Just some quick thoughts on last weekend’s Asbury Park Comicon…
- The train takes two hours from New York. If you are exhibiting, that means getting up before the sun. I left after work, and checked in on Friday night. Slept in, moseyed down stairs.
- The hotel was engaged in a dispute with the restaurant manager. So no bar or restaurant, not even a simple breakfast. I had some snacks, and there were food trucks for lunch. Otherwise, nothing nearby on the shore in the early morning.
- Two levels at the hotel, but the rooms interconnect. It was easy to move around… the crowds were not challenging, but it seemed lively. I think the panels and food pulled people away from the booths.
- I spent almost the entire convention chatting with exhibitors. I did some shopping on Sunday, but all of Saturday was spent with artists.
- J. H. Williams III is a very nice guy! He had original art from Batwoman, way outside my price range, but fully inked! No color needed! Or text. IDW or DC needs to do an artist edition off the boards. Creator-owned work to come, but no news.
- I bought two pages from Tim Truman, who is making his own comics as well as illustrating the Grateful Dead archive CDs. I bought the pages for two reasons: the art is stunning, the thumbnails on the back. A Justice League page had rough crayon sketches (in reverse). For a more recent Hawken page, Truman took a thumbnail, then used a 3-D pose program to create each panel’s staging. That was printed on the back of the page, then lightboxed for fully rendered inks.
- Serendipity smiled… while chatting with R. Sikoryak and Kriota Willberg, I was privileged to peruse preliminary pages from an upcoming Kickstarter Windsor McKay project! Keep an eye out! It’s gonna be amazing!
- I had lots of fun brainstorming with people! Some ideas I gave freely to the creators, others I might develop myself!
- Comics? Oh yeah!
- Jinx, Volume 2: Little Miss Steps (While Archie Comics does a great job with The Gang, this series is woefully ignored. J. Torres! Rick Burchett! Terry Austin! John Workman!
- Astro City: Shining Stars (a duplicate, but on sale, and I’ll probably gift it onward)
- The “Nam, Volume 3 (Hey, Marvel! When do you plan to reprint this series?)
- The 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time, #21-18 (A “Best Of” series, from 2001, reprinting: Avengers #1, Uncanny X-Men #350, Amazing Spider-Man #122, Captain America #109, )
- Imagination Rocket: Sicence and Social Studies Volume (a comics textbook with some great creators!)
- Band
Erin Humiston, with his self portrait, and that of the author, Christine Humiston.
- Dennis the Menace: Dennis and the Bible Kids: Moses (Published by Word Books, Dennis is taught about a biblical hero. Drawn by Hank Ketcham, the pages alternate between Dennis and biblical full page illos. The color registration is off, which is very noticeable in the “real” illustrations.)
- Uncanny X-Men #401 (The “‘Nuff Said” issue. Co-starring President Clinton!)
- Wimmen’s Comix (#14) Presents Disastrous Relationships (1989! What a list of creators!)
- 1974 Comic Art Convention program book. (Forty years ago! Where are they now?)
- San Diego Comic-Con Comics #3 (1994. Dark Horse.)
- Classics Illustrated #9: Tom Sawyer (adapted by Mike Ploog)
- The Comic Reader #159 (August 197 “DC Axes 23 Titles!”)
- God Nose: Snot Reel (Jaxon, 1971)
- 9th Art Ink, by Jude Killory
- Kid Blastoff #1 and Biff-Bam-Pow! #1 (Good clean wholesome fun from the House of Fun!)
- Schmuck Comix #1
- Invisible People S&N hardcover (Only $35!)
- Consumer Comix (A PSA comic funded by the government, produced by Kitchen Sink, detailing all sorts of frauds and cons.)
- Abortion Eve (A 1973 comic explaining the new law. Straightforward, without the baggage of forty years of arguments.)
- Visiting NASA #1 (a mini-comic by Alison Wilgus, who has an upcoming book with First Second!)
- boobage, by Monica Gallagher (good stuff!)
- Kurtzman Komix (intro by R. Cummb! Lots of early Kurtzman one-pagers._
- Dirty Diamonds: Break-Ups
(Carey Pietsch, Kelly Phillips, Claire Folkman! Next issue is about how they got into comics!)
- Best cosplay? Hunter S. Thompson
A great show… a mixture of MoCCA Fest, a hotel dealers show, and a comic-con. Definitely attending the New York Comic Fest in Westchester June 14th!
As readers of this blog know, it has been a tumultuous time here—a sinking realization that not all the people you trust to get something right (or to do right) do. A sense of helplessness about a false newspaper claim. And so many friends stepping in to cry out against the injustice.
And while I will never be able to leave this cruelty behind—for it is not about me (about that I would not care) but about someone I deeply love—I did physically leave home very early yesterday morning to join friends at the Glory Days Symposium, an intelligent gathering of people who recognize that Springsteen does so much more than entertain. (One of my own—many—appreciations of Springsteen is
here.) I was proud to join April Lindner, Jane Satterfield, Ann E. Michael, and Ned Balbo on a storytelling panel, and deeply inspired by the conversations I heard along the way. I was happy to at last meet Mark Bernhard, an associate provost at University of Southern Indiana, who puts so much of himself into this event.
Mid-afternoon I slipped away to Asbury Park and walked the boardwalk alone. Sea and salt and time to be. A quick but essential exchange with my editor, Tamra Tuller. A funny, I-am-the-luckiest-mother-on-earth text carnival with my son.
Monmouth University, where the Glory Days Symposium was held, is a green campus, architecturally cohering and whole. At its center stands Wilson Hall, a Horace Trumbauer designed mansion originally built, in 1929, as the private residence of F.W. Woolworth Co. president Hubert Templeton Parson. In the summer of 1916, in a building lost to fire on this same site, Woodrow Wilson worked through his presidential campaign. If this Trumbauer building looks familiar to you, that's because it served as the set for the movie,
Annie.
I share above some images from the day.
"The really important reading that I did began in my late twenties, with authors like Flannery O'Connor. There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn't be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she'd left the hole there, that hole that's inside of everybody. There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own. She knew original sin—knew how to give it the pesh (sic) of a story. She had talent and she had ideas, and the one served the other."
Bruce Springsteen in conversation with Will Percy, for
DoubleTake Magazine (Spring 1998)
(Do you remember
DoubleTake? How I loved that magazine. The photograph above is of Asbury Park, taken in winter, a few years back.)
This is the glorious Asbury Park, a photograph taken in winter
three years ago. The Stone Pony is off the boardwalk to the left. A glassblower is staying warm beside his fire. Beth is singing behind the camera.
Springsteen, as readers of this blog know, has played a central role in my creative life.
I love and live by many of his songs. He takes me to a thrumming place. I own the albums. I know the words. I dance alone. I have seen his band play live. I have not, despite a life-long yearning, seen him.
In September, that will change, thanks to an early morning ticket purchase. I will be on the field at Citizen's Park. I will see, at long last, Springsteen for myself.
There are no words.
We set out early in the direction of Spring Lake, a vague idea of a getaway day in mind—Victorian and quaint, we thought. Boutiquey and proper. The roads were nearly empty, smooth as silk. The car was fleet. I tried to keep my acceleration action as close to legal as possible.
We came in on a road that wasn't precisely on the map. We saw nothing, then we saw hundreds. People dressed in Elk ears and red capes and Santa Claus bikinis. An ambulance crew holding towels. "What's going on?" I asked one guy. "Five minutes of crazy," he said, and by now the ambling hundreds were massing along the beach. They were walking straight to the water's edge and summoning their wits and courage.
"I'm checking this one off my bucket list," one woman in a gray tee-shirt told me.
"I guess so," I said.
"I don't even have a bucket list," she said.
"Well now you do," I said.
A pirate with a sword charged before the shivering crowds. A man hoisted his flag and pointed waterward. Someone with a trojan's hat screamed bloody trojan somethings. And then on the count of three, the massed hundreds lemminged themselves. Dove into the ocean froth and came up screaming harder. It was 39 degrees outside. The ocean temp? Well, you've got me.
This didn't seem like Spring Lake. Was this Spring Lake? I asked my husband. I asked my son. They shrugged. We didn't know, but it didn't matter, because suddenly, instead of going off in pursuit of our boutiques, we got back in the car and drove north. Drove straight through, to Asbury Park and Bruce Springsteen country, where we finished out the day in our own kind of crazy.
We take our son back to the bus that will take him back to his college tomorrow morning. It's been a whipping, wild week. I think I'm talked out. I know I'm thought out. This blog may be quiet, thus, tomorrow.
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Good report, Torsten. I checked out Monica Gallagher’s work (there is a lot of it, and she has a great online store) and was fascinated by your information about Tim Truman working with the 3D program. Would love to know more about that page, and how he uses software tools in his work.