer run, and Chris Giarrusso on his popular Mini Marvels series.

Just a few years ago, Jason Aaron was waiting for a lonely bus to pick him up from his day job so he could go home to write comic books. Now on the heels of the success of his Eisner-nominated Vietnam War graphic novel The Other Side (with Cameron Stewart) and his hugely acclaimed Native American reservation noir series Scalped (with R. M. Guéra), Marvel Comics has Aaron hard at work on a number of books including Ghost Rider, Wolverine, and Black Panther. But Aaron’s latest gig came about, somewhat appropriately, in a barroom deal in New York City. Starting in June’s issue #245 with art by Sean Murphy (Batman/Scarecrow: Year One), Jason Aarron will lend his talents to Vertigo’s longest running series, Hellblazer. CBR News caught up with Aaron to discuss his John Constantine tale.

I read Andy Diggle’s trade “Joyride,” in preparation for this story with the thought originally in mind that I would be talking to both Aaron and Diggle, and gearing the conversation towards how John Constantine is a distinctly British character. The series is also (arguably)  Vertigo’s most popular series ever, if you judge by how long its been running.  In hindsight, it would have been interesting to focus on both of their differences as noted in the article that Aaron is the second American to write the distinctly British character.  As a result of doing this article, I finally learned what everyone was all up in arms over the Constantine movie. Though I still dig the movie.

NYCC 2008 Recap II: First day.

Thursday was a reasonably easy day. I spent much of the day gathering materials and prepping for all the panels that I would be covering. The system Jonah had implemented had me helping Andy out doing live coverage of panels, which was a great way of going about things considering I had no experience covering panels before. Which meant that Friday we would be live blogging three panels in a row: Mondo Marvel, Secret Invasion and DC Nation. Yeah you can imagine that I was close to shitting myself.

I had a bunch of things to handle before meeting Jan for the Daily Show. He would be getting in from Baton Rouge and staying with Katie. With Uma Thurman! You can imagine my excitement. Now I have a confession to make: I’ve lived in New York for almost four years now, and I have to say that I am totally ashamed that I haven’t been to Jon Stewart’s show even though I consider him, like many others, my hero.

So, Jan explains to me that we have to get there mighty early, between 3:30 and 4:30 otherwise we won’t get into the show. Other reason why Jon Stewart is my hero? His show is FREE. Though like all things that are free, there is a catch, you have to get in line and there is only two hundred seats in the audience. So only those people got in. Like the neurotic social liberals we are, Jan and I made it in line at 3:30, and the line had already wrapped around the corner. The security guards were like Soup Nazis saying such things that there will never be any flash photography and cell phones must be turned off because even if they are set to vibrate the microphones pick it up and, “You will be thrown out for any cell phone use.” One security guard told the story that they had to pull someone out of the audience because they had reached down to put their phone on silent when the show was already in progress and had to be thrown out. Not so cool, and I’m the jack ass that brought his camera, so I was going into a nervous sweat thinking that I’m going to fuck up the whole thing for us because I brought a camera.

It turned out to be a total amount of stress for nothing, because once they announced that they would be taking the crowd in just after 4:30, fifteen minutes later they said the theater was full. And we were all turned away, but we could email in and get VIP tickets. Our disappointment was palpable for a few moments until Katie suggested we try going to a show or a movie or something. We met up with Katie’s fellow CUNY Journalism grad student Erin during our search to figure out something to do now that our Daily Show plans had gone up in smoke. We ended up going to the St. Mark’s Hotel bar, where we watched the Yankees game and drank pitchers of Brooklyn Lager. Followed by lingering off to a nice outdoor hookah bar and narrowly escaped a time at karaoke bar much to my glee.

Friday began, as it probably should have, with calm and nervous apprehension before the convention. This would eventually transform into nervousness in doing the live blogging of the three major panels. I loved this strategy as it would be my first experience on the other side of the fence, and I definitely needed to learn the ropes in convention coverage that I previously had no experience with.

I got to the Con early, or through the various comics pros that had started following me on Twitter, I had gotten there fairly late. I met up with Andy at the Journalism panel that Heidi had informed me about Tuesday night that our boss, Jonah Weiland, would be on with IGN’s Richard George; an old friend of Jan and Katie’s from their Metroland days, ComicMix’s Rick Marshall; Brian Heater (from the aforementioned Daily Cross Hatch) and Newsarama’s own Matt Brady.

It was a fascinating panel in regards to the questions going back and forth on the state of online coverage and the emergence of blogs doing their own reporting of the medium. A year ago, a discussion like this may not have been something I had previously thought about, or even cared about, but up until I realized that I could do some of the coverage these sites had been doing that this panel was exceptionally interesting to me now. My career had now combined both my experience in reporting and my love of comic books. Both of these facets had been an integral part of my life from an early age and up until a year ago I never really thought far enough ahead to think that I could combine both and put myself in the position I have now. So, what I had previously turned my back on a year ago (and was completely childish on my part), that being journalism, had now put me in a position at this con where I met all of these wonderful people.

I’ll get more into that in the concluding chapter of the series, I’ll just do the blow by blow for now. After the online journalism panel, Andy, Jonah and I headed to the Avatar booth that CBR was sharing. We set up the banners and whatever else before Andy prepped me on what he would need me to do during live coverage of these panels. So while running the gamut, and much of the coverage coming out of all these panels were nothing to really write home about besides NARC’s Joe Carnahan taking on the Taskmaster series. Other than that it mostly commentary on what’s going to not happen in both the Marvel and DC mega events “Secret Invasion” and “Final Crisis.”
Marvels panels are a bit more organized that DC’s. Though it was observed that the DC fans seem to be a bit more rowdy, and love the idea of being quick and sharp witted. If one had a transcript of DC’s panels it would probably read like a West Wing script. Where Marvels are a bit more sarcastic which I can appreciate.

After our marathon of panels coverage we absolutely had to bust out of the convention center because GOD DAMN the humanity, we frankly couldn’t get enough of those pocket disinfecting agents that the people working that giant Andromeda Strain prop had been handing out. After leaving the Javitz Center, we met up with Andy’s friend Brendan, an intellectual property lawyer who Andy interviewed following in the wake of the Siegal Superman copyright decision, and Jeremy Love (creator of Zuda Comics’ webcomic Bayou) and his lovely girlfriend for beers. We sat there and drank for a long time after Jeremy and his girlfriend went back to the hotel to take a nap before their drink-up at the Heartland Brewery beneath the Empire State Building. Brendan, Andy and I hung out there at the bar for a little while drinking it up until about 9 or so that we decided to get Jeremy for our own dinner at this classy burger joint near the W hotel. Ultimately we deciding to call it an early night at around 2am, considering Andy and I had to be at the Countdown to Crisis panel by noon the next day and Saturday was sure to be a marathon run. Which, it was.

So, maybe you heard?

Prince did a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” I’m…I’m…seriously, like, ruined for the week. Its like a train wreck that you can’t peal your eyes away from, to put it as mildly as possible. Judge for yourself, please attribute all forthcoming misery to Matt Fraction for pointing this out via Twitter.

NYCC Recap, Take One…

Apologies in advance for the lateness of this post, a couple unforeseen and very unfortunate circumstances came out of nowhere early on last week and I had to go offline for a couple of days. I think I’m probably the last blogger on the comics blogosphere to do their recap of the convention almost a week after its ended.

As I posted, the week preceeding the Con was uber-busy for me. I got back to New York from home on Monday night knowing full well what kind of week it was going to be, so the time at home was extremely necessary as it helped me wrap up the multitudes of articles I had to finish for CBR. I was really glad to get those things out of the way before the Con started because I knew that the event itself and the many things happening around it beforehand would do nothing but tie up my time and I wanted to be able to focus entirely on the Con and have a good time with almost the entire staff of CBR coming in from L.A and other points west.

So, Tuesday (April 15) was the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Drink and Draw celebration of the premiere of Mark Smith and Paul Maybury’s graphic novel AQUA LEUNG. Smith, who resides in South Korea was not on hand but Maybury was. The entire event was MC’d by Greg Thompson who loves calling himself a red neck. The Drink and Draw is something CBLDF does as a fundraiser at local bars where a handful of local comics artists draw up awesome things and they do a silent auction. Some of the artists included Alex Maleev, Nikki Cook, Dan Goldman, Joe Infurnari, Molly Crabapple, and tons more. I met the wonderful Elizabeth Genco finally, after we had been following each other on Twitter for months on end and going to the same events but I never walked up and introduced myself. I also met Eisner nominated webcomic artist Joe Infurnari who is just awesome. Brian Heater from the Daily Cross Hatch, myself and Heidi MacDonald mused that this party was literally the beginning of the Con and that we were all in for it.

I came away from the party with the exceptional titular book that was the focus of the party as well as Flash Gordon 0, which intrigues the fuck out of me. I figured I’d get it considering how much my Dad would get me watching those old Buster Keaton Flash Gordon serials when I was a kid. My Dad got me into all those old radio shows that he used to listen to including the original Green Hornet and The Shadow serials. Love that stuff. So I picked up this comic by Brendan Deneen and Paul Green, I figured anything could be better than that awful show on the SciFi channel with whateverhisnameis who was Kristin Kreuk’s boyfriend on a season of Smallville. I was pleasantly surprised with this comic, it had the real futurism content and alienation with some art tendencies leaning on the manga style, but I feel like all of that really works for a Flash Gordon comic, and makes it sleek and cool. There wasn’t enough in it to really say that I think its awesome, but it intrigued me enough to get number one. Oh, and the New York Times did an article on the party.

Wednesday was Jeff Smith’s RASL party. Where Frank Miller made an appearance and I met CBR’s staff photographer Pinguino who wins the award for the Coolest Person I Met at this convention. Of course, that could also go for Andy Khouri, CBR head Jonah Weiland and others but I had been talking to them online and through other means long before the con so I’m using the above designation for someone I had previously no correspondence with.

Pinguino is this totally rocking gallery owner, freelance photographer, 5th degree black belt in Tang Soo do and raver comic book geek. We spent much of the evening hanging out with her friend Tendency and guiding her around to people she should know and take pictures of for the Con. Including wee hours of endless fun throughout the weekend. Check out her fantastic photography here.

That party was at Cooture Spain in Hell’s Kitchen, and I caught a conversation with Miller where he talked about how the Kitchen has changed since he moved there from New Hampshire when he was nineteen. I would have liked to pick his brain for a while, since I’ve met him, but that’s a story for another time. I came away with this awesome RASL print, that reminds me that I need to get frames for all these great prints that I get at these CBLDF events, as well as this totally kick ass Bone hoody.

I’m going to do this thing in parts, considering how long and massive the entire week was and considering the average blog reader’s attention span wanes after almost a thousand words or five paragraphs I’m going to save the second part for tomorrow.

NYCC recap is going to have to wait.

I had an unbelievably stellar week last week, but a friend from college’s brother just passed away this weekend so I’m off to Connecticut for a while and my recap is going to have to wait.

In the meantime, hopefully my few photos will hold you up.