shortboxed Posts

February 9 / / Cons

Cal Comic Con 2015 Recap and Review

Back before people camped out overnight to watch a panel with the cast of Twilight, people used to go to comic book conventions to buy comic books. Crazy, right?

Cal Comic Con is an event for comic book collectors, by comic book collectors. It’s an old school style con in every sense – there are no movie trailers, celebrity panels, video game demos, exclusive toys or cosplayers, just lots and lots of comic books.

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The Shortboxed crew decided to take a little road trip and drive down from San Francisco, CA to Orange County, CA to check out this show for ourselves, and it was everything we imagined it would be.

Hosted for one day in the Yorba Linda Community Center, it’s very unassuming and bare bones. It’s technically more of an expo (dealer showroom) than a full blown convention – over 30 dealers filled up 2 rooms and an outdoor patio. Some of the largest and most well-known dealers on the West Coast attend this show, and for good reason – all the attendees are hardcore comic book collectors looking for hard-to-find books or to fill gaps in their collection. This is the best show to buy comic books.

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February 8 / / Image

Eating Crowe: Image Delivers Entire Spawn Library Digitally

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Here at shortboxed, we are advocates of the physical medium of comic books. The tactile feel of the pages as we scrutinize the art, the story, the lettering… we feel it simply can’t be beat. But sometimes the utility and ease of digital comics reminds us that there is a place for both formats.

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January 29 / / Graphic Novels

Recommended Reading: By Chance or Providence Review

January 29 / / Cons

Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity at Long Beach Comic Expo

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It’s easy to forget that, in the comic industry (and everywhere else, for that matter), we still need to fight for diversity. We’ve featured a few different creators that keep diversity top of mind, and we wanted to highlight an event where you can go to hear about diversity in the comic industry. If you’re going to Long Beach Comic Expo, this one’s for you.

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January 21 / / Indie

Recommended Reading: Copra Round One Review

What do you do when your government requires you to do a dirty and suicidal job no one else wants to? You get a team of superhero assassins and call them Copra. It was Sonia Stone’s job to corral these mean and ugly superheroes. Their last mission was meant to be a simple transport job – to transport a weird alien fragment stuck in a man’s head. That is until they were ambushed by a character named Vitas and his crew, previous member of team Copra. Apparently this alien fragment and its residence had powers of mass destruction. As this altercation took place, an awesome battle left 4 Copras dead, the other 4 barely survived. But not before Vitas was able to utilize the alien fragment to destroy an entire nearby city of tens of thousands of people.

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January 21 / / Industry

Creative Team Hot Potato – Following Your Favorite Creators

January 20 / / Image

Recommended Reading: Sex Criminals Review

Sex Criminals, written by the best duo in comics today, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, is a coming of age heist story, with lots of sex.

Suze is a woman who stops time when she has an orgasm. No explanation necessary, that’s just what happens. One day at a fundraising party to save her library, she meets Jon, whom she sleeps with, and discovers that he can do the same. What follows is an exhilarating tale of two young people in love who can stop time when they have sex, and of course they use their “ability” to rob banks and save Suze’s library from demolition at the hands of an evil corporation.

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January 15 / / Industry

Superhero Comics as a Gateway Drug

If you were a kid of the 80’s and 90’s, like me, you were probably familiar with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the X-Men, Captain Planet, and even Darkwing Duck. What do these characters all have in common? Well, hopefully the blog title gave you a hint because they’re all superheroes! Now, superheroes have been around for as long as comics have been in existence but in our society today, superheroes have become so popular that it’s hard not to run into anyone who hasn’t seen one of the Marvel blockbusters or isn’t aware of Christian Bale’s gruff-voiced Batman.

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