Of Comics & Cowboys

Today ended up being a long but pleasant day.

The afternoon was spent cruising down over to the University of Toronto campus where one of the old and currently under renovation halls was taken over by the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. While we did not achieve everything that we set out to do, it was for the most part a success. Our failures come in the form of completely forgetting that Stuart Immonen (penciller for the utterly hilarious Next Wave: Agents of H.A.T.E.) was there and bringing anything for him to sign. The other failure was missing out on James Jean (cover artist for Fables) who was in the middle of a panel discussion when we showed up, and the other miss was Paul Pope (creator of 100%) who we spectacularly failed to locate.

On the other hand, we managed to meet with Evan Dorkin, who has done completely psychotic Milk & Cheese comic (“When dairy products go bad!”) and got him to not only sign our trade paperback, we came away with a Milk & Cheese fridge magnet. This is, of course, awesome. The other success was meeting Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of local comic sensation Scott Pilgrim, and I finally got to ask him whether he liked moving from Toronto to Nova Scotia, since we were contemplating a Halifax move ourselves last year. It turns out he doesn’t and will probably be leaving the province, so maybe we made the right choice after all in settling down here. I picked up the third book in the Scott Pilgrim series and got him to sign my first. We also ran into the Old Friend who was hanging out with her girlfriend, who, in turn was dating a guy that does a webcomic called Butternut Squash and seduced his lady love with a heart full of love and plastic guitar. The song? Freebird. The level? Medium. I give him credit for trying, but dude, Medium… Come on…

After that, we went to another part of the Annex to attend the Wife’s Friend’s 30th birthday party which had, wait for it… A COWBOY THEME! People were dressed as desperadoes and there was pinata in the shape of a cactus. Being the big Party Animal that I am, I immediately ran from the crowd in the backyard and retreated to the basement, there, to find (what in retrospect should been obvious) that someone had brought Guitar Hero II to the party.

As you may expect, it was all over for me at that point.

I am once again amazed at the continuing hesitation of people to play at Expert. I think I may have also accidentally killed the more innocent, “Hey, let’s just have fun” buzz that the other party-goers were enjoying with GH2. I strapped on the guitar, warmed up with Sweet Child O’ Mine and noted that the buttons were a bit stiffer than my hugely worn out Gibson SG at home, but got into it after a bad start and then after that went through a few favorites like Messenger In A Bottle, Carry on my Wayward Son and Monkeywrench at which point there were a lot of “Holy shit…”s, “What the hell level is he playing?!” and “HOW THE FUCK DID HE DO THAT?!”

Once I was done, fewer people were willing to approach the game, and some folks did attempt Expert, usually getting shut out within 2-4% of the song’s beginning. I told them I wasn’t that good. They told me to shut the hell up. One guy, upon leaving the party, put his hand on my shoulder and said “Dude… YOU are my Guitar Hero.”

As befits the basement, this is where we found the Nerd/Geek contingent and immediately scored Respect Points with whole “She draws comics, he reviews videogames” thing. It is still baffling to me that people would now actually consider this cool, and that so, by extension, are we. Much talk of games, anime, illustration and comics ensued and I think these guys now have a far more heavily distorted and favorable view of our lives than we actually deserve.

Also we finally finished Digital Devil Saga 2, today, but I’ll write more about that properly tomorrow.