Todd Klein snuck a photo of Kathryn and me at the Top Shelf booth at CCI, darn him, and I thought he was just waiting patiently while a fan tried to extricate himself from an untenable conversation.

Apart from being the best letterer in the business and a prolific blogger, Todd’s an experienced naturalist and a birder worth his saltmarsh. I wish I’d known he had been at the show before Sunday; I would have gladly welcomed him on our short tour up the coast. As it was, I picked up about a dozen west coast birds, including good views of Least Terns fishing in the San Diego River. The Least Tern is an endangered species, with protected breeding areas in the metropolitan area of the city– it was a thrill to see them working the shallow riverbed and coasting easily on the ocean breeze.

A company specializing in lofty personalized logo distribution was pumping these little fellers out from a doohickey parked in the loading dock of the Marriott. They were cute and expressive, as long as the wind was light. One got sliced apart landing in a palm tree, and the gathered crowd cringed audibly. Poor little Soapy.

I just plowed through Tom Spurgeon’s final con report– as usual, well-thought-out and un-sensationalist and comics-centric, unlike some other site reports. I won’t pretend to have an overarching opinion on the show, or even on Comic-Con in general, or the state of conventions, or that of the industry; basically I absolve myself from all blame. But I happen to be reading James Burke’s The Pinball Effect, in which he describes Alexander Von Humboldt’s theory of vegetation as society:

“The organisms that [live and multiply] best are those that adapt best to the environment, using that adaptability to expand their territory. When these expansionists meet other organisms, they survive by simply destroying them or by reducing their take of available food. The losers then die, or become slave organisms.”

Metaphor? Read it as you will. it would be disingenuous of me to say that “Hollywood” did not come up in conversation during the weekend, but I’m confident in saying that, for us at least, the next year is still going to be comics work. Someone has to do it.

Post-processing is essential in digital photography, and the bundled software that comes with the camera usually has all the tools one needs to enhance what would otherwise be a meh picture, but sometimes overenhancement can kill a subtle image. While looking into astrophotography techniques, I found a simple math trick that takes advantage of noisy long exposures, usually disastrous for delicate details.

Signal averaging works with any static image, as described in this blog post; naturally (actually, celestially), sky objects aren’t static at all, so some registration is required in the stacking process, or the object requires tracking in the field, necessitating special equipment.

I won’t go into the details of how to manage it– the Digital Art Form post covers it perfectly well, and the results I achieved with minimal effort in the 100% crop above support it. The post-processing technique needs nothing more than the capability to layer image files, and line them up. The more images you have, the better the results. Above I’ve compared a stack of four pictures with identical EXIF data on the right with a single frame from the sequence on the left. Eight, 16 or 32 pictures would continue to improve the quality of the final photo.

It may seem like polishing mushrooms to want to tweak an image already hundreds of times better than what Galileo used to discover sunspots and the moons of Jupiter, but I doubt he would have turned down the opportunity for a clearer view.

You know those annoying people who push themselves to the front of the line because they have the right coloured badge? That’s us. Sorry.

But it does amuse me to be able to tag this post as “work.”

Wandered back over the threshold just before midnight last night, dropped the luggage, hugged the boy, and tumbled into bed.

Despite mystery ailments (I broke out in hives on arrival, probably due to having been closer to Warren than ever before (at least four football fields away)), we had a great time at CCI, and after our long hiatus, it honestly didn’t seem that different a show than it was in 2000. Not until I started reading the Comics Reporter and the Beat this morning was I aware of what was going on beyond the friendly and relatively orderly comic portion of the event. Huh.

Talking with Cameron Stewart prior to our departure also was revealing; he’s done 10 CCIs in a row, and admitted to being worn out by the commercialism and fervour; we’ve been away that long, and it appeared to be a really well-run good-sized comic show in the middle of a larger event, of which we did not partake at all.

We were treated so well, and it was thrilling to get to finally meet co-workers (Todd Klein!), online friends (Kevin Church!) and fans (you!), to be well-moderated (John Siuntres! Tom Spurgeon!), and to joust catch up with old companions (Jim Dougan!) and make time with the boss (Nick Lowe!) . Still, this feels like the last show for a while for us; we love the spectacle, but it doesn’t have much to do with the work, which is what we’d much rather offer the world.

See you again in 2020.

La Guerre Infernale, written and illustrated in 1908 by Pierre Giffard and Albert Robida, was a serialized children’s novel, predicting a global aerial war among Germany, Britain, the USA and Japan in the 20th Century. Robida’s drawings are magnificent (when not xenophobic and racist), and indicate an ease with the mundane as well as the fantastic. Think Miyazaki illustrating Wells, but more French.

More links via.

APPEARING:

Thursday, JULY 22
6:00-7:00 PM
Marvel Booth Signing, Booth #2329

Friday, JULY 23
10:00AM - 12:00PM
Top Shelf Booth Signing, Booth #1721

12:30PM - 1:30PM
Spotlight on the Immonens: Sex, Lies and Comic Books— Kathryn Immonen (Heralds) and Stuart Immonen (New Avengers) enter the ring with the peerless John Siuntres (wordballoon.com) to talk about working for Marvel, publishing with Top Shelf, and sleeping with the enemy. See new work unveiled! Bring your questions! Room 9

5:00PM - 6:00PM
Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web— Meet and talk with women who write, read, game, and perform in arenas that are historically and statistically dominated by men. What’s it like to try and get a job in a field where most of your competitors and colleagues are guys? Can women write men, and vice versa? And what happens when traditionally “male” genres are reinvented by female writers and embraced by female fans? Sex and the City it ain’t! Meet the women who like to play with trucks and Barbies…and Wolverine action figures. And flux capacitors. Featuring Felicia Day (writer/producer, The Guild; actress, The Guild, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog), Kathryn Immonen (writer, Patsy Walker: Hellcat, Runaways, Heralds), Laeta Kalogridis (screenwriter/producer, Shutter Island, Ghost in the Shell, Avatar), Marti Noxon (screenwriter/producer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Mad Men, I Am Number Four, Fright Night), Melissa Rosenberg (screenwriter/producer, Dexter, The Twilight Saga), and Gail Simone (writer, Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey).Moderated by Io9’s Annalee Newitz. Room 24ABC

Saturday, JULY 24
12:00PM - 2:00PM
Top Shelf Booth Signing, Booth #1721

3:30PM - 4:30PM
International Comics and Graphic Novels— Comics are popular the world over and Comic-Con always includes an impressive gathering of worldwide talent. Journalist Tom Spurgeon talks with special guests Moto Hagio (Japan: Drunken Dreams), Émile Bravo (France: My Mommy is in America and she Met Buffalo Bill), Milo Manara (Italy: Click!), and Kathryn and Stuart Immonen (Canada: Moving Pictures, Russian Olive to Red King) about graphic novels with a more international flavor. Room 4

Sunday, JULY 25
11:00AM-12:00AM
Marvel: Women of Marvel Panel— One of the most talked-about panels from last year is back! Forget Storm and She-Hulk; meet the real Ms. Marvels of the comic world! Join women from every discipline in the creative process at Marvel to hear what it’s like working as a woman in comics today and how you can join them. Say goodbye to the so-called “Boy’s Club” — these ladies are busting down the four-color ceiling! Panelists include Marjorie Liu (Black Widow), Kathryn Immonen (Heralds), Christina Strain (Shadowland), and others. Room 7AB

11:00AM - 1:00PM
Top Shelf Booth Signing, Booth #1721

2:00PM-3:00PM
Marvel Booth Signing, Booth #2329

“”What would I like to do if I wasn’t a footballer? I love drawing cartoons and building Lego with my sons.

“This is going to make me sound really weird but when I was in Milan I had such a big amount of spare time. I found online that you can buy a Lego model of the Taj Mahal so I bought it and started building it, I only built some of it because I got injured halfway through.”

I read this transcript this morning, and actually guffawed, mostly because Becks admits that he injured himself playing with Lego, but also because there’s a persistent notion that drawing can’t possibly be real work, that the profession is within the grasp of anyone who can hold a pencil or drew Tippy from a copy of the Saturday Evening Post when they were 10.

Watch the Yahoo! interview. Via. Via.

It wasn’t all about birds, despite what Kathryn might have you believe. One of the highlights of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens were the resident fruit bats, the Grey-headed Flying-foxes, which roosted by the hundreds (thousands?), a mere half-block from the towers of Sydney’s financial and commercial centre.

We failed to see them on their nightly flight (the sun set distressingly early, and it was dark before the convention closed), but during the day, they bitched and complained and climbed on each other and occasionally stretched out to their full metre wingspan and glided to a new tree.

Despite the numbers at the RBG, the Grey-headed Flying-fox is threatened in Australia and conservation is a concern. See Sydney Bats for more information.