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Season of Mists Buy from tfaw.com

The Sandman just keeps getting more and more ambitious. As grand as I think Season of Mists is (I always remembered it to be one of my favorites) it fell a little short for me this time around. The set pieces and characters that appear seem to be more the point than the actual story.

We meet the rest of the Endless (minus Destruction) and Dream is goaded into saving Nada from Hell. I think Death’s statement of “That’s a really shitty thing to do” is a vast understatement.

Once in Hell, Dream finds it empty, and Lucifer (and I suppose, Gaiman) makes grand speeches before abandoning his post. I think there are some good points here, but it does feel a little clunky. Comic books – even highly literate ones – are about the combination of words and images and there’s just too many words and too little action.

As other pantheons pursue the Key to Hell, we get to meet a bunch of old god and goddess and entities. All of this is fun and feels pretty well educated. It expands on the seeds of story Gaiman began to build in earlier volumes. The story itself is more dramatic than action-packed, and the resolution is basically a deus ex machina (although in a somewhat self-aware way – it doesn’t quite build to an outcome the way I expected). While there was no really another way for it to end, the build-up does sort of fizzle out.

Thus far, I think artistically, this is the most uneven of the Sandman volumes. A half-dozen artists worked on these eight issues and there are some definite color issues in my version. I can only hope they will be improved in the Absolute version (which I still can’t afford, of course).

Beneath it all, the interpersonal drama is entertaining. It’s great to see the Endless interact – Gaiman famously said when asked if he regarded the Endless to be a “dysfunctional family” than he’d never seen a “functional family.” As archetypes, they’re a lot of fun. The various gods from various cultures are treated playfully and Gaiman gives you credit for being smart.

(I love Chapter 4 with Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. Gaiman writes about childhood like no one else can, capturing how overwhelming and scary it can be.)

I don’t think Seasons of Mist quite lives up to the “big” story it wanted to be, but it’s epic and entertaining nonetheless. While Dream Country is where The Sandman found its voice, Seasons of Mist is where it found its pacing. It could be a medium to tell big, unwieldy stories than dragged in every culture it could. I think, as a smart teenager, that’s what I loved the most about The Sandman. I think that’s still what I love the most about it.

(And I may have used Hob’s toast a few times while signing yearbooks in high school.)

Everyone wants to be an action hero. We sit in traffic wishing we were chasing after the bad guys in a fast car or daydream about sneaking away from the enemy while we stare at computer screens all day.

Everyone has these fantasies. Apparently even people who start successful media and gambling companies.

Ayre Force puts Calvin Ayre, the founder of Bodog Entertainment, into the role of leader of a special ops team — who are, unsurprisingly, also members of the Bodog Entertainment group. They are pitted in a life and death battle against evil pharmaceutical tycoon Janus Winter and his genetically modified children.

To say this is a vanity project may be an understatement — obviously, it’s designed as a promotional product for Bodog and those the company represents (there are helpful biographies in the back about who everyone is in real life). It felt like an extended advertisement in a magazine to me and not really something I’d buy on its own (I received a copy of this to review).

But once I got past that, this is pretty much fun. This isn’t a work of high art, but it’s as entertaining, if not more so, than any typical action movie. While plenty of other stories have dealt with the duality of being a secret agent, the idea that people who are “famous” also working as special ops is a neat one and works well here. Why not pick people who already know how to fight and are sneaky?

Shawn Martinbourough’s art is slick and commercial and suits the project well. It’s a little generic but screams “comic book” and his fight scenes are surprisingly kinetic. Writers Adam Slutsky and Joseph Phillip Illidge are basically creating a silly action movie but the writing didn’t make me feel stupid. The contributions of color artists Andrew Dalhouse and Felix Serrano actually bring quite a bit to the book, filling scenes with hot reds and oranges for battles and cool blues and greens for more dramatic parts.

Messages against animal exploitation and dangers of genetic engineering do give the book a more “high-minded” purpose. Combined with the fact that proceeds are going to the Calvin Ayre Foundation, this at least strives to be a little bit more than a goofy comic.

Still, the appeal of this is limited. If you’re a fan of these poker players, mixed martial arts fighters or musicians, maybe this is worth reading (Bif Naked was the only one of the bunch I’d heard of, so I will allow that most of the fun of this was lost on me). For most everyone else, though, Ayre Force is probably nothing more than an amusing but ignorable novelty.

Right now, it’s all kind of a blur. I was in New York for less than 24 hours, feeling rather tired, it was hot (as everyone has mentioned) and I was basically being fueled by coffee.

But it was a ton of fun, despite all of that. MoCCA puts on a wonderful show.

I loved that everyone was handed a Forbidden Planet bag as they walked in the door. One of the oft-heard complaints at Small Press Expo is that there were no bags. When you start accumulating mini-comics and books, you need a bag.

They are different shows and certainly there’s a lot of crossover, but MoCCA is clearly much more of a New York show than SPX. The exhibitors there seemed to have a bit more range, seemed to be a little more ambitious. What I’ve read so far of what I bought confirms this. The difference is subtle but it’s there.

The day was capped with a visit to the Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Musuem. And then exhaustion.

I’m happy I went. It was quite a whirlwind but a delightful one nonetheless. This is one of the vaguest, most nondescript accounts of MoCCA I’m sure you’ve read. More will come back to me as I go through what I bought (I basically just walked up to tables, picked something up and paid for it. I was nearly at the point where I didn’t remember who I’d bought from and who I hadn’t).

But yes, I would go again. I hope next year it won’t be the hottest day ever.

No, seriously, due to a wild storm system, most of the apartment is without power. I work tomorrow, will be at MoCCA art fest through Sunday (then work) and the XO is really hard to type on (it was designed for children, after all) and the uh, “borrowed” wifi connection is slow.

All of this is to say there will be no Revisit of The Sandman tomorrow. My notes aren’t in a Google document and I don’t think I have the patience to recreate the whole thing tonight or tomorrow.

I think I’ll just skip this week and get back on track next week. Expect an awesome report on MoCCA on Monday.

It’s always great to go to a new city and only see the inside of a convention center.

Wizard World Philly was fun, although not for the reasons they intended it to be. Mostly, I enjoyed hanging out with Tim. The actual show itself wasn’t of much interest to me.

I know great deals are to be had, but with the Internet, tracking down that specific T-shirt of whatever obscure character or buying a light-up samurai sword is pretty easy. I don’t really have the patience to hunt through boxes of single-issues of comics — but then, I’m a pretty bad collector as things go.

Those Robert Tonner dolls are undeniably gorgeous. I’ve been told that they are and I always thought they looked wonderful in the photos. But they’re incredible in person. They’re the sort of dolls that make me think “$100? That’s a great deal for that!” Sadly, the Harley Quinn doll didn’t get to come home with me because good deal or no, I didn’t have $100 to spend. It did make me happy to see that plenty of people were buying them, though.

The wrestlers that I saw at the autograph alley looked pretty bored.

I was fairly disappointed with Artists Alley. I understand that Wizard World is not Small Press Expo, but the overabundance people selling drawings and painting of superheroes was tiresome. I suppose that’s what most people were there to buy, but it was boring to me. There were a few people doing their own thing — such as Tim’s neighbor, Melissa Diaz (and I’m delighted for no particular reason to see she’s a MICA grad) — but they were rare.

I was also shocked and disappointed to see that no one was crowding around David Petersen’s table, but I suppose that this wasn’t really the crowd for Mouse Guard.

Mostly, I sat with Tim at his table. Women really like his art and in the time I was there, the majority of the people who bought his prints were women. One seemed pretty starstruck by him and his work and that was fun.

A lovely black woman took him to task — in a playful way — for his work featuring mostly white women. Tim said he’s wanted to have more diverse models but it’s hard since he lives out in the middle of nowhere and people usually don’t want to come out to him. The woman liked Tim’s style, but she said it wasn’t something she’d feel comfortable hanging up in her house, but she’d be happy to if something like “Titania” featured a black model.

(A lot of Tim’s work has been for book covers where the art directors are looking for specific things, which does account for some of the models he’s used.)

Being a skinny white girl (who is featured in a few of Tim’s works. You can find them. They’re there), it’s not something I’ve thought too much about with his work, so it was interesting to hear her perspective. I think we all want media to reflect who we are and how we perceive ourselves and when it doesn’t, it can be alienating.

The crowd was mostly young white men with a few families and young women scattered in. I remember the crowd at Baltimore Comic Con last year being more diverse, but Wizard seems to have little shame about appealing to a particular demographic. Still, I think 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, there weren’t have been that many women there. Tim said he even has noticed a change in the few years he’s been going to shows.

I probably wouldn’t go to another Wizard World con and I only went to this because Tim was there, but it was still a good time.

Next week, due to insanity, I will be at the MoCCA Art Festival, which is probably the dark mirror image of Wizard World. I look forward to it.