Rain, Rain, Come This Way

soak my shoes on Comics Day

RavenCon 2025

The Tower of Meat

Grilled sausages, sliced lengthwise; brisket, stacked on top of them; pulled pork, piled on top of the brisket; and pickled purple onions. Seeing as how I do not have the Flash’s metabolism, regardless of what my shirt might imply, it took three solid meals to eat, and another for the mixed-berry oat crumble that’s not in the picture. Photo by Jennifer Reall.

Where I tend to just walk around until I smell something good, my wife is sort of a food tourist. She does research on places to eat. We went to this barbecue joint in Richmond called ZZQ. Waited in line for lunch. Paid $16 for that sandwich, which I had to play meat Jenga with until it was small enough to fit my jaws around.

Totally worth it.

Creature Commandos

This Saturday night panel on James Gunn’s new animated series was up against another more canonical monster movie panel. Five panelists (including me), zero audience members. We had a pretty good conversation amongst ourselves.

War comics, including post-apocalyptic nuclear war comics, were a thing in the 1970s. Because the Korean and Vietnam Wars were so unpopular, both big companies were trying to find ways to freshen up their coverage of World War 2 (the last good war?). There were a bunch of these that a serious comics historian would delineate, but as amateurs we lumped them all together. My only personal experience was reading my older brother’s collection, which featured quite a bit of Sgt Rock, a few Haunted Tank stories, the Viking Commando, and the Unknown Soldier, who as a master of disguise was my little-kid second-favorite after the Creature Commandos.¹

Even its creators said that putting a vampire, a wolfman, and a modern-day flesh golem named “Lucky” (rebuilt from a soldier who stepped on a land mine) together to fight Nazis was a silly idea. But as a little kid, I thought it was much cooler than normal guys shooting each other with machine guns. I find it hard to describe. The idea of mass slaughter was actually kind of . . . boring? Like, Humans are awful, I get it. What about the monsters?

Why that clay giant has a receding hairline (or hair at all), I have no idea. That young lady in yellow is a Brit called Spifire, who worked with them off and on.

I was always more into superheroes. Marvel’s The Invaders was my personal favorite war comic up until Jerry Ordway started drawing All-Star Squadron for DC.

For the record, the new show is dark, funny, and well-animated. Perennial anti-hero bureaucrat Amanda Waller recreates Task Force X with monsters as a way to get around a court ruling that even criminals have rights. Conveniently for her, monsters are by definition not human (by her definition, anyway). Each episode is an origin story for one of the characters, which is the money short of comics. The central conceit for the show is always, Who’s the real monster here?

The panel kibbitzed for about 20 minutes before going our separate ways. At least one person tried to invoke the Bar Rule but we were all too lame. What can I say? I’m a morning person, and a little bit solitary. I placed a higher priority on exploring the creepy abandoned golf course next to the convention hotel. There was a collapsing boardwalk that snaked its way back into the adjacent swamp. It might have been the most Scooby-Doo thing I have ever seen. I wish I’d taken a picture of it.

Shaggy is apparently the world putt-putt champion? From What’s New, Scooby-Doo? season 3, episode 8, “A Terrifying Round with a Menacing Metallic Clown,” which might be the most literal title ever.

X-Men ‘97

That outsider vibe (which I still feel, even at a convention of other outsiders) was one of the things that drew me to Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics. After Spider-Man they were my best fictional friends as a child.

The new show is unbelievably dense, cramming 14 or 15 major comic book story arcs into ten episodes. Quite a few of them I was not familiar with, because I stopped reading in the early 90s, by which time single issues had become too numerous and too individually expensive for me as a student on a tight budget. Even in the 1980s I had relied on borrowing from friends to read the direct-market indies and prestige stuff like Vertigo. Later, once I had a girlfriend who worked in big-box bookstores, I shifted to reading greatest-hits type compilations that we now call graphic novels.

I had never been responsible for moderating a panel before. Given that I teach classes for a living, I’m not normally nervous in that situation, but I had signed up to do that panel sometime in 2024 and never quite got around to watching the show beyond the pilot before we got rid of Disney+. We legally downloaded all 10 eps as homework for the drive to Richmond, but it turns out I can no more watch TV in a moving car than I can read. So I had to do it at the con, in between panels.

Here we only had three panelists and five people in the audience, so despite my personally shoddy preparation it went pretty well. Small panels can be more interactive.

Return to Dark Tower

A few months ago I posted a link to some of Orson Welles’ many TV commercials.

Dear Zacky

My parents would never have bought Dark Tower, back in the day.

I did get a chance to play the reboot, Return to Dark Tower, on Sunday morning. Even with the near-infinite replayability promised by one of my fellow players, who worked at a game shop in Baltimore, $125 for just the base set is not something I can see doing. Sure, it’s less than a convention, with registration and travel and meals and a hotel, but much of the point of a convention is meeting people.

Speaking of games, tonight is our free (buy your own beer) board game night at Gate City Growlers, on Battleground Avenue here in Greensboro. 6:30pm. We will obviously not be playing Dark Tower unless some rich benefactor brings it by.

Rainin’Con (aka Free Comic Book Day 2025)

This just-past Saturday morning I met three of my Alien Ecosystems students at the Science Center for a field trip. That zoo has really expanded in the ten years or so since I was last out there for the opening of the aquarium.² There’s still a lot of construction going on, and not all the animals were out, but they now have some cool forest species:

• Pygmy Hippos

• Okapi

• Cassowary

plus multiple small wild cats (sand cat, serval, fishing cat). My students and I spent a good three hours walking and chatting, and we never got past the live animals into any of the museum collections or exhibits. One of them was excited about the chance to volunteer there (though we all know that undergrads are not great at follow-through).

By 2pm I was downtown, where there was a pretty good Daredevil costume in line with maybe 50 people outside Acme Comics. I never minded standing in line for comics with my kid (all grown up now), but by myself? In the rain? No thank you.

However, the city had closed off Elm Street for First Friday the night before, where the Folk Festival was doing a mini-concert at Natty Greene’s before announcing its 2025 performer lineup. My wife and I sat through two sets

• King M Dot, from Rocky Mount

• Maia Kamil, from Winston

before walking up to Cheesecakes by Alex for dessert.

Next day, on Saturday afternoon, I discovered that they had left the barriers in place for Free Comic Book Day! There were a couple dozen vendors and artists up there under tents to keep the rain off themselves and their stock. I’ve been following artist

Colleen Doran

here on Substack,

and one of the vendors had a compilation of her series A Distant Soil, the first collected volume of which he sold to me for five bucks. At first glance, it’s a New Agey sort of thing with very human-looking psychic aliens in flowing robes and crystal ships.

It turns out that Acme Comics started 42 years ago, in the building that now houses Little Brother Brewing. This was in the early 80s, well before the downtown revival kicked off by Natty’s and the other craft breweries just as I moved here in 2006. Given the boom-and-bust nature of the comics industry, the owners and patrons of that store are justifiably proud of its long tenure. They had a little display of news clips and con flyers and fanzines set up by the bar.

I think panels in general would be improved by beer. I drank two while listening to three veterans of the store reminisce about local comics history, including their social support for the local artist community and the inevitable I got to meet X! :) stories — and the variant I missed meeting X! :( stories³. Another patron, just there for the beer, leaned back and asked me, “What are they talking about?” I tried to be brief.

I swung back by the store on my way out, and while the line had shrunk to maybe 25 people by that time, and it had temporarily stopped raining, I still had better things to do than stand in line with wet feet.⁴ Like stopping at Deep Roots grocery co-op for their plant sale and benefit concert, featuring a group called College Hill Kids, who mostly seemed a cover band but did a couple of originals that I enjoyed while buying zucchini plants for my wife.

I also got her a cranberry, something I’d never seen outside of movies like My Old Ass, which I liked quite a bit more than the World Socialists did.⁵ Not that they’re wrong about the protagonist(s) being ridiculously self-centered. But hey, I just spent a thousand words talking about comics, so I shouldn’t be too judgey.

Like so many people, I assumed that the bogs were flooded year-round. But no, it’s a technique, like temporarily flooding a rice paddy to kill weeds.

When it’s time to harvest in early fall, the farmers add water to the beds to the top of the vines. The berries are still attached to the vines but begin to float. Machines under the water surface agitate the berries to release them.

Additional water is added to submerge the bushes and float the berries on the water’s surface, where they can be easily gathered.

We had similar tricks with tobacco, like cutting off the blooms in July to route more of the plant’s energy into the leaves instead of being “wasted” producing seeds.

I’m going to try the cranberry next to my blueberry bushes, which are Vaccinium cousins who also like acidic soil. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Happy Finals Week!

1. I did not remember GI Robot, even after watching the show, until I was doing my minimal research for this article and dug up the Wikipedia page, with an image I do recognize, with the robot colored in steel blue. The orange metal in the show reminded me of the Doom Patrol’s Robotman and confused my memory.

2. A $20 million bond from the city will do that for you.

3. John Byrne, the subject of that story, drew the first variant cover, a marketing gimmick that has grown, cancer-like, into a truly egregious example of capitalist excess.

According to an article by ZapKapow Comics, The Walking Dead #1 (originally published in 2003), currently holds the record for the single issue with the most variant covers at 253 distinct variants.

4. Waaaah. https://thehardtimes.net/culture/chucks-soaked/

5. I’ll watch just about anything Aubrey Plaza does, except those stupid Cointreau commercials.