#dare2draw

Image Comics has been the publisher I’ve read the most for several years. I went to several of their panels that year. Towards the end of the convention I found the moderator of more than one at the Image booth towards the end of the Con and congratulated him on doing a good job.

I swear, I didn’t remember I wrote this down when I wrote about it in a previous post. I would like to say that a thing Saga and Game of Thrones have in common is that  both have sprawling ensembles whose characters you enjoy on their own only to be shocked by how painful and violent things get when they actually meet. They’re both also anti-war stories set in war times, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say Saga does a better job in not glamorizing the war.

I’m a huge Sex Criminals fan. I have two shirts related to the series, a Sexual Gary one (which you may have noticed I was wearing in the selfies) and more recently a “DON’T WORRY BE WORRY” one that I wore to the first day of Book Con this year specifically to impress Kelly Sue DeConnick. (It worked.)

I only read the first issue of Deadly Class. I had recently read the first trade paperback of writer Rick Remender’s Black Science and hated it.  I thought it was needlessly mean, doing things like killing off a character in the first issue only to have her show up in flashback a few issues later all excited about the mission that already killed her. (There was also something degrading about a dancing humanoid female amphibian.) Nothing in that first issue of Deadly Class made me feel like “this might be better.” I’m just really excited to learn about artists’ models.

Right now that everyone seems underwhelmed by Hawkeye’s role in the MCU, it may be hard to understand, but the Matt Fraction penned Hawkeye series was very hot at the time. It had very little to do with the film version of the character. It was a fairly low key tale of the least powerful Avenger being a mentor and a good neighbor in some trying circumstances. I have a shirt based on this run too.

Part of the regular response is that Vaughan wanted The Will to be a Jason Stathem type. Vaughan also jokes about this being an “all white bald men look the same” describing himself as confusable with fellow comic scribes Grant Morrison and Brian Michael Bendis. I actually agree that he and Morrison do look very similar.

Now I’m wondering how much this inspired the flash forward in which The Will is drug-addled and has gained a lot of weight.

This came up with the example of someone on YouTube reading out loud a then recent issue of Thor to point out how bad the dialogue sounded. I wonder if this caused a controversy that I missed.

So this is the point where I have to write about having a pleasant encounter with someone at NYCC and then finding out about that they’re awful. Shortly after this convention in which Upchurch told charming stories about the difficulties of working from home with small children, he got arrested for domestic violence. He served his sentence, had the crime removed from his record, but was still let go from Rat Queens. (His wife claims the abuse was worse than in the police report and that after completing his sentence he abandoned her and the children, both physically and fiscally.) Stjepan Šejić finished out the arc they we’re working on and Tess Fowler became the series artist. She was fired after one five issue arc and a spin off special. At the time she was let go, she was under the impression that she was going to be replaced by Upchurch. That didn’t end up happening, but the whole thing was pretty devastating. I gave up on Rat Queens, but I still follow Fowler and Šejić. Upchurch recently announced a new series. I won’t be reading that.

I didn’t remember writing this as a tweet when I wrote about this in the previous entry. It’s a sign that one remembers things better if you write about them, even if you don’t remember writing about them.

I really do feel like my autograph hounding has led me to being in a rut while attending conventions.

Let’s talk about Dare2Draw. I’ve spent a lot of time with them, though not recently. It’s an organization that promotes people interested in cartooning and drawing for comics. For a while they would have monthly meetings which consisted of an opportunity to draw cosplaying models doing quick poses, a competition involving how to draw some high concept that you associate with comics. (There was a Godzilla inspired one the first time I went, some other time there was what your pet does when you’re not around. Then there’d be types of gods or villains. It’s a very demanding contest.) There’d be a lecture by a guest artist, examples of whom include Cliff Chiang, Bill Plymton and Russ Braun. There wasn’t a lecture part, just the competition. The category was creating heroic types. I had no idea what to do, did a variation of Casper David Friedrich “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.” I didn’t place, all three of the people who did were women and had much better, more dynamic drawings then I did. I only ever placed, once. I actually won that time. I haven’t been back. I miss it, even the constant losing.

I would have liked to have met Marc Andreyko. I really wanted to publicly support his Batwoman run. It is as much about me being a contrarian as about me being nice. I also like him as a Twitter follower.