War Rocket Ajax #19: The New York Comic Con Wrap-Up with Andy Khouri and Caleb Goellner

This week, we've moved our monthly War Rocket Ajax roundtable episode up a few weeks to bring you a New York Comic Con wrap-up with ComicsAlliance editors Andy Khouri and Caleb Goellner! It's a strange trip back to the stone age as we discuss everything from the return of Extreme Studios to the music of Fall Out Boy (really), and you can listen to the whole show right here at ComicsAlliance!War Rocket Ajax v.2, #19: Stone Tablets and Giant Fingernails with Caleb Goellner and Andy Khouri

(WARNING: Contains NSFW language)

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In this week's episode, Chris gets inordinately excited about the return of the McRib and recounts a trip to see Adam Warrock, Tribe One, Mega Ran, MC Lars and mc chris in a show that took an unexpected turn. Matt, on the other hand, brings us another installment of our popular segment, Let's Play Games From Three Years Ago, with his thoughts on Assassin's Creed 2 and Devil May Cry 4.

When Caleb and Andy join us, Caleb tells us what it's like to cover a convention in New York City's Javitz center:

Javitz sucks to cover a show, because it is a giant cave where cell phones become obsolete, and you are thrust back into the Stone Age and must rely on ancient journalism techniques to get anything done. At one point I had a stone tablet and I was etching in the news with my fingernail. At another point I was fighting for meat with a hyena.

Andy also had a little technical trouble and talks about the business side of things:

Covering conventions is always the hardest thing that comics bloggers have to do, and this year it was really difficult because, as Caleb said, the communications situation was really grim. Nothing worked, even for the vendors we were talking to. A lot of people are using iPhone attached credit card machines now, and they couldn't do any sales, just because of how bad the cell reception was. People were paying $75 for wifi for the weekend and it just didn't work.

I enjoyed being in New York, though. That was fun. The New York Con is a cool con, everyone has a good time, and it's in some ways a more productive con than San Diego. San Diego for many people is like an obstacle course of events and obligations and duties and formalities, things that you have to do. In New York, it seems like people just kind of get to business at their booths or with their panels and conversations and job hunting. It's a lot more streamlined.

Everyone on the panel is exited about Conan: Queen of the Black Coast, but Caleb says it best:

We did a preview of that book with a bunch of sketches and initial drawings [Becky Cloonan] had done. Looking at them, there's a very animated feel, Conan's a little bit leaner than you sometimes see him portrayed as, which I think, in a lot of the stories he's a spy or a thief or whatever, so he's not going to be some big axe swinging brute.

Some of the comments were like "ugh, Conan's too skinny," and I was like "arrrgh, but look, the art is beautiful! He's going to be on a sailboat!"

He could be wearing boat shoes and a powder pink polo with like a sweater draped over his shoulders for this story, listening to Vampire Weekend, and it would be the awesomest comic ever because Becky Cloonan's drawing it. So I'm excited about that.

And finally, Caleb gives us a reminder we should all think about:

Rob Liefeld is the bomb dot com.

Show Notes:

Andy and Caleb are on Twitter! Why not keep up with their day-to-day concerns?

The ComicsAlliance NYCC News Roundup.

Check out a few sketches from Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's Conan book.

mc chris has a list of the few remaining Race Wars tour dates. We suggest you either live in New England or get to driving.

Chris's Rec: Batman: Arkham City. Try to suppress your surprise.

Matt's Rec: Dino Stamatopoulos's Mary Shelley's Frankenhole

Comics Reviewed:

Fear Itself #7: "It did exactly what an event comic needs to do." "Stuart Immonen... Holy buckets, man, does he knock it out of the park." "I understand why the epilogues are in there, but it detracts a little bit from the power of an ending."

Atomic Robo: The Ghost of Station X #2: "It's very much a brief thing to remind you that even in this bright, colorful, all-ages world where Robo teams up with a vigilante and says 'golly jeepers, Jack Tarot!', there are consequences. There is danger. It's pulled off so well."

Justice League #2: "I think you could ditch the first issue completely and start this issue on page one, where it is, with the dialogue it already has, which covers everything that happened in the first issue, and publish it. And you would be fine." "There's better characterization in this from a lot of people. I do like having Batman be the guy who tries to call off Superman." "Hal Jordan and Barry Allen are terrible."