Comic Con 2010 is over and I have cast my vote for the fictitious “Bad Ass Mamma-Jamma Booth of the Year” award. Since I am the only voter in said academy, the winner is booth #2010! AMC television’s The Walking Dead set (a six-episode series based on the comic book written by Robert Kirkman). It’s not every day you can take the kids out for a stroll and pop in somewhere to have a lovely photo taken with your choice of:
Ben Templesmith is an Eisner-nominated Australian comic book artist, known for many things, among them Fell, written by Warren Ellis, and 30 Days of Night, written by Steve Niles. He’s also known for his love of tentacles, zombies, and making very special faces in photos. I spoke with Ben at the Image booth while he was hard at work on a sketch for someone’s future tattoo, and asked him for his top five songs for a Moody Monday.
The iconic video game The Legend of Zelda was co-created by one of the industries most respected artists, Shigeru Miyamoto. Its design was meant to wax poetic on the misadventures in his childhood home of Kyoto, Japan. In kind, the hugely successful symbiotic online sitcom The Legend of Neil was created by a guy who plays a stalker on a hugely popular web series The Guild, Sandeep Parikh. His concept is based on a guy getting all shit housed and wanting to wax the ass of the fairy in The Legend of Zelda, whilst using the controller wire as a means of autoerotic asphyxiation, who then becomes magically transported into the game world. You say tomato, I say tomato. But don’t scoff what ever you do, because it’s good. Really good.
I recently talked with Sandeep (for a few minutes of yelling at each other over the crowd at Comic-Con 2010) and these two stories are all I gather from said garbled audio recording:
“Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light”
– Paradise Lost
Sure, the burning flames of Hades are no doubt uncomfortable — but ask any struggling artist and most of them will give you their own version: walking around the exhibitor hallways of Comic-Con for eternity, forever seeking acknowledgment in the unofficial 10th circle of Hell. Milton’s prose is equally applicable to the long, arduous task of making headway in art. Judging by the amount of fanboys and souls anxiously awaiting judgment at Comic-Con 2010, competition is fierce, and most people are looking for some way, any way in the door… really. A fair share of these guys would sell their respective souls to get noticed, maybe even force a loved one into slavery, if it meant selling a comic or drawing — even if it’s something buried in a Cracker Jack box or Bazooka Joe wrapper. Let’s face it: No matter who you are, you’d just as soon not be taking orders or slaving away in a cubicle somewhere. If you really want to make it as an independent artist, the bottom line is that you can’t afford to be messing around.
Evan Dorkin is probably best known for his underground hit ‘Milk & Cheese’, but he’s been doing work for Dark Horse Comics since the early 90′s and has even penned a strange ‘Hellboy’ tale. His recent collaboration with famous water-colorist Jill Thompson on ‘Beasts of Burden’ has earned him nothing short of absolute praise, and garnered the creative team several industry awards including an Eisner. The hardcover collection of ‘Beasts of Burden’ is set to be released this August.
Ben Stenbeck is an established illustrator from New Zealand who first starting working with Dark Horse on President Mike Richardson’s series ‘Living with the Dead’. Since then, Stenbeck has gone on to work with ‘Hellboy’ creator Mike Mignola on ‘B.P.R.D.’ and the series ‘Witchfinder’. This fall he teams up with Mignola again, and novelist Christopher Golden, on ‘Baltimore’.
Do you like Zombies? How about mad scientists? What if I throw in some large fella with mob ties who beats people/monsters with a large wrench…? SOLD! But, If you were dead for the last 12 years or, Buddha forbid, not into comic books; then you might not know I’m speaking of the other worldly comic series The GOON. Or as series creator and 5 times Eisner Award winner Eric Powell describes it, “A dark comedy about a street thug, in a world of monsters.” Ah, Quaint.
The only other film really matching Tron 2 as far as hype is, of course, Green Lantern. And yeah, maybe that new Harry Potter film, which literally sent the girl sitting next to me into orgasmic spasms, clutching herself each time a new trailer scene popped up. And what better place to hold panel conferences for such overly-anticipated films than Magical Hall H, next to which people are known to camp out all night or at least wait in line for a good 4 hours to check out maybe 2 minutes of footage, only to get rejected when you’re about 50 yards from the door? Green Lantern is being helmed by Mask of Zorro/new James Bond director Martin Campbell, and judging by the footage, looks every bit as f&%ing rad as the crowd was hoping it would be, despite Campbell’s insistence that what was being shown was mostly rough and early FX.
