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Those Post-Con Blues Runarounds..

I have bought my children Hello Kitties and Uglydolls. My wife has the Dollhouse DVD. And I have my family back again, so I spent most of today playing with them. Alice is now crawling up stairs at a race of knots, and Eve is just growing up so fast, and she made me a card.

But part of my head is still half a world away and out of synch by eight hours. I love the San Diego Con, its flaws as much as its joys. Choosing the DC or the Marvel side of the Homophobic Hyatt bars – and ending up in the smoking area anyway, even though hardly anyone actually is. I haven't been for four years, but like an unruly nephew it hasn't really changed, it's just grown a bit. And developed acne.

But it's still sad to see it go. Hopefully again next year, after possibly seeing a relative or two, I'll come by again to ruffle its hair and pinch it on the cheek.

A number of booths had stock packaged up after the show, to be collected and shipped to New Mexico for the filming of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's movie Paul, where the booths will be recreated.

Mike Meyer adding to his recent piece on the Digital Comics panels, writes;

Sunday's iPhone panel got hijacked by a surprise guest.   Uclick brought Stan Lee onto the panel to hype the iPhone comic version of "Stripperella."

Rantz Hosely was there, as were a couple of other folks, but nobody really got a word in edgewise as Stan held court, going on and on about how great the book was,  (and promptly clearing one mom attending with her young daughter out of the room), and fielding gushing comments from audience members, to the consternation of people who wanted to know about technical specs, creative considerations, and return on investment for different development approaches.

Turns out, too, that this "big announcement" was kind of late,  the Stripperella comic has been live on the app store for over a week, and appears to have gotten little business, if the number of user reviews is any indication.

In between pronouncements from Stan about the intelligence and social conscience of his PG-13 watered-down stripper superhero story,  they talked about all the difficulties they had adapting to the iPhone format, but it appears that their big difficulty was that their reader software wasn't very good.   Also, in a supreme display of tone-deafness, Uclick is pricing the Stripperella episodes at $2.99.  I think they have 2 issues in them, but still they are more expensive than other e-comics.   About what I'd expect from a newspaper syndicate.

The other big announcement they had was some upcoming contests for new cartoonists, with the price being representation on UClick/Universal Press Syndicate.   The value of this price is, of course, somewhat dubious —  offer a price of being the replacement for one of those 70 year old zombie strips you still run in 1400 papers, and then I'll listen.  The online play that UPS has is pretty weak, as they have added lots of new strips that will never reach a newspaper, and aren't really well-publicized.  You might as well sign with Keenspot to get noticed, far more Keenspot alumni are making a living from their work.

One of the bizarrer promotions at San Diego was from Electronic Arts which decided to reward people for posting evidence of them hassling "booth babes" or basically anyone female working at the convention. Now some of the specially hired models may consider this part of their job, but some of the publishers staff or creators may not have felt so inclined. I really hope they didn't try and pull it on Martha Thomases, she'd have had them in a headlock.

However, the flipside of this story is that the acceptance of nudity over violence was terribly gratiying this year. Pirates were unable to pose for photos with their plastic cutlasses out, however there were fair few topless cosplay costumes, a couple of which were on purpose, but there were cosplay wardrobe errors aplenty and in the Homophobic Hyatt bar on Sunday, there was at least one bottomless display which drew a small crowd.

I understand that Darick Robertson and Ben Templesmith, quite innocently found themselves on the end of a harranging from a Famous American Writer on the Sunday night. No one is still quite sure what it was all about. Darick is however behind a poster and online campaign for Parisiene ply A Suivre!

And in my abscence, there were all sorts of nice reviews of Doctor Who: A Room With A Deja View. Here are a few of my favourites.

Wednesday Comics seems to be a real hit and retailers have switched from being terribly dubious about the format to demanding DC put out all sorts of other comic books like that Although it odd that the "dedicated to" credit on the preview art for issue 1 posted on the DCU Blog, the Source, switched from Archie Goodwin and Alex Toth, to just Goodwin in the actual published issue, and from then on for subsequent issues… it seemed an odd change.

Marvel have been pushing the Marvel Retailers Resources Center program to comic stores, which is a website that, for a monthly subscription fee, you can access for approved artwork and sneak peeks for retailers. One of the big selling points of this is a website for your shop that automatically gets updated with Marvel information. Recently they changed the URL format for that website, to basically nameofshop.marvelretailers.com. And they had a free trial. So which retailers that have taken this up after the trial ended? Well, it's not that many. Common Marvel haunts MidTown and Jim Hanley haven't. The paid up stores seems to be Lone Star Comics, Heroes, Horizon , Impulse, Newcastle, Comics To Astonish, Italy Comics and Paper Escape.

Any more for any more? Can you find yours?

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