Still Back From San Diego!

You know, the Comic-Con isn't all about seeing famous people. It's also about crap. Crap as in, "boy, that movie sure looks like crap", or "what sort of crap are they giving away at that booth?", or even, "crap, my feet sure hurt".

However, here are some of the non-crap things that we saw at Comic-Con:

Flapjack Toys is a new company started by the founder of Funko. Although Funko is still going strong with it's Wacky Wobblers, the owner decided to move on and start a new brand. Their Symptoms and Spooky Kooky toys made their debut at Comic-Con. While bulging eyeballs and little monsters won't appeal to everyone, the design showed a lot of promise for the future.


We were there in 2003 when the Uglydolls first showed up in San Diego, and it's nice to see how they have grown since then. The Uglydolls have moved into vinyl figures, t-shirts, and have shrunk down into little keychains; can a cartoon show be far behind? This year we picked up the newest Uglydoll, Chuckanucka.


Steve Rude is one of the most talented artists in the business today, although he isn't as prolific as he was in the eighties. It's a shame that he and Mike Baron aren't producing the Nexus comic anymore, but I eagerly wait for the next Mothman series to come out. His latest sketchbook, Steve Rude Sketches & Commissions 2006, is available from his website.


As I have wrote earlier, I love Phil Hale's artwork. Mockingbirds/Relaxeder is a pair of small, hardcover books commemorating a 2005 Phil Hale exhibit in London. Mockingbirds features the artist's more recent oil paintings, while Relaxeder showcases his pencil drawings. I also picked this set of books up from Bud Plant.


Fantagraphics is currently putting out a series of internationally-produced comics called the Ignatz Series. These comics feature a rotating group of artists with stories done in a more European style. I really hadn't heard much about these comics, but once I picked some of them up and flipped through them, I was hooked. It's always good to have a balanced diet of comics, and the Ignatz imprint is a great way to offset too many superhero comics. Each comic comes in an 8-1/2 x 11 two-color format printed on nice quality paper.


I had to do a little research on them first, but I finally figured out that Dumbrella is a group of web comic artists. Each artist has his own website that features their own individual comics. It seems that one of their main sources of income is t-shirts. At the convention they had their own booth with mostly t-shirts with clever drawings and witty statements. The shirts were apparently selling very well, because they never seemed to have the sizes we were looking for. It's always nice to see that both the big companies and the little guys can both thrive at the Comic-Con. Ah, there's nothing like a level playing field.