Pictures from the 2013 New York Comic-Con, part 2

I've got a few more pictures to share from last month's New York Comic-Con!  I was only there on the Saturday of the show, but there was still a lot to see.  Let's get to it!

First on the list is this image of Sgt. Slaughter, he of WWF and GI Joe fame.  He's still got the look.  It was interesting to see him on the show floor as opposed to in the lower-level autograph section where there were a few other wrestlers from the same time period, most notably Hulk Hogan.  I suppose that the Sarge was also selling merchandise here, which might explain the difference.

This guy was, understandably, a big hit.  I wonder if he has any idea who Edward Scissorhands is.  I also wonder how a movie like Edward Scissorhands got made and released.

It's never a con without a good Adam West-era Batman costume.  Here we have him checking his Bat-Phone.

I've seen so many Zapp Brannigan costumes at conventions recently.  I wonder what's responsible for the surge!  It used to be all Fry, but now Zapp is coming up strong.  I was very happy to see the Kif costume on display.  You'd think it'd be easy enough to replicate with the green body suits that are so prevalent, but this is the first I've ever seen.  Very cool.

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.  Quicksilver forgot her pants, but I guess that's okay.

Also along the convention floor was Billy West!  West, of course, is well known for his voice acting and I love him for Futurama.

Next to Billy West (apologies for the fuzzy picture) was...Darlene Love?  That's an interesting choice for the New York Comic-Con.  Love is a '60s pop singer best known for her Christmas music like "Marshmallow World" and the like.

Heritage Auctions, the company that likes to make everyone feel poor by selling great pieces of art to extraordinarily rich people, had a display at the show with some original art that is set to go on sale soon.  Of course, I was drawn to the original Jack Kirby Fantastic Four art, featuring an incredible scene with Dr. Doom and Mr. Fantastic.  The pre-auction estimate for this piece?  $40,000.  Forty grand!  Holy moly.  Obviously, Kirby's work is the most sought-after in the industry, and this is a lovely piece, but wow, I never would have imagined that it would be quite that high.  20k, for sure, but 40?  Wow.

Also on display was this Superman/JFK piece.  Again, I was surprised by the price, but more because I can't imagine that it isn't listed as high as the FF page.  It's by Al Plastino, a classic Silver Age Superman artist, it's a full page, it has a great shot of Superman on it, it's from a well-remembered and well-liked story, it features none other than President John F. Kennedy, and they're "conveniently" selling it around the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination.  It's got so much going for it.

After the show, I read that Plastino was contesting the sale.  You can read the details here - http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/10/24/al-plastino-jfk-superman-original-art-and-heritage-auctions/ - but here's the short version: Plastino said that he originally donated the piece to a Kennedy museum, which claims they never received it.  Now a buyer has surfaced who wants to sell it, and Heritage (who stand to profit from the sale) is backing up the buyer.  I obviously have no idea who is in the right here, but I'll hold out some futile hope that Plastino can regain possession of his work from so long ago.  It'll never happen, greed being what it is, but you can't help but feel bad for a creator in a situation like this.

On a lighter note, HERE'S PAC MAN!

Toward the end of the show on Saturday, I managed to land one Thing sketch for the book.  Here's Derek Fridolfs in the process of adding his rendition.

As I mentioned last time, there were a lot of groups in costumes at this convention.

More Futurama!  That's a great Bender costume.

And Spider-Man 2099!  It's a brave person who wears a skin-tight jumpsuit at a convention.  Love the design.

And it looks like we've got some gender-reversed X-Men here (plus Apocalypse).

I, uh, I have no comment on this last picture.  A neither do any of these hundreds of other guys surrounding this person.

More pictures to come soon!

Advertisements

I find that I have a love-hate relationship with advertisements in comics.  I realize that, from an economic standpoint, anyway, they are something of a necessary evil, but I'm looking at this from a strictly aesthetic standpoint.  A few years ago, Marvel had big, two-page ads for the Honda CR-V smack dab in the front of their books, which irked me to no end, and before that they had a string of books where the flow of pages was interrupted quite demonstratively by an ad spread.  But then I think about all of the back issues I buy, and how amusing the old 2"x3" ad clips for fake mustaches and 'miracle' weight gain are, and suddenly I embrace ads as a part of the fun in collecting - a cultural barometer even more accurate than seeing the Thing and the Human Torch in Beatle wigs on one of those old Strange Tales covers (at least I think it was ST) or JFK dressing up as Superman.  "If I can't trust the President of the United States with my secret identity, who can I trust?"

Now that we're almost two full issues into the production of Teddy and the Yeti, I'm starting to think about things like page layout and how I'm going to fill those non-story pages.  I'm sure I'll throw in some staples like a letters/editorial page, maybe some of those 'anatomy of a page' features, but I keep coming back to advertisements and how fun it'd be to see one of those in my book - almost like a validation that this is a "real" comic book.  I honestly don't know how I'd even approach someone about placing an ad in the book, and I especially don't know that anyone would be willing to fork over cash for an ad in an unknown quantity like T&Y.

Because I am a nostalgic collector at heart, I'll probably end up trying to give away some ad space to places like the Hero Initiative, a comic book charitable organization that has a real fancy logo.  That way, I get what I want - cool ads that make the book feel legitimate without disrupting the story flow.

Dibs on the back cover?  Line 'em up.