Books and Comics and Stuff, Oh My!

Today I stuck my head into the New York Comic-Con, and then went to my usual comic-book store (because, I guess, a full display hall at the Javitz Center just wasn't enough comics for me). Stuff I got included:

• El Borbah by Charles Burns
  
• Zippy the Pinhead: Type Z Personality by Bill Griffith
  
• Powers Vol. 2: Roleplay by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming
  
• Lucifer Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway by Mike Carey and a bunch of other people
  
• Tales Designed to Thrizzle #1 by Michael Kupperman
  
• Keif Llama: Xenotech #3 and #4 by Matt Howarth
  
• Marvel Age Fantastic Four Vol. 3: The Return of Doom by various people
  
• a small pile of Tokyopop and Viz manga samplers
  
• Sonic the Hedgehog #159 and Sonic X #5
  
• a Marvel comic with Franklin Richards in its very long title, by people I can't remember (the Things are reading it as I type, so I can't check)
  
• Teen Titans Go! #28, which I have to admit I make sure I read before I pass it on to the boys. (And I did the same with the Franklin Richards comic this time, too.)

The comic-con was odd -- I'd expected something Book Expo America-sized (maybe just because it was at the Javitz), and this one was much smaller. It still filled up a good-sized exhibit hall, so it wasn't small, but it only took an hour to walk through. That wasn't what I was expecting. So I walked through again, more or less, and then didn't have anything particular to do. The days are long since passed when I walked around with a list of comics wants (I try to buy as few pamphlets as possible these days), so poking through long-boxes wasn't an option.

As I said to my associate Austen Farrell, as we were waiting to get our badges, "All of these people are about as strongly connected professionally to the comics field as we are." There were a lot of folks there for the "professional" day, and I wonder how professional most of them were. (After all, my connection to comics is that 1) I read them 2) I work for a publishing/retail company that sometimes sells comics and related stuff, though I'm not the one that buys them.)

Yesterday I dragged home two old-fashioned, words-on-a-page books, but, in a burst of synchronicity, they're very apropos: Men of Tomorrow by Gerald Jonas and The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios. I might be able to read them sometime in November, if I'm lucky.