Last day. Tough choice at 10:30, too. Go hear Neil Gaiman and Darwyn Cooke and others talk about how awesome Jack Kirby is or hit the DC panel in which Morrison, Johns, Dini, Reis, Pacheco etc discuss the Big Guns, the major heroes of the universe. I mean, Morrison or Gaiman. What a bitch. We wound up splitting the difference, the X-Men panel later was going to be in the room with the DC guys, so we hit Gaiman first, heard a great 5-minute monologue/anecdote about Kirby’s impact on him through British reprints of 60s Marvel, then excused ourselves down the way to hear Grant Morrison respond to a multitude of FINAL CRISIS questions with “Dogs will eat dogs. Wolves roaming the streets. Worms everywhere. Final Crisis!” which was really hilarious with that accent. Can't freaking wait for that book.
Then we hung out for the X-Men, or I guess, Mutants panel. Brubaker was on hand along with Carey (announced as having killed Cable, I don’t believe it for a second) and Way and Peter David. No big revelations here. Some cool Silvestri art for Messiah Complex. Way kind of came off like a dick, further justifying my decision to drop ORIGINS. David was funny. Brubaker worked in like four CRIMINAL plugs, which was also amusing. This one guy asked a question that was more of a paragraph on how great the entire line of books is right now and, lo and behold, it was Jason Street from FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, just another incognito fan, loving on the X-books. Cool little moment, there.
Then we hit the FABLES panel. Willingham and Buckingham and co. were all there and walked us through a page of FABLES, what it takes to create it, every step of the way, choosing the most recent at the time, pg. 22 of, I think #63. They also gave out a free one-page comic. It was all cool, but man, we was fried.
That one let out at 2, and we were done with official business. Time to hit the floor one last time, get pictures of the Vader masks and Batman and Droids LEGOS, and find some damn comics! Which it was fun to do, after all that other. I asked everybody for FLEX MENTALLO, most people hadn’t even heard of it, will Atlas ever let the TPB happen? What is the deal? Found a great dollar bin and scored some old BATMAN annuals, including #11 by Moore, that wacked out Clayface story, along with the first NEW MUTANTS annual that I’ve somehow never read, and a $3 reprint of ACTION COMICS #1. Figured I’m never going to be able to see every page of THAT one cheaper, so what the hey.
And then we were done. It was kind of sad, looking around and realizing it was time to leave the Convention Center. I told Catherine we could stay another couple of hours and keep thumbing through bins, but no takers. Took quite a few pictures:
Batman made out of LEGOS
The prototype Iron Man armor from the upcoming movie starring Downey Jr. as Stark. Looks amazing.
Black Lightning.
Finally left and went down to the beach with Paul and Lane and got some killer seafood and wine and beer and then went out to this seriously longass pier and toasted the sunset with whiskey and wine.
Then went down to the beach to just get our feet wet but that wasn’t enough so Paul and I swam out into it, dove as hard as I could into wave after wave, to make them batter off the parts of me that weren’t strong enough to hold on, planes taking off and flying right over our heads, one of them heading out right in the direction of Hawaii which was so perfect, the beach and the sound of the Pacific crashing in and all. Goodbye, San Diego.
Drumbeat cut, white letters over black screen.
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