Tag: Ivan Cohen

Pop Culture Squad > Ivan Cohen
With Further Ado #373: The With Further Ado Annual Gift Guide – Part 1

With Further Ado #373: The With Further Ado Annual Gift Guide – Part 1

Posted on by Ed Catto

Every year, this gift guide is offered as a shortcut to some of the best stuff out there. Maybe you want need helping pick out gifts or perhaps you want to give gift ideas to those who want to buy you something! I’m not here to judge.

This week is just part one – we’ll roll up our sleeves and really get into this next week!

Doctor Strange: A Decade of Dark Magic
by Stuart Moore
(part of the Marvel Age of Comics series)

I have been looking forward to this series new series ever since I heard favorite authors like Chris Ryall and Stuart Moore promoting their entries at San Diego Comic-Con. I just finished the Doctor Strange book, and was so impressed.

Stuart Moore is an accomplished writer and editor and we’ve all enjoyed his work for many years. He’s also not only well-versed in comic book history, but able to weave together real-world events in such a way that we can better understand everything that was going on the series.

Doctor Strange, unlike Marvel contemporaries like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four, wasn’t a breakout hit. Moore helps the reader appreciate this and weaves together the tale of the character with that of the creators, starting with Stan Lee and Steve Ditko but continuing on to folks Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner.

I love comics history, but I feel Moore just gave me a masterclass in Greenwich Village history too. The key to understanding the character and series, I’ve come to believe, is to understand NYC, and the post-war population, during the doctor’s creation and his first decade of adventures.

Oh, and Moore is delightfully snarky too. Just when he’s making some important insight, he pulls the rug out from under the reader with a smirky side comment that both brings it all into better focus and makes you laugh out loud.

Highly Recommended.

Doctor Strange: A Decade of Dark Magic
by: Stuart Moore
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic
Paperback‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8765137543

Batman Returns: One Dark Christmas Eve: The Illustrated Holiday Classic Hardcover
By Ivan Cohen (author) and JJ Harrison (artist)

I think I’ve put this one into the spotlight in a past column, but it deserves another look as I just bought a couple of copies at Ollie’s, the discount store. What a delightful—and weird—book this is.

I am always loathe to (hesitant to?) trumpet the discounted treasures that one finds at a place like Ollie’s, fearing that it undermines the whole publishing industry. But I rationalize this by noting I buy more than enough stuff at full price.

Clearly, writer Ivan Cohen, writer of many Batman all-ages comics was having fun with this one. Harrison’s illustrations strike just the right chord too – they evoke the movie, but in many cases, it looks like it’s the comic book version of Batman that’s in the thick of it.

This lovely Insight Edition (I find most of their books to be excellent) celebrates the 30th (-ish) anniversary of a movie, Batman and Christmas. How can you go wrong for just $3.99?

Batman Returns: One Dark Christmas Eve: The Illustrated Holiday Classic Hardcover
by: Ivan Cohen and JJ Harrison
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Insight Editions
Print length ‏ : ‎ 32 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1647227542

 

Next week : More from the Annual With Further Ado Gift Guide

Editor’s Note: This piece was delivered in time to hit the interwebs in its normal Wednesday slot. Due to time and technical constraints that are no fault of the author, we had to push back publishment by one day. However, we are happy to bring you the first installment of 2025 for the Annual WFA Gift Giving Guide on the first official shopping day of the holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving to all, and in the words of Wilma Flinstone and Betty Rubble, “Charge it!” 

 

With Further Ado #105: Sharing SDCC’s Secret Traditions

With Further Ado #105: Sharing SDCC’s Secret Traditions

Posted on by Ed Catto

The San Diego Comic-Con is many things to many people.  For the business community, it’s an incredible commerce success story.  For fans and collectors, it’s both a celebration and a validation.   For entrepreneurs, it can be an enjoyable way to drive revenue quickly. For the entertainment community, it’s a fantastic marketing venue. For the entertainment community in Los Angeles and Hollywood, it’s also a great excuse to get outta town.

And for so many folks, professionals and fans alike, it’s an opportunity to spend time with 200,000+ of your closest friends.  It’s an annual journey to a real-life Disney World, mixed with a hefty dose of your best days on a college campus and the most incredible state fair ever, where the main dish on the menu is “all the stuff you love.”

This year, as the nation and the world struggles with Covid-19, the folks behind the convention shifted gears quickly to morph the show into a virtual convention. We’ll all be analyzing that for a while, but one refrain I heard time and time again was not so much how folks missed the big events, but how they missed the little things.

I reached out to a group of fascinating folks and asked them to share some of their more personal stories and traditions from their annual pilgrimage to San Diego Comic-Con and the little things they miss this year.

* * *

Rob Salkowitz is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Geek Culture  (I use this as a textbook for one of my college classes)  a consultant  and a sayer of things. He wistfully remembers one tradition he and his wife Eunice especially hold dear:

Our oldest and longest running SDCC tradition is the Tuesday night dinner we instituted with Batton Lash and Jackie Estrada back in 2000, maybe earlier. We were fans with no industry connections whatsoever. They befriended us, introduced us to pros, made us formally part of the Eisner Award staff and brought us into the circle of Comic-Con. After we lost Batton a couple of years ago we continued with Jackie. We really miss seeing her in person this year.

Continue reading “With Further Ado #105: Sharing SDCC’s Secret Traditions” →