Emerald City Comic Con: That Just Happened!

Haven’t we been over this thing about capes already?

Well, this year’s ECCC is over, staggering to the finish line in a haze of energy drink cocktails and cosplay-related hairspray fumes, tripping over the inert form of a passed-out Deadpool. Sunday afternoon conventioneering is really a whole undertaking of its own; a mix of low-key visitors who just came for one day to hit the dealers’ hall at its quietest, and the 3-day pass folks who are by this time a wretched, hungover mess. If you enjoy people-watching but don’t want to pay sixty bucks to do so, just grab lunch near the Seattle Convention Center on the Sunday of a big con. You’ll enjoy yourself, potentially at my expense.

Anyway, what actually went on within those hallowed halls? It’s difficult to report on a lot of the panels because, well, you had to have been there. For instance, the sequels to last years’ famed Star Wars Radio Play were a huge success, but does anyone really get anything out of my enthusiastically describing Richard Horvitz & Quinton Flynn making laser gun sounds? Probably just a vague sense of annoyance. It was great, it’ll be on Youtube soon, there was Surprise Jennifer Hale, so you should watch it.

Anyway, putting away the list of “Panels That Mean Nothing If You Weren’t There,” I spent a good while combing the exhibition hall for new & interesting comics to write up. I was lucky enough to get a few minutes each with the creators of the upcoming Oni Press series Helheim. Writer Cullen Bunn has done some work for Marvel, including long runs with Deadpool & Venom, and is probably best known for his Western horror-fantasy series The Sixth Gun; Helheim isn’t so much a departure for him as an expansion of territory.

Unsurprisingly, Helheim is also a Norwegian black metal band.

Cullen described the premise of Helheim as “Viking-era Frankenstein,” and said that the inspiration was already there – “I look at Beowulf and it’s basically a horror story, with Grendel haunting the hall and all that stuff.” For the art, his editor linked him up with Joelle Jones, who you might know from the Oni graphic novel 12 Reasons Why I Love Her and her work on Fables and Zack Whedon’s Dr. Horrible comic. Unlike Cullen, Joelle was venturing into uncharted waters; “Most of my stuff is a lot more talking, panels of conversation, and less action. This was really my first action-y project.” But their visions clicked immediately; when I asked Joelle if she drew inspiration from anything for the new undertaking, she gave possibly the perfect answer. “Oh, you know…Heavy Metal covers, heavy metal album covers…stuff you might see airbrushed on a van. Terrible things that I love.”

The result is pretty stellar; while the horror-genre mashup is kind of reminiscent of Sixth Gun, Cullen’s dialogue is much starker and to-the-point, as befits frozen-ass Dark Age Scandinavia. And compared to Gun’s delightfully garish clusterfucks, Helheim benefits from Joelle’s clean, pseudo-realistic take – lantern-jawed, mightily bearded Viking warriors taking their Robert E. Howard heroic sensibility and wandering into something far beyond the power of axe or sword. So yeah, it’s impossible for me not to give Helheim a ringing endorsement. #1 is due out on Wednesday, and is set to run six issues. Check ‘em out.

Hereville: Barry Deutsch’s modern-day fantasy apologies for being about “Yet another troll-fighting 11 year-old Orthodox Jewish girl.” Yeah, Barry. Here we go again, damnit. Seriously, Hereville’s first collection got Eisner, Nebula and Harvey nominations, and it’s a charming, clever hoot. Great for junior high kids, if you’ve got a niece or nephew who needs some indie comics cred (or, you know, just something cool to read). And you’ll probably get something out of it yourself, especially from the art, which has a great Golden Age-newspaper comic sensibility to it leavened with some excellent sight gags.

Oh yeah. Taste that GRIT.

Skyward: another all-ages effort, this one by freelance comics artist Jeremy Dale, who latched on to Jeff Smith’s Bone and never found a good reason to let go. A lack of comparable fantasy comics with cross-generational appeal led him to start work on Skyward, which is, at its core, a story about a boy and his dog. Well, and his retired legendary warlord of a dad. And a good-looking lady with a bow. And some dickhead goblins. The scripting’s a little raw, but the undeniable sense of adventure and enthusiasm creates instant appeal. Oddly enough, you can pick up preview story Skyward #0 on Free Comics Day on May 4th…packaged with NFL Rush Zone: Season of the Guardians. Apparently, that is a comic about magical football players. I don’t know either. But you do what you gotta to get the word out, and Jeremy Dale is doing it, and with good reason – he’s got a pretty sweet comic that we should read.

Outlaw Territory: you like Westerns? Not, like, horror-Westerns, or fantasy-Westerns, or Westerns-in-space, or complicated-inexplicable-anime-Westerns? Then hit up Outlaw Territory. Editor Michael Woods has collected a fair sample of writers & artists from across the industry for his anthologies, two volumes of which are already out on Image. While there’s some fear of grit poisoning, from all that realistic grimness, it’s a pretty excellent idea and a surprisingly tough thing to find amidst all that modern genre-blending.

Well, there was also a Garth Ennis panel and of course the inevitable hour of listening to Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton talk about essentially whatever the hell they wanted, but there’s nothing tremendously groundbreaking in the latter (Hey, go check out literally everything Geek & Sundry is doing, okay?) and the former is likely to be a whole article. Until then, sate yourself on the works linked above, and stay tuned for Hannah’s ECCC coverage later this week.