WonderCon 2009 wrap-up

Out of all the comic book cons I've been to, I prefer San Francisco's WonderCon because it's more laid-back than the other cons and Moscone Center South isn't so packed. And yes, there are TV show and movie panels like the Chuck panel with cast members Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski (above), Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez and series co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, but there aren't so many TV and movie panels that they cause the programming schedule to be overcrowded, so that gives me more time to talk shop with people and check out their comics. Plus, WonderCon is right across the street from Jollibee and Red Ribbon. Automatic win.

At WonderCon, I ran into an ex-co-worker, an on-and-off Fistful of Soundtracks listener (more on him in the graf after the next one) and Film Score Monthly soundtrack label founder/honcho Lukas Kendall, whom I never met face-to-face before. Lukas used to record a few phoners with me in the earlier years of the college radio version of A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Also, I got to meet some bloggers whose blogs I regularly read, I talked shop with IDW letterer Chris Mowry, I took some career advice from Keith Knight and Stephen Notley (he raised a good point about why Topher Grace would have been a better Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire, whom Stephen finds to be too humorless to play a wisecracking New Yorker like Spidey), and Chris, Keith, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Darick Robertson, Erik Larsen, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Michael Aushenker signed comics or promo materials for me.


The AFOS listener I met was graphic designer Joe Sikoryak, who's responsible for the look of Film Score Monthly and its spiffy CD packaging and booklets. FSM's Superman: The Music box set (above) is one of Joe's coolest achievements. I went to see Joe at a panel he was moderating (it was for Super Capers, an indie superhero flick in which Adam West pokes fun at his Batman persona) because before the panel started, I needed him to answer a question that had been nagging me ever since I ran into him on the previous day: Was Joe the cartoonist behind The Daily Show's brilliant "Decider" segments, which reimagined Bush as a caped superhero? (Joe told me his brother R. Sikoryak was the one who produced "The Decider.") It was surreal to be talking to Joe for several minutes while both Adam West--a.k.a. '60s Batman, a.k.a. Lookwell(*), a.k.a. the Gray Ghost--and Sam Lloyd, one of my favorite supporting players on Scrubs, are sitting a few inches from you.

(*) Lookwell, a great unsold 1991 sitcom pilot written by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel, features my all-time favorite West performance. West's title character is a pretentious, washed-up star of a '70s detective show who attempts to become an actual P.I.


Here I am at WonderCon's G4 booth with Attack of the Show's Blair Butler, who reviews comics and graphic novels during AOTS' Fresh Ink segment. She's guested in the past on Joe Gonzalez and Jimmy Aquino's Comic News Insider podcast (where I recently plugged Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology), so I told her both my first and last names to see what her reaction would be. Blair was initially confused because I look nothing like the CNI co-host. I explained to her that I'm Jimmy Aquino the scriptwriter and there are now two Jimmy Aquinos in the comics world.

Blair lit up when I asked her to autograph her own rave review of All-Star Superman in an issue of Geek Monthly magazine. I'm not really a fan of the Superman character or the superhero genre, but like Blair, I've enjoyed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's clever Supes revamp, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and was the recent focus of an A.V. Club "Gateways to Geekery" post. As Blair wrote in her review, All-Star Supes is "a master class on how to mesh great plotting and great pencils."

Then I said to Blair, "The Eskimo kiss you did with Olivia [Munn] made my week."



Blair said that when Olivia goes off-script or takes shtick like the Eskimo kiss or an impromptu shaving of part of Kevin Pereira's hair into unexpected directions, you can't stop her from whatever she's doing and you have no choice but to roll with it. The Eskimo kiss went way longer than Blair expected, which of course, resulted in great live TV.

Also, Blair and I wondered what is the deal with Olivia's irrational fear of balloon popping noises ("Maybe they sound like gunshots to some people").


Nice. Miramax had a booth for Adventureland, an upcoming comedy about amusement park workers from Superbad director Greg Mottola.

I wasn't at the Adventureland booth when Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr, who has a role in the film, showed up to sign Adventureland posters and tees. I would have liked to have seen how Starr interacts with fans of his old show. The former Bill Haverchuck needs to do more TV or movies. He was terrific on Freaks and Geeks.


Next time, instead of the Star Wars droids, I'd like to see the Daleks roam around the Moscone hallways, so that I'd have some fun watching the giant salt-shakers with toilet plungers harass any of the British WonderCon visitors who used to hide behind the couch during a Daleks episode of Doctor Who. (I mean, c'mon, England. Giant salt-shakers made you shit your trousers when you were kids? Really?)


Here's an Asian American Catwoman. I always get a kick out of seeing Asian American cosplayers suit up as non-Asian DC or Marvel characters.

Unfortunately, the rest of the photos I took--like a snapshot of a female Robin (the Boy Wonder, not the Witch Hunter) cosplayer--are even blurrier than the ones I've posted. There are a bunch of pretty dope Flickr photo galleries that feature WonderCon snapshots that are better than the ones I snapped.

Here's a word of advice to anyone who attends WonderCon and is actually reading this: Skip the expensive, underwhelming convention food (you're going to have to in this recession) and eat outside. Take your money to Jollibee or any one of the local cheap eateries (or better yet, non-fast food joints). Chickenjoy trumps overpriced Costco-quality pizza any day of the week.

The other Jimmy Aquino

There are two Jimmy Aquinos on the blogosphere and on Web radio: me and Comic News Insider co-host Jimmy Aquino.

My hair is close-cropped. He has long hair. I live in California (and can't wait to leave it). He hails from New York. I host a film and TV score music show that attracts nobody. He hosts (with Joe Gonzalez) a comic book review podcast that attracts guests like Brian K. Vaughan, Greg Pak, Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Patton Oswalt, Rosario Dawson and more recently, Kristin Chenoweth (see above). I'm studying to be a voiceover actor. He's acted on stage for several years. I'm a total recluse. He's not. Family members have called me either "Jim," which I went by when I started out writing for newspapers, or "J.J." because my middle initial is J. His middle initial is P. Despite all those differences, it's easy to mistake him for me or vice versa because we share the same first and last names, we're both Pinoy and we dig the same geekish stuff.

We've known of each other and we might have walked past each other a few times during my first and so far only visit to the San Diego Comic-Con in 2007, but we've never met face-to-face.

That's going to change soon. We will finally meet face-to-face in the studio, on a date yet to be determined.

Mark your calendars and start coming up with some sort of elaborate escape plan because the day of my guest appearance on CNI is the day when the world will end. You see, the East Coast Jimmy is really my future self--sometime in the future, I will get sick of my middle name and change it and grow my hair out--and if the two Jimmy Aquinos meet, it will create a paradox that will tear apart the space-time continuum and destroy the universe. In other words, a shitstorm that's worse than all two seasons of A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila.

Jimmy invited me to be a guest on his fun podcast after I confirmed that in April, my first piece of comic book writing, "Sampler," will appear in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, a graphic novel that he blogged about back when its editors were seeking story ideas. He saw his friend Heidi MacDonald's recent BEAT post--in which she linked to my blog and said she's amazed to learn that there are now two Jimmy Aquinos in the comics world--and then contacted me earlier this week about going on CNI to discuss "Sampler," Secret Identities, A Fistful of Soundtracks, our favorite comics and which network TV execs we want to put contract hits out on.

(On the latest episode of CNI, which is available here, Jimmy gives me and AFOS a nice shout-out. Joe jokes that I'm CNI Jimmy's future self, which is made funnier by the fact that I'm actually younger than Jimmy, who's celebrating his birthday during this ep. I don't know Jimmy's age, but I'm pretty sure I'm younger than him.)

My visit to CNI will be my first-ever guest appearance on a podcast or talk show (outside of a couple of occasions when I dropped by KSJS-FM's Celluloid Dreams back in my newspaper days). It will also be the first in a special series of shows in which the CNI hosts will mess with listeners' minds. The following week, Jimmy, Joe and Blair Butler will welcome to the studio both Vanessa Williams from Ugly Betty and Vanessa Williams from the Soul Food TV series and grill them about who should be Bruce Wayne's successor as Batman.