Comic-Con International starts tonight and I've added one more stop in my relentless campaign to have more panels than Steve Harvey has TV programs. I will now be appearing on this panel…
Thursday, July 24 – 4 PM to 5 PM in Room 4
JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD
Rand Hoppe (Kirby Museum director), Tom Kraft (Kirby Museum president), Bruce Simon (underground cartoonist), Mark Badger (comic artist and educator), and Tracy Kirby (Jack Kirby's granddaughter) discuss the themes of Kirby's Fourth World and how they reflect on his work before (Fantastic Four and Thor) and after (Eternals and 2001).
Those of you tracking me the way the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracks whale migrations may note that this puts me on two panels in the same hour — to which I reply, "So?" I've done this before. In fact, I did it one year with two simultaneous panels when I was the moderator of both of them. Fortunately, they were directly across the hall from each other.
Here — and this'll be the last time I post this — is what I believe is my full schedule unless I go out to the sidewalk and do an interview with that guy who's usually there with the yellow sign telling us Jesus will be back any day now and this is our last chance to repent. We've been getting those last chances for at least the past fifteen Comic-Cons and I keep thinking Jesus keeps getting shut out of the con because he can't score a badge each year. Anyway, here's this…
This morning on Facebook, I saw a rant from someone about how Comic-Con is not a Comic-Con because there's nothing there about comic books. This complaint usually translates to there being nothing at Comic-Con about the specific comic books that the complainer favors. But just by way of rebuttal…
This year, I'm hosting or appearing on three panels about the works of Jack Kirby. I think those are about comic books. I'm doing panels in which I interview long-time comic book letterer Todd Klein, long-time comic book writer Don Glut and there's another one with Frank Miller, who's among the most important writer-artists of the last few decades. Also, long-time comic book writer Mark Waid and I will be doing a panel where we answer questions about how the comic book world operates or did in the past. I have a panel about a comic book I work on called Groo the Wanderer and another panel about Walt Kelly's Pogo, which was a comic book and a comic strip. So was Charles Schulz's Peanuts and I'm on a panel about that, too.
I'm on a panel about Bill Finger, whose involvement in comic book history included co-creating (arguably) the most popular comic book character ever and that wasn't all he did. I'm hosting a panel in which comic book artists discuss how they design covers for comic books and I'm playing quizmaster on a game show (sorta) in which cartoonists, some of whom draw comic books, compete to draw funny things in a hurry. I'm speaking at a memorial for the late writer of comic books, Peter David, and I'm presenting awards at a ceremony that is all about honoring the best work in comic books.
And that's just me. As I scan the full schedule, I see plenty of programming items about comic books…and yes, there are other things there. Three of my panels are about animation, which is not that far off the topic of comics.
But we now live in a world where a lot of related fields — comics, movies, cartoons, videogames and others, are becoming not only more closely related but are all merging almost seamlessly into one another. The major publishers of comic books are no longer comic book companies. They're multi-media companies that dabble in all those fields and market the properties they control in every possible venue. Superman and Spider-Man are no longer comic book characters. That just happens to be the medium in which they first appeared and a decreasing number of people know or care.
This is the fifty-fourth one of these summer gatherings in San Diego — and I know because it's also my fifty-fourth. They were never exclusively about comic books or even comic books and comic strips. You have no idea how much I'd love it if these get-togethers were still mostly about the men (and occasional women) who created the comic books I read in my youth but I can't seem to get them on any of my panels anymore. Maybe if I did them with a ouija board.
For good or bad, Comic-cons — all of them, not just the one that starts tonight in S.D. — are mainly about what comics are today. And comics today are not just things with drawings and word balloons printed on paper. The definition has expanded considerably and you can accept it and then seek out the parts of the convention that interest you or you can…well, you understand the alternative. One reason I do all these panels is to make sure than for most of the con, there's not only something that interests me but that I'm guaranteed a good seat for it.