This is the C2E2 Live Stage. They do a open chat panel about different topics or spotlights on actors or guests to the con. There are a lot of chairs available and a lot of open space in the corner of the hall.
Sitting down and enjoying a little spot of breakfast. Which is mostly snack-based, but healthy snacks. Like roasted almonds, cheese snacks, and purified water.
It’s only just begun! A view along Artists Alley for all you dear readers. It is slightly low press, as compared to previous years, which is remarkable and somewhat less distracting. Which I like.
Also, today is brought to you by trolley and bungee: 
BCW, Braunschweiger, Copernicus, and Wittgenstein. Classic names in comics.
I’m going to liveblog throughout the con for as long as WiFi, LTE, and the Good Folk of the Battery Blessing Way are with me.
The hotel, the Hyatt Regency at McCormick is quite good. The bathroom is a little haha and the lack of plugs only demonstrates that they don’t really understand technical people. Also, the power plugs by the bedside are switched with the primary room lights, so, your phone charging and the doofy little alarm clock they give you are functionless if you turn the main lights off by the door. It’s not a feature, its a mistake. But how do you fix it? Rewire the joint. LOL. Nah. It’s not worth it.
Soon we’ll migrate down to the queue lounge and wait in line from 8am to 10am. Then the con starts at 10am, and it’s an instant hustle for some. Some to artists alley, some to exhibitors, some just because it’s the way of the con. I’m going for social support for Scott. Plus it gives me a chance to keep on trying to catch up with my comic reading.
Just re-watched Avengers Infinity War. Everyone’s dead! Yaaaay!
Obviously this is comic book universe. Don’t be upset. Everyone is dead. They do that all the time. Existence in comic books is a flippity-floppity timey-wimey ball of faff.
It sells comic books. But not nearly so many as what happens next.
And you thought the ending to Dallas was absurd. Oh honey. You should sit down. LOL.
While I’ve been enjoying Chicago, and we’ve been pretty much carless the entire time with the Santa Fe parked in the hotels parking structure and taking Uber rides everywhere it has done nothing to reduce the nightmares that I suffer every night sleeping in this place.
Car Theft.
These nightmares are riffs on a theme, different thieves, different cars, different lives, different settings. Cars without wheels, somehow rolling away, cars without any internal parts whatsoever operating as if they had them. Thieves that are anonymous or thieves that are caught but chatty occupy the dreamscape.
I’ve had three cycles of sleep here, and in each cycle, the same exact thing. My vehicle is stolen. When I try to stop the thieves, they explain to me that it has to be this way, that it always has to be this way.
And while I’ve had a delightful time at C2E2, I am going to welcome my exit from this place. I can’t stay in Chicago much longer, if nothing more that I can’t endure many more of these nightmares every single night, like clockwork.
Just updated my Comixology app on my iPad and overhauled my password so I could login. I knew I wasn’t going to find the same app I remember, and I had issues with that one as well. So in we go, talk about a chop-job. I found all the comics I bought, 252 of them, yah, and then on a lark I went looking on how to buy a new comic book. No store that I could find, just a search panel. Searched for Marvel and found all of that, went looking for DC and couldn’t find them. Searched for New 52 and found some titles. So, no more shelf-appeal or browsing titles. Okay.
Then there is the lack of in-app purchasing. Yeah, they are. Owned by Amazon now, so no more of that. Have to go on Amazon to buy the comics. Nope. I don’t like Amazon and it’s a matter of monopoly aversion in my consumer psyche. I do not like Amazon any longer. They are too big, too invasive, and too damaging to people in general. How Amazon treats their workforce is a lot like how Walmart treats theirs. Once Costco opens up here in Kalamazoo, we won’t ever be going back to Sams Club. I won’t ever be going back to Amazon or Comixology.
So, online comics are back to the Stone Age. I’m glad that there are long boxes downstairs with copies of all the comics now lost to me on Comixology. When I have money again, it’s back to the Comic Book Store with me. Comixology’s sell-out was the kiss of death. Amazon won’t be and can’t be controlled. They need to be shunned. If not by everyone, at least this household. There are more considerations on where you buy something beyond the “low price leader”, especially if that leader is a morally and ethically bankrupt monopolistic ravening monster.
Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.
The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.
The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.
Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.
I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.
While sitting in listening to the Comixology staff hawk their Submit technology, which is quite nice to see especially for independent comic book creators there was a point raised at the end of the panel by one of the attendees. That some people are hesitant to engage with digital comic books because they perceive their purchases not as licensing but rather as chattel. When I buy an issue of Comic X for $1.99 in paper, I have that comic and I can put it somewhere safe and always go back and enjoy it. What then for the digital comics? What if Comixology collapses? This touches more than just comics and the real discussion is actually cloud escrow. Cloud services could collapse at any time taking their content with them, right down the drain. Evernote, Dropbox, Comixology, and even Google itself could founder and collapse leaving behind a smoking corpse and no way for customers to retain the data they consider as theirs.
The industry has perhaps accidentally selected this as a possibility by only conducting business in a cloud infrastructure way, it’s a thin veil on digital rights management — a way for content creators to secure their goods for sale (DRM) without driving away their customers, that veil works quite well. Except for when things utterly fail. What happens when fail comes to call?
When this fear pops up in other, more serious business discussions there is usually a section devoted to source code escrow services from escrow surety companies. So is there room for cloud escrow services in today’s world? Would that be enough to help keep people feel safer so that they would presumably give digital comic books a chance?
I can’t deny that this could be a great niche for a middleman company to step up and offer a kind of data presence insurance. The cloud products you buy are safe, permanently so, not by the companies that fail, but by the escrow service that vouchsafes the data in question.
What’s to keep the escrow service safe? This may be a irreducible hall-of-mirrors. There may be no way for people to feel absolutely safe until content is delivered in an open non-DRM format. I seriously doubt that DRM will go anywhere soon, so this may all have to be sidelined as an argument for some other time.
What started out as a blog post about escrow services has apparently turned into a railing against DRM. There may be no way out of the argument over DRM. It all comes down to “Who do you trust?” And “Can you?”.
A disturbing thought occurred to me this morning. In regards to DC and their lack of show-floor presence at C2E2. When you come to a convention like this, it’s your best opportunity to connect with your fans, otherwise known as your customers. The usual way to do this is to have some prefab construction that your fans can spot and congregate around. Marvel, Dark Horse Studios and the three big tee-shirt companies Graphitti, Stylin Online, and SuperheroStuff. No DC presence at all on the trade show floor. When asked about this, DC stated that they wanted to engage in the panels and let their artists engage in Artists Alley.
I can understand the logic, but It seems rather remarkable and upsetting. Marvel brought their A game with a big beautiful HDTV with Avengers on a play-loop. DC? They didn’t even come to the game, let alone bring anything for us. They are still giving things away, as is the custom, but only in the panels. It’s fine really, but indicates a disturbing new take on how DC considers conventions and fan/customer relations.
What occurred to me that pushed my worry buttons even harder was the way DC is treating their writers and artists. I call it DC’s Musical Chairs for their creative staff. This upsets the fans because you like how a story is being told and how it’s being illustrated and after a few issues things change. This points to DC turning their creative staff into a commodity pool. You have X random writer and X random artist and they seem to be selected by dartboard or roulette wheel. Ignoring the convention goers by abandoning the trade show floor shows a mark of carelessness that only gets reinforced by the musical chairs. Who cares who writes Superman? Who cares if he’s made of teeny triangles, stick figures, or photo-realistic styles? DC doesn’t. This turns their conventions and their creatives into commodities, just another rude list of ingredients which lowers the art down to mechanistic pablum to seed fandoms and sell movie tickets.
I say rude because this squandering of talent and respect is eroding the brand identity. Marvel is making off with all the jewels. Our attention is on Marvel, on The Avengers, not on DC, Green Lantern (movie flop) or, and here’s the real obnoxiousness, where is Superman?!? You’ve taken a archetypal hero (he is now, everyone recognizes superman) and squandered him. The Man of Steel movie comes out in a few weeks! What are your fans thinking? We’re thinking about Marvel, The Avengers, and Iron Man 3.
Superman didn’t show up.
This was an error DC. You are sliding down the drain and eventually your fans will wander away. I only hope this sort of concern, and the reasons for it are just a blunder, never to be repeated.
Today I learned about a new comic book site hosted by Mark Waid. The site is called thrillbent.com and I’m quite interested in taking a deeper look. I asked Scott about Mr. Waid and if I’d like his work and he said “Duh, yes. You’ll love him.”
After the digital comics first panel and a recent look at the @comixology app I feel it is only fair and appropriate to blog about how they have improved because they definitely have.