Emerald City Comicon 2012 recap

I think I have finally recovered from ECCC 2012. I was there for all three days, from March 30 through April 1st. Overall, it was a great show, with a lot of great guests. The check-in was a little disappointing, however. There were nearly as many people helping the walk-ins as there were helping the pre-sales. In fact most of the walk-ins got in before I even had my badge, so what was the advantage of buying ahead of time?

At any rate, the first thing I did when I got in was to head to Thom Zahler's table. Thom is the writer and artist of the amazing, funny series Love and Capes. I had commissioned a piece of artwork from him, and I picked up his con print. I also had him sign my trades of Love and Capes.

Next I headed to Don Rosa's table. Outside of Carl Barks (Scrooge's creator), no one has done more for Disney's Duck comics than Mr. Rosa. I got a free sketch from him, and a print of his Duck Family Tree. He does something cool for the print, in that he fills your name in as the previously unknown father of the three nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. I also had him sign my Boom! hardbacks of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck and found out how disgusted Mr. Rosa is with Boom! If you see him, have him sign the Gemstone versions which he prefers.

While I was waiting to meet Mr. Rosa, my wife found an awesome Muppets Doctor Who print by Amy Mebberson at the table next door, which she later purchased.

Then I went to the tables of David Petersen of Mouse Guard fame, followed by Katie Cook, writer and artist of the Gronk web comic. I had my Mouse Guard hardcovers signed, including having Ms. Cook sign Legends of the Guard, and moved on to see Danielle Corsetto, writer and artist of the Girls with Slingshots web comic, where I scored the next two books of her strips. Next to her was Jeff Schuetze, the writer and artist of the JEFbot web comic. I picked up his book of strips because I have never taken the time to back and read the earlier strips, and because I love to support web comic creators.

After that, we returned to our room so I could off-load all the hardcovers I had been hauling around. We ate lunch and returned to the con so I could begin my shopping. I spent most of the rest of the con looking for books I needed for my collection. All told I ended up getting around 500 back issues, including a couple missing issues of Justice League of America, Super Friends, Star Wars, and Kamandi, complete runs of The Shadow and Strange Sports Stories, and large chunks of Alpha Flight, Champions, Logan's Run, Batman Family, Ghosts, Weird War, Weird Western, GI Combat, Detective, Men of War, Challengers of the Unknown, Unexpected, Unknown Soldier, and a bunch of the digest books I was missing. I also found a paperback, published in the 1970s, that reprinted a couple of older Legion of Super-Heroes stories. I think I might have seen it as a kid but I never owned it, until now.

Here's looking forward to next year!

Harry Potter and Emerald City Comicon

If you haven't been paying attention, the Harry Potter books were recently released for electronic readers.  I, for one, say that it's about time they did it.  What surprised me was how it happened.

Trying to buy it from Barnes and Noble, since I have a Nook reader, I followed the link and saw that there was no pricing shown.  I refreshed the page, thinking that it might not have gotten the page correct the first time, but it still didn't come up.  So I decided to try to purchase it, at which point it would have to tell me the price, right?

Surprisingly, it took me off B&N's site to the new Pottermore website store.  Purchasing it there gave me the ability not only to download it up to eight times, but also to link my B&N account so that the books became "natively" part of my Nook's ecosystem.  My dream has finally started to come true, that my Nook account is effectively a locker that my Nook connects to for me to read my books.  I'm sure B&N didn't get as much for my purchase as they would have if I had purchased it directly from them, but I'm sure they will still be making out like bandits on all the sales of the series.

Reading the series again, which I haven't read for years, is definitely like revisiting an old friend.  I still feel the disgust I felt the first time I read about Harry's poor treatment by his aunt and uncle, and the sense of wonder when Harry gets chosen by his wand.  Yes, the later books were a bit too long and could have stood with a bit of editing, which probably didn't happen as much because of the meteoric rise of fame J. K. Rowling received, but the series is still amazingly good.

On another note, I'm going to be at Emerald City Comicon this weekend!  If you are planning to be there, I would love to meet you.  Just post a note in the comments!

Anne Rice's The Wolf Gift

I realized a funny thing while reading Anne Rice's new novel, The Wolf Gift.  It read exactly like a superhero origin story. 

I admit I've never read one of her novels completely.  I started Interview with a Vampire many times, but I have never been able to finish it.  I think it was as much me as it was her.  Her writing style made it easy for me to become distracted.  However, I read enough to believe that I understood her style: florid, with long descriptions.  Never having finished one of hers, though, I thought I'd start with her newest series.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book.  It tells the story of a journalist who gets bitten and turned into a werewolf.  However, as with the Vampire series, Rice's werewolves are unlike most werewolves you've seen before.  They don't look particularly like wolves, nor are they harmed by silver.  They are, however, drawn to evil.

The writing, like I said earlier, made me think of an origin story.  The main character gets his powers, tests them out, learns about them, and ultimately learns how they came about, both how he got them, and whence they originally came.  And it wasn't at all what I expected of Rice.  Yes, there were moments where she got florid, and she overused the word "boiling."  There was actually a moment where something happens between the main character and his eventual girlfriend that almost made me quit the book.

But I didn't quit, and I did enjoy the story.  While I had enjoyed it throughout, the events about two-thirds of the way through the book grabbed me and I couldn't put it down until I finished.  All in all, I recommend it, especially if you haven't read her books before, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series.

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 3D

As I'm sure you know, Episode 1 was released last Friday to 3D theaters.  I debated for quite a while about whether I was going to see it.  There are two main reasons why I debated so long.  The first is that I really don't care for the movie because it has always felt to me like George Lucas couldn't make up his mind who his audience was going to be.  There is too much Jar-Jar Binks, too many poop and fart jokes, and really bad slapstick for adults to enjoy.  On top of that is a totally-incomprehensible-to-children story about trade agreements.  In addition to that, two of the main characters are played by horrible actors, in the forms of Natalie Portman and Jake Lloyd.  The other reason I debated, besides my dislike of the movie itself, is that I have always thought that 3D is overly-hyped, and that there's no way that paying extra for 3D would ever be worth it.

Having said all that, I'm a died-in-the-wool Star Wars fan, and I can't pass up the opportunity to see that universe back on the big screen.  So I got tickets online for my local theater.  And that's where my distaste for modern theaters is proven correct again.  They service-charged me for getting my tickets early.  Except that I didn't really get them early.  I had to print the email, bring it with me to the theater, along with the credit card I used to buy the tickets.  How is that worth the service charge?  And they didn't tell me that I had to do all that until after I "purchased" the tickets.

We arrived at the theater, got our commemorative glasses, and got our seats.  It turns out I shouldn't have bothered to get my tickets early, because there were only about 10 of us in the theater, and we were the first ones there anyway.  The trailers eventually started, and I expected to get blown away by the 3D on those movies that were designed with it in mind, but I really wasn't.  It could have been our theater, but there was a slight background "echo" of the image that was distracting.  We saw trailers for The Lorax, Paranorman, and the new Spider-Man, and while there were a couple moments that gave me the "wow" feeling that I wanted, they were few and far between.  In reality, the things I liked most about those trailers would have worked perfectly well in 2D, such as using Spider-Man's point of view while working his way across the city, including flipping the view upside-down when he was walking on a ceiling.

Then the feature started. My feelings about the movie itself are unchanged.  It's still a confused mess.  The 3D worked okay for things like the space battles, the pod race, and the final battle between the Jedis and Darth Maul.  In fact, the shot of Obi-Wan hanging in the tube made for a wonderful perspective shot.  They also did some interesting things in order to accentuate the perspective from the flat, 2D film, such as adding window frames to the foreground to add depth to long-shots.  Unfortunately, though, one of the ways they did this in medium and close-up shots was to blur the background, which gave the background a "rear-projection" feel, so that it seemed as if the background wasn't really there (which it wasn't in most of the shots, since they were doing green-screen, but the green-screen work in the original still felt present, rather than added later).

At any rate, the conversion was at least partly successful, but I'm still not impressed with the 3D technology.  I suspect that it was a combination of my theater and the hype and recommendations I've gotten that got my expectations too high.  I will probably see the other five movies in 3D, because how can I not?  But I have to console myself with the fact that I'm not seeing them for the 3D, I'm seeing them because I love Star Wars, and I prefer it on the big screen.

Asimov's Elijah Baley stories

Thanks to the advent of electronic books, I've been reading more now than ever before...well, more books, that is. And saying that I've been reading more is an exaggeration, even then. I've actually been rereading more. I find myself buying and reading books I already own more often than I'm buying new books.

Case in point, I was ecstatic to find that they were finally releasing Asimov's Elijah Baley books. I preordered them so that they would show up on my Nook as soon as they were available. I remembered reading and loving these books as a teenager, and I was actively watching for their release.

Having reread them, I'm not sure why I was so taken with them.

Basically, they are science-fiction mystery books. The main character, Elijah Baley, is a detective on Earth. Assigned to solve various mysteries, he is accompanied by his unwelcome (at least, at first) partner, R. Daneel Olivaw. The R stands for robot. But Daneel is a special robot, even by robot standards, as he is almost unmistakably human-like.

The first book, The Caves of Steel, introduces the characters and their world, where Earth has been left behind by those who have settled fifty other worlds. Those settlers, referred to as Spacers, consider themselves vastly superior to their forebears on Earth, who have consolidated themselves in massive city complexes where thing like weather and even sunlight are all but forgotten. Baley, with Olivaw's help, must solve the murder of a Spacer with Earth's position in the galaxy in the balance.

The second book, The Naked Sun, takes Baley off Earth to the planet Solaria to solve the murder of another Spacer, reuniting him with Olivaw and introducing the dead Spacer's wife, Gladia. Once again, Earth's position in the galaxy rides on Baley's ability to solve what is essentially a locked room mystery.

Lastly, the third book, which I've been reading this week, is The Robots of Dawn, which takes Baley off-world again to solve another "murder", this time of a human-like robot in the service of a relocated Gladia. Not to sound like a broken record (shouldn't that phrase really be a scratched record?), but Earth's position in the galaxy depends on Baley's ability to solve the murder, as does his own position within Earth's police force.

In the first two books, quite a bit of time is spent with Baley making bad guesses about what was going on. For example, in the first book, he spends an entire chapter detailing Baley's supposition that Olivaw wasn't really a robot, when simply having Baley, a supposedly good detective, ask Olivaw, who must obey orders from humans, to prove his robotic nature would have shortened the book considerably.

The second book also spends quite a bit of time dealing with Baley's newly-discovered agoraphobia. Having been raised in the all-encompassing City on Earth, Baley hasn't spent any time out in the open. Asimov constructs many contrived situations that force Baley into the open, only to spend needless pages on the consequences. Baley supposedly can't solve the case without traveling to interview the witnesses instead of using a three-dimensional video phone, yet there's nothing in what he discovers that proves him right in that respect.

The worst, by far, is the third book. Firstly, Asimov uses this book as an opportunity to tie together all his previous robot books and short stories, by referring to Susan Calvin, and his Foundation novels thanks to continual references to psychohistory. In addition, there is a secret, mostly unimportant to the story, but leading up to the reveal, Asimov can't resist making little off-hand references to it, which on rereading come off as smug, almost as if Asimov needed to point out how much smarter he was than the reader. Lastly, he also breaks one of my cardinal rules of writing by making many references to a hard-to-find short story starring the pair. If you intend to spend pages referring to a short story, you might be better served just including the story.

These books are fine for what they are, but now I'd be hard-pressed to give them more than a passing grade. The first two are better than the third, but not by much.