Baltimore Comic-Con 2009 - Brandon's Take

Let me reveal this blog's "cards" a bit: You're getting these nerded-out lists of the random-ass comics we all bought at the Baltimore Comic-Con because that's what comics and comic conventions are about. Not getting poor old Jeph Loeb to sign six copies of Spiderman: Blue or those tiny slivers of industry insider information the big three (I'm counting IMAGE as big at this point) mindfully drop to you, the comics reader. It's about comics.

That said...it was especially about comics this year for all of us because well, we didn't really attend any of the panels and autographs are for suckers. The panels, this year relegated not to their own rooms as in past years but these weird, flimsy, roof-less structures in the back corner of the main room of the con, meaning the roar of the crowd or "your kid is missing!" announcements, over-powered the actual panels making them totally not fun to sit and listen to. Really. This was awful. Disrespectful to the fans and the creators.

Really, if there's ever some kind of sad-sack movie a la The Wrestler about comics artists, there'll be a scene in which the artist tries to speak to a group of adoring fans in a shit-ass, half-structure room, with bad sound, made worse by a loud-ass crowd like nine feet away. The weekend was fun at the time, the not attending panels hardly a big deal, but a few days later I feel a little bit like I didn't really get my $25 bucks worth. Still, when it came to comics, it didn't disappoint...

Awesome Undergrounds
Because I had more money than usual--and I've been super into porn comics as of late--I went hard on kinda expensive underground stuff. It's main appeal for me has been the realization of just how insane this stuff remains...and how artistically interesting it is too. That's to say, if you're making "indie" comics nowadays, chances are you should look at this kind of shit and just feel ashamed. Freak Brothers was a comic that I was into when I was in middle-school--via reprints obviously--and Bode is an obvious legend, so the only "risk" I really took was on Inner-City Romance which turned out to me well worth it. A sort of fine-art, proto-graffiti, urban nightmare sex comic. I'll be on the hunt for the first four issues of this series.

• The Complete Cheech Wizard Vol 1 by Vaughn Bode
• Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #6 by Gilbert Shelton
• Inner-City Romance #5 by Guy Collwell
• Junkwaffel #3 by Vaughn Bode

Cheap, Random, Back Issues
All these were from one dude with $1 comics whiteboxes that became 15 comics for $10 if you could find enough stuff. Between Monique and I, were got thirty issues from dude. The only thing here I went in looking for was the Hellboy: Weird Tales because it has a story by Gene Colan and the idea of Colan illustrating the Hellboy universe is too much. That said, I also found the issue of Casanova I didn't have, one of the few Concrete things I didn't have, some dope Eduardo Risso illustrated stuff and some recent Corben too.

• Casanova #4 by Fraction & Ba
• Concrete: Eclectica #2 by Paul Chadwick
• The Exploits of the Junior Carrot Patrol by Rick Geary
• Haunt of Horror: Edgar Allan Poe #3 by Richard Corben & Rich Margopoulos
• Hellboy: Weird Tales #6
• Johnny Double #1-4 by Azzarello & Risso
• Swamp Thing #7 by Corben & Pfeifer
• Weird Western Tales #3

Some Trades
You can really clean-up on trades at the comic-con, everyone's offering them at like 50% off or 3 for the price of 1 and all kinds of good stuff. Still though, it's mainly stuff you see all the time and well, at this point in my comics reading career, I get cynical towards stuff that's seen everywhere, unless it's just plain awesome. So, I picked up Red Colored Elegy for $8 bucks, mainly because the only thing that's stopped me from reading it has been it's high cover price. Also, copped this old Elementals trade for $2 from these guys with lots of old Heavy Metals and shit.

• Elementals: The Natural Order by Bill Willingham
• Red Colored Elegy by Seichi Hayashi

TMNT!
Trying to complete the run of all the Eastman and Laird-drawn issues and really only need issue 3 at this point. TMNT is just an underground comic really. The art has much more in common with the straggly, nervous cartooning of Shelton or even, Crumb than anything else out there. But then it's basically a trippy Jack Kirby-inspired, Frank Miller-tinged party-action comic or something. I mean you know all this already though...

• Michaelangelo One-Shot by Eastman & Laird
• TMNT #2 by Eastman & Laird