Starting tomor­row (which by my cal­cu­la­tions is Tues­day, June 10) we’ll be post­ing offi­cial comic-​type things up here. This mes­sage is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from the non-​official pseudo-comic-type things that came before, which I have now deleted from the site and which have returned into the mys­te­ri­ous ether of Inter­net from which they sprang, never to be seen again. A moment of silence is in order. (Not really.)

Anyway, we’re going to aim for a twice-​weekly update sched­ule, hope­fully Tues­days and Fri­days; how­ever, as the saying goes, Comickin’ Ain’t Easy™, espe­cially for those of us who are com­pletely new to this whole busi­ness. What I’m trying to say here is that things might be a bit rocky at the start. But we’ll try! We’ll try real hard! And isn’t that what truly counts?

What’s that? No? Oh. Damn.

I’m glad to announce that we’ve broken the 20 mil­lion thresh­old! These are magic days, people. We’ll remem­ber them for the rest of our lives.

First decree: I should make an effort to try to some­times think of remotely inter­est­ing things to impart once in a while. (I should say things.) In the mean­time, please point your browsers to the Shoe Blog.

Friday’s comic will be a slight diver­sion from our reg­u­lar comick­ing, as I will be trying my untrained hand at illus­tra­tion. You might call this a “filler strip”; I prefer the phrase “artistic experimentation”.

How­ever you care to refer to it: do not fret. It won’t be a per­ma­nent thing. It won’t even be a fre­quent thing. And rest assured, we will be back to our reg­u­larly sched­uled pro­gram­ming next Tuesday.

Here are a few tid­bits that I’ve been mean­ing to throw up here:

1. Comic-​Con is really soon! Like, next week soon. John and I are both going, which means that we won’t have so much time for comick­ing. We’ll have some­thing for you, but it prob­a­bly won’t be reg­u­lar Chronil­log­i­cal stuff. Never fear—it prob­a­bly won’t be The Mag­i­cal Man, either (unless you people want to see more of him…?)
     
2. We like feed­back! Really, we do! Com­ments are open for a reason, so if you have con­struc­tive crit­i­cism, post away. Plain-vanilla crit­i­cal crit­i­cism would work, too. Heck, I’d even take a vio­lent, raving dia­tribe if some­one cared enough to write one.

   And of course, if you have some­thing pos­i­tive to say, the ol’ self-​esteem bal­loon could always use a little inflat­ing, too.

3. Noth­ing! There is no third thing.

I am writ­ing this to you all from the glass-​walled busi­ness center of the Embassy Suites in down­town San Diego, a place I emphat­i­cally should not be. This is not to say that I have any­thing against San Diego or the Embassy Suites—I don’t—it’s just that I had orig­i­nally been expect­ing to be some­where over Kansas around now. Appar­ently, Jet­Blue had some prob­lems with this plan; rather than scram­bling to find a con­nect­ing flight, I decided to just cool it and take tomorrow’s flight out. I’m in no rush, the hotel room was booked for the extra night anyway, and hey, San Diego’s a pretty nice place.

Anyway: Comic-​Con. It hap­pened. It was excit­ing! It was so excit­ing, in fact, that I com­pletely forgot to take any pic­tures! To make up for this, John will recre­ate the expe­ri­ence for you in astound­ing, jaw-​dropping, col­or­less and sketchy detail. You already got a taste of this last Thurs­day, and you can look for­ward to a little more of it on Tues­day. But to help sati­ate your surely-​excruciating inter­est, I will attempt to sup­ple­ment his visual extrav­a­ganza with a few humble words of my own.

Pre-​Con
I got my first taste of Comic-​Con this year before even arriv­ing in San Diego, as both R. Stevens and Jeph Jacques were on my flight! For a couple of dudes whose web­comics I don’t read, I sure do manage to run into them an awful lot. (By “awful lot”, I mean “twice”—the first time being ROFLCon—and by “run into” I mean “awkwardly stare at from a healthy distance”.) If I keep this up, one of them might even start rec­og­niz­ing me as That Tall Creepy Guy Who Keeps Look­ing at Us. A man can dream, at any rate.

On Wednes­day, John, John’s mom, and I went to see Hell­boy 2. We agreed that it was a very pretty movie. Then we went to pre­view night.

Pre­view night is the night before the con­ven­tion proper, and they open up the exhi­bi­tion hall to let atten­dees roam wide and free. Those who forage suc­cess­fully are rewarded with exclu­sive goods and excit­ing mer­chan­dise. The rest either go mad or are devoured whole by inscrutable cos­play­ers. Hap­pily, I sur­vived, and was rewarded with a set of Final Fan­tasy plush toys. In fact, I’ve had my eye on those damn plushies for the past two years, so I was down­right ecsta­tic to get my grubby paws on them at long last.

We also went to a Star Trek exhibit at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, where I annoyed John per­sis­tently with innu­mer­able dumb ques­tions, found out and promptly forgot what class ship the Enterpirse-C was, and learned from Worf that per­haps today is a good day to die. Good times all around.

Thurs­day

In the inter­est of time and space, I’m going to describe the rest of the con­ven­tion in list format. Any­thing I fail to men­tion will be excluded for one of three rea­sons: (1) it is not inter­est­ing, (2) it has been or will be cov­ered by one of John’s comics, or (3) I forgot about it. But if you’d like me to elab­o­rate on any­thing, you can always just ask.

• Spore: Will Wright gave an excel­lent and intrigu­ing pre­sen­ta­tion, and the game looks fan­tas­tic. It was a little awk­ward, how­ever, when he started talk­ing about Nazi slave camps and the people in front of us wouldn’t stop laughing.
• How to Tell a Story: Exec­u­tive sum­mary: STO­RIES should have CHAR­AC­TERS that DO THINGS.
• Dum­b­rella: More gawk­ing at R. Stevens, but also a bunch of other web­comic artists (and MC Frontalot, too!) and an offi­cially sanc­tioned pre­text within which to exe­cute my gawking.
• Sci­ence of Sci­ence Fic­tion: John went to some Star Trek thing instead of this. What a nerd!

Friday

• Watch­men: I woke up early and wait­ing in line for 2 hours to get into this panel. The movie looks good, but the panel wasn’t worth the bother.
• Intro­duc­tion to Web­comics: This was very much like a live edi­tion of Web­comics Weekly (plus Phil Foglio). I rec­om­mend the pod­cast if you don’t already listen to it.
• Penny Arcade: Mike and Jerry have a great rap­port; if you ever have the oppor­tu­nity to see them in person, seize it!
• MST3K 20th Anniver­sary Reunion: Gah! We missed this! GAH! Miss­ing this panel was by far the biggest dis­ap­point­ment of the con­ven­tion. Every­one from the show was there. Every­one! Now, if they had hosted this event in a bigger room, maybe we could have gotten in. Instead, the Comic-​Con orga­niz­ers decided to use the largest avail­able space to screen Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• Worst Car­toons Ever: I’ve gone to this show every year for the past three years. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s some kind of deep-​seated self-​hate com­plex? Actu­ally, it’s prob­a­bly because of Sam Bas­sett: Hound for Hire, who hap­pens to have a machine gun in his hat.
• Spike and Mike: The Gaunt­let: This year’s batch of ani­ma­tion was weaker than in pre­vi­ous years. But it gives me an oppor­tu­nity to rec­om­mend Lone Sausage’s pro­duc­tions, a peren­nial favorite of the show.

Sat­ur­day

• Quick Draw!: Think Whose Line Is It Anyway? meets illus­tra­tion. Although it’s an annual Comic-​Con event, this was the first time John and I went. Fan­tas­tic stuff. If you ever attend Comic-​Con in the future, def­i­nitely go see it. (Sergio Aragonés in par­tic­u­lar deserves spe­cial men­tion for his excep­tional impro­vi­sa­tional talent.)
• Doll­house: John and I some­how man­aged to squeak into this one. Joss Whedon is a funny little man and I envy him enormously.
• Myth­busters: To avoid miss­ing the Myth­busters and reliv­ing yesterday’s MST3K dis­ap­point­ment, we camped out in room 6B start­ing two panels prior. It was nec­es­sary. Adam and Jamie were greeted like rock stars, and the energy in the room was as explo­sive as the show.
• Riff­Trax Live: One of the biggest and best sur­prises of the trip—at the Balboa The­ater, we got to see Mike Nelson, Bill Cor­bett, and Kevin Murphy do a live riff on Plan 9 from Outer Space! It def­i­nitely helped ease our dis­ap­point­ment over miss­ing the MST3K panel the night before.

Sunday

• Woke Up Late: I slept in until I was woke up with a call from my brother telling me my flight was can­celed. Nice!
• Exhi­bi­tion Hall: My first pur­chases since pre­view night: Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes and A Con­tract with God by Will Eisner.
• Frag­gle Rock: I don’t really watch the show, but John does, and I couldn’t turn down the oppor­tu­nity to see Red Frag­gle live, now could I?

And that’s about it. The hos­pi­tal­ity of Embassy Suites has enabled me to spend the rest of my Sunday after­noon as I invari­ably do, wher­ever in the world I so happen to be: lying some­where, stuff­ing my face and watch­ing movies on TV. Beyond grab­bing a grilled chicken sand­wich at the second-​sketchiest Wendy’s in the world and writ­ing this post—this very one that you are read­ing right now—not much else has happened.

So yeah! That was Comic-​Con. Goooooooooooooooooooood times.