I find myself daylogging again, something I had planned not to do. But I also did not plan to meet Kurt Busiek today.
I had gone to the Hollywood District of Portland to get some new checkbooks, but the bank there had different hours. I was wandering around in the rain when I saw Things From Another World advertising that it was Free Comicbook Day, a fact I had forgotten. I saw that the featured guest for the day was Kurt Busiek, a name I was familiar with, in passing. Surprisingly enough, he was alone, and I struck up a conversation with him just because I was ashamed that a comic book writer should not be surrounded by admirers. Although his name was familiar to me, I didn't have a good sense of who he was, since Busiek is not a talent on the level of say, Alan Moore, nor is he a controversial figure. So I asked him the usual questions: what his favorite work was (Astro City), if he had any scary Jim Shooter stories (he did not). I also asked him, half jokingly, if he would autograph an issue of Starbrand I had in my bag. By the time I got to this point, the line had reappeared behind me, and so I had to leave, but I wanted to know one answer first:
Who would win in a fight, Batman or John Constantine?
Busiek dodged the question, saying that the question is never as simple as that, because it depends on why the figures would be fighting. He had written
JLA/Avengers and had arranged Batman and Captain America to come to the conclusion that it was a waste of time to fight each other, after all. He then revealed that, as a writer, it is his job to "fix fights" as needed to move the story along. I could have expressed my disappointment with his less than
Platonic faith in Batman and John Constantine as
archetypes, but there was a line of
fanboys behind me, so I took my leave.
I also didn't have the time or the indiscretion to query him about the Silver Surfer and his perpetual state of undress.