It’s funny to think that the first con in 2008 was based in only a few small rooms in Eden Court and this year managed to fill the large theatre as well as several others rooms at different times over the weekend.

The main point for me was, of course, selling my collection. Stupidly I didn’t take any pictures of my setup, but you can see me standing behind a Predator over at the Forbidden Planet blog. I was also running up and down to cover another two tables, selling raffle tickets, Hi-Ex t-shirts and some very, very nice Dredd badges from Termight.

I did amazingly well over the weekend, helped in no small part by being the only person who was selling a wide range of back issues. I think the £1/book price point helped as well. I got a lot of repeat custom over the weekend, helped especially by dropping the price a couple of times on Sunday to try and shift more. The people who benefited from the “3 for £1” selling did better than hey had any right to hope for, but I’m glad I managed to make a lot of people happy with some new books to read.

I was quite restrained with my own spending (beyond copious beers), only stopping by Cinebooks and the Harker stands. I would have bought more but it was late on by the time I got round so some folks had sold out.

Dave from KoA was an absolute star, minding the stall for me while I got my first shot at some pen & paper role-playing. It was good. It was very good fun. I need to do more of that. Listening to nothing by D&D podcasts on the drive up and back probably helps with that opinion.

Dave and I yakked about the con for an hour for the podcast, both of us trying our best to sum up just how much fun we’d had. I had a truly amazing weekend. It was great to catch up with Simon, albeit briefly, I had a good conversation with Charlie Adlard about European comics, X-Files and Argento. Despite missing the Cam Kennedy interview on the Sunday, I ended up chatting to him one-on-one for a while as he wandered round the hall. He also gave me a beautiful set of postcard-sized prints of some of his iconic work.

So many other great moments, not least of which was the side-splitting Saturday night. A night of plentiful drink, plentiful friends old and new, and jam comics that will never see the light of day again.

Roll on Hi-Ex 2011.

Step forward Northwave. Damn you, damn you to Hades!

I was excited for the film and in the run up I decided not to re-read the book and was often the voice in a discussion pointing out that it would need to be changed for the screen and we shouldn’t expect anything less, it’s an adaptation after all. Still, even with those caveats I was nervous about the film. Having read the new ending I wasn’t particularly sold on it but vowed to go with an open mind and try to enjoy it for what it is.

There are so many good things to say about the film. It’s visually stunning (leaving aside Snyder’s insistence on slow motion shots), the performances are all excellent with special mention for Jackie Earle Haley as Rorscach and Henry Dean Morgan as The Comedian. Many of the shots are lifted directly off the page which could have gone wrong but works perfectly. There’s no attempt to sex up the story with extra action sequences or characters and, for the most part, it is faithful. However, a lot of the book is missing and here’s where my earlier insistence that this is necessary wavers.

There will be spoilers, don’t bother complaining as the book’s twenty years old. Also, I may make mistakes since, as previously mentioned, I haven’t opened the book in over six months.

We lose much of the character backgrounds that was supplied in the chapter end inserts. There are entire sub-plots missing including a couple that I think are crucial to events that are left in the film. There are subtle changes such as Silk Spectre killing one of the muggers and appearing to enjoy it. That’s the style of the Comedian, surely? Ozymandias is sign posted as the villian with evil glances to camera. Oh, and Ozymandias’ impression of Dr Strangelove in the final act is…not in need of further comment.

The real bugbear is the ending though. Okay, so the space squid would be very difficult to pull off now that the disappearing artists story has been removed but what replaces it manages to change the original ethos and also make no sense. Ozymandias plans to bring peace to an unstable world by uniting people against a common, external threat but in this new ending the common threat is Dr Manhattan.

We’re expected to believe that a world on the virge of all-out nuclear war (the US is at DEFCON 1) stands idly by as mass destruction takes place across the globe. Add to this the fact that the US is the last country to be hit, a full 35 minutes behind the first. Surely that would be seen very, very negatively. Not only that, but the USSR extends the hand of friendship to the country where the apparent source of the explosions was created? Not likely!

The scenes of devastation are glossed over. In the original it’s hammered home that as ordinary people caught up in the machinations of a few, self-appointed keepers  but since several of the characters have been excised it we’re shown a brief glimpse of a crater in New York instead.

So after Dr Manhattan is blamed for the devastation the world surrenders to peace, in fear of a vengeful god returning to repeat his earlier aggression. The generators were being created by Veidt technologies but apparently no-one cares about that as they hire the company to rebuild the world. All while the remaining masks carry on life as normal with apparently no backlash.

Complete nonsense. I’ve already had a couple of people say that I should “just go with it” or similar. It saddens me that people will go to see the film as just another comic book super-hero film without realising that the original elevated the form to something else. I’ll forgive low budget films their flaws but when you’re playing with hundreds of millions of dollars I don’t see the point in making excuses.

Until recently I’ve never given my Dad a comic book. I’ve been reading comics as far back as I can remember but it’s never been a hobby that I’ve shared with any member of my family, something which I’ve found occasionally frustrating as I see comics as just another medium. Why avoid reading a story in one medium that you’d happily read in another? Whatever the reasons, I’d always held off giving Dad a comic until I could find one that I knew he would dedicate some time to.

Step forward Queen & Country. A modern British spy series with no gadgets, no superheroes and believable storylines. I past him the book a few weeks ago and he said he’d give it a shot.

The other night, while on the phone, I asked if he’d had a chance to read it yet and he enthused about it at length! I was so happy to hear that not only had he read it, he was wanting more! I’ll need to pick up volume 2 now, but I think I’ll also try out DMZ on him. I can’t see Dad browsing with 3 for 2 graphic novels in Waterstones just yet, but I’m working up a list of books he might like.

I really want to order this, Brian Wood is easily one of my favourite writers of the moment. DMZ and Demo come highly recommended.

When you get an email reply from your supplier saying “Are you really sure you want to order this much? Want to wait for the softcover?” then you gotta figure that backing off for a bit would be a good thing.

I’ve still got the Sam ‘n’ Max collection still unread, as well as the complete Astonishing X-Men run on loan from Kas (so far, I still say Whedon is something of a one-trick snappy dialogue pony) and I haven’t read a prog since July.

That’s in between stepping up my running speed, getting some bike miles in long before the October Ace Race and hopefully finding time to complete GTA IV before the end of the year.

The only problem with video is that they need to be transcoded to h264 which takes time, they also need to be loaded into certain directories for different codecs in some kind of ass-backward implementation. However, thanks to the googlewebs I have a script called vepp which takes care of all that for me.

Apparently it also plays games. Had a look in Gamestation but they didn’t have anything of note.