This is the last one of these posts featuring photos from Comic-Con International 2025 — which I'll say one more time might have been my favorite of all the Comic-Cons I've attended in San Diego the last few decades. There was something magical about the first ones because (a) everything was new to me, (b) they were small enough that you could meet everyone and attend everything and (c) present were so many people who'd created the comic books of my childhood and I had the opportunity to meet all of them. None of these reasons apply now but I've found new joys in hosting and/or appearing on panels.
This was one that I appeared on but did not host. It was called The Many Hands of Bill Finger and the folks on it were, left to right above, Alex Grand (moderator), Athena Finger, Bill Field, Lenny Schwartz and me. We all spoke at length about Athena's grandfather, the late Bill Finger, co-creator of Batman and a lot of other things that don't get mentioned as often. We talked a lot about those other things and I could tell you what was said or I could direct you to an audio recording of the panel online. I think I'll direct you to an audio recording of the panel online.
I don't know why I look so glum in many of these photos. I was having a great time every minute of that convention with the exceptions of one bad meal and one way-longer-than-I-expected walk. This was the Friday afternoon Pogo Panel and I love doing a Pogo Panel, interacting with the kind of smart panelists and attendees who love Walt Kelly's great newspaper strip. Above, I'm seen with five of the former. My way-longer-than-I-expected friend Paul Dini is next to me and in the back, we have the cartoonist Liniers, Kelly archivist Jane Plunkett, Fantagraphics co-publisher Eric Reynolds and the immortal and wonderful Maggie Thompson.
We talked about Pogo and why it and darn near everything Mr. Kelly did was so funny and fascinating. Jane put together a great slide show of treasures from the Walt Kelly archives we're still compiling and sorting through. Oh — and let me tell you something else about Jane…
I introduce her sometimes as "my assistant" and that's true, though it may trivialize how much she has helped me. It started when my lovely friend Carolyn Kelly (daughter of W.K.) was dying and I couldn't handle all I had to do. It persists to this day when I need to be driven to doctor appointments or have someone utterly trustworthy to send on some urgent mission. I have a very good support team in my life and if you ever break your ankle (as I did) or have any other need for assistance, I hope you can find an assistant who assists as well as Jane assists.
I did three other panels at the Comic-Con that aren't depicted in this series of posts. On Thursday afternoon, I appeared on a panel for Abrams ComicArts, the fine company releasing this new book I wrote about Charles M. Schulz and that comic strip he created seventy-five years ago. The panel was about all the amazing books AbramsComicArts is releasing soon and they graciously allowed me to go first, talk about my book and then scurry off to appear on another panel that had been programmed against it.
The other panel was about Jack Kirby's Fourth World, and as (I believe) the lone surviving witness to its creation, I feel great responsibility to share what I know and what I saw. It is a body of work that many loved at the time and which sold better than a lot of people think…and with the passage of time, it seems to be more loved and more profitable for its publishers. You have no idea how much this pleases me.
And there's one other panel I hosted but I have no photos for it. A very large room filled up so quickly that my photo-obsessed friend Bruce Guthrie couldn't get a seat for it. It was me spending a delightful hour interrogating, interviewing and occasionally cross-examining one of the most important creative talents among my generation of comic book creators, Frank Miller. I'd like to think Frank enjoyed it too. We talked about his takeover of the Daredevil comic and his makeover of Batman after that. But I also made sure to leave time — the hour went by very fast — to discuss upcoming projects which are now being announced across the web. I hope someone recorded it somewhere.
And that brings this review of my 2025 Comic-Con to a close, at least until I think of some other moment I want to write about. I hope you were there, in spirit if not in person, because it was one of those cons that I left thinking, "I wanna go back and do more of it." I see that later this month, the San Diego Convention Center is hosting a meeting of the National Association of Chain Drug Stories. I'm thinking of showing up there and seeing if they'll let me host some panels about "Flosspick Design," selecting the proper shade of hair dye when you don't have any hair, "Engineering Child-Proof Prescription Bottles So Anyone Under the Age of 13 Can Open Them But Older Than That, You Have To Use Your Teeth If You Have Any" and, of course, Jack Kirby.