Brad Meltzer's book talk - guest blog post by Bruce Guthrie

I went to Brad Meltzer's talk at the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library last night.  He's definitely a crowd pleaser!  He was promoting his new book "History Decoded" based on the History Channel show.  Wonderful speaker who even brought junk food for the signing line.  Scott Rolle from the show was also there.

Q&A focused mostly on Kennedy's assassination and I was relieved to hear him dismissing the conspiracy theorists so quickly.  He said we don't want to accept that a lone crazy could have killed a popular US president.  Makes you wonder about why we don't have that problem with John Hinkley.  Is it just because both Reagan and Hinkley survived?  When the story's cut short, I guess there's more room to make up conspiracy stuff to fill in gaps.

Several questions dealt with his comic book work.  He said he was very excited to be working on the Batman 75th anniversary retelling of the Batman origin story due out in January.  As http://bigstory.ap.org/article/batman-turns-75-dc-plans-weekly-title-events says,

The Bob Kane and Bill Finger-created character's origin will get a "modern-day retelling" in the 104-page issue by Brad Meltzer and Bryan Hitch, along with new stories and art from Snyder, Frank Miller, Sean Murphy, Peter J. Tomasi and Guillem March, Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen, Gregg Hurwitz and Neal Adams.

The issue, out Jan. 8, will also lay the framework for new creative team Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato, who take over the book in the spring.

"We want to bring him closer to his roots and be more of a street-level type of hero," Manapul said about their plans. "His super heroics will still be present, but the investigative part of Batman will be at the forefront."

He also showed some pages from his upcoming "I Am Amelia Earheart" kids graphic book and he showed covers for "I Am Abraham Lincoln" and "I Am Rosa Parks".  Apparently there will be at least six book in the "I Am..." treatment.

The signing event was fun as he appeared to recognize a bunch of his fans.  He's great at establishing personal connections with his fans through social media and in person.  He's got a lot of fan loyalty.  I talked with three people about many times they had seen him before and two of them said five or more times.

There were about 250 people in the audience.  The signing lasted over 90 minutes.  Pictures are up on http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2013_10_23B_Meltzer

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Bruce Guthrie
Photo obsessive
http://www.bguthriephotos.com

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