Avengers Initiative: Basic Training Premiere HC
Wikipedia entry on Avengers: The Initiative

The Avengers spinoff book featuring War Machine, Triathlon and Gauntlet gets the hardcover treatment.

Also this week:
Bomb Queen IV #3 (of 4). Story and art by Robinson.
Black Panther #32. Written by Hudlin.

So I went to the Mid-Ohio Con this past weekend working on an upcoming story. Now in ten years of serious convention touring (mostly east of the Mississippi although I have visited the west coast), this was the first time my chosen vehicle of transport actually broke down on me while in transit. (One time when I flew to Charlotte, the plane had to turn back to the airport shortly after takeoff, but that was because of a problem with the air pressure. Everything else was working fine.) Yes, sports fans, the Greyhound bus died en route to Columbus.

It happened sometime around 4:30 Saturday morning outside of some west Pennsylvania town I’d never heard of. The bus driver would get the engine started, but when she tried to get the bus moving, it would stop again. We were plain stuck. When she called HQ she was told a replacement bus was coming from Pittsburgh, but initially she was told it would only be a couple of hours. Well, two hours became three… became four… and ultimately ended up as six – during which time, the cops came by and told her the bus was too close to the highway and that they’d need a heavy-duty tow truck to pull it further onto the shoulder. We never saw the old bus get towed by the time the new bus came, though the cops detained us further on account of them wanting to talk further to the original driver. Oy.

By the time I got into Columbus it was almost six PM and I knew I was gonna miss the Saturday portion of the show altogether. I was supposed to meet the people I was gonna interview at a certain place and time, and while I knew they would be there all weekend, I was holding out hope that they’d still be around somewhere. So I hurried over to the convention center as fast as I could – which was a little too fast for this one traffic cop, who twice prevented me from jaywalking – and he and I kinda got into a brief shouting match. New York City pedestrians will jaywalk in a flurry of speeding cars and the cops won’t say word one, but a lone small-town cop gets in my face for it when the street had very minimal traffic? Gimme a break!

Anyway, I miss my interviewees but run into a bunch of old friends, some of whom put me up for the night in their hotel room (thanks Jim and Matt!). I was only planning to stay for Saturday; but thanks to the delay, my entire schedule was thrown out of whack. Staying for Sunday would mean I’d have to miss work on Monday (the bus ride is normally about 10-12 hours), but after all I’d went through, I was not about to throw in the towel.

I found my interviewees the next day – plus I made a few new contacts and bought a couple of books (including the out-of-print collection of Barbara Brandon-Croft’s Where I’m Coming From!) – and I got home at about 10:30 this morning, after calling in sick. Not the worst con travel misadventure I’ve had. But very close.

Not much news other than this new Ho Che Anderson interview.