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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

I was at the O’Reilly Media-sponsored Web 2.0 Expo here in New York last week. While I wouldn’t exactly call it fun, I learned a lot. Here’s a few observations:

*** The term “Google-juice” sounds really, really gross

*** The word “leverage” is vastly overused. It’s not a verb, people. Every time you say it, an IQ point dies.

*** People love to talk about the “Wild West” mentality on the Internet. Meaning, I think, that there are no rules or ethics online. The real Wild West was about gunfights, cattle theft, drinking whiskey in filthy saloons and dying during childbirth. Making baseless claims anonymously in your underpants is the opposite of tough. There’s a big, big difference.

*** Being articulate, intelligent and well-read and being a Top Digger are not the same thing by a damn sight. I’m not going to name names, but a certain social media expert should be aware that they speak Portuguese  in Brazil — not Brazilian.

*** There were a lot of people asking “how can I leverage the power of Web 2.0 community to ‘go viral’ and drive traffic to my market share, incentivizing revenue generation through targeted content promotion?”

Nobody asked “how can I make content that’s actually good?”

I’d like to focus on that a little bit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last week, I posted about the giant mashed-up colorform graffiti on the New York Subway system. The post got picked up by Gawker, Art Fag City, Neatorama and some others, garnering a little attention.

A few days later, I got a comment that said:

i know the guy who does this stuff. i can get you more info and pictures of the originals if you’re interested. these pics don’t do the originals justice. you have pics of them after they’ve been tampered with …

I got a bunch more photos out of him, and he’s right … these are way, way more fun, especially this Iron Man remix:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Godzilla Witch Project. Nothing more, nothing less.

Popularity: 2% [?]

There’s a new Dove ad out. And, whether you agree wholeheartedly with a campaign meant to cram beauty products down your throat while saying “we’re not cramming beauty products down your throat,” this is inarguably a really, really good ad.

It’s good enough that I’m using it for content this morning, propagating the Dove message for free. Execs and directors at interactive companies worldwide are looking at this thing and saying

See, we should totally do something “viral,” where bloggers get the word out for us, expanding our market share and leveraging Web 2.0 social media space networking CTR impressions Facebook. And, since it’s viral, we don’t have to spend any money on it, right? It can be, like, I dunno, viral. And grow organically.

Not that I’m bitter …

Popularity: 1% [?]