Anticipating an AFternoon with Fred Van Lente

For the 3 people who actually read this, I promise you I will actually review some comics here eventually. It's been slow goings in monthlies coming out, and I haven't had the opportunity to grab any trades lately (it is so much easier to shell out 3 bucks at one time than 18)... but that's not to say I don't have a large list of things to buy.

As I have been informed, by a variety of sources, namely facebook and the targeted ads on this blog, a West Island comic shop known as The 4th Wall will be hosting Marvel scribe Fred Van Lente for an afternoon of hanging out and signing books.

I, personally, have only read one of Van Lente's works, The Incredible Hercules, and if everything goes as planned I intend on having him sign as much of my run as possible. It is an excellently written and drawn, fun and witty series. Unfortunately, this isn't going to be a review of the series as, at the current moment, my copies of the series are all in storage at my mothers place (if I didn't have her being amazingly kind enough to let me leave the majority of my collected goods at home I would have had to liquidate a vast majority of my collection).

No, what this is going to be is a brief extolling of the growth of conventions and guest appearances in the area. I've been a lifelong fan of comics, but it wasn't until later in my life when I started travelling outside of my hometown for school that I ever had access to comic shops. These shops varied in size and classiness, and still do, but never did I hear of any of them having actual recognized names in for signings and it wasn't until 2008 that the Montreal Comic-Con came into existence.In the two years since then, things have actually started to take off. The convention has grown in size with each iteration and Cosmix, on the most recent FCBD, had a recognizable name in for a signing (of course I can't remember it now). Now The 4th Wall, which has been around for barely a year or so, has Mr. Van Lente appearing.

This, to me, shows that Montreal is growing. Toronto has the massive Fan Expo, after 15 or so years of growth it has become quite epic, and Calgary has their giant comic con. If things keep going the way they have been, I expect that in the next 5 or so years Montreal very well might be the next big Canadian convention location, and that might very well benefit the plethora of upstart young creators like myself who want to break into the industry but really cant afford the trek to places like San Diego or Chicago and need to rely on homegrown possibilities. The more there are, the more opportunities to get noticed any one individual has... and that, I dare say, is a grand thing.

I hope you weren't too offput by my very local musings, and I hope youll join me next time when I ponder what to do with my large collection of single issues and my newfound preferences for collecting most titles as Trades...

Propogating the Industry I Love

Today I experienced something that made me feel better about my geekdom than ever before: I got to help someone bring comics to children.

It is a simple but meaningful story, and I'd like to share it with you.

This morning I got a call from Oscar, one of the organizers of the Montreal Comic-Con, to confirm my ability to volunteer for the three days of Convention activity (Friday isn't a day of attendance, but I will be there to set up before the Saturday start). Later in the day, while running errands in the city, I swung by 1000000 Comix to talk to Alex, the other Convention organizer and one of the owners of 1000000, about what I'll be doing at the Con as a volunteer. When I got to the store it was relatively busy, so I do my usual browse the racks thing and I notice an out-of-place mid-to-late 30 year old lady dealing with a pile of singles and trades, looking perplexed, while her very young son nearby reading an issue of Marvel Knights Black Panther 2099 (I seriously didn't even know this book EXISTED until today).

Seeing as the one-man-staff of the store is moderately busy elsewhere I wind up, after a brief while, heading over to see what the mess of comics splayed out in front of her was about. As it turns out she is a teacher and, during the summer, she runs a camp for at risk students (those who are most likely to drop out of school either because of family situations or because they have trouble for one reason or another keeping up with where they should be academically (reading levels etc.)), and the theme of their camp is Comic Books (at least this year and the last). They use comic books to help get these children interested in reading and to help cover various ideas, such as seeing how representations of characters differ depending on the era they were written in etc.

She had requirements she needed to meet with the material she was getting, such as needing to have black superheroes (which her son was adorably trying to help her with by handing her Black Cat and Spider-Man: Back in Black trades) and needing to have differeing levels of difficulty in her material. she had a decent variety of reading levels in front of her, but the metric tonne of singles she was going through did not equal up to any one story getting told in sequence. First I helped her with the fact that she had no continuity to the books she had, which is something she herself just didn't have any awareness of before this shopping excursion (her experience with comics in the past having been Archie as a child and collected volumes of Bone for the previous year), and this wasn't just the geek in me saying "Egad, how do you expect them to read issue 3 and then jump to 15 without the twelve issues between them?", because, as she explained it to me, the idea is that if a child reads part one of a story they are more likely to want to keep reading if the next relevant chapter is nearby and just as easily mentally digested (well, clearly those are my words, but that is the meaning she conveyed).

Following that (I really wanted to use Pursuant, but the definition just doesn't match up) I acted on the Black Hero requirement and reccomended War Machine to her, for two reasons: 1) He is bad ass and covered in guns and 2) he was in Iron Man 2 and would draw in recognition credibility from the kiddies. I scoured through the back issues and found a small 5 issue run of the classic 1990s War Machine comics, which I figured would be much more kid friendly than his newer run which, from all I have read of it (not much), is more realistic and therefore more violent.

Alex wound up sort of working out a deal with her for how she could affordably bring the entire camp to the Montreal Comic-Con, and then she bought a big stack of books and headed out.

I was left feeling very satisfied and accomplished, knowing that I had just helped somone (who thanked me profusely throughout the entire event) bring both reading and comic books to children. It was very fulfilling to know that I could very well have helped to spread the love of this medium on to another generation... and I can only think of one thing that would be more satisfying than that...