We haven’t done of these before so we decided to give it a go. We’ve seen sites that use infographics — images that pack a lot of text and graphical information into a single picture. Since we’re part of the comic book crowd, pretty pictures accompanying our reading literature is always welcome. Anyway, our thought was to create a big ol’ stream of pictures with commentary showing what we’d seen at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con. After more than an hour of flipping through images and trying to pack them into the picture, we decided to drop the commentary and let the mess speak for itself.
Here is an example of a good infographic.
This is an example of an infographic from Haley Barbour’s website. It lacks punch.
If you been on this blog before you know how we like to kvetch about the fact that we only got Thursday and Sunday badges to the Con. Damn your eyes, comic book gods! So, anyway, these pictures are from those days. Please do not point out what we missed the other days. It will make us sullen. Maybe worse.
Oh, yeah. Speaking about badges — wanna know what happens when you lose a badge? First, you feel sick. Then, you feel angry. Then, you feel all panicky-like. Once reason has been restored, you go to the convention center and tell Security that you need to replace a lost badge. They will smirk and direct you up the escalator and along a cordoned off path against the wall to the registration area. Once you are there, you will stand in line with a handful of other poor sods. Your turn will eventually come up and you will quickly surge to the counter where your pleading and desperate eyes will be met by cold and WGAF eyes. Only the DMV will suck more juice out of your soul (OK, the staff is actually direct but not unkind; we just need to deflect our pain to someone else. And we all know that pop culture pain is the worst kind there is. Oh, the humanity and stuff).
Hey, how are you? Say, is that your badge? ‘Cuz that’s my name too. Kind of weird, huh? Same name and … oh, will you look at that … same city! Wow, what are the odds. Well, anyway, I was wondering if you would mind very much if I pull the bottom end of your intestine out your back door and stuff it back down to connect at the top end . You know, for a poop loop-dee-loop. Give back the damn badge!
You will fill out a lost badge document explaining in as much detail as possible what happened to your badge. Then, if everything is in order, you will be issued a new badge and pay a minimum of $12 (that’s just to get a new Sunday badge; if you lose a four day badge – get out your wallet and sit down). You will be told that the first time you lose a badge, this is the process you will go through. Your information will be entered into a database. If you lose your badge again, you will be blacklisted. Meaning, no soup for you, dear boy/girl.
How should I know where it is? I can’t even remember where I put Mommy’s keys and boy is she sure sore about that. Go away! I gotta concentrate on finding them before she sells me to the gypsies like she’s always threatening.
Why all this brouhaha? Apparently, there is a propensity among attendees to “lose” their badges into the hands of another person and then go get a new one. The Comic-Con staff is becoming much more active in its enforcement of attendee registration violations. We can only hope that wherever our badge ended up that it was not in nefarious hands. We don’t want to be black-listed because some degenerate took advantage of our good standing and used the badge for some untoward activity. Dunno, maybe like trying to get into a panel and getting pulled aside for a random check. These things are happening now, so be forewarned. One of us didn’t know how to use a lanyard very well. He has learned.
See? This attendees on top of things. Notice the careful placement of the badge in a tightly secure and clearly visible location. No worries about a fan boy diving in after that! They’ll think about it all day, but they won’t do it.
On to the infographic thingy!
This one is surprising to us. After a Pawn Stars episode, we posted a write-up right about an incredible collection of Jimi Hendrix photographs that came up for sale by Jimi’s personal photographer. It’s by far the most popular post. No idea why. But there you go.
We might as well get this one out of the way. With the upcoming movie, it is likely that new fans will want to learn more about Hergé’s world famous creation, Tintin. If they dig deep enough, the curious will discover some not so pleasant things. In the early stages of his career Hergé hadn’t really fleshed out the Tintin character and his adventures were fairly infantile. The audience was mostly young kids so the stories didn’t need to be anything profound or intricate. During Hergé’s first forays into the Tintin storyline, the world was in the midst of profound change. Europe was between two world wars, Bolshevism was rising, and colonialism was dying. Hergé’s first story (published in a Belgian children’s newspaper supplement in 1929), Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was essentially a right-wing, anti-Communist propaganda piece directed at children. We’re not reviewing it here, but essentially the boy reporter, Tintin, travels to the USSR (the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” for you kids that don’t bother with geography or history — and if that doesn’t ring any bells either, go back to school and pay attention) to discover what the comradenicks up to are [can't end a sentence in a preposition, right?]. Apparently, nothing good – the Bolsheviks are stealing food and killing the opposition. The book was probably successful in its time and locality but apparently in the subsequent Tintin canon, it didn’t really fit so it hasn’t been published regularly or in color. Besides Tintin and Alph-Art, this is the only other Tintin book we haven’t read (and we’ve read the others plenty, so our reviews will be thorough and well-researched … maybe).
Hergé isn’t completely off the hook for this atrocity, though. Most of his books have some level of racism, even in the form of a patronizing “Big White Brother” kind of thing. Hergé actually had the audacity to redraw and color Congo in 1946. Redoing his early books was something he did often but clearly he hadn’t yet divorced himself from the misguided travesty by the end of WWII.
We are, however, currently talking about Tintin in the Congo so we will complete this post with more details. As we noted, Hergé knew very little about the Congo and according to 
comicsagogo.com
