Category Archives: Log

C2E2: Where is DC?

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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.

C2E2: Thrillbent and Comixology Panel

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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.

C2E2: DC Panel

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The Q&A is less about DC rah-rah and more about DC not having a show-floor presence, a don’t-wanna-be-dead Damian Wayne, and fans expressing irritation on DC’s musical chair design for writers and artists in their titles. Mostly it’s back-pedaling and affable excuse mumbling. It’s not pretty.

At least they’ll be coming out with a story about trillionaire teenagers, because flogging that trope has a oodles of miles left in it. L.O.L. 😉

Use Drafts, Dumbass!

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Turns out blogging with the iPhone has a hidden trap. Turn the phone to landscape orientation and you run the risk of accidentally sending your blog post and then you have to mop up in the WordPress app. Duuuur.

Then you remember you have Drafts app and smack your forehead with how dumb you were in not using it in the first place!

Fixed that… 😉

C2E2: Digital Comic Panel

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Attending a panel from a company called iVerse about Digital Comics. Lots of talk about price points, acknowledging the 800 pound silverback in the room, Apple, and talking about digital libraries. Social networking is still the red-headed stepchild, phrases like “… Twitter, whatever.” which I find *hilarious*.

What I find really interesting is when these digital comics will become so mainstream that they feel comfortable moving forward with a Netflix model where you pay a monthly fee and can access as much as you like.

Now we’ve entered the dimly lit world of licensing versus ownership, flooding, fire, or company collapse. How can you secure your digital goods if you lose access one way or another? Thinking about this topic with some of the things I’ve experienced in my professional life you would just need a source-escrow agreement so when the company fails, the content you purchased is made available to you in an open format. This doesn’t exist now, but it could.

PAD 4/13/2013 – Charitable

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PAD 4/13/2013

Daily Prompt: Charitable
by michelle w.
You’ve inherited $5 million, with instructions that you must give it all away — but you can choose any organizations you like to be the beneficiaries. Where does the money go?

The money would not go to any charitable organization. I find the notion of charitable organizations to be inherently wasteful with overhead. Everyone gets a cut of the money and when the funds get to the people with the need, after everyone has their piece of the action there isn’t much left. I’ve thought of this before, and the best thing I can think of is to better lives and keep them that way with an eye to permanence. To that end, the best destination for money like this is to create trusts for people, lock the principal money off and only allow those whom I bestow with the benefits access to the interest earned from the principal fund. This as a permanent thing wouldn’t be wise either, so I would put a 30 year timing lock on the principal, after 30 years the entire principal becomes available to the beneficiary, hopefully by then they have enough wisdom to not squander it.

Plus a construct like this helps fend off the law of found money. If all you get is a constant trickle then the law may not notice you and you likely won’t suffer for the gift. That’s the double-edged sword of giving. The law of found money punishes everyone.

PAD 4/10/2013 – Imperfection

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PAD 4/10/2013

Daily Prompt: Imperfection
by michelle w.
Imperfections — in things, in people, in places — add character to life. Tell us about an imperfection that you cherish.

Imperfections abound. I can’t help but wax philosophical as it was the first thing to come to mind when I saw this particular prompt. Which imperfection do I find the most valuable? Our imperfect understanding of the Universe. Yes, as I said, it’s huge and bold and monumental. If we knew exactly how the Wizard did what he did behind the curtain would life be as rich as is it for us now? Not knowing everything keeps room for the mysteries alive. There are so many little mysteries that would wither and die if we had the keys to the Grand Unified Theory. If we could explain everything then there would be no room for fancy and imagination. Sometimes I think that there really isn’t a Grand Unified Theory, because the Universe loathes certainty. If there is no room for gnomes, dwarves, manitou, brownies, or fairies then there is no room for beauty and who would want to live in a world like that? I suppose it’s the romantic part of me that rejects the notion of the Universe as a marvelously complicated clockwork. If we could pin down a Grand Unified Theory then we could exorcise randomness from everything. How agonizingly banal would it be when we had a rule that fit every single observation perfectly? Sometimes I think that if there is a God, he’s spending his time keeping us guessing because that’s how he expresses his love for us. Keeping us on our toes, always guessing, always learning, always marveling at the mysteries that lay before us, in a way, our imperfect understanding is the fertile soil of the true beauty we are seeking. A wild and wonderful world where the rules are just beyond our grasp constantly challenges and enjoins us to engage with it. That striving for the Grand Unified Theory is actually our goal, not actually attaining it, but pursuing it. Endlessly.

It’s important for it to be this way, where else could the fairies go if it wasn’t?

PAD 3/13/2013 – “I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”

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PAD 3/13/2013 – Silver Screen

Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the title of your post. Now, write!

“I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”

Without a doubt my favorite movie of all time is Airplane. Anyone who knows me really should watch and learn because that movie is one of the best and funniest movies that has ever been made. There are so many kinds of comedy expressed in that movie that it makes me giggle uncontrollably even just recalling some of them. The quote from Lloyd Bridges, playing McCroskey is just one of many, but it’s one of the most useful especially for me at work. There are times when work tries me so much that the escalating substance abuse lines that McCroskey says during the movie accurately reflect much of my emotional state of disbelief that I endure while at work. Whenever I’m feeling down, or when happiness just seems a little out of reach I’ll play this movie for myself and I always feel so much better afterwards.

I wrote before about how blogging is kind of like therapy. So are the movies, especially this movie. The ability to laugh is essential and laughter is much like a hug from a loved one. To quote one of the best lines from one of my favorite TV series, which is Pushing Daisies, a hug is like an emotional heimlich maneuver. It grabs you and helps you eject awful feelings and makes life better. Laughing while hugging? Why, yes! Better than any drug!

PAD 4/4/2013 – The Transporter

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Tell us about a sensation — a taste, a smell, a piece of music — that transports you back to childhood.

I’ve written about nostalgia before. The scent of WD-40 enables me to recall my very early life, when I was about five years old. The scent of this product is indelibly linked with my maternal grandfather and every time I catch it’s scent a part of my consciousness returns back to when I was five, sitting in my grandfathers lap playing with his miniature train set that was set up in his root cellar. It’s quite difficult for me to access those memories without WD-40, so it’s become a part of a ritual when I use WD-40. I always find time when I have to use WD-40 to dwell on the unlocked memories and in a way, bring my long passed on grandfather back to me now. In many ways, the people that we loved and lost are always with us, in this limited way. I suppose in one way of considering it, it’s through WD-40 that my grandfather has a rough semblance of immortality, at least in my consciousness.

There are also other strong memories, but they are linked to places and mundane situations by exceptional events. I remember, for example, exactly where I was and what I was feeling and seeing when the Challenger accident occurred as well as when the 9/11/2001 event occurred. They are unremarkable memories only made important because of their bound events keeping them “alive” in my memory. Not really worth writing about, at least not in the context of WD-40 and my grandfather.