Monday Morning Post-Buffycon Thoughts
Jun. 16th, 2003 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sdelmonte1. Tired today. Couldn't sleep. I'd realized that I have a tendency not to sleep well the night after the con. I figure I'm too wound up after the weekend, and perhaps have had my sleep patterns disrupted just enough to not sleep properly at all. Cons are a wonderful thing, but clearly, there is a trade-off.
2. Ladymondegreen posted a con report already that covers a lot of the highlights and some of the lowlights sufficiently well that I will trust my gentle reader to read it.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ladymondegreen/
3. Not that I don't have some comments. I had a good time, despite the travel and hotel headaches and so forth. Here's a good place to tip my hat to stakebait and her crew for all their hard work and diligence in pulling Buffycon off. Now go get some rest, as you've all earned it.
One Robin Sachs story: Saturday morning, Robin - who was a gracious and friendly guest and who really seemed to be having loads of fun - walked into the con suite. At the entry to the room was a larger-than-life cutout of Buffy, standing nearly six feet tall. He looked at it and did two double takes, stating that she is certainly not that tall, indicating that she was about waist-high in reality. It was a very funny moment.
Among the things I watched in the video room was the Angel season one two-parter featuring Faith. It was better than I recalled, with not only strong performances by everyone involved, but also a sense of where things would be heading with Wesley. The willingness to do whatever he thinks must be done, the anger, the skills, are all there in a lesser degree. I would say that to a large degree, the writers on Angel have done right by Wesley from the start, and that he has developed and changed in a steady and consistent and logical way.
Got to see a whole bunch of friends over the weekend, but wish I had more time to chat with a lot of them. Saw soem people I don't get to see to often, met some new people. In other words, a typical con. It was a good mix of folks, and to a large degree, it was a mellow crowd. Small cons are a good thing, as the levels of mellow are steady at such events.
3. Meanwhile, the fannish world turns. Away from the land of Buffy, at a place called Marvel Comics, something bizarre happened...
You may remember that last summer, I told everyone to run out and buy the 9-cent issue of Fantastic Four, that Mark Waid had just taken over the book and that this may be the start of something big. For the most part, I was right. Fantastic Four was a much better comic than it has been in ages, and was getting better with eahc issue as Waid found the right tone for the comic.
However - and you knew I was getting to this - the knucklehead that runs Marvel, a suit named Bill Jemas, told Waid his editor, Tom Brevort, to change everything and turn FF from an adventure comic to a "dramedy" where the FF live in the suburbs, Reed is the absent-minded professor, Sue is the breadwinner, and their arch-enemy was a nasty neighbor. Really. Mark Waid tried to do something with this, but in the end, he told them he couldn't. So Mark Waid, one of the most successful comic book writers around now (OK, not that great a claim to fame, but I'm a fanboy), the man who made Fantastic Four worth reading again, was fired.
And then Waid reported his replacement would be Bill Jemas. Who is a businessman, not a writer. Who is the author of a apparently putrid humor comic call Marville. Who started a rather pointless feud with Peter David that most people thing only hepled PAD. And who seemed determined to drive every good writer away form Marvel.
OK, there might be insider things I don't know about here. But to tell Waid to turn the FF into a silly sit-comic, and then to replace him with yourself? Well, I can't say it bodes well for quality comics from Marvel. I can't say that I am likely to even nuy a Marvel comic again after this. I can say, though, that Waid - whose ties with DC Comics had loosened a lot in the past few years - might happily turn his back on Marvel for good and go back to DC. Which I wouldn't oppose in the least.
Waid has submitted FF scripts for the next ten months, so we have some time to cherish them. But after that, the FF's short glory days will be done, and I will probably say farewell to Marvel again. There is a lot of good stuff coming from Marvel now, but I have the sense that in the end, it will all be turned to mud by people like Jemas. DC is far from perfect these days, but at least I feel like the writers and editors get to tell their onw stories and not be at the receiving end of bad executive decisions.
That's all for now. Guess I should get to work. :)
2. Ladymondegreen posted a con report already that covers a lot of the highlights and some of the lowlights sufficiently well that I will trust my gentle reader to read it.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ladymondegreen/
3. Not that I don't have some comments. I had a good time, despite the travel and hotel headaches and so forth. Here's a good place to tip my hat to stakebait and her crew for all their hard work and diligence in pulling Buffycon off. Now go get some rest, as you've all earned it.
One Robin Sachs story: Saturday morning, Robin - who was a gracious and friendly guest and who really seemed to be having loads of fun - walked into the con suite. At the entry to the room was a larger-than-life cutout of Buffy, standing nearly six feet tall. He looked at it and did two double takes, stating that she is certainly not that tall, indicating that she was about waist-high in reality. It was a very funny moment.
Among the things I watched in the video room was the Angel season one two-parter featuring Faith. It was better than I recalled, with not only strong performances by everyone involved, but also a sense of where things would be heading with Wesley. The willingness to do whatever he thinks must be done, the anger, the skills, are all there in a lesser degree. I would say that to a large degree, the writers on Angel have done right by Wesley from the start, and that he has developed and changed in a steady and consistent and logical way.
Got to see a whole bunch of friends over the weekend, but wish I had more time to chat with a lot of them. Saw soem people I don't get to see to often, met some new people. In other words, a typical con. It was a good mix of folks, and to a large degree, it was a mellow crowd. Small cons are a good thing, as the levels of mellow are steady at such events.
3. Meanwhile, the fannish world turns. Away from the land of Buffy, at a place called Marvel Comics, something bizarre happened...
You may remember that last summer, I told everyone to run out and buy the 9-cent issue of Fantastic Four, that Mark Waid had just taken over the book and that this may be the start of something big. For the most part, I was right. Fantastic Four was a much better comic than it has been in ages, and was getting better with eahc issue as Waid found the right tone for the comic.
However - and you knew I was getting to this - the knucklehead that runs Marvel, a suit named Bill Jemas, told Waid his editor, Tom Brevort, to change everything and turn FF from an adventure comic to a "dramedy" where the FF live in the suburbs, Reed is the absent-minded professor, Sue is the breadwinner, and their arch-enemy was a nasty neighbor. Really. Mark Waid tried to do something with this, but in the end, he told them he couldn't. So Mark Waid, one of the most successful comic book writers around now (OK, not that great a claim to fame, but I'm a fanboy), the man who made Fantastic Four worth reading again, was fired.
And then Waid reported his replacement would be Bill Jemas. Who is a businessman, not a writer. Who is the author of a apparently putrid humor comic call Marville. Who started a rather pointless feud with Peter David that most people thing only hepled PAD. And who seemed determined to drive every good writer away form Marvel.
OK, there might be insider things I don't know about here. But to tell Waid to turn the FF into a silly sit-comic, and then to replace him with yourself? Well, I can't say it bodes well for quality comics from Marvel. I can't say that I am likely to even nuy a Marvel comic again after this. I can say, though, that Waid - whose ties with DC Comics had loosened a lot in the past few years - might happily turn his back on Marvel for good and go back to DC. Which I wouldn't oppose in the least.
Waid has submitted FF scripts for the next ten months, so we have some time to cherish them. But after that, the FF's short glory days will be done, and I will probably say farewell to Marvel again. There is a lot of good stuff coming from Marvel now, but I have the sense that in the end, it will all be turned to mud by people like Jemas. DC is far from perfect these days, but at least I feel like the writers and editors get to tell their onw stories and not be at the receiving end of bad executive decisions.
That's all for now. Guess I should get to work. :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: Jun. 16th, 2003 08:35 am (UTC)Though we still have Morrison on New X-men, we're losing the reborn FF just after I rediscovered them.
(no subject)
Date: Jun. 16th, 2003 05:18 pm (UTC)Yay! I was just thinking this myself this weekend as I was watching my first season Angel DVDs, trying to figure out where precisely Wesley stopped being a wimp and when he started to groove on that pragmatic streak of his. And actually it started even before this, back in the episode 'The Ring', it's one of the first times that Wesley shows he's willing to inflict pain to get what he wants when it comes to getting the job done. Er, anyway, hi! Just wanted to see that someone else felt this way about Wes.
(no subject)
Date: Jun. 18th, 2003 12:57 pm (UTC)Rest would be good. Still tying up loose ends and figuring out the problematic question of Buffycon 2, to con or not to con, but I am getting more sleep.
Mer
(no subject)
Date: Jun. 19th, 2003 08:46 am (UTC)The scary part is that I can hear, in my mind's ear, the exact line of the pitch for that: It's like the Osbournes, except Ozzy's a genius and they all have super powers.