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.

WonderCon! Fighting evil as it comes!

I'm attending this weekend's WonderCon, where the lead actors from Chuck and Sit Down, Shut Up (Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz's upcoming animated sitcom) will plug their shows and attempt to make sense of strange and awkward questions from creepy fans and microphone hogs. In San Francisco, you know it's WonderCon time when you see Stormtroopers and Sailor Moon try to cross Howard Street. The cosplayers and their cool costumes are always a highlight of any con. At WonderCon, I'll be going as an unemployed loser who's trying to jumpstart his scriptwriting career.


Above is a snapshot of a hot cosplayer at the 2007 WonderCon, which is the first--and last--WonderCon I attended. The Team Misaki Studios site snapped this photo of Wonder Woman doing the "up yours" gesture or blocking bullets or something. WonderCon '09 will feature the West Coast premiere of next week's DVD release of the badass Wonder Woman animated movie, which I saw at the New York Comic Con and briefly praised here.

I'm looking forward to the Star Trek and Ed Brubaker panels and the overpriced Costco-quality pizza.

Hurley's a Y: The Last Man fan!

My favorite in-joke on the most recent Lost episode--besides the rabbit cameo during the retirement home sequence, clearly a reference to the DHARMA Initiative lab rabbits--was Hugo Reyes' choice of reading material at the airport. Dude was checking out the Spanish-language edition of Vertigo's Y: The Last Man, Vol. 3: One Small Step TPB. One of my favorite comic titles of all time, Y, which ended its run last year, also happened to have been created by Lost staff writer and co-producer Brian K. Vaughan.

This isn't our first peek into Hurley's comic collection. Back in the first season, Walt leafed through Hugo's copy of the Spanish edition of Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1. (Then a couple of seasons later, in an episode that BKV scripted, Hugo and Charlie got embroiled in a debate about Superman and the Flash.)

Because Y is back in the spotlight thanks to "316" episode co-writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's little shout-out(*) to their colleague, I'm cross-posting "Y: The last issue," a piece I wrote for another blog last year (January 30, 2008, to be exact). Some things have changed since I wrote that post: I was critical of Torchwood, but that show has improved since then, and Eagle Eye director D.J. Caruso now wants to split his planned adaptation of Y into three movies.

(*) Is Hurley's Y TPB also a foreshadowing of future events on the island? The Y issues that were collected in that TPB involved the crash-landing of a team of cosmonauts who were in space while almost all of Earth's male population perished. The sole survivor of the crash was a pregnant female cosmonaut. The Oceanic Six Five has returned to the island in similar fashion, and many fans suspect that Kate, who had hate sex with Jack before the Ajira flight, is prego.

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Y: The last issue

It's a sad week for comics. The brilliant and addictive Vertigo series Y: The Last Man is wrapping up its five-year run this week with its 60th and final issue. Written by Brian K. Vaughan (whom I met at WonderCon last year--he's a nice guy and he gave me some good advice about comics scriptwriting) and pencilled by the underrated artist Pia Guerra, Y is the saga of Yorick Brown, a twentysomething slacker who embarks on a globehopping journey to find his missing girlfriend and to find out why he survived a mysterious plague that killed all the men on Earth. In 2003, the superb writing in then-new titles like Y, Gotham Central and Sleeper reignited my love for comics after a low creative ebb during the '90s drew me away. (I stopped buying comics in the mid-'90s because I got fed up with the fugly-looking "enhanced" covers, the inane costume changes and the unwieldy crossover events--all '90s Marvel and DC gimmicks to boost flagging sales.)

What does any of this have to do with TV or film? If Y were a TV show, it would have been the best mythology show on the air. (It's because Vaughan didn't have network execs meddling in his vision or forcing him to keep his series going for another few years. Aw, the creative freedom a comics creator gets to enjoy when he owns the rights to his project and answers to no one.) Maybe the writers from inconsistent and unfocused mythology shows like Heroes should start taking notes from Vaughan's comic about how to build an intricate mythology and keep it from falling apart or how to do any of the following:

Unlike Lost, no ill-conceived, one-dimensional Nikkis and Paulos have ever been awkwardly added to Y's large, predominantly female cast. Every character in Y has been richly drawn, from 355, the world-weary, kickass African American government agent (and knitting aficionado!) assigned to protect Yorick, to Dr. Allison Mann, the surly Asian American lesbian biochemist who must unravel the mystery of the plague, to Col. Alter Tse'elon, the driven and enigmatic Israeli soldier who wants to capture Yorick as part of a plot to repopulate Israel. No character is overlooked. Even Yorick's pet monkey, Ampersand--the only other male survivor of the plague--was given his own flashback issue.

Unlike Heroes or 24, Vaughan's post-apocalyptic series has never taken itself too seriously, despite its exploration of gender politics. (Vaughan once said in an interview that "the level of discussion [of gender issues in comics] was never very sophisticated. If written by men, they were either this gross sex fantasy or, alternately, the surviving women would all go down to the U.N. building and hold hands, ending war and suffering. Both were insulting to women. I wanted to subvert the fantasy.") Speaking of attempts at subversive writing, Y is genuinely adult sci-fi, unlike Torchwood, which pats itself on the back for doing "adult sci-fi," but with the exception of the standout "Out of Time" episode, it has come off more juvenile than the show it was spun off from, the family-friendly Doctor Who. It's interesting that Y has been loaded with more T&A than Torchwood--Y wouldn't have been a Vertigo comic without them--and yet Vaughan's series is still more intelligent and grown-up than Torchwood, because of thought-provoking (but not preachy) dialogue like Dr. Mann's brief and startling discussion about how the plague fixed China's gender imbalance problem and caused the crime rates in that country to drop.

And unlike the showrunners of mythology franchises that wore out their welcome--I'm looking at you, X-Files--Vaughan set an end date for Y (as well as his other creator-owned comic, the equally enjoyable WildStorm title Ex Machina, a 50-issue saga about a disillusioned ex-superhero who becomes mayor of New York). From the start, Vaughan promised to conclude Yorick's quest after 60 issues and has stuck to that promise, so Vaughan's single-minded, Col. Alter-like devotion to reaching that end point hasn't resulted in filler storylines like Galactica's Apollo/Starbuck/Anders/Dualla love quadrangle or the repetitive Heroes-goes-El Norte arc involving Dania Ramirez's endlessly weeping character, Maya the walking Ebola virus (in Spanish, "Maya" means "basket case").

It's no wonder that Vaughan's knack for straightforward storytelling, his ear for witty dialogue and his clever but never gratuitous or pointless pop culture references (I love that Yorick is a fan of The Last Detail--his reaction when he stumbles upon a DVD of the Hal Ashby flick is priceless) landed him a spot on the writing staff of Lost last year. Vaughan co-wrote the "Catch-22" episode about Desmond's past as a monk, and of course, it was one of several highlights of Lost's third season.

Before the writers' strike caused it to slip into development limbo, Vaughan worked on the screenplay for a feature film adaptation of Y, with Disturbia director D.J. Caruso scheduled to be at the helm and Caruso's Disturbia lead Shia LaBeouf as a frontrunner for the title role. Like most other fans, I think Y is better suited for TV. It would have been perfect for HBO. But Vaughan disagrees and has said, "I never felt [that it can only be a TV series to be done correctly]. Maybe because I'm the only person who knew exactly how Y ends and I've always been able to see it as something with a three-act structure--something with a clear beginning, middle and end."

Despite Vaughan's involvement in the Y feature film--he said the feature is an opportunity to improve on material that he felt he bungled in the comic's first few issues--the film can't avoid paling to the original comic. For two hours, the feature will likely be a globetrotting action thriller elevated by sharp dialogue about gender roles and amusing pop culture references. For 59 awesome issues, the comic has been a globetrotting action thriller, a thoughtful exploration of gender issues, a satirical critique of sexism in the comics industry, an all-girl gang flick, a simian slapstick comedy, a medical drama, a floor wax, a dessert topping...