Iron Man

I loved Iron Man. Jon Favreau gets how to direct the character, the visuals were excellent, the script was strong, the villains made sense and held together logically.

I have a few minor quibbles:

1) I would have dialed back the Tony Stark / Pepper Potts (played well by Gwynneth Paltrow) romantic tension just a little bit. Overall I liked it.

2) There's no way that any battle tank in production would be able to hit a target flying through the air at the speed that Iron Man was travelling. Tanks are designed to blow up slow moving, truck sized ground targets, not fast moving, human sized air targets. On the other hand, I liked that the .50 cal knocked the early Iron suit around.

3) The cute house robots went a bit too far. Ugh. I liked the automation of his mansion, however, and a certain amount of cute robotics is tolerable. It was that last bit when one handed his power-heart thing to him that i'm complaining about.

4) The film Tony Stark and Iron Man seemed based primarily on the 616 version, while Nick Fury was very much an Ultimate Universe adaptation. This doesn't really bother me, I feel compelled to play my uber-comic geek card on this vague discontinuity.

Again, these are minor complaints. For every one of these, there are at least 10 things done perfectly.

Emerald City Comicon

Nora and I went down to the Emerald City Comicon yesterday.

We first attended the show during its inaugural year, and I think we had only been dating for less than a year. It was TINY back then. There weren't any panels, no real celebrities, and only a handful of top creators and a few of the moderately sized companies were represented.

It feels very much like a grown-up convention now. It still can't compare to San Diego's convention, but now, at least, it's the same order of magnitude, if not quite in the same league.

We went to three panels, "FRAUGHT WITH PERIL: MAKING COMICS INTO GAMES," "WIL WHEATON PERFORMS THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF OUR LIVES" and "SPOTLIGHT ON JAMIE BAMBER." All were great. Matt Turnbull and John Feil broke down the challenges and rewards of converting comics into video games. Wil read three stories from his book (probably from a couple different books of his), and Jamie answered questions. All were charming, engaging and smart.

The floor of dealers and artist spaces was as chaotic and intense as San Diego ever is, only with much less total space.

Another high point was in the gaming area where I was able to demo Marvel Heroscape. The game is quick to learn, fast to play and pretty fun overall. From the website, "Heroscape is a fully-customizable game system that lets you build your own battlefields, create your own armies, and battle the enemy using your own strategies." While I don't quite see myself rushing out to buy the game, it definitely activated my gamer hunger. My tastes run less toward the wargaming type, even though Heroscape is relatively simple.

I do think I will attend Go Play Northwest in a few weeks to try and get my gaming itch scratched.

Comic Book Geek Pondering

All good comic geeks know, there's an endless mine of 'all-star team' topics to explore, and they're all endlessly satisfying.

What would it be like if you took the main powerful characters from all the main continuities?

Superman, Captain Marvel (Shazam!), Wildstorm's Apollo, Thor...you could also include Wonder Woman and Silver Surfer

Am I forgetting anyone? The characters on this team have to be able to fly, preferrably into outer space (can Captain Marvel do that? I think he can.), and they have to be virtually invulnerable and able to kick ass and tear shit up.

When the Warren Ellis started The Authority, it was the sort of book that this hypothetical book would have to be. Big battles, lots of explosion, gnarly bad guys who deserve what they get. Earth, and multi-verse shattering stories. That's what this would have to be like. Who else could challenge this group, united?