I was walking South on Seventh Avenue from Penn Station yesterday when I came across this great, rushed piece of Michael Jackson memorial graffiti:

It’s everything I like about folk art — public, not too fussy, and definitely puts passion over precision.

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I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.

I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.

Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.

Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.

This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:

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If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you’ll know that me and David are suckers for brightly-colored comic-themed street art. Particularly if there’s a visual non sequitur involved. Like this poster I saw plastered around the streets of Philadelphia this weekend.

It’s an image of Marvel’s Doctor Doom charging toward the viewer with the phrase “Well, at least things can’t get any worse” superimposed over top in bright pink text …

Pretty much perfect, I think.

Although it contradicts the Simmermon family motto, which I swear I am not lying about. My dad always says

You know, Jeff, we have a saying. “Things go on like this for a while, and then they get worse.”

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My friend David William is helping me beef up the NY/Web-based arts coverage here, just to get more content moving through the pipes and be another set of eyes, ears, and opinions on the street. We’ve been friends for a while now, and I’ve loved his art and aesthetic for a long time. Make sure and make him feel welcome, folks, while we monkey with the technicalities of setting him up with his owner user account here.

He writes in here with his first guest post:

Walking past the Taco Bell on 14th street, just West of Union Square, I spotted these two new cut-and-shuffle jobs:

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