The inimitable Douglas Wolk, whose book Reading Comics Jim Henley has been posting about here, and which just won the 2008 Will Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book, took a few minutes on the last day of the convention to chat with me about the eight coolest things he saw while wandering the floor and attending panels and parties. We suggest you listen to the audio version (3:26), but I also typed up a transcript for those who want the quick-and-dirty read.
LG: I am Liz Gorinsky for tor.com, and I am here with the awesome, newly Eisner-winning Douglas Wolk. It’s Sunday, we’re in day four-and-a-half of the convention, and we are all a little brain-dead, so we’re going to do a quick feature on the five coolest things that Douglas has seen while he’s walking the floor, and he’s going to tell us what they are.
DW: Can I make it eight cool things instead?
LG: Of course you can.
DW: Okay. The biggest cool thing in terms of physical proportions is the Owlship from Watchmen, which people are just clustering around. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a total dead-on replica of the Owlship from the comics; it even has little scrape marks where you can tell it went into a garage the wrong way; that’s kind of fantastic.
There’s some art from J. H. Williams III’s forthcoming Batwoman series that he’s showing off at his table, which is called Naked Fat Rave—don’t hold that against it—. It’s exquisite looking, it’s like the best thing he’s ever done.
I picked up a little microcomic. It’s a preview of Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s forthcoming series Stumptown, which I think is a detective series set in Portland, Oregon, hence the name. It’s a little manila envelope, inside which there’s a tiny tiny tiny little photocopy of the first eight pages of the first issue, and a magnifying glass. Perfect.
Love & Rockets: New Stories, Volume 1, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’ long-running and astounding art comics series. This is the first issue in its new format, which is a little Granta-sized trade paperback, and this time Jaime Hernadez does something that he’s done a little bit before, but not in a really long time, which is instead of being, you know, a slice of life story about former punk rockers from California getting older, it’s about superheroes in outer space. Didn’t expect Jaime to do that now; I’m so happy he did, it’s a joy.
The Comic Book Tattoo anthology is selling like crazy. It’s an anthology of comics inspired by—not adapting, but inspired by—Tori Amos’ songs. It’s 12″x12″, the size of an LP. It’s 480 pages, the size of something that you could brain an elephant with, and it looks gorgeous.
There’s a little mini-comic I got, I’m trying to remember the name of by Jen Wang, but it’s a beautiful mini-comic about a man who falls in love with a beautiful creature in a cage who is also a man-eating monster, and he’s prepared to deal with that.
I found… The best t-shirt I found, over at Jordan Crane’s booth (I forget what it’s called), but they have a t-shirt from Secret Headquarters, which is an amazing comic book store in Los Angeles. It looks exactly like the cover of the Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” single, so that the collage pasted over the eyes of the photocopied face, except that it says “God Save Stan Lee,” and it’s a picture of Stan Lee’s face.
And my personal highlight of this year’s Comic Con, when I got my Eisner Award for Reading Comics: it was presented to me by Jane Wiedlin from the Go-Gos, who kissed me on the cheek—I’m not going to be washing this cheek for a good long while—while surrounded by stamping Stormtroopers. I can die happy now.
LG: That is awesome. Thank you so much for talking to us. And if you guys are listening to this from the floor of Comic Con, then you still have a little bit of time to track down some of these things. I hope you enjoy the rest of your show! Thank you, Douglas.
DW: Thank you!
(Okay, so we didn’t quite post this before the end of the show. But at least I’m still on the floor, posting from the newly-packed up Tor/Seven Seas/Tor.com booth. That’s it ’till next year!)
