Chris Gumprich asks…
For as long as I've been following you, you've hosted a tremendous number of panels. How do you prepare for these? Is it like a journalist preparing for an interview, or do you rely on your own deep knowledge of virtually everything in comics and animation to just wing it?
Has there ever been a time where you hosted a panel and felt completely out of your depth?
Some panels, you just wing. I've usually found that if you have a solid opening question, the responses you get usually lead organically to a solid second question and a third and so on. So I don't do much prep with those except to think of a solid opening question…and to research the interviewee(s) a bit just to see if there are areas worth exploring that I don't know about. You don't want to miss some fascinating part of the panelists' lives.
But Quick Draw! takes a lot of prep as do the Cartoon Voices panels, as does Cover Story. This Comic-Con, I'm interviewing Don Glut, who I've known for about fifty years. If I just bring up all the interesting things I can remember about Don and his work and get him to telling stories about them, it should be an entertaining breeze.
I don't recall any awkward panels when I was the one deciding on the panel's theme and who'd be on it. I do recall a few where the convention operator asked me to moderate a panel they'd configured…and they had configured it with no rhyme-and-reason. I told one of those stories here and there were others long ago.
The con would have a lot of guest stars who really had nothing in common with each other. That was fine when they were sitting behind tables in the Dealers Room autographing stuff. But someone running the con would say, "We have to have our guests on a panel" and there were two things wrong with that. One was, and probably still is, that some convention guests would rather spend that time at their tables making money. They were appearing on a panel under at least slight duress, eager to get the thing over. Never a great situation.
So I had to moderate a panel where the panelists had nothing in common and there were few (if any) questions I could put to all of them. And when I asked Panelist #1 a question about his or her work, Panelist #2 wasn't interested…and it can make for an awkward panel when anyone on the panel doesn't care about much of what's being said. They're fine with the parts of the panel where they can talk about their own work but during the ones when they can't, they're sitting there squirming, thinking of all the sales they're not making back at their tables. So we try to avoid that.
Mostly, it's just a matter of me thinking either "What do I know about this person that this audience would like to hear them talk about?" or sometimes, "What do I not know about this person that I'd like to hear about and which I think the audience might be interested to hear?" If you keep those two questions in mind and the panelists have something in common and want to be there, you can't go much wrong. And when it's me interviewing just one person, you usually don't have those problems because most people like to talk about themselves.
