CCR 2026 Report

Had a fun time at Comic Con Revolution – Ontario. Held in Southern California’s Inland Empire, about 60 miles from the coast, it offers locals the comic con experience in their own backyard. People were happy to be there, many for the first time.

A big appeal of the show in recent years has been the celebrities who come in for photos and autographs. Among this year’s guests were the casts of the Flash television series that included Grant Gustin, Tom Kavanagh and John Wesley Shipp; Battlestar Galactica with Edward James Olmos, Katee Sackhoff and Grace Park; and Beverly Hills 90210, including Jenny Garth, Ian Ziering and James Austin Green.

In fact, about half the main exhibition hall was designated for celebrity guests, while Artist Alley was in a separate ballroom in the same venue. On Sunday, I made a quick visit to the area and saw Gustin, Cavanagh, Shipp, and Garth; the day before, as I left my table to grab lunch, I passed Ziering on the floor, checking out Artist Alley.

While comic book sales weren't as strong as I would have liked, afterwards, in making my final tally, I happily discovered that I did better than I thought, in large part boosted by sales of prints and original art and sketches! Foot traffic was light on my end of the floor much of the time and a large percentage of people who stopped by, even if they liked my work, weren’t comics readers. (That said, I was happy to see that two comics legends, Chris Claremont and John Romita, Jr., had healthy lines throughout the show!)

Nevertheless, it was fun to meet the usual spectrum of fans, like the two young women who immediately and enthusiastically vibed with the series and got a kick out of the variety of stories. They laughed at the situations I told them Rob often found himself in, at one point saying “We love Rob!” and “Poor Rob never seems to take a break!” (Which gave me the segue to tell them about the story, “Crime Takes a Holiday,” where Rob spends his entire vacation trying to figure out what a longtime foe is up to when he spots him in the same area.) They purchased all my trade paperbacks and a selection of other issues.

There was also the kid who bought the first issue and asked me to sign the cover with a special pen he has for such occasions—then returned later asking me to draw a doodle on the cover because he assured me it would increase its value lol!

And there was the otherwise amiable gentleman who at least three times during our conversation let drop that he’d just gotten out of prison after seven years in stir—but he never said for what, and I wasn’t quite clear what the etiquette was for asking! Anyway, though sales were just a bit disappointing, I had a fun time and enjoyed meeting attendees and fellow creators.

See the full gallery. 

 

UPCOMING: Comic Con Revolution–Ontario

This weekend, May 16–17, I’ll be at Comic Con Revolution–Ontario in Southern California’s Inland Empire, at the Ontario Convention Center!

Visit me at booth F12 in Artist’s Alley at the show. 

The Conchords Take Flight

For Mother’s Day, we got tickets for the comedy singing duo, Flight of the Conchords—or, as they describe themselves, New Zealand's fourth most popular folk-comedy duo, ranked just below a Flight of the Conchords tribute band, Like of the Conchords (who they said were only better because they practice more).

Made up of actors/comedians Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, the team were coaxed by Netflix to reunite for this year’s Netflix is a Joke Fest held all over in L.A. May 4-10. The show was held at the open air Greek Theatre, up in the hills of Griffith Park here in L.A. (Originally billed for one show, a second night was added due to the demand. I posted last week that we saw a small show at the Comedy Store as part of the festival. In addition, at last year’s Fest, we saw Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Gaffigan, and Nat Bargatze at the Hollywood Bowl.)

This is their first appearance together since 2018—though, in preparation, they performed several tune up shows that included a few shows in L.A. locally last week at the small smaller supper club venue, Café Largo. Joking at the start of the show that they had to re-learn the music and lyrics of their old songs, there were occasional false starts and miscues that were part of the fun and charm of the show. (You can see a couple of these miscues in the video clip below lol.) A lot of the show was obviously ad-libbed, particularly in the interactions with the audience.

Like many people, I discovered the duo through their self-titled two-season 2007–09 HBO series—last night’s show included “surprise” appearances of series cast members Arj Barker, who performed his stand up act to open the show, and actors Rhys Darby and Kristen Schall in character as, respectively, their hapless manager, Murray, and sole, obsessed fan, Mel (proudly telling the audience she was their only fan before there was OnlyFans). My wife actually spotted Schall in the venue prior to the show.

Though I wondered whether there’d be new material as in their 2018 special, the show consisted primarily of their back catalog, opening with “The Humans Are Dead” (updated to reference AI) and “Frodo, Don’t Wear the Ring.” It closed with “Bowie's in Space” and, as their encore, their rap battle, “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros.” In between, there was plenty of funny chatter. My only disappointment was that they didn’t perform “The Summer of 1353”—one of my favorite lines from that song being, “That haircut’s a little 1351.” It was a rapturous audience and a hilarious, fun evening.

Free Comic Book Day 2026 Wrap Up!

Thanks to the Santa Monica Comics Co. for allowing me and a bunch of other creators to be part of the first Free Comic Book Day at their new store in West Los Angeles! I'm fortunate that the store is pretty much on my side of town since I live less than 5 miles away either by freeway or local streets. (I'm partly re-posting the store's post about the day because I ended up not taking many photos myself, aside from a video I posted yesterday—and I'm in one of the cover photos lol!) I had a lot of fun meeting great, interesting folks. One 11-year old bought a few issues that his dad first carefully leafed through—he wasn't harsh or anything, but he understandably wanted to make sure my comics were age appropriate. In fact, he specifically asked me whether there was any profanity or sex, and I assured him that the issues his son picked up did not have anything gratuitous. As a dad myself, I respected his due diligence lol.

I also met a gentlemen who was in town on business to find investors for his hedge fund who was staying in a hotel in Beverly Hills—but was also a good Catholic who attended my local church whenever he was in town (he asked if I might be there on Sunday, and I said, no, that's why I called him a "good Catholic" lol); a mother who bought my baseball issue because she loves the sport; and a long time comics fan who told me the story of losing what sounded like a prized childhood comics collection to water damage (yes, it was at painful as it sounds!) We had fun talking about the great artists of our youth, like John Buscema, John Romita (and John Romita, Jr.), Paul Smith, John Byrne, and titles like Creepy, Conan the Barbarian, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and more! He really knew his stuff.

A lot of people, of course, were locals—my first college apartment away from home was in this part of L.A., so I still know it fairly well and this occasionally came up in conversation, especially with somewhat famous University High School (or Uni High) nearby. Some of the people I met were either current students or graduates. (Given its location, many of its alumni were celebrities or their children—I know that comics and television writer Mark Evanier also graduated from Uni, and occasionally tells stories about his time there at his blog.)

The NuArt Theatre, an arthouse theater, is just down the street, and was a favorite haunt for friends and me when it was one of many revival houses in L.A. back in the 1980s and ‘90s. Another arthouse theater, the Laemmle, is even closer on the same street—I actually saw actor Leonard Nimoy there in the lobby during a showing of Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Hamlet, and once ate next to Randy Newman at a sushi bar that used to be next door!

Anyway, it was a fun event in a part of town that has many great memories for me. This side of L.A. also is known for its Persian restaurants and businesses, and one of our favorite such restaurants is nearby, Javan. Afterwards, to reward myself after a long day (I pretty much skipped lunch), I stopped there for dinner to go since it was on the way! Next up for me is Comic Con Revolution - Ontario in a few weeks, May 16-17!

Free Comic Book Day 2026 is Saturday, May 2!

From the Vault: Unpublished Art (1)

While going through old art, I came across close to 80(!) pages of unfinished and unpublished art from stories I never completed (one was abandoned 18 pages in!). I can't recall why I stopped work on them—though I usually work from a completed script, I probably just felt I wasn't feeling it or the story was going nowhere. But in retrospect, they seem to hold up okay. Though some have the lettering lightly pencilled, as organized as I generally try to be, I actually don't seem to have the original scripts for many of these!

Anyway, here's a three-page sequence I vaguely recall was to be Rob's first appearance in a story, Rob breaking into a lab or something in Asia for some evidence. These were fully inked, but not yet shaded or lettered.

Web Tweaks 2026

Yesterday, on April 17, I deployed the re-designed and updated the WCG Comics website!

When it comes to my website, I am an inveterate tinkerer. Though not an expert by any means, I enjoy the process of building and coding web pages. In 1998, I started with html, moved to CSS in 2009, and Wordpress in 2022. These updates have included re-designs, moving to different web hosts, and migrating from PayPal to WooCommerce and Square as my payment processor.

While my website has always met my needs functionally—the main goal being the ability to make the purchase process at my webstore as smooth and painless as possible for users—a major goal in my bucket list has been to move to a more modern fluid and responsive full-width website design. Not only was my current website—using a template called MH Themes—somewhat outmoded because it was an older design, I did not have access to some recent Wordpress features.

Above: Recently retired WCG Comics website.

Over the past several months, I intermittently experimented and played with a variety of designs and themes. None seemed to adequately meet my needs—existing templates seemed too rigid and unsuited for what I wanted.

I realized that another daunting aspect of a potential re-design would be the need to re-create and migrate all my existing sales and products, images, and other features I’d incorporated over the years. Indeed, it was enough to make me believe that such a re-design was unfeasible and daunting to rebuild the website again from the ground up.

A major breakthrough was coming across the Staging feature in Wordpress, that allows a user to duplicate an existing website into a walled off sandbox and play with it without risk of breaking the original site. Just as importantly, when it’s ready, staging also allows you to deploy the website by simply writing over and replacing the existing website to make the new site live.

I also came across a theme that I thought might work for me—NewSpare by AF Themes. Though similar to the MH Magazine theme in that it’s a news site at its heart, it had a full-width design with a top banner image that gave me access to more modern features. While I still had to re-build (or rather, re-create) the front page from scratch, and ensure the webstore pages worked properly, the rest of my content otherwise transferred fairly smoothly into the new format. I still need to slightly tweak the containers of the other pages to ensure they do not run to the very edge, but fortunately, these are mostly cosmetic changes since the pages otherwise retained their layout and content, and were already fully functional and readable. Because of all this, what I thought might take me months was completed over a a few nights!

While I’ve learned to never say never when it comes to my website, hopefully this recent leap will be the last major re-design or update to the website I’ll need to make for awhile!

Below: The website from May 2024.