Scott Pilgrim's precious little logo

(Photo source: "The 30 Best IRL Ramona Flowers")

Like the "Sundance Curse" on indie films that take the festival by storm and then tank outside Park City, there seems to be a Comic-Con curse on films that garner enormous buzz within the halls of the San Diego Convention Center and then somehow fail to interest non-geeks when they hit theaters. Unfortunately, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the latest blockbuster to join that list of films that flopped after the SDCC hype (they've included Grindhouse and The Spirit).

It's unfortunate because Scott Pilgrim, a perfect marriage of source material and director, is in no way a two-hour piece of fecal matter like most of those other flops, due to Wright's respect for--and enhancement of--Bryan Lee O'Malley's material and inventive gags like what has to be the most amusing cover of the Universal logo music to ever open a Universal picture.

O'Malley's creation is partly influenced by 8-bit video games, so legendary Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich redid Jerry Goldsmith's Universal fanfare in 8-bit form. It accompanies an NES-style version of the Universal globe that's as charmingly pixelly as all those title screen graphics that would open NES games I used to play as a kid. The enthusiastic audience that was treated to an advance Scott Pilgrim screening at Comic-Con went so wild over this opening gag that a Wired blogger couldn't even hear the drowned-out 8-bit logo music and wondered in his post if the opening piece was the Legend of Zelda theme. The redone fanfare also opens Godrich's digital-only Scott Pilgrim score album.

Another studio logo music parody I like is the J.B.'s-style cover of the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start of White Men Can't Jump (one of many instances where a Fox release spoofed the fanfare--another example was Alien³). Alfred Newman never sounded so funky.

The Hunter gets captured by the geeks: The books I picked up at Comic-Con, part 2

Previously: The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, Adrenaline and Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain.


My rundown of the graphic novels and TPBs I bought at Comic-Con concludes with two recent projects from IDW, which quickly became the comics publisher whose releases I've been looking forward to the most because of its ambitious reprints and high-quality revivals of properties like Star Trek and Doctor Who.

I picked up Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 at the IDW booth because I was looking for a comic that veteran Marvel and DC letterer (and friend and mentor to several of us Secret Identities creators) Janice Chiang worked on and could sign for me at Comic-Con, and the TPB happened to contain an issue lettered by Janice. She then brought me over to another former Marvel letterer, Rick Parker, to have him sign the TPB because his work appeared in the collection too.

I never was an avid reader of Marvel's G.I. Joe comics, although I bought some issues of the mothership and a couple of its spinoffs when I was a kid. I was more familiar with the Sunbow animated series, which hasn't exactly aged well. Even when I watched G.I. Joe and Transformers back-to-back after school, I thought the animation on both those Sunbow shows sucked. The constantly choppy character movements made the crappy made-for-TV Popeye shorts from the '60s look like Richard Williams cartoons. Because the Sunbow series was essentially a 29-minute toy commercial (subtract one minute for the "Knowing is half the battle" PSA, which was devoted to giving safety tips or warnings about creepy guys in white vans instead of selling toys), most of G.I. Joe's episodes were forgettable and silly, except for one: the Steve Gerber-penned "There's No Place Like Springfield," an eerie two-part ep about Jack Nicholson's Shipwreck's awakening from a seven-year coma that was inspired by The Prisoner (Shipwreck's home address at "Number Six Village Drive" was a shout-out to that famously surreal show). The downbeat tone of the ep and the images of Shipwreck's wife, daughter and friends melting into grey goo blew my mind when I was a kid and scarred other kid viewers for life.


The Marvel comics were intended to sell toys too, but the writing in those comics tended to be much better than the writing on the cartoon, thanks to regular scripter and G.I. Joe action figure dossier writer Larry Hama, a real American hero, especially to Secret Identities contributors who dug that an Asian American was at the helm of Marvel's finest-written toy-based title (also the first comic ever advertised on TV). The Vietnam vet-turned-comics scripter's military expertise added authenticity and grit to the comics and kept them more grounded than the cartoon, where nobody died, Star Wars-style lasers replaced bullets and Cobra was about as dangerous and menacing as Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. That's why the late Gerber's despair-filled "Springfield" was such a stunner back in 1985--the cartoon ditched its usually campy tone for once, added some much-needed menace to Cobra and incorporated a storyline from the comics, the Joes' discovery of a Cobra base disguised as an idyllic, all-American suburb called Springfield.


The standout 1983 G.I. Joe issue that introduced Hama's Springfield--a town that's as rotten-at-the-core as Matt Groening's Springfield--is included in Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1, which collects the first 10 issues of the original 1982-1994 Marvel comic, most of them drawn by '70s Incredible Hulk artist Herb Trimpe in the classic '60s/'70s Marvel style. My tastes in espionage comics lean towards the more adult Queen & Country and Sleeper, so I found the dialogue in these early '80s G.I. Joe issues to be on the hokey side. Despite the hokey one-liners, as the Topless Robot blog noted last year, the original comic still kicks its cartoon counterpart's ass. Scarlett--the lone female Joe in these earlier issues, before Hasbro added Cover Girl and Lady Jaye to the cast--gets a bunch of thrilling take-charge moments in the 1983 issue that Janice lettered, a Mike Vosburg-drawn story in which Scarlett is assigned to protect a diplomat who's being targeted by Cobra (another highlight of the TPB, as well as one of the few issues in the collection that didn't involve either Hama or Trimpe).

I bet the old issues I read in Volume 1 even wallop the ass of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which hired Hama as a creative consultant. I have no plans to watch the movie because it looks terrible and overly CGI'd in the TV ads (this was a much more expensive Paramount movie than Star Trek, yet they couldn't afford to get some decent-looking CGI that looks like 2009 CGI instead of 2002 CGI?). Director Stephen Sommers seems to have gotten the '80s toy lines-turned-cartoons mixed up. Exosuits?! (Or as the movie calls them, "accelerator suits"?!) That's Centurions, not G.I. Joe. The Funny or Die parody was better cast than the movie itself. Henry Rollins would have been a more charismatic Duke than Channing Tatum, whose acting coach was apparently a 3 3/4-inch Duke action figure. And what the hell is the very blond Sienna Miller doing playing the very dark-featured Baroness (who's portrayed in the Funny or Die spoof by a far more convincing-looking Olivia Wilde), and why was Miller directed to give the Russian villainess an American accent? To me, Miller will always be Eddie Arlette's prissy and spoiled British flatmate.

Judging from the ads, the only performer in The Rise of Cobra who's perfectly cast is Star Trek's scene-stealing Orion babe Rachel Nichols as Scarlett. She looks like she walked straight out of the issue that Janice lettered, which at one point has a shorty robe-clad Scarlett making a daring high-wire escape from an upper-story hotel window with her crossbow. The statuesque ex-Alias season 5 regular appears as if she were born to perform a sequence like that.


Speaking of destiny, artist Darwyn Cooke--a fan of the artwork on the '60s/'70s G.I. Joe action figure packaging--was born to bring his minimalist style to the late Donald E. Westlake's equally minimalist 1962 crime novel The Hunter, a book so nice moviemakers have filmed it thrice, as the badass Lee Marvin revenge flick Point Blank, the Chow Yun-Fat actioner Full Contact and the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (the only one of the three loose screen adaptations of The Hunter I haven't watched, and that's partly because composer Chris Boardman's ripoff of David Shire's Taking of Pelham One Two Three main title theme indicates how tired and derivative Payback must be).


For those who have never read Westlake's original novel or watched either Point Blank, Full Contact or Payback, the brutal tale follows a ruthless career thief's vendetta against his former partners-in-crime, who left him for dead and screwed him out of his share of a successful heist. The vendetta escalates into a one-man battle against the mob, a.k.a. the Organization ("The funnies call it the Syndicate. The goons and the hustlers call it the Outfit."), as the crook, known simply as Parker, kills his way through the Organization's hierarchy to get back his skrilla.


Under his Richard Stark pseudonym, Westlake wrote 24 novels featuring Parker--the original cold-blooded, unrepentant thief. Westlake's creation has clearly influenced so many similar thief characters in film and TV, particularly the protagonists in Michael Mann caper flicks like Thief. The climactic retribution that James Caan's self-made small businessman character unleashed against the control-freak boss who "owns the paper on his life" echoed Parker the similarly independent freelancer's confrontations with big business. Linda Fiorentino's Last Seduction antiheroine Bridget Gregory seemed to have inherited the Westlake character's amorality and relentlessness. Michael Westen, the blacklisted ex-spy and occasional safecracker in Burn Notice, inherited Parker's icy demeanor, professionalism and stubborn refusal to let a faceless, elusive corporation screw him over (in Michael's case, the shady character known only as "Management" and the nameless black ops organization that arranged to have Michael "burned"). Leverage co-creator John Rogers named Parker the possibly Asperger's-afflicted cat burglar chick after Westlake's equally antisocial thief. Parker has basically begat more offspring than Anthony Quinn.


Some readers have complained that Cooke's IDW adaptation of Westlake's first Parker story is overhyped. On what planet is this graphic novel overhyped? As a commenter on the Robot 6 blog noted, "In a world where Blackest Night is consuming 90% of the comics blogosphere's attention, this is overhyped?," but both Westlake's writing and Cooke's work have loyal cult followings, as evidenced by the slightly long line for Cooke's Hunter signing at the IDW booth--the only Comic-Con line I had the patience to stand in. I was lucky to nab a first-printing copy of The Hunter (wrapped in an exclusive Comic-Con dust jacket that I prefer over the regular white version of the jacket) before the hardcover novel sold out at its distribution level.


It's easy to see why The Hunter attracted a lengthy line that Friday, skyrocketed to #3 on the New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List in its first week and is already on its way to a second printing. Cooke's spare, monochromatic and beautifully shaded artwork is extraordinary, whether it's visuals of sexy women or 1962 New York streetscapes. The DC: The New Frontier writer/illustrator told the L.A. Times that he intended his art in The Hunter to be as stripped-down as Westlake's prose, which was the crime author's experiment to see if he could tell a story without any emotional content and with an antihero who internalizes his emotions. The Cooke adaptation's first 16 pages are as coldly efficient as Parker himself. Cooke superbly establishes Parker's criminal skills and single-minded, amoral character without any dialogue. It's as ballsy an opening as the disorienting first few minutes of Point Blank.


I never read the original source material, but the 1967 John Boorman film wowed me when I first saw it in university a decade ago, despite a puzzling ending that was initially frustrating (SPOILER: Patrick Duffy emerges from a shower and says "it was all a dream"). The Hunter doesn't quite do for crime comics what Point Blank did for '60s American crime flicks, which was revolutionize that genre with its fractured narrative and Euro art film-inspired sensibility. The Cooke version is just solid storytelling that makes the most of the strengths of comics as a visual medium, and like any good adaptation of a work from a different medium, it honors the source material without being overly reverential (for instance, Parker's resemblance to bodybuilder-turned-actor Edson Stroll, who played the leader of the exiled beautiful people in Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder" ep, is quite a departure from Westlake's vision of Parker as a more rugged-looking Jack Palance type).


I'm more acquainted with Cooke's animation and cover illustration work than his Catwoman and Spirit comics. The Hunter has made me want to check out more of Cooke's comics. These storyboards Cooke pencilled for Batman: The Animated Series' "Legends of the Dark Knight" homage to The Dark Knight Returns, which I've taken from Paul Dini and Chip Kidd's 1998 Batman: Animated coffeetable book, are Hunter-like in their intensity:


Westlake never granted Hollywood producers permission to use Parker's name in their adaptations of his novels because he would only allow them to retain the name if they agreed to do a series of Parker movies, and none of them had sequels on their minds (hence the name "Walker" in Point Blank, "McClain" in 1969's The Split and "Porter" in Payback). Cooke's novel is the first Parker adaptation in which Westlake gave the okay to use the name, possibly because Cooke planned on writing and drawing a four-volume series. Scheduled for summer 2010, Cooke's next Parker comic will adapt both The Man with the Getaway Face and The Outfit, which director John Flynn made into a solid 1973 Robert Duvall vehicle of the same title that's more straightforward than the stylized Point Blank, so it's blander in comparison, but it deserves as much notice as Boorman's movie (The Outfit isn't on DVD yet, although TCM occasionally broadcasts it).

Screw Avatar: The Next Whitewasher, The Twilight Saga: Emotards and the other unpromising blockbusters that are slated so far to hit theaters next summer. The one true blockbuster of summer 2010 will be found not in a multiplex, but in comic shops and bookstores.

A shot of Adrenaline: The books I picked up at Comic-Con, part 1

I finally finished reading all the books I bought during my one-day trip to Comic-Con. In an August 6 post, I discussed the first book I grabbed there that day, The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, Javier Grillo-Marxuach's adaptation of the unproduced final episode of his prematurely cancelled TV series version of The Middleman.

I also picked up a TPB of Tyler Chin-Tanner's self-published miniseries Adrenaline, Debbie Huey's Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain, IDW's Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 and an exclusive Comic-Con edition of Darwyn Cooke's eagerly anticipated IDW adaptation of The Hunter, the first Parker novel by Richard Stark, a.k.a. the late Donald E. Westlake. My tastes in comics aren't usually this wide-ranging--I stick to a steady diet of mature crime or espionage titles--but this list of books I grabbed in San Diego was an exception.

I first met Tyler at the Asian American ComiCon, where we had Artists Alley tables, and I ran into him again at the SDCC, where the AACC was still on our minds (the much smaller AACC was a far more enjoyable experience than SDCC, despite the occasional moments of insensitive Artists Alley behavior). Tyler is currently at work on American Terrorist, a comic about ordinary citizens who go on the lam after they're branded as terrorists for criticizing the government (the first issue is available to iPhone and Google Android users).

Like American Terrorist, Adrenaline is ripped from the headlines, and it centers on Dr. Saida Nri, a young Nigerian physician who gets roped into competing for a $4 million grand prize on a sensationalistic, globetrotting reality show of the same title--think a sleazier version of The Amazing Race. This enjoyable actioner, which Tyler wrote and drew layouts for (with epic-looking artwork provided by penciller/colorist James Boyle and inker/letterer Fabio Redivo), is a gentle sendup of reality TV and its frequent co-opting of the extreme sports craze. Alex Lowder, the Adrenaline show's wealthy host/creator (and he's not only the host, but he's also a contestant), is a mash-up of the douchey, culturally clueless Jeff Probst and an extreme sports nut.


In some moments, the comic reminded me of director Daniel Minahan's 2001 reality TV spoof Series 7: The Contenders. The most biting part of Series 7's critique of reality TV was its comparison of the genre to snuff films, whereas Adrenaline's sharpest jabs are directed towards the rigged nature of reality shows and their showrunners' callous treatment of foreign cultures, which is depicted through Alex's poaching of a lion on a Tanzanian wildlife preserve in the series' first few pages. The illegal hunt enrages Saida, who runs a small health clinic near the preserve. In a slightly ridiculous but literally gripping action sequence, Saida displays the agility of a parkour athlete--the doctors on NBC's ER were never this agile--when she leaps onto Alex's copter to stop him from escaping from the local authorities. She gets knocked unconscious during a scuffle in the copter with one of Alex's tough bodyguards and winds up kidnapped in a moment that strains credibility (in real life, Alex would be locked up for abducting Saida, despite his power and wealth), but I let it slide because Adrenaline is essentially an over-the-top Bond film, except Bond is a compassionate Nigerian female doctor-turned-reality show contestant who's trying to save her struggling clinic (and her Maasai patients) instead of the world.


Adrenaline is loaded with thrilling sequences straight out of Bond films, from a wordless, beautifully illustrated scuba diving sequence to a downhill race between snowboarders and skiers that goes awry. In fact, as I read the TPB, I kept choosing John Barry 007 score cues that would have served as perfect musical accompaniment for those Bond-like moments (Thunderball's "Bond with SPECTRE Frogmen" for the underwater sequences, A View to a Kill's "Snow Job" for the snow race).


One of the many reasons why I despise the reality genre is because too many of those shows regurgitate the same old racial stereotypes--especially the programs on VH1, home of Flavor "No sellout" Flav--but in fairness to the genre, it has also influenced scripted network shows like Lost and Heroes to opt for racially diverse casts. Because Adrenaline is about a reality show, it contains an equally diverse cast of characters, from Saida ("What we don't see are the many strong native Africans who are leading the way in resuscitating their country. I felt they needed to be the hero of a comic book," said Tyler in a 2007 interview about Adrenaline) to Ben Wong, a brash Asian American stuntman who has a tryst with a female teammate in a romantic subplot that's a nice little up-yours to Hollywood and its emasculation of Asian guys.

Debbie Huey's Bumperboy has plenty in common with Adrenaline's Saida. They're both unlikely action heroes who are unafraid to stand up to corporate greed when it endangers the well-being of their neighbors, whether they're humans, animals--or talking mountains. In Debbie's inventive AdHouse Books graphic novel, 2006's Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain, the rubber-suited Bubtopian and his canine sidekick Bumperpup travel through a magical portal called a "borp hole" to a faraway land where they encounter a lonely and chatty mountain named Jumbra.


The duo also befriends a band of armless, marshmallow-shaped creatures known as the Grums, who speak only in Bumperpup's language of Pictonese (in which the speaker communicates by projecting pictures, much like X-Factor character Artie Maddicks) and help keep the childlike Jumbra alive by planting Grum fruit trees on his back. Without giving away too much of this second installment in the Bumperboy series, an unknown menace is causing Grums to disappear from their home, and it's up to Bumperboy and B-pup to rescue the missing Grums, save Jumbra's life and restore order to the disrupted ecosystem.


All-ages comics are not my forte, but I picked up Debbie's book because Bumperboy's ability to "borp" to distant lands is an appealing hook (it's reminiscent of one of my favorite Warner Bros. animated shorts, Robert McKimson's 1955 cartoon "The Hole Idea," about a professor who invents the portable hole, a gadget that was later featured in Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and I wanted to support a fellow Slug, especially someone who I recently discovered was involved with the same campus newspaper where I used to be a staff writer.


As with any of the best all-ages comics, kids will be entertained by Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain because of its resourceful heroes and offbeat supporting characters, while older readers will enjoy it for its wonderful black-and-white art and subtle social commentary. The book decries child labor practices and environmental racism without turning into a preachy G.I. Joe "Knowing is half the battle" PSA. Speaking of which...

The next post will focus on the rest of my Comic-Con purchases: Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 and The Hunter.

The Middleman: The series finale manifestation

One of the books I picked up at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con was an early copy of Viper Comics' The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, which, according to Middleman creator and Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse co-writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach on his Twitter page earlier this week, "has shipped to the distributor and should hit comic book stores this or next weds."

After JGM wasn't able to film the 13th and final episode of his rejected TV series pitch-turned-Viper comic-turned actual TV series due to budgetary issues, he did what Buffy creator Joss Whedon and Farscape creator Rockne O'Bannon have done with their respective shows after the end of their runs. Like those two cult TV masterminds, JGM decided to pick up where his show left off--in comic form instead of onscreen.

Without giving too much away, The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse is an entertaining and bittersweet farewell to the TV incarnations of the Middleman and his trainee sidekick Wendy Watson (wonderfully brought to life on the show by Matt Keeslar, the most prim and proper action hero on TV since the days when Paul Gross' polite Canadian Mountie neatnik literally cleaned up the streets of Chicago on Due South, and newcomer Natalie Morales, who once called herself "the child that Amanda Peet and Rosario Dawson would have if they could procreate"). But the graphic novel, which JGM co-scripted with his fellow Middleman co-executive producer Hans Beimler, also opens the door for more adventures with the Middleman characters, although if JGM decides to resume the comic, I doubt we'll see them drawn again as Keeslar, Morales and the other actors (in the comic, Wendy is a redhead and is white instead of Latina).

I wasn't familiar with the comic before the TV version premiered on ABC Family last summer, but I instantly became a fan of the show because of its perfectly cast actors and amusing dialogue, which was loaded with pop culture references that were never forced and bizarre-sounding exclamations like "Story of O!" and "Eyes without a face!" For those who have never watched The Middleman--and really ought to now that Shout! Factory has released all 12 wordily titled episodes on DVD--the show is about Wendy, an unemployed art student who becomes the apprentice to a mysterious, Eisenhower jacket-wearing secret agent known as the Middleman, the latest in a long line of agents who take on adversaries other agencies are too chicken to fight, from evil extraterrestrials disguised as boy bands to corporate tycoons with hidden agendas like Manservant Neville (serial guest star Mark Sheppard), a Steve Jobs-esque mastermind with nefarious plans for his iPod-like uMaster product (rhymes with "View-Master").

Superbly illustrated by Armando M. Zanker, The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse pits the Middleman and Dub-Dub against a more-insane-than-usual Manservant Neville and further explores the Middleman's conflicted feelings for Dub-Dub's hot and leggy performance artist best friend Lacey, who was continually referred to by the show's chyrons as "the young, equally photogenic artist whom Wendy shares an illegal sublet with." On the show, the Middleman's love interest started out as yet another annoying Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but both actress Brit Morgan--an interesting cross between a young Frances McDormand and Zooey Deschanel who could have been perfect as a relative of McDormand's mother character and Deschanel's daughter character in Almost Famous--and the show's writers developed the Middleman's biggest admirer into something more nuanced than an MPDG. I usually don't care for the romantic subplots on my favorite shows--I'm not one of those viewers who "squee" over the "shipping" of two characters, and I wish those two slang terms would go away and take the equally grating "bromance" with them. But Lacey's crush on the Middleman--who's attracted to her and shares her love for Randolph Scott westerns, but doesn't want another relationship because of both his loyalty to his job and a rarely discussed previous romance that ended in tragedy--brings some welcome depth to an otherwise lightweight, '60s Avengers-style series.

Speaking of The Avengers--my second favorite spy show, right below Burn Notice--Jeremiah Chechik, who co-produced The Middleman and directed several of its eps, previously made the ill-advised Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman feature film version of The Avengers. Chechik was able to do something with The Middleman that he failed to accomplish with his bloated reimagining of Steed and Mrs. Peel: he captured the spirit of the original, lower-budgeted Avengers. There's no sexual heat between the Middleman and the occasionally catsuited Wendy(*) like there was between Steed and Peel (the Middleman views Wendy as the little sister he never had), but the enthusiasm the Middleman and Wendy have for their work is as infectious as it was when that other pairing of "top professional and talented amateur" did their duty for queen and country.

(*) Not catsuited enough on the show for my tastes. The only times on the show that Morales squeezed into the Peel suit that she rocked for ABC Family's Middleman posters were the opening credits and "The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown."

I recommend watching Shout! Factory's Middleman: The Complete Series box set before reading the series finale, which contains tons of callbacks to the show's running gags and makes little sense if you've never seen the show. At Comic-Con, the cast and crew performed the entire novel as a table read (which I wasn't able to catch, but meeting JGM and having him and previous Middleman GN artist Les McClaine sign my copy of The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse compensated for missing the table read). On Facebook, readers won't be able to see this, but here on Blogspot, I'm juxtaposing a Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse moment between the Middleman, Wendy and Ida the android secretary with the table read version of the scene (it takes place between 7:06 and 8:12 on the embed), performed by Keeslar, Morales and Ida's portrayer, Comic-Con audience favorite Mary Pat Gleason. Ida is what you get if you mash up Ray Bradbury's Electric Grandmother with Roz from Monsters, Inc., Blanche Devereaux from The Golden Girls and Joe Flaherty's pothead-hating Harold Weir from Freaks and Geeks ("Go back to Jamaica, greenie!").

Jam masters, sketch faster: Secret Identities' San Diego Comic-Con '09 jam piece

At Comic-Con, Secret Identities fans were asked to go on a con floor scavenger hunt to collect 10 signatures of contributors from the book and then enter their names into a drawing. The winner of the drawing would receive a jam piece of Asian American superheroes drawn by artists who participated in the book, or in the case of Larry Hama, almost participated (but has given the book his blessing and even lent his mug to a cartoonized version of himself).


Either Parry Shen or Keith Chow invited me to jam. I practiced my jam piece contribution on a separate piece of paper before getting to work on the actual jam piece. Keith was kind enough to help shoot footage of me with my tiny Aiptek HD camcorder while I sketched (this pic is actually a capture from the footage). The camcorder, which doubles as a still camera, particularly fascinated Ming Doyle and Keiko Agena's husband, who told me he'd now like to have a similar camera.


At first, I tried to sketch out an Asian American version of Batman, but it looked terrible (I stuck a yin-yang symbol on his cowl), so I opted to draw "Sampler" character June Park instead.

Drawing June is something I rarely do--I prefer to leave that task to the professionals--so I had to pause for a few minutes and brainstorm how June would look on the jam piece. While I'm brainstorming during the camcorder footage, Keith can be heard joking, "This is riveting television."

The final result, a collage of drawings by Hama, Ming, Bernard Chang, Benton Jew, Tiffanie Hwang, Jerry Ma, Gene Yang, Sonny Liew and myself, looks dope and was inked by Walden Wong.


Top row: Asian (and most likely lactose-intolerant) Hulk by Bernard and June Park of "Sampler" by yours truly.

Center row: Jimson Po from Jeff Yang's "Driving Steel" by Benton, a Ninja Turtle by Tiffanie, a character whose name escapes me by Jerry and X-Men member Jubilee by Ming.

Bottom row: Snake Eyes by Hama, the Monkey King by Gene and a trademark Sonny Liew pairing of a kid and a robot.

Congrats, Orange, California resident Cecil DeClaro, the proud owner of our jam piece, which is already a collector's item because of the debut of Asian Hulk ("Mr. McGee, don't make me hungry. You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry.").

[Via Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Blog]

One day of San Diego Comic-Con '09 is all I can take

Like angry asian man blogger and Secret Identities booster Phil Yu (more on him later), I picked only one day to attend San Diego Comic-Con '09, and one day is really all I can tolerate of the overwhelming, overcrowded and smelly Nerd Prom.

My favorite aspect of Comic-Con is not the panels--I wasn't able to go inside any of the ones I wanted to see--but unexpectedly meeting writers and bloggers whose work I've enjoyed for several years, such as Phil. Here's my recap of Comic-Con Friday in pictures.


Hey Optimus, why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?


I didn't know Bumperboy creator Debbie Huey and I worked for the same university newspaper 12 years ago until my older brother pointed it out to me recently. We never met each other because her department of City on a Hill Press never really interacted with my department. I also didn't know Secret Identities approached Debbie to contribute a story, but she had to decline. I'm glad to see another alum from the paper doing well as an author (Azadeh Moaveni is another alum from my period at the paper who's had quite a career as an author).


From left to right: a group of cosplayers suited up as Wonder Woman, Poison Ivy, the Golden Age Flash, Harley Quinn and Green Lantern.


Here I am with Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who looks like he's pointing at me and saying, "Who the hell is this guy?," but actually, he's looking at another camera. The underrated Middleman TV series--one of my favorite shows that debuted last summer--may be cancelled, but it's having one hell of an afterlife at Comic-Con (Javier and the cast reunited to promote both the debut of a "series finale" in graphic novel form and a fully loaded DVD box set). It was also cool to unexpectedly run into one of the series' biggest boosters, blogger and Newark Star-Ledger TV critic Alan Sepinwall, at Javier's booth. Javier's next TV series will be the post-apocalyptic NBC drama Day One.


These Clone Stormtroopers are so lazy they don't even notice the guy's flashing a peace sign and outing himself as a Galactic Republic sympathizer. Quit falling asleep on the job, you goosestepping test-tube babies!



At the booth shared by Secret Identities and the Epic Proportions studio, I signed a few copies of Secret Identities for fans and then decided to challenge myself by doing something I rarely do, which is draw the character I scripted, "Sampler" heroine June Park (I prefer to have artists who are way more skilled than I am--like Erwin Haya--visually interpret June). I did a pencil drawing of June for a jam piece, the grand prize in a Secret Identities scavenger hunt.


I had to sketch out June first before doing the final drawing on the jam piece. Here's the rough sketch I made before redrawing it on the jam piece. JLA and Justice League Unlimited comics inker Walden Wong did a nice job inking the final drawing.


Erwin and I finally meet face-to-face. He said he didn't do the final lettering on "Sampler," which contained a few typos, and if he had gotten to do it, the typos wouldn't have appeared. I'm glad to see Erwin's artwork in "Sampler" has been getting positive feedback. He told me people have said to him that they want to see more adventures with June.


The recession's been so tough for Transformers' token female bot Arcee that she's had to moonlight as a bodyguard for the constantly pawed-at Olivia Munn.


Former Gilmore Girls co-star Keiko Agena and the talented--and lovely--Ming Doyle worked on the clever Secret Identities story "Learn to Share," about a blind Thai girl whose powers make Daredevil look like Don Knotts.


Avengers member Mockingbird prepares to use her battle stave on nerds who don't shower.


I could use a utility belt like Captain America's. I'd rather rock that than a camera murse.


It's Firestorm, back when he was white and into Seinfeld puffy shirts.



The Spy vs. Spy feud started when Black Spy dissed White Spy during "Pull Your Skirt Up."


Psylocke ought to use her psychic knife to shut down fake psychics like Dr. Girlfriend soundalike Sylvia Browne. Does Sylvia Browne smoke cigarettes or does she just eat them?


The Joker (with a bikini-clad Harley Quinn) refuses to join the spray tan bandwagon.


"Jayna, did you tell Gleek to take a shit in the bucket again? That shit's not funny!"



A G4 booth babe promotes the network's new reality show Focus Group, in which people are locked in a room where they're forced to watch nothing but G4's reruns of Cheaters.



Paramount Pictures booth babes take it to the bridge.


Only Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot and Fluid Man from Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles can pull off the scuba flipper look.


From left to right: Eternal Smile author Gene Yang, Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone and Secret Identities editor-in-chief Jeff Yang discuss the growing numbers of non-white or female comic book buyers at the SDCC panel Jeff moderated, "Four Color Reality: Making Comics Relevant to Readers Across Cultures."


During the "Four Color Reality" panel, Milestone Media founder and Justice League Unlimited writer Dwayne McDuffie recalled being the second African American to ever write a Marvel comic, as well as Milestone's efforts to tap into an underutilized talent pool of writers of color (Dwayne noted that Valiant was the only other comics company at the time that had an equally diverse staff). Yes, I know I look like I represent the Lollipop Guild, Daly City Chapter.


Dwayne stands with the four Secret Identities editors who followed his example (from left to right: Jerry Ma, Jeff, Keith Chow and Parry Shen).


Dwayne briefly reunites with letterer Janice Chiang, who worked on his issues of Iron Man and Hardware. Thanks, Janice, for introducing me to Dwayne, as well as past Spider-Man letterer and current Tales from the Crypt artist Rick Parker, former Marvel editor and current Papercutz editor-in-chief Jim Salicrup and '90s X-Men writer Scott Lobdell.


The highlight of the day was hanging out late at night with the likes of Jeff (who took this picture for me), Keith (not pictured), Amulet creator Kazu Kibuishi (not pictured), who contributed the "Go" pinup to Secret Identities, Eternal Smile artist Derek Kirk Kim (left) and Phil of angry asian man (right), whose shirt says "My Ninja!" and whose blog I've been following for several years.

I wasn't aware Phil and I both hailed from the South Bay. The first and last time I talked to him was via e-mail during the early years of his blog (I don't remember what we talked about in our exchange--I bet it was about Asian American movies). I was jazzed to learn from Phil that he's been checking out my blog, but I had to admit to him--and another guy in the room admitted this to Phil too--that I can't read his blog on some days because the hate crimes or moments of verbal Asian-bashing that he reports really make my blood boil.

I told Phil I'd like to be part of his blog's Angry Reader of the Week section someday (hey, my new friend Kate Agathon is the Angry Reader this week!), though one question might make me nervous: "What makes you angry?" I'd be nervous trying to answer it because the list of things that make me angry would turn the Angry Reader of the Week post into a three-parter.

Now added to that ever-expanding list: the long lines and claustrophobic Exhibit Hall at Comic-Con.

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Added on July 27, 2009: The Facebook version of this gallery contains some different photos. Also, almost all the captions for the pics on the Facebook version are completely different from the captions I wrote on this post. Check out my alternate silly captions.