Monday, July 26, 2004

Con Stuff

Reports on the Comic-Con are popping up all over the Internet. Check out Ken Plume's coverage over at IGN Filmforce. And here's Greg Hatcher at Comic Book Resources taking in the Golden/Silver Age Panel. If I see any good reports that don't mention me, I may list them, too.

• Posted at 11:46 PM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

A reader named Paul Lewis sends this message that I figured was worth a public reply...

Should I still want to go to the San Diego CC? Even though I've never been there before, the horror stories I'm hearing make me want to pass. Has the Con simply outgrown the convention center and San Diego? What I don't understand is why the con is held in a city that isn't a major hub airport. I wish Chicago or Dallas was the site of the industry's largest convention, then the airfare would be reasonable for all.

Fast answer: No. Do not let any "horror stories" stop you from attending next year's Comic Con International. Most of them spring from not planning ahead. I mean, if you decide to go at the last minute, you're going to pay serious kruggerands for your lodging and wind up with an ugly commute. But the travel problems are no worse than vacationing anywhere in Southern California in July, and the tales of a crowded Exhibit Hall pertain mainly to a few hours on Saturday when you ought to be upstairs watching one of my panels. (Someone sent a tip: Forget about seeing the middle of the hall on Saturday...but things aren't bad on the far ends.)

I don't think the con has outgrown the San Diego facilities but obviously, if each year is 20% above the previous, that day will come. A lot of the talk this year about the crowds had to do with fretting about what will happen then. Perhaps it is nothing to worry about. Not that long ago, if you'd told people it would reach 80,000-100,000, they'd have predicted an Armadgeddon that has never come to pass. (In fact, I heard several comments this year that on-site registration never went smoother, and I did not see any block-length lines as were common in '03.) The folks who run the convention have proven very resourceful at crowd control, and I know they're working on it. So please don't let anything I say here discourage you from attending. Just do a little planning, get your room early and understand going in that there is no way you can see everything.

Why the con is in San Diego is a long story involving a gent named Shel Dorf, who founded it in 1970 and who lived (and still lives) in San Diego. For a long time it was there because Shel was there and because the other folks who operated the convention were there. You do have major conventions in other cities and there's kind of an understanding among some cons not to invade one another's turf. There's also the matter of facilities. The Comic-Con International is very important to San Diego and the folks there in charge of luring conventions to the city offer terms that probably make it appealing to stay. You can't just up and move a convention to another burg. You have to find available space on the desired dates, then negotiate a thousand different things ranging from hotel prices to facility fees and civic support. That is sometimes difficult to do.

I should also add that while airfare to San Diego may not be as cheap for some as it is to Chicago, a pretty substantial percentage of Comic-Con attendance is folks driving down from Los Angeles, including a generous portion of the TV/movie biz. Take that away and you'd have a very different convention...maybe not the industry's largest and maybe not too dissimilar from others that already exist. Even though I may carp about traffic on the 5, there's a reason so many of us make that drive each year.

• Posted at 2:50 PM · LINK

Flashback

Just turned on C-Span to see if anything's up with the Democratic Convention and there's Walter Mondale, way back in '84, giving his acceptance speech, listing things that will occur during the Mondale-Ferraro administration...even mentioning a few that might not be attainable until their second term. I'd forgotten what a terrible, colorless speaker he was. There's nothing wrong with what he's saying — even Republicans would have agreed with about 80% of it — but he makes it all sound like your high school vice-principal reading out of a book of regulations. The delegates cheering him at the end, singing and swaying to the song "Celebration," sure don't look like they're about to run out and topple an incumbent. And of course, they didn't.

While I was writing the above, they had a quick clip of Barry Goldwater in what I guess is some sort of Cavalcade of Losers. Senator Goldwater had the opposite problem as a speaker but managed to achieve the same result.

• Posted at 12:04 PM · LINK

Day Five

Woke up this morning and went down to do a couple of panels before I realized I was home.

• Posted at 10:47 AM · LINK

Day Four

Well, I spent more of it on the freeway than I'd have liked. Rolled out of the hotel in San Diego a little after five, pulled up at the old homestead close to Midnight. In there were one stop at a favorite Japanese restaurant (Samurai Of Japan, in the shopping center at 979 Lomas Santa Fe in Solana Beach), one stop in San Clemente for supplies and to let a traffic jam abate, and one stop in Lakewood to get out and walk around the car a few times. Some traffic is described as stop-and-go. This was more like stop-and-stop-and-stop-and-go-a-little-and-stop-again. Anyway, it's nice to be home even though as I write this, my right foot is tapping on a brake pedal that isn't there.

About two dozen e-mails informed me that my Day Two posting somehow disappeared from this site, and one of you (David P. Murphy) was nice enough to send the text of it, fresh from his browser cache. I have reposted it in its proper time sequence.

Only two panels today...so you can tell I've begun sloughing off. First up was the Julius Schwartz Memorial, with Len Wein, Paul Levitz, Elliot S! Maggin, Marv Wolfman, Mike Carlin and Forrest J Ackerman. Forry, who only knew Julie for a hair over seventy years, closed the proceedings by addressing Julie...and showed great affection and trust in his old friend by calling upwards, not down. He said (approximately), "In twenty or thirty years, I'll be joining you and I'll need an agent." Before that, we all swapped stories about the legendary comic book editor...who, by the way, has now been reincarnated as the old guy in the Six Flags commercials. I believe Alter Ego is going to be printing a transcript of this panel and I'll let you know if and when they do...or if not, who does. (We had one nice surprise guest in the audience: Joanne Siegel and her daughter Laura. The widow of Superman's co-creator had only nice things to say about Julie, the long-time editor of The Man of Steel.)

Then I spent 75 minutes interviewing two great comic artists, Frank Springer and Tom Gill. Tom's long and impressive career is chronicled in the new issue of Illustration magazine, complete with testimonials from a small but impressive fraction of the illustrators (mostly but not exclusively from comic books and strips) who apprenticed with and/or studied under this man. Frank Springer deserves a few testimonials of his own but for now, we have to settle for the interview I conducted, which traced his history from assisting George Wunder on Terry and the Pirates, on through drawing on his own for Dell, DC, Marvel, National Lampoon and many more. Two delightful gentlemen.

With such a minimal panel schedule, I was able to wander the hall, which seemed a bit crowded for a Sunday. One comment I heard from a couple folks was that the quality of material in the so-called "Small Press Area" was way up and so, apparently, were sales. In fact, most of the dealers I asked said they were quite happy with the amount of commerce they'd conducted in the past four days.

I enjoyed meeting a lot of readers of this weblog, including many with whom I've exchanged e-mail. Most of you look a lot better in person than you ever did in my mail program.

So I guess that's it for my 35th San Diego Comic Convention...and after the first half-hour on the freeway, it felt like I might as well turn back and wait for #36. That one will take place July 14-17, 2005. If you're going to need a parking space, you might want to leave for it soon.

• Posted at 1:59 AM · LINK

July 27, 2004 • Current • July 25, 2004