Comics

Hellboy and the Right Hook of Doom

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The first time I came across Hellboy was after a particularly nasty winter storm on a Saturday afternoon  in February of 1994. The New York Comic Book Spectacular was being held at at the Javitz Center despite the cruddy weather. Dark Horse Comics was showing off their Legend imprint. Legend was an umbrella for creator owned comics that featured Frank Miller’s Sin City, Miller and Dave Gibbon’s Martha Washington Goes to War, John Byrne’s Next Men, Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, and the debut of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. See, I went to the show to get John Byrne to sign some X-Men

Wallflower’s Curse

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It’s a shame that women can’t go to conventions without being harassed in this day and age. The idea of a lady going to SDCC in a Batman t-shirt to seem “cool” has been thoroughly debunked by people smarter than me, so I won’t dwell on it here. But geek culture didn’t come up with this blatantly misogynistic stereotype because it inherently hates women. Have you read anything Gail Simone’s ever written? Do you watch Tara Long’s stuff over at Revision3? Women and nerdy things combine pretty well, as it turns out.

True Hallucinations

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After a somewhat misspent youth experimenting with drugs, my biggest disappointment was that I didn’t see a pink elephant. Or blurry demon. Or a talking hot dog. The time I tried acid was mellow: I felt like I was in a sound bubble moving through the Florida night. And, truth be told, I was inside a pick up truck with Aphex Twin on the stereo. The best thing I can come up with was the time we were in an after-hours club by our house, high on ecstasy. It was well into the morning, so we kept our trip rolling