odds and ends: cincinnati comic expo 2012

Fast becoming an annual geek tradition, I’ll be spending Saturday and Sunday at the Cincinnati Comic Expo.

As regional comic shows go, the CCE has been growing like crazy in the past three years and 2012 promises to be the biggest yet. The Guest of Honor include four of the artists (Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, Thomas Yeates) who worked with Alan Moore on Saga of the Swamp Thing, a comic I loved as a teenager. It’s a nice get for the show and I’m looking forward to getting all four gentlemen to sign my hardcover collection of these comics.

Geoff Darrow is also going to be in attendance at the show. Darrow’s probably best known for his work with Frank Miller on Hard Boiled or his own creation, The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. Back in 1995, I met Darrow at a comic convention in New York where he signed a “suitable for framing” poster print for me.

Now, this print’s been through a LOT in the past seventeen years. It’s hung on walls in Western New York, Boston, and Ohio. Ellen and I hung it on Elliot’s wall when he was a baby! I’m pretty attached to it, and my kids are too. I’m hoping I can get Darrow to add Elliot and Henry’s names to mine at the margin at the bottom.

Of course, those of you who read here regularly already know, the real reason I like going to comic shows is the shopping; those dollar back issue bins are like catnip for me. I’ve also a few “holy grail” comics I’ve been looking to acquire for years. They’re always ridiculous things though, with no real monetary value. For example, this CCE, I’m hoping to locate a copy of DC Comics Presents #67

…the issue where Superman teams up with Santa Claus. I realize that is a pathetic “holy grail” but it fits perfectly within my spectrum of interests, no?

I will, no doubt, regale you with my finds next week.

odds and ends: cincinnati comic expo, bunheads

Hey hey, final announcements have been made about the guest roster for the 2012 Cincinnati Comic Expo.

I’ve attended the CCE for all of its’ short history and enjoyed myself more each year as the con gets more ambitious. This year, the convention has expanded to two days worth of programming, and they’ve announced an interesting rosters of guests.

This year’s Guests of Honor are Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Thomas Yeates, all artists who worked on DC Comics’ seminal Saga of the Swamp Thing during Alan Moore’s tenure as writer. The Saga of the Swamp Thing trades loom large in my reading as a teenager; I still have my weather-beaten paperbacks of those comics in my library, having too much sentiment for them to ever have traded up to the nice hardcover collections DC has been publishing in recent years.

Of the four guys, I’m pretty interested to speak with Bissette, whose crazy-beautiful dinosaur comic Tyrant was something I read to pieces in the 1990′s.

I wish I was more excited about meeting Dave Dorman, a fantasy/sci-fi painter whose art I really admired as a teenager. He did a lot of work for Dark Horse Comics‘ Aliens comic book franchise… and we all know how I feel about Aliens. His painted illustrations for Aliens: Tribes set the bar for how I imagine those creatures. Earlier this year, Dorman made a couple of exceedingly strange statements with which I didn’t agree and they  soured my enthusiasm a bit about the painter. I suppose I should try to divorce my feelings about the artist from his art?

At any rate, I’m already starting to look forward to the weekend and tentatively planning on bringing Elliot and Henry.

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 You all know I’m a fan of Gilmore Girls, right? The dramedy aired on various networks from 2000-2007 is a favorite, despite my possessing a fully functional set of male genitalia. The character interactions, the fast-paced dialogue, the soapy dramatic plotlines… I would never have pegged myself as a GG fan when it first hit the airwaves, but by God, I loved it later and miss it now.

As far as I’m concerned, GG creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has a lifetime pass from me. Any show she creates, I will check out. I cannot commit to watching those shows blindly (The Return of Jezebel James was a trainwreck I bailed on as quickly as the FOX network) but I will sample. So it is I found myself watching Bunheads on ABC Family this past Monday.

The show is even less male-friendly than GG, which I would have thought was mathematically impossible… but ASP found a way. It focuses (so far) on a small town dance studio. Bunheads features a lot of the hallmarks I so loved about Gilmore Girls. Quirky characters and lightning fast conversation peppered with pithy allusions to popular culture abound. The pilot episode takes an abrupt turn into maudlin in its’ final minutes, but there was enough to like about Bunheads to offer a tentative recommendation. I’ll be tuning in this Monday to see where it goes.