Ever been within inches of a passing semi truck on a busy freeway, whipping past at 70 mph? Even in your car, you get thrown around like a leaf? Yeah, that was SDCC for the remainder of the weekend.

While I’d love to share pics, I’m still on borrowed time — my flight back home departs TODAY, thus I can write to you all, but I have roughly 500 pictures to sort, weed out and organize into a functional blog. In the meantime, let me tell you all — California rolled out the red carpet, and I had THE BEST — excuse me, *ahem* THE BEST time at a convention since the Blizzard of 2003 during Katsucon. That’s no small feat.

This was geek Mecca. Direct your prayers of Dr. Horrible and new episodes of Eureka just south of the setting sun, folks. While no show is perfect, and Murphy’s Laws prevail, I will say that the positives of the experience far, FAR outweigh the negatives. In other words, don’t feel bad. Everyone else is broke too.

So, in the meantime (while I’m 30,000 in the air for several hours) here’s my take on:  FIVE THINGS I LEARNED FROM SDCC.

(1): No one in their right mind should ever move an event or convention from San Diego. It’s PRIME real estate. I’m not the man behind the wheel, so there’s no telling what the future holds — but I will say that San Diego embraced the convention with open arms, and there was PLENTY to do and see beyond the convention walls. Go to lunch at the Tin Fish restaurant. Get around on the trolleys. Check out the best damned reuben ever at The Field.  Speaking of fields, the Padres play at Petco Park right up the street (say what you like about the Padres.)  Even the train station is a photo op waiting to happen!

(2): Your Mileage May Vary.  And oh, did I rack up a few.  Now, you can actually stop and get a breather throughout a good portion of the con, you just have to be… creative about it.  And not have any hangups about sitting on cold floors, corners of huge displays or just around the corner of an artist table.

(3): You have to be extra special, determined or crazy (or maybe a heady combination of the three) to actually get the Rare Collectable Merchandise Given Out Only At The Con Wherein You Must Stand In Line For Several Hours For The CHANCE To Get It.

(4): Besides, there are scores of people hired just to hand out free flyers.  Save the earth, collect them all!  I bet you could fill a phone book with all the mini posters, cards, flyers, and extra bits.

(5): Some personal tips to share with you all:

-Bring a camera, and break a bank book on batteries.

-When you’re done packing, open your bags again, take out half the stuff you packed.  You’re not going to need it.

-Say “yes” to whatever absurd means it takes to get there, short of risk to person or possessions.  This place is worth it.

-Water.

-Plan ahead.  There is for even the regular attendees, four whole days worth of events to attend and people to see, things to buy (or have a conniption over whether TO buy) and while you CAN do it all in a day, if you’re around for the whole thing, space it out.  Get some rest.  Eat hearty.  Because TONIGHT WE DINE IN — *ahem*

I’ll be back with photos, folks!  Sorry for the delay, but right now it’s time for me to say goodbye to perpetually sunny San Diego!

(Oh yeah, and there was an earthquake yesterday.  Most bizarre damned thing I’ve ever experienced.)

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…Which, depending on your outlook was either a disaster or a success for this blogger.    So, the previous night, we capped off with a bender — and paid the price in the morning, being too tired or too hungover to risk fighting the crowds — and the crowds are struggle!

But I spent my afternoon in style, with the crew of Lava Punch, including Alex Ahad!  I hope to try out his demo for his game, “SkullGirls” tomorrow.  Likewise, there will be mad scanning and photography to show at the end of the day tomorrow.  Prepare for the weekend media blitz, when I return.  Somehow, I’m seeing Friday & Saturday as a non-stop affair.  Which is cool, considering I must have slept at least… 12 hours today…

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Otherwise known as the first day of the convention!

Hey readers, coming to you live from after the convention!  It’s 2am, Thursday morning of SDCC, and ALREADY it looks to be a phenomenal event.  The best of comics, animation, illustration, video games and more are front & center in sunny San Diego for — and I’m really avoiding hyperbole here — an epic, auspicious event for all of geekdom.

[0] San Diego itself deserves mention for being an absolutely BEAUTIFUL piece of real estate.  I’ve been to many, many conventions; this one is loooong on looks.   Also — and bear in mind this was the exception, not the rule — most of the registration lines were very quick and despite the sheer scale of it, for a pre-registered guest, the wait never exceeded an hour’s time.  Most of the convention center staff; much less the staff for SDCC itself seemed pretty open and receptive.  If there was a place to be, they’d point it out.  If there was somewhere someone wasn’t authorized to go to, it was handled quickly and fairly.  Kudos to San Diego for making the show a true EVENT.

[1] Did you know, I have an entry in the Street Fighter Tribute artbook by Udon Comics & Capcom?  Please ignore the shameless self-promotion, and pay attention to an encyclopedic, 320 page monster of an artbook, with nearly EVERY notable artist in the world today — from Udon’s inner circle, to most online artists, to even the likes of Jorge Gutierrez (El Tigre!)  Simply marvelous!

[2] It’s telling that the video game creators man one of the main entries to the convention floor.  Capcom, Square/Enix, Konami, Activision, Sony, Microsoft, all within spitting distance of each other, and it isn’t until you’ve plowed through the first five or so minutes of people that you reach the television and animation venues.  Just an interesting note — by all means, there are enough people to really, REALLY fill in  the space.

[3] There is no number 3.

[4] This will be a day-to-day update affair.   I’m VERY excited to upload and post pictures for you all to see!  This is more or less one of the great geek Mecca of the world, so it’s not just one minor day’s post worth of material.   I’ll be back tomorrow night with more on SDCC!  If there’s any questions you all want to ask, I’m all ears!

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Hello, loyal Spwug readers!

Katy and I apologize for not posting much recently, things have been crazy at home.

This is not a post saying that Spwug is ending, because it’s not. Nor is it a post saying that Katy and I will be posting more, because that’s in the air.

However, it IS a post saying that in a week or two, there will be a call for writers! If you’ve ever wanted to write for a geek culture magazine, here’s your chance!

Just keep an eye on this space, and I’ll have the details up as soon as I can.

Thanks!

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No no, get your mind out of the gutter, I’m not talking about THAT sort of dungeon. I’m talking about that bastion of geekery, Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I don’t play myself, but many of those whom I have been privileged to call friend over the years have played, so I am somewhat versed in the culture that is the role-playing game. However, even if I was coming to it cold, unaware of any of the language or cultural touchpoints involved, I would still have enjoyed the book “Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress” by Shelly Mazzanoble.

This book follows the birth of a brand new gamer- a woman who works for Wizards of the Coast and yet has never rolled a 20-sided die before in her life. She takes you with her from her initial spark of interest (’hmm, maybe I should learn something about this thing we do here’) to her attempt to force her newfound passion upon her friends (ok, so homemade chocolate volcano cake is a pretty good bribe, I think.)

I really enjoyed this book, I have to say. I liked her sense of humor about the whole thing, and her attempts to dispel the myriad stereotypes that swirl around this game. My S.O. (who has played so far as to even DM games himself) even found it amusing to read through, so there seems to be something to satisfy even experienced players while being a pretty good read for those who perhaps have someone in their lives that they love, but don’t quite understand when they go on about loot drops and tanking. Hey, it might even spark enough interest to inspire conversation- I know I actually managed to deepen my understanding of the game, which has helped strengthen my knowlege base for my WoW playing.

So there you are, an actual book review. If we get really energetic over here at Chez Spwug, the next book review will be on the new 4th edition books…. Once I get my DM, I mean my sweetheart to explain them to me.

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Waugh!  Yesterday was Wednesday wasn’t it?!  Don’t you hate it when one day transposes itself over another?

Anyways, quite a few things going on worth mention:

 -The Demon Mages, Issue #2 is on the threshold of completion.  Took a little extra time, but significantly less OT than before.  Look for that in and around the time of…

 -SAN DIEGO COMIC CON!  I’ll be happy to give you readers the extended post-con coverage (August 2nd.  Let’s be fair; jet-lag) , but in the meantime, a few lead-up articles will get passed around, starting next week.  There’s not much to say here, except that packing for ten days in two bags will be… interesting.

-Almost directly afterwards is Otakon 2008.  This blogger lives moments away from it, so like the event horizon of a black hole, it seems many individuals may be drawn into it’s vortex.  Convention roundup on that one as well will be posted, come August 13th. 

-Pixiv.net & Nico-Nico Douga are neat!  Even if your Japanese is lackluster, it’s easy navigation & content abounds!  I’m there most every day!  Google searches readily turn up non-native registration instructions, so there’s little chance of getting lost.

-BONESAW IS REA-DY!!!  Tough as heck with a keyboard, a little imprecise, but still an impressive game and I chuckled at most of the humor.  A cool homebrewed time waster.

-In the spirit of our nation, I watched Paul “John Adams” Giamatti in probably my most favorite role I’ve seen him play — as the whip smart, buck-nasty Mr. Hertz in Shoot ‘Em Up.  Funny to me to see commercials for his HBO special, and super-impose Mr. Hertz’s cellphone ringing.  Or maybe an extended gunfight with Ben Franklin. 

And now, some new art!  Both done by hand, with markers & pens — the second from back on June 13-15th for the Anime-Mid-Atlantic weekend.

That’s all for now!  See ya next week!

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(Many apologies for last week, folks!  I thought it’d posted, but something must have fouled up along the way.  Still relevant info though…)

Japan rolls out the first robot girlfriend.  So soon?!  Man, trying to get up to walking & talking PVC models by 2010, I see.  Robots.  Destined to be our steel plated, glowing-red-diode-eyed apocalypse.  And the first step, to win the hearts and minds of humankind.  Or at least, charm the hell out of us with plastic perfection.

 Now, considering the idea is not even remotely new, I was entertained by how matter-of-fact, the news blurb seems.  It’s barely even two pages of text!  Nothing to see here, folks.  Wait for the Mac OS version; she’ll be a lot more stylish and have a punchy on-camera role in the Mac vs. PC commercials.  To be honest, it’s amazing to me that the premise of artificially intelligent, robotic companions isn’t a far fetched idea.  Heck, here we see the concept is already commercialize-able — SOMEBODY out there bought those robotic toy dogs!  It’s only a matter of time, I tell you!  Only a matter of time till Asimo is tooling around our homes, plotting our demise!

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As many people know, the earthquakes that happened last month in China have been devastating. We have seen the reports, and know of the horrors that have happened.

But I believe that this page of comics (http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/133_china/133_china.htm) shows us some stories that we haven’t seen here in the U.S. (and possibly in other countries as well)

Warning: The stories are very moving, so if you’re someplace where you don’t want to have people see you cry, you may want to wait until you’re home.

Our thoughts go out to the people in China affected by these tragedy, and to all of those people in other places (like Burma) who are dealing with their own tragedies.

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It’s been rough for a lot of people.  Money’s tight.  Work is fleeting, and when it’s not, it’s a punishing rain of stupid.  In this time of disarray, the geek nature thrives.  GUILTY PLEASURES, my friends.  Guilty pleasures.

-The frothy quadruple cream & sugar of this cup of links: “Kamen No Maid Guy.”

Kogarashi is easily one of the silliest concepts yet.  A 7-foot tall, superpowered, shark-toothed, musclebound, MIT-graduate(!) ninja in a maid costume?!  His ear’s a USB 2.0 interface!  He’s got x-ray vision!  Hair radar?!  It’s not going to change the world, or provide true innovation in any way, but what it does, it does better than most.  I do also enjoy that this male lead is neither waifish, limp-wristed, or TRAGIC.  He’s a monster!

-”Invincible” is a quintessential superhero comic, mixing the teenaged angst and growth of Marvel’s Spider-Man, takes a large part of it’s pacing and structure from DC’s Justice League of America (sometimes even lampooning them), and is deeply integrated with Image’s stable of heroes (Savage Dragon even makes an appearance!)  But luckily, Invincible spins it’s own unique tale of a superhero’s coming-of-age and throws a heckuva curveball too.

“King of Thorns“ is a survival-horror story; afflicted carriers of a deadly virus that’s stricken the world, awaken from cryosleep to find the population devastated and what seems to be dinosaurs (?) roaming the land.  But while ruin and desolation are everywhere, there are a lot of clues that don’t add up.  The story is ripe with both interesting twists and though the story might seem average, it’s polished so well that characters don’t suffer for it, and the pacing is extremely well done.  

-TIME TRAVEL!  “The Guardian Legend/Guardic Gaiden” for the NES/Famicom is a recent replay this blogger is currently going through.  Still one of the best fusions of a vertical shmup (scrolling shooter) and a adventure game in the vein of the original Legend of Zelda.  Unique weaponry, high difficulty, bizarre monster designs, and well.. a cyborg lady warrior in a bikini who transforms into a high speed fighter ship.  Yes.

-My old man pointed this one out: the Maybach 62 Landaulet.  Rampant and aggressive Ebay sales might land you this disgustingly pretty set of wheels.

That’s all for now — it’s time to get back to the grind, ladies & gentlemen!

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Andy Robles, the artist behind http://zeroa.deviantart.com, good friend and associate to Spwug writers, Artist Alley regulars here on the East Coast, and an all around humble guy, passed away last night.  His 30th birthday is in late May.

He had been struggling with cancer for a few years, and amazingly (even while hospital bound) continued producing artwork at great speed, variety and detail.  His presence will be greatly missed.  The staff and artists for Angry Viking Press will dedicate our latest and newest runs of comics to his memory.

Rest In Peace, Andy.  Your work, you plans for the future; comics or otherwise won’t be forgotten. 

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