Middle East Film and Comic Con 2013

Image courtesy of the MEFCC FB page.

Year-long (at least) readers to the blog will remember that last year in April I attended my first ever major con, the inaugural Middle East Film and Comic Con. It was a fantastic event, and I’ve been waiting for the second installment ever since. I got the chance this past weekend, and it was absolutely amazing. I am told that where the attendance last year had been upwards of 13,000, this year it was predicted to be in the 23,000-26,000 range. That is unbelievable, an almost 100% increase over and above the first year. I will say that the show absolutely deserves it. The organisers put on a terrific show, and it was certainly a few notches above last year.

Diversity in DC Comics and John Stewart

Green Lantern John Stewart’s planned death was a few days back, when the news broke that new writer on the Green Lantern Corps creative team, Joshua Hale Fialkov, had walked off from the title because DC editorial was pushing for this direction. The Mary Sue has a pretty good editorial on the whole thing. In keeping with that, I thought I’d do my own write-up on the issue, and lay out why I think this is a totally bad idea. Yes, the planned death has gone back to the drawing board after stiff opposition from the fan community, but the concerns are still there, and that is what I want to address.

Best of the Best Part 2

I last did something like this in July for the six months from January 1st all the way to June 30th. This list is for July 1st and all the way through to December 30th (the last day doesn’t count!). As I mentioned at the end of that list, this isn’t going to be regurgitation of my “Reading Awards” page, but something more varied. The list takes into account everything I’ve read in the last six months.

Let’s see what makes the cut and which comes close then!

Advent Reviews Day 24: Not Really A Review, Something Different

As the title says, I was conflicted about what to post for today’s Advent Reviews. I didn’t want to do any negative reviews, for an obvious reason: today is Christmas Eve after all and it’s time for good cheer, not for me to rain down on someone’s parade! Doing negative reviews before was fine, kind of. I didn’t want to do a positive review either, since I do so damn many of them anyway. I often take a lot of flak for being that positive, especially when it comes to Black Library publications, so I wasn’t really on the mind for any of that either. Just thinking of any possible backlash rains down on my parade, you know? In short, I didn’t want to do a review period. What follows is a stream-of-consciousness post. Apologies for any incoherency.

Advent Reviews Day 10: Earth 2 #0 by James Robinson

I picked up this title, because it said Earth 2 on the front cover. As a fan of the Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis crossovers, alternate settings have been of quite a bit of interest to me. The “old” Elseworlds comics featuring Superman? They were awesome because of the alternate takes on the character, even though a fair bit of the stuff was tacky/campy/cliched. Robinson wowed me with the first four issues of the series, his take on Green Lantern, The Flash and Hawkgirl being really awesome. The #0 prequel issue went back into the timeline to explain what happened to all the Wonders, the first superheroes and especially the big 3 of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, at the start of #1. I got far more than I expected with #0.

The Why of Batgirl and Gail Simone

If you read comics from the Big Two, and are on Twitter and Facebook, then there’s little chance that you will have missed the latest disaster tale coming from DC Comics: Gail Simone, who has been working on Batgirl for DC’s New 52 line-wide relaunch since the first issue, has been let go from the series, apparently without any explanation, and that too, over email, by the new editor to come on board. Several places have already covered the news: DC Women Kicking Ass, Bleeding Cool, Comic Book Resources, Gail Simone’s Tumblr, and others. Various forums around the web have gone into depth about them as well. I am not going to delve into any of that at all. Because I don’t want to go into all that negativity. Instead, I want to talk about something else: why I started reading Batgirl.