Broken Frontier

“I’m serious. I’ve already seen four breasts today. At least 75%. Maybe as much as 82% of a full breast.”

This is the first remark I chance to overhear as I’m waiting at the traffic crossing to enter the San Diego Convention Center. He who uttered this brilliant phrase turns out to be painted blue and holding a ninja sword. Standing next to me on the curb are a pair of Jedi in Coke bottle glasses, a female Darth Vader who looks exactly like what you might expect J. Scott Campbell to draw if you asked him to draw a twenty-seven year-old woman dressed as Darth Vader, and the usual collection of Japanese school girls, dudes wearing some replica headbands from some anime I must admit I’m totally ignorant of, and a lot of bickering comics nuts busy highlighting a schedule of the day’s events.

Welcome to Comic-Con, everyone.

This is the first in a series of columns that are actually supposed to be about the goings-on at various panels taking place at the San Diego International Comic-Con, in this, the two thousand and fifth year. And yes, when possible, there’s lots of juicy gossip and news to be had about ultra-top-secret stuff that got unveiled. But there’s this little snag and that fact that you’re on the Internet right now reading this is kind of that snag.

But in the grand tradition of the above-mentioned comic book panel discussions, I’ll talk more about that later. Think of these columns as a highly patchy and largely whirlwind tour of the weekend’s goings on. We’ll begin our Friday at Comic-Con at a popular morning panel – Marvel’s panel discussion regarding the ongoing House of M storyline. So here we go.

HOUSE OF … well, we can’t actually tell you, but we strongly hint that it starts with M

“When are we gonna get back Thor?” the first fan demands at the beginning of this panel. Even if this had anything to do with House of M, Marvel’s people would still be remaining tight-lipped on this topic. Actually, they hint vaguely that there are in fact plans afoot to rekindle the Thor thing, but that’s about as specific as it gets at these types of things.

Attendees are then treated to a rapid-fire slideshow presentation of upcoming covers to comic books; including the next four or five House of M covers. Big shocked gasps erupt from the crowd upon seeing Wolverine, claws out and hand pulled back, about to deliver the death blow to an unmasked and saggy-bodied Magneto. At this I’m a little bit mystified, given that this exact scene has (right? I’m not crazy, right?) played itself out already in both New X-Men and Ultimate X-Men. Still, the artwork is pretty and since it’s a given that covers are more of a tease and less of an indication of what transpires within a comic book’s pages, don’t treat this as a serious spoiler. But now you know everything about House of M that we do.

You may be surprised to hear this. After all, was this not a panel titled House of M? Surely there’s more.

The sad fact is that Marvel understandably can’t risk revealing all the plot twists or even any details of the plot whatsoever for their big event of 2005. Because, you may not know this, but there are people out there who write for Internet sites, sometimes even ones about comic books, and they are known to sit in on these things and publish what they hear online for the whole dang world to read. It kind of steals the thunder of the writers who worked so hard to craft those plot twists.

In Ye Olden Dayes of Comikdom, a learned comic expert whispers to me in a hushed tone, it was possible to hear creators spilling the beans on some amazing little plot twist for the handful of people in the world attending some panel at a Con. But those days are past. Obviously, if I’d heard that some new villain named Cheese n’ Crackers Man was secretly the real villain of House of M and in a surprise plot twist, Scarlet Witch’s crazy mental powers cause the real identity of Spider-Man to be changed to Joe Quesada, I’d be blabbing it right now to the world via this handy website. So in the interests of not spoiling the story for the whole world, a panel like this becomes about three things:

1. Hyping the book (or other books published by same publisher) and showing off some nice safe spoiler-free material
2. Hinting that something exciting will happen soon in the book and emphasizing how cool this is by adding the suffix, “you heard it here first.” But never, you know, actually revealing too much of that twist.
3. Providing a forum for fans to have their questions answered about ideally what’s gone on so far, but more often than not about things not even peripherally related to the topic of the panel, such as when Wolverine’s getting his own MAX series. Answer: Not at present.

There is, however, some small low-level news, which follows: Marvel intends to heavily build Black Panther as a cornerstone for several of the major stories taking place in the universe this year. Sentinel will be returning soon. Marvel’s new Mythos series gets a lengthy mention, as they cite the desire to create a gateway drug for those unfamiliar with the origins of classic characters. Beginning with the origin of the X-Men, popular X-Men scribe (and general complicator of the already-muddy X-Men continuity) Chris Claremont will be returning to the fold. And then there’s X-Factor, which gets a quick rundown when former X-Factor duder Peter David stops by to talk story. Madrox, Strong Guy, and Wolfsbane are definitely back.

As for the rest of the team? You guessed it kiddos. They can’t talk about it yet, except to say it ties into how House of M ends. The same story is going to be true all over these panel discussions. But there’s no need to be frustrated. There’s more good stuff to be found.

Learn from the Masters

If you’re passionate about comics, the absolute best thing you can do at Comic-Con is skip these PR stunts with no real answers, (even for questions about Thor) and instead attend
the professional development panels that are being hosted all over the convention center.

Seriously, this is an amazing opportunity even for those of you who aren’t necessarily interested in starting your own comic. These panels typically have some pretty awesome industry people at them, all of whom are masters of their craft and who are there to generally illuminate the process of the business and art of comic books. They’re not here to hype their own stuff and they’re not here to answer off-topic questions. Learn about writing. Learn about the nuts and bolts of what it takes to publish. Learn about the subtle skills it takes to be a really kickass colorist. Hear these huge names in the world of comics weigh in on an issue, impart some interesting knowledge, and even crack a few jokes as they do it.

I was fortunate to sit on the second of two panels about coloring for comic books. They took a few questions and then really delved deep into some fascinating stuff about the theory of coloring comic books. If you’re like me, your previous impression of coloring goes something like: “they use Photoshop and it looks pretty cool.” But did you know that there are all these guidelines and limitations based on what you can do on the screen and what colors are available for printing? Did you know that on a good day the very best of these guys is lucky to finish three or four pages tops?

Did you know the colorist for Red Star goes by the moniker “Snake” and that he’s just about the coolest dude you’re likely to meet at a convention like this? And he made a couple of interesting points, chiefly that the abilities of computer coloring add a whole new level of detail to comics, but they’re by and large constrained by the old paradigm of coloring comics. Big thick black outlines inked from the pencils, for example, flatten out the 3D rendering work. Things in real life aren’t outlined in ink? If a book is using photorealistic colors, don’t those big inked lines defeat some of the purpose?  Likewise, colorists frequently make use of a technique called “cut and grad” meaning they take small slices of an image and apply gradients over and over to achieve that rendered look. They do this because computer coloring tools used to be a lot simpler than they are now and this was the only way to do any kind of advanced coloring at all. Now that the technology’s opening up the playing field, says Snake, maybe it’s time for new approaches.

You get the idea. This is not the kind of interesting insight into creating comics you’re likely to get when panels are about things that can’t be revealed yet and most of the time is spent fielding questions from the floor that are of the “will there ever be a Boba Fett/Avengers crosser?” variety.

Was I supposed to tell you about Dan DiDio?

Despite the shared problem of not being able to be too specific about any of the big goings-on in the next year, honorable mention goes to Dan DiDio over at DC for the totally entertaining if not terribly informative panel “Crisis Counseling.” Much like Marvel’s House of M panel, too much of the Infinite Crisis is still under wraps and thus can’t be discussed openly. But thanks to DiDio’s brilliant bantering in which the genuinely giddy and excited editor accidentally let the occasional possible spoiler slip, this bawdy DC panel definitely made the experience of hearing every third question answered with “wait and see” a little more interesting. Most of the time, DiDio didn’t seem to really indicate he’d accidentally leaked something vital and secret. I took my cues from the occasional murmurs of rampant fanboy speculation that coursed through the room, but more often from the murderous looks being given to DiDio by Greg Rucka and Geoff Johns after one of these tidbits escaped.

It’s a great moment. Something about multiple earths leaps from DiDio’s mouth. Fanboys begin to mutter. Greg Rucka pushes a chair out of the way to give him an unobstructed path in which to leap from his chair and tackle DiDio off the podium in the event of another leak. Good times.

This about wraps it up for part one. But I’m reasonably certain something’s in the works for part two of this feature. Maybe. Was I allowed to say that? Can we tell them that yet? Here. Just look at these covers. Wait and see. I can’t say one way or the other. Yeah…

(Note: Images used in this article were taken from the ComiCon Website: www.comic-con.org)