Saturday at Comic-Con – The Great, The New and The Tasty
WELCOME TO EARTH-4
A Weekly Column with J. Torrey McClain
– I may have missed the “Saga” panel at 1 pm, but I caught Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples during the “Strong Female Characters” panel two hours later in the same room. June Brigman, Colleen Coover, Sara Mayhew, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Paul Tobin, Vaughn and Staples talked about what it takes to make strong female characters, how they approach it and listed some of their current favorites. The story that will last with me though came from the moderator, Maggie Thompson. She told the story of her husband reading to their daughter a run of “Fantastic Four” every night before bed. As a gift for their daughter when she was away in college they gave her a bound collection of a great many of those same stories. When she received them and started to read the stories, she angrily called her mom and yelled that these were not the stories her father had read to her. It turns out that her father had read her all of Reed Richard’s lines as the words said by Sue Storm. He didn’t want the only female superhero in the story to be the one that fades and hides.
– I returned to Donovan’s in San Diego to visit some friends and once again got to enjoy some of their fine food. I had the three sliders and after a lunch of only a Snickers bar in between panels (but I’ll have you know, it truly satisfied – now Mars, please send me a free box), those burgers hit the spot.
– I paid my respects in person to the player and the man of San Diego baseball, Tony Gwynn.