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SDCC 2021 Announcement

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Tuesday, 22 March 2016 00:03

WonderCon 2016: Bring it on, L.A.

Just four days to check-in at the Omni Los Angeles, kittens! Dr. Lucy and Yours Truly are headed north and changing hotels for the weekend so we can cover all the geeky, gooey goodness of WonderCon 2016 (March 25 - 27, L.A. ConvCtr) just for you, fair reader! Playing under the bright lights of Hollywood (well, H-town adjacent), especially after the Con doors close, brings a splash of glamour to this year's WC that, as much as we love The O.C. (Psst, don't call it that.), Anaheim just cannot provide.

After-hours at any comic convention can get weird. Saturday night at WonderCon 2015 found our Wednesday Addams in quite the weird situation, indeed.

 

 

Like Waldo, something was missing, or at least hiding adeptly, this year at WonderCon Anaheim (WCA, Anaheim Convention Center April 3-5, 2015). Maybe something was amiss on the con floor: no behemoth media structures; no celeb sightings; no multi-screen overload; no roaming camera crews from the big-news outlets. Maybe something was amiss outside: no hordes of the gawking, general public, curious shutterbugs or looky-loos. Then again, maybe nothing was amiss and I misread the whole situation. Whatever occurred, as satisfying as WCA2K15 eventually turned out to be, something intangible was mislaid; and its absence left an energy-void, and not just for Yours Truly.

Holy moly, Hellboy!! This year was a close one! If you read my Adventures in WonderCon post, you will have noted the tint of sadness that came with realizing WonderCon Anaheim (WCA) was it for the year; the Comic-Con Badge Quest Slaughter of 2014 had left Dr. Lucy and myself emotionally exhausted and near expiration, with little hope of survival on the Con battlefield. Yet, like a Phoenix, rising from Arizona -wait, that doesn't sound right- we mustered every cell of life that remained, gathered our courage and cerebral weaponry and ... huzzah! With two weeks to spare, we parried and riposted our way into San Diego Comic-Con!

 

Picture it ... early-morning Saturday, March 15, 2014: San Diego Comic-Con Badge Quest

  • 6:00a.m. Awakened ceremoniously with rousing rendition of John Williams' Star Wars Theme, performed by Boston Pops
  • 6:15  Fully awake, finally, after repeats of Star Wars Theme
  • 6:20  Espresso
  • 6:30  Text cohorts in NorCal, registration codes and Member IDs ready to go
  • 6:35  Re-read official CCI email re: SDCC badge-sale
Remember, there is no need to rush to the landing page at 7:00 AM! You can enter the waiting room two hours before the sale begins [ at 9:00 AM] or 10 minutes before the sale begins, and your chances are the same. Your wait time is up to you!

So, for those whom did not make it to San Diego Comic-Con this year, or did and unwisely tossed your official Souvenir Guide, my odd wordsmithing made it into the book once again! This year's is a favourite thus far: article and Souvenir Guide in toto.

Sandman, the cover art commemorating twenty-five years of Neil Gaiman's Gothic oeuvre, has hit my radar anew, having not read it since the glorious, gloomy, gringy Nineties. After reading the Sandman articles and delighting in the accompanying gorgeous and ghoulish artwork, The Annotated Sandman has made my very particular birthday and Christmas lists: as there are multiple volumes, it is worthy of both.

 

For now, enjoy a posting here of Bartbarians at the Gate: 20 Years of Bongo on the Digital Frontier.

 

Bartbarians at the Gate: 20 Years of Bongo on the Digital Frontier

By Jennifer Susannah Devore

 

‘Cause he’s an old [comic junkie] and he don’t know what to do.

Should he hang on to the old, should he grab on to the new?

He’s an old [comic junkie], this new life is just a bust.

He ain't trying to change nobody, he's just trying real hard to adjust.

 

-David Bellamy

November spawned an empire. Like an impatient, petulant newborn, Bongo Entertainment spewed forth, squealing and sliding into our arms like a greased up Spiderpig. Present in the room for the birth were Radioactive Man, Bart Simpson, Itchy & Scratchy and, naturally, The Simpsons. Waiting in the hallway, anxious friends and family would queue up for years to administer the requisite welcome-slap on the bum: Bender, Comic Book Guy, Leela, Professor Frink, Ralph Wiggum, Fry, Li’l Homer, Zoidberg, Maggie, Poochie, Mr. Burns, Akbar & Jeff, all the denizens of Treehouse of Horror and dozens more.

“Welcome to the world of print comics, you magnificent bastard!” the masses cried outside the gates. “It’s about time!”

 

Geeks Get Published: it sounds obvious. At first blush, with the exception of folks like Snooki, the Fifty Shades of Grey author and Penthouse letters, who else do you imagine is getting published? Mostly geeks, that's who! Bookworms, academicians, poetry goths, art nerds, amateur scholars, film dorks, scientists, comic book enthusiasts, pop culture obsessives, military buffs and historical reënactors are busily scribbling, publishing and selling the most important theses and musings of all: their own.

With a plethora of visual outlets today, it takes a geek to stick with the romance of the written word, I know. It takes a geek to write anything today, even a Thank You note. The real trick is not getting a geek published ... it's getting a geek read. All those non-geeks roaming the planet, unaware as they are of being thiiiis close to mankind's discovery of the God particle, have a Black Hole's worth of activity to keep them occupied without cracking a book. Authors' efforts are being slaughtered like Britons at the hands of marauding Vikings, slaying and slicing with a force of diversions no other generation of writers has ever suffered. Sure, it was probably easy for Chaucer to be a best-seller. What else was there to do in the Medieval era? Everybody just waiting around to die from a splinter, plus everything was dark by four o'clock. Today? It's never dark.

The Wild West of 1850s southern California never saw WonderCon coming. Originally an agricultural collective of pious, German farmers and vintners, Victorian Anaheim would have plotzed at the site of The Joker, Jawas, Hobbacca and G-stringed Supergirls crossing Katella and Harbor, headed into their Anaheim Convention Center. Although, he might have appreciated some of the more inventive steampunk costuming, 1857 co-founder George Hansen must have just come to grips with Disneyland when WonderCon steamed into town last year. This year, it descended upon the O.C. once again and, if Hansen's ghost gets his wish, it should be headed back up north, to San Francisco's Moscone Center for 2014. If the rest of us get our wish, parent company Comic-Con International will permanently add this southern substitute, WonderCon Anaheim, to its regular menu des plaisirs.

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