Saga is a space opera with a strange focus. The first issue, coming on March 14, starts with a quite literal birth. From what can be gleaned from interviews, our two main characters are on opposite sides in a galactic civil war but fell in love anyway and decided to go on the run from their responsibilities.

The comic has been described as Game of Thrones meets Star Wars. And it seems like Star Wars artist Dave Dorman was offended by what he somehow thought was a family friendly book. Seems he was excited to share this space saga with his young son until realizing, god help him, that one of the main characters dared to breastfeed on the cover.

I find this image offensive, not only for promotion of a comic book, but specifically for a comic that Brian clearly states that he would like to see today’s younger generation pick up and read as he did when he was kid. Rather than a family-friendly heroic saga, this promo art is telegraphing to the world that it’s a series I cannot share with my 7-year-old son.

To anyone familiar with Vaughn, it’s fairly obvious that this would in no way be a family-oriented book. But what’s most disconcerting is that the breastfeeding wars have come to comic books.

Come on. Really?

Saga begins with a 44 page special ($2.99) on March 14, 2012 and is written by Brian K. Vaughn and illustrated by Fiona Staples.

According to Vulture, Bird has sat down to talk over directing duties on Here there be Monsters, a film that has “British War Hero John Paul Jones stripped of his naval commission and hired by a shipping magnate to investigate the disappearance of his merchant ships in the North Atlantic.” Naturally, big slimy monsters are involved and things probably explode in interesting ways.

Sounds fun.

Theatre, especially London theatre, is such a mess when it comes to seeing (or rather not seeing) performances.  It’s not like movies, where time and money and intention will get you to it at some point.  You can have the time and location and finances and still just be unlucky (a friend and I were ten people away from the last Frankenstein tickets in London last spring).  Maybe you’re lucky and someone like Fathom will do a showing, but overall unless it’s seen as good PBS “Great Performances” fodder you will not have another chance.

And that’s why Digital Theatre are such clever people.  For about the price of a DVD, you can get a high-def download of any of a number of stage shows — mostly Shakespearean in nature.  Their big seller right now?  The much-hyped Tennant/Tate production of Much Ado About Nothing, the stuff of much fannish tooth-gnashing and “Why can’t I live in England”-ing.  It’s a high-quality recording of a live performance, shot up close and personal, and for quality alone it’s worth every penny.

All right, some of you may not actually remember the story from high school English class, so here.  The cast is headed up by two couples: the argumentative Benedick (Tennant) and Beatrice (Tate), and the very much in love Hero and Claudio (Sarah MacRae and Tom Bateman, both in their West End debuts).  During the nuptials of the latter two, both pairs are duped by the surrounding cast — Benedick and Beatrice into loving each other, and Claudio into rejecting Hero for believing her to be disloyal to him.  As it’s a Shakespearean comedy, wacky hijinks ensue, but in the end all the right people end up happy and all the wrong ones vanish into the night and are promptly forgotten about.

This modern restaging of Much Ado makes no effort to be overly socially relevant.  It’s clearly set in the here-and-now but, other than the conversion of a few of the Bard’s verses into club bangers, there aren’t any forced modern cultural references.  The acting and staging are completely contemporary, though, and the whole thing is delivered with a sort of goofy rom-com ease that tends to be lacking in a lot of other modern Shakespearean performances.  It doesn’t feel like stuffy Theatre-with-a-capital-T, nor does it feel awkward like trying to set Romeo & Juliet in a Catholic school with four actresses playing the various aspects of Juliet’s personality.*  It’s fun no matter who you are, and the actors don’t struggle with preserving iambic pentameter or speaking in lofty tones.

If you’ve ready enough of my reviews, you know my feelings on David Tennant: he’s an excellent actor and a force to be reckoned with, but he doesn’t usually share a stage well.  Here, though, he does.  He pulls back his “stage storm” and channels it into the broad comedy aspect of his role, so that even his dramatic turn late in the show is on the subtle, stolid side.  He is actually amazingly good and delightful at comedy delivery, including and especially the slapstick scenes (he and paint don’t seem to get along).  We already know that Catherine Tate handles the same wonderfully, and it’s fun to see her return to more extreme physical comedy at points throughout the show.  The pair of them really do balance each other out, and watching Much Ado solely to see them is a perfectly legitimate move.

However, the rest of the cast is nothing to be sneezed at.  MacRae and Bateman have a great deal more drama to deal with, and for a pair out on their first outing, they do an admirable job of it.  Elliot Levey (of “Hotel Babylon”) is impressively slimy as Don John, the mastermind behind Hero and Claudio’s rift.  Perfectly awesome, though, is John Ramm as Dogberry — though if you can’t have fun as Dogberry, something is seriously wrong with you.

This version of Much Ado is very well-balanced, bright, loud, silly, and fun.  It’s also one of the few shows I’ve watched recently where I’ve had to pause the video just to stop and think about how cool it was.  David Tennant and Catherine Tate really just shine, and you can see their chemistry and ability to just have fun.  But the scenes without them aren’t slow or boring, either; they may be the headliners, but everyone has merit and it’s a strong, tight cast.  I bought the HD version of the video (all their videos require a special player and are keyed to work only with a certain person’s player, so no burning or sharing), and it was very good picture quality even on fullscreen and played without glitches.  Skipping around in the video within the player didn’t work so well, so individual scenes were tough to get to, but that’s my only quibble with the video or the player.

All that said, it’s worth your money: £6.99 for an online rental, £8.99 for regular-quality, or £10.99 for the (well worth it) HD version.  As it’s downloadable, they do take international orders with no trouble.  In short, if you want it — and you likely do — you have every opportunity to get it legitimately, and legitimately good.  Who knows … if it gets enough downloads, maybe they’ll put out a proper physical DVD.

Digital downloads of Much Ado About Nothing are available at DigitalTheatre.com, along with a whole bunch more Shakespeare, some things you’ve never heard of, and something about Kafka’s monkey.  Which I’m sure is delightful because, hey, monkeys.

* This happened at my college.

Produced by Luc Besson, Lockout stars Guy Pearce who gets the unenviable job of rescuing the President’s daughter from a rioting space station prison. Let’s not complicate things beyond that.

The reason we have two trailers here is that one is the awesomely introduced but somewhat boring US trailer, while the other gives a better look at the smart-ass that Pearce will be playing in this film.

Lockout is directed by first-time director, long-time cinematographer James Mather, produced by Luc Besson and will be released on April 20, 2012.

After the ending of the first series of Sherlock, a friend tweeted desperately to Steven Moffat that clearly he forgot to deliver the next episode to the BBC.  For more than a year, the fandom has been biting their nails waiting to see how the horrifying cliffhanger would be resolved, and on New Year’s Day they finally got their show back and could breathe again.  For three weeks.  In those three weeks, though, we got to see an already-good show evolve, finding ways around last year’s weak points without suddenly flying off the handle and changing format and theme.

A few things did change this series.  For one thing, they went in a similar direction to “Jonathan Creek,” forcing their genius protagonist into the limelight to deal with unwanted new-found celebrity.  The unwanted attention also found its way into Sherlock’s personal life, as his unfortunate admirer Molly (Loo Brealey, an unsung talent in the show) goes from being a bit of a joke to genuinely sympathetic.  This isn’t the only woman in Sherlock’s life, though.

Nope.  If you had your ear in even the general direction of this series’s production, you knew The Woman — Irene Adler — was on the way.  Played by Lara Pulver (of “MI-5″ and the ill-fated final series of “Robin Hood”), this Irene is certainly a bit on the edgier side — her episode, “A Scandal in Belgravia” (based on the original story A Scandal in Bohemia), presents her as a dominatrix whose fascination with Sherlock’s apparent asexuality leads her to play a variety of games with him, mental and otherwise.  Let’s just say the “battle dress” she greets him in leaves very little to the imagination.  Moff came under a bit of fire for this, as the show aired before the watershed, but he’s always getting yelled at for something, so moving on.

Now in its second series, the show knows where it stands well enough that it can tackle the famous stories; thus, their second episode is Gatiss’s “The Hounds of Baskerville” (based on … well, it’s fairly obvious).  ”Hounds” is a horror story in every sense, from directorial choices to high-strung psychological crises.  Gatiss, whose Doctor Who history includes the spooky “The Unquiet Dead” and “Night Terrors,” was a good match, and his writing gives the actors a challenge they appear to be more than up to.  Russell Tovey puts in an impressive appearance — and no, I don’t think it was lost on anyone that the werewolf from “Being Human” was in the episode about a giant demon dog.

As for the third story … “The Reichenbach Fall” … there’s not much one can say.  This is in part for spoilers, in another part for honest inability to try and relate it, but mainly because if you know Holmes canon you already know what that title signifies.  What can I say?  Strenuous and amazing work from both Cumberbatch and Freeman, for a start.  Andrew Scott continues to be utterly mad as Moriarty, and we finally get to see an extended performance from him.  More than anything, though, this proves Steve Thompson as a writer, whose episode last year — “The Blind Banker” — was (if one had to choose) the weakest of the three.  He was given an essential and unchangeable piece of Holmes canon to adapt, and he made it both tear-jerking and utterly confounding … though one gets the feeling Moff helped with that.

I think I’ve complained in the past — actually, I know I have — about warring fandoms (specifically, Ritchie movies vs. this … I’ve yet to see a rabid Basil Rathbone fan lose it on Tumblr about accuracy to the source).  One thing I really did love in here was a pair of brief, yet obvious, directorial nods to the Ritchie flicks.  Given that I’ve heard Cumberbatch enjoys the movies and they scared him into going to the gym, I take them as a cute little tip of the hat to its fellow reinterpretation.  See if you can spot them.

The main thing Sherlock had going for it this year was the fact that there was no more setup necessary.  With all the characters in place and the style of the series established, they were free to branch out both with plots and with character development.  Rupert Graves is delightful as Lestrade, and he actually gets some of the best lines in the show for a change.  And Una Stubbs as the indispensable Mrs. Hudson becomes essential to the action, as does the aforementioned Molly Hooper.  Even the main pair got some character development — yes, even Sherlock, a risky direction for this characterization but handled well and interestingly.  Cumberbatch and Freeman continue excellent, with their chemistry improving significantly this year.  I heard from a few viewers that the “we’re not gay” gags wore a bit thin on them, but your mileage may very.

Last year, too, the pairing of writer to story seemed a bit arbitrary — the show-runners get the first and last story of the year, and the third writer picks up the middle.  Here, the choices made sense: Moff gets the sexy one, Gatiss gets the spooky one, and Thompson gets a golden opportunity to show what he can do.  And while there was the running thread of Moriarty last year, this year the connections between things are more subtle and (according to Moff) some are still going unnoticed as the fandom scratches its head over the big finale.

Never fear, though.  A third series was commissioned and approved long before it was announced, so questions will be answered and more stories are in store.  I can’t wait to see them explain this one away, though.

The second series of Sherlock will air in the US as part of Masterpiece Mystery! starting on May 6.  Tune in to see people get naked … there, that’s got your attention.

According to Deadline, Warner Brothers wants their movie, Gods and Kings, not to follow The Ten Commandments but rather be a “warrior film…with the grittiness of Saving Private Ryan.” Spielberg first read the script in September and talks, for good or ill, are supposed to be finished by the end of the month.

The treatment was brought to the studio by Matt Leshem, who will be producing, and the script is to be written by Michael Green (co-writer, Green Lantern) and Stuart Hazeldine (Paradise Lost). Filming is expected to being in 2013.

I’d love for this column to be helpful to our readers, but I’ve no idea if our audience is made up mostly of webcomic readers or creators.  So as I start sorting out my writing responsibilities for the new year, I’m curious — as a regular (I assume) reader, what would you like to see this section of the blog cover?  More specific comics?  More business/financial-angled stuff?  Or are you content with something as free-form as it’s been lately?

I still plan to cover conventions as I attend them, new projects from known creators, and — whenever possible — information on new artists who are coming up with innovative new presentations.  Those things won’t change.  But in between times, I’d love to hear what our readers would like to see this column become in the new year.  I look forward to reading your comments.

Josh A. Cagan performs at w00tstock 1.2. Photo by Adam Savage.

There have been many great things to come out of the invention of Twitter, and one of those things is the fact that Joe and Jane Average Geek can have a closer relationship to the celebrities they admire. Of course, sometimes what happens as a result of those Twitter conversations occurs in a completely unpredictable way, and the result can be something rather spectacular.

Take screenwriter Josh A. Cagan (@joshacagan) for example. One minute, he’s noodling around on Twitter, the next he’s starting a friendship with Adam Savage from “Mythbusters,” after that comes an appearance at the inaugural w00tstock shows, and just recently, a script he sold last year was on the 2011 Hollywood Blacklist of the year’s “most liked” spec scripts.

But as Lowell Greenblatt and I found out during our interview with him, Cagan’s life and career has had its low points, too:

• Am I ever going to start one of these podcasts without some audio difficulties? Skype is great for doing long-distance conference calls, but for some reason we had to stop and start so many times. The best part is that after every time we stopped the call, Skype sent us a “So how are we doing?” feedback form. Also, if you hear clicking, that’s me attempting to log some of these notes during the interview. I promise to use a quiet pen and paper (or my boyfriend’s iPad) next time.
• Here’s the w00tstock performance by Josh Cagan which got me interested in stalking him following him on Twitter:

Josh A. Cagan performing in w00tstock at Largo Los Angeles, CA, 2009. from Kayla Cagan on Vimeo.

• I gotta say, I only ever listened to the audio and I still cracked up watching the video of Cagan’s performance.
• The items on the American Science & Surplus Clearance page alone makes this worthy of linkage. No wonder Mrs. Adam Savage took a fancy to the cut of Cagan’s jib.
• Homestar Runner was one of the best Internet things ever; I’m sad that it hasn’t been updated since December 2010.
• Yes, Virginia, there was an unreleased Fantastic Four movie from 1994; I don’t encourage people to bootleg media, but it’s the only way you can see the whole thing.
• Almost every geek knows about “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” but only a select few will recall The Golden Turkey Awards; an interesting side note is that one of its co-authors is now a conservative pundit.
• Just like Coke and New Coke, some people like the post-MST3K stuff from Cinematic Titanic, others like Riff Trax. You can like both, too! As Tim Gunn says, “It’s all a matter of taste.”
• Interestingly, this very thing happened again back in July 2009 when the co-heirs to the estates of Superman’s creators were able to get a few, but not all, of the rights to that character back. The result is that Man of Steel is now in production, and the U.K.’s Henry Cavill (“The Tudors”, Stardust) is stepping into the famous tights, sans red briefs.
• Still going strong, FilmThreat.com is still the awesome resource that Cagan remembers, minus original founder Chris Gore who is now does the film beat at G4’s “Attack of the Show,” amongst other things.
• Yeah, “Turkish Star Wars” is really a thing.
• “Undergrads” still maintains an official online presence with two clips from the show on it; I’m sure more stuff is on the fan sites that are linked as well.
• The Calgary Expo just announced that Cagan, Pete Williams, and Andy Rheingold from the crew of “Undergrads” will be attending their show, which runs from April 27 to April 29 this year. Other recently announced guests include Wil Wheaton, Richard Hatch (both versions of “Battlestar Galactica”), and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy, from the Harry Potter movies). Get your tickets and/or your passports now!
• Is now a bad time to confess that I’ve never read Charlotte’s Web?
• I have to say that having worked with a celebrity’s management agency in my former profession as a luxury real estate broker’s executive assistant, I know from experience that they are the real deal and do a lot for the people they represent. Cagan’s lucky to have had the people at H2F Entertainment at his side for so many years.
• Just so you know, Gary Glitter is out of prison, and back in the U.K.
• The sad (or maybe awesome) thing is that Yaffa Blocks still exist at its original website.
• You can buy The Duff for your Kindle or your bookshelf; author Kody Keplinger’s site is here.
• According to Gawker.com, here are the “rules” behind the concept of director jail. As for Todd Graff, I’m not sure if he’ll be put behind bars for having directed Joyful Noise, a choir competition movie starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton. It made $11 million on a weekend where it went up against the Mark Walhberg vehicle Contraband, the re-release of Beauty and the Beast in 3D and the very awesome and still out in theaters Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol—but it has a 35% rotten rating from the critics. Sounds like Graff just can’t please everyone all at the same time.
• I remember Adam de la Peña as being a very cool guy to know in high school, and I also remember for our school’s French club and Spanish club fundraiser, he and his classmates translated the witch scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail into Spanish and performed it. Unfortunately, it bombed, because the audiences was all about the broad physical comedy, not the subtle foreign language wordplay comedy. (My original French skit about a writer and the characters in her private detective noir novel went over a little better.)
• Cagan’s fellow writers in “The Job Factory” are: Rob McKittrick (Waiting…), Matt Allen and Caleb Wilson (Four Christmases and Soul Surfer), and John Davis (The Dukes of Hazzard, the Eureka: Dormant Gene miniseries).
• Cagan’s comment about Wil Wheaton is referring to an interview I did with him for Sequential Tart.com in 2004 which was so long that it had to be split into two parts. A summer project I have is to convert those mini-tapes into something suitable for a podcast.

Our many thanks again to Josh Cagan for spending so much time with us. If you have suggestions for other people you’d like for us to interview who deserve a wider audience, please let us know in the comments below.

The Artist has picked up another ‘Best Picture’ award, this one the Darryl F. Zanuck award, which has been awarded to the best picture winners for the last few years. Also a winner in the animation category was The Adventures of Tintin, beating out Rango and the slate of sequels that came out in the last year.

Other winners included Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire and Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.

Check out the full list of winners here.

Haywire
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas

Haywire is not pretty.

That’s a misleading statement. I’m not saying that it’s a bad film, or that it isn’t shot well. On the contrary, it’s a lot of fun, and the cinematography make for an extremely entertaining film. No, what Haywire is is what The Expendables should have been: action stripped down to it’s most basic, bloody, bone-breaking form, with none of the CGI or wire-work that has come to define the genre.

And not a single explosion.

Haywire is the story of Mallory Kane, played well by MMA-fighter Gina Carano, an ex-Marine working for a private military contractor. After a job in Barcelona goes off easily enough, Kane quits the company but is enticed back for that proverbial one last job. And during the course of this final job, she realizes that for some reason, she can’t trust any of the people that she thought she could.

The story is a pretty basic disavowed-agent-gets-revenge arc, and Carano plays the part well. Discovered by Soderbergh when he was watching MMA after getting fired from a movie, he wondered why no one had built a movie around her. The audience can really only say “It took long enough” as Carano has more than enough chops to lead this thing. With an excellent supporting cast including Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas and Bill Paxton, the only let down is that some of them have very little to do in the film’s 92 minute running time.

The Bourne films have made audiences hunger for intelligence with their action and while Haywire‘s story is fairly convoluted, it won’t leave anyone scratching their head. Once again though, this appears to be by design. Soderbergh has condensed action into a taut thriller that comes at you with bursts of violence, plot delivered in flashbacks and cutaways. The focus is on Carano and the violence that is her stock in trade.

And oh, that violence. Starting with an opening sequence that made the entire audience cringe, the discomfort of seeing a man attack a woman with such brutality palpable, Carano quickly shows that she can more than hold her own, with her doing her own stuntwork adding to the adrenaline. The fights and really, much of the film, are often without music, making it a much more visceral experience, with a soundtrack of grunts and cracks making it on par with the MMA fights that made Carano a star.

The film does occasionally trip on it’s own stripped approach. There are moments when it can look slightly cheap, with shots losing that gritty but professional feel and looking more like something shot by someone who had just picked up a camera. These are rare, but they tend to take you out of the flow. Soderbergh has refined this gritty feel a lot, an improvement made from 2009′s similar build-a-movie-around-this-non-movie-person The Girlfriend Experience.

Overall, the film is enjoyable, though the short running time and occasional bad shot may be off-putting to some. If you’re looking for a back-to-basics actioner, though, with practical stunts, brutal fights and a protagonist you can’t help but root for, you could do a lot worse.

If you had told College Me that Eddie Izzard would someday be killing it in a serious period drama, my response would likely have been “Right, and next you’ll be telling me that North kid will actually survive as a grown-up actor.”  Well, to be fair, I would have found the latter mildly more believable.  But over the years, Izzard has been stepping out into more mainstream dramatic roles — such as “The Riches,” struck down in its prime as it was — to the point where hearing he was playing Long John Silver wasn’t a shocker so much as a pleasant surprise.

This new version of Treasure Island, billed during its inception as family fare, was Sky 1′s holiday offering, and featured an impressive cast that just grew more impressive during the span of slow-release casting news last year.  Daniel Mays (of “Ashes to Ashes” and recently the Doctor Who episode “Night Terrors”) appears as Dr. Livesey, Philip Glenister as Captain Smollett, and the afore-referenced Elijah Wood is Ben Gunn.  Just to name three.

As with a lot of new-new-new adaptations of classics already made into films in the past, this two-part miniseries is not afraid to go both grittier and truer to the original story.  Its “family” billing is clearly by British “kids can handle this” standards.  As for loyalty to the source, this version mentions Silver’s wife (here named Alibe and played by Nina Sosanya of “Casanova”), who has never made an appearance in any previous versions.  Also, with a much longer form to work with, there’s a lot less trimming to do.

The heavy-hitter cast does not disappoint.  Wood plays the best kind of crazy as the religion- and cheese-obsessed castaway Ben Gunn, and it’s a pity that his role in the book meant he only got an outing in the second half.  Young Toby Regbo plays an admirable Jim Hawkins without being too wide-eyed or innocent, and Mays as Dr. Livesey lets “Ashes” fans see him take another go in a sympathetic role.  It was also nice to see Shirley Henderson (as Meg Hawkins) stepping outside fandom’s perception of her as incurably young to play a strong mother figure opposite Sosanya as Alibe (who, fortunately, had a decent chunk of screen time).

The two real killers of the cast, though, were easily Glenister and Izzard, and one of the great pleasures of Treasure Island is seeing them engaging in extreme acting opposite each other.  The former, whose recent roles seem to entail him unbuttoning his shirt in warm sunny places, has always done well in period dramas, and people who know him for nothing other than Gene Hunt will get to see a very different side of him.  Yes, Smollett does begin a bit Hunt-esque, but that melts away quickly.  And Izzard — I’m hard pressed to find adequate words.  As a comedian he’s always been rather endearing in a pleasant, scatterbrained sort of way.  But in drama, somehow he seems to excel at characters who are simultaneously untrustworthy and subversively likable.  Silver is one hell of a physical transformation for him, so even if somewhere within you there’s a bit of difficulty separating yourself from his other roles (or himself), the tattoos and shaved head should drive it home.  As well as that really fierce coat.

There are two big reasons to consider watching this version of Treasure Island: either because you love the story, or because you love the cast.  Either of those alone is enough reason to watch, as it’s an admirable adaptation and shows everyone at their best.  If you’re a regular reader, I can assume that you’re familiar with a bare minimum of three of the featured cast.  In which case … provided you can get your hands on it … give it a watch.  Sky 1 has done Region 1 releases of its Discworld adaptations, so if there’s enough demand we may see this stateside.

At the very least, it’d be something cool to show a high school English class during their last week before summer vacation.

This adaptation of Treasure Island also features Donald Sutherland as himself, if he were a crazy old pirate.  So, well …

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

This one is funnier, but no less intelligent.

Contact your senator and let them know that they need to vote against these bills. If they pass, sites like this one could not exist in the very near future.

Gary Ross, director of Seabiscuit as well as the first film, is returning to direct. But in a move that represents what the studio is investing in the film, The Wrap announced that Oscar-Winning screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) is working on the script. The film, which covers the birth of the revolution surrounding series protagonist Katniss Everdeen, will release on November 22, 2013.

But for Hunger Games fans, the date to wait for is the premiere of the first on March 23, 2012. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Kicking off this year's inevitable slew of "End of the World" themes at cons, we have a zombie apocalypse brewing

From a creator standpoint, MarsCon has never been much of a commerce convention.  If you’re the guest of honor or write for an established property, you’re likely to have more luck.  For a webcomicker or indie writer, though, your mileage may vary.  At $25 a pop for a table, it’s not as bad as, say, striking out at a bigger Artist Alley.  Here, regardless of whether I sell, I’ve always had good luck getting to know people, making connections (both with readers and fellow artists), and getting a feel for what’s popular among different age groups.

For the record, MarsCon tends to have a spread leaning toward older fandom.  This year there were a lot of teens and twentysomethings on hand — not surprising for Williamsburg, home of the College of William & Mary — but in large part, the attendees are people who have been going for quite a while, or who at least have been going to cons in general for quite a while.

This year, a few artists I’d seen beside me in Artist/Author Alley got “upgraded” to Dealer Room tables.  Unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to ask what the standards were for this.  My assumption is it had something to do with general popularity and/or amount/type of merchandise on hand.  While the move to a bigger (and nicer) hotel next year brings with it the promise of more room for artists, authors, and dealers, I can hope that we’ll find out where the difference lies and what constitutes eligibility for an upgrade.

Granted, this has a lot more to do with better sellers than myself.

The tough part of Alley placement in recent years has been the fact that it’s around the edges of Main Programming.  That means hours are dependent upon performance times, which can be a hassle when you have a group performing midday Saturday.  (I was, however, in one of these groups, so it would have been the same for me regardless.)  This has more to do with the sheer lack of space in the hotel than anything — even panels were cramped, including two I sat that were SRO in a rather unfortunate corner room.  With all this in mind, I was very happy (as were many others) to hear that separating out and increasing our space was high on the list for next year’s plans.

It’s very hard to say whether or not I’d recommend MarsCon to someone looking to sell, as things will be different next year.  In recent years, I’ve discussed it being good for networking.  That will always be the case, and networking is essential when you’re looking for a day-to-day readership as a webcomicker.  Thus, improving conditions for writers and artists can only be a step up.  And improved conditions at a con where the con suite already serves free full meals throughout the day?  That’s saying something.

Set in the 1960s, the film follows a young boy and girl who run away after they fall in love. Looks beautiful, funny and brilliant.

Moonrise Kingdom stars Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton,Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Jason Schwartzman and opens May 25.