The two Jimmy Aquinos at NYCC

This is like one of those Doctor Who episodes where the Doctor meets another incarnation of himself.

At NYCC over the weekend, I finally met Comic News Insider podcaster Jimmy Aquino, who interviewed me about Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, A Fistful of Soundtracks and the fact that we share the same name. At one point on his blog, he joked that I'm the Earth-2 Jimmy Aquino (heh!).

CNI will post the interview soon. Also on this very special episode of CNI, Blossom gets her period.

The interview marked both the first time I've ever been interviewed by a podcaster and the first time I've been given the opportunity to plug Secret Identities and "Sampler" in an interview. Props to CNI's Jimmy for giving Secret Identities some coverage on his podcast.

Right after we recorded the interview, I showed Jimmy one of my baby pictures because I once rocked the long hair like Jimmy does now:


Later on, I had fun kicking it with an exhausted-sounding Jimmy(*) and his friends at Phonogram artist Jamie McKelvie's party at the Nolita dive Botanica, a joint that reminds me of the Red Room from my Santa Cruz days. That night, I overheard cute or gutsy karaoke renditions of tunes ranging from "Punk Rock Girl" to "Wanted Dead or Alive." The night was also scored by the worst mangling of "Bohemian Rhapsody" I've ever heard (it sounded like it was being sung by Christian "Mr. Sunshine" Bale in his Batman voice).

I got to meet THE BEAT's Heidi MacDonald, who has helped plug our Secret Identities novel on her blog (thanks, Heidi!). I was disappointed that I wasn't able to attend NYCC's Chuck panel and say hello to another favorite blogger of mine, Chuck panel moderator Alan Sepinwall, so meeting Heidi, whose blog I also read everyday, made up for that.

Despite a scratchy, under-the-weather voice that made her sound like a Bouvier sister (or me when I was 13), Heidi chatted with me about topics ranging from the clever British educational filmstrip spoof Look Around You to the Stephen Chow flicks Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle (she said Chow knows how to write for an ensemble cast, and then I told her that's why those two Chow films are superior to Bryan Singer's X-Men installments as superhero flicks--Singer and the X-Men screenwriters weren't as good at writing for an ensemble).

(*) I hope Jimmy's voice has recovered in time for his podcast because I've occasionally had to record my voice when it was really shot, and it's no picnic.

My next post will contain pics of me at NYCC's Secret Identities panel.

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.