Awkwords
The melancholy life and love of Erik Satie first caught my attention after I read a wonderful comic strip about him by one of my favorite cartoonists, local misanthrope Ivan Brunetti. Brunetti’s seldom-published book Schizo is one of the most relentlessly nihilistic and funny autobiographical comics going. Check him out ya’ll! More tales of fin de siecle woe to come!
Speaking of comics and clumsy segues, I think it only proper to give an account of Wizard World, a massive comic book convention that took over the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL for one weekend of nerdtopia. It was dork critical mass, and I fit in a lot better than I’d like to admit. There were 20,000 Leagues of comic books, bootleg DVDs, movie promos, video game tourneys, costumed models, and dungeon masters. I saw three dudes dressed up as robin, EACH with their glasses subtlety wedged beneath their masks. I wept.
Rumor had it that Brunetti along with comic wunderkind Chris Ware were wandering around, but I saw none of them. I did see several people I knew, including Madeline L., who was dressed in Catholic schoolgirl attire passing out promotional fliers for a movie entitled Cry Wolf. She was hit on by nerds all day. Indeed, there was enough sexual tension locked within the Stephen’s Center to cause a multiversal catastrophe of Infinity Gauntlet proportions (See Thor Vol. 5 No. 112).
One big highlight for me was meeting Jeffrey Brown, who does Cuticle in the Reader, as well as a bunch of heart string harpsichords about his life and loves. He did a little drawing on the inside cover of the comic I bought from him. I tried to muster up the courage to converse, but not much came out other than a muttered, "I really like your stuff." So maybe in this case "met" is a strong word.
My only other haul from the convention was an old Patsy Walker romance/humor comic from 1951. The gentleman who sold it to me waxed nostalgic, remembering when major comic companies would put out comics about anything, for any audience. Then a sexy zombie walked by. Time and space burst asunder.
