A gent who signs his e-mail "Pauly" sent me this and asked that I only identify him as Pauly. So here's Pauly…
You've done so many panels at conventions. In your mind, what is the ideal number of panelists to have on a panel?
I started to write an answer to Pauly, then realized that I wrote it almost a quarter-century before he asked. This is excerpted from a column I wrote for The Comics Buyer's Guide in August of 2001. Please note that in describing the panel at the New York convention, I don't remember precisely who the panelists were and I didn't remember when I first wrote this piece in 2001. So I just stuck in the names of people who might have been part of it…
One too-common mistake is to pack the event with more participants than can comfortably be accommodated. Some cons think they have to put every guest on some panel or if, say, they're having something called a "Golden Age Panel," they have to include every body on the premises that was in comics before 1960 or even 1970.
I once moderated a Golden Age Panel with, I think, 18 people. It was ridiculous — especially since two of them were Julius Schwartz and Gil Kane, each of whom is/was a panel unto himself.
More is not always better because, with so many up there, the topics run far afield and the discourse loses focus. Get enough folks up there and the subject will be spread thinner than the meat in Marie Callender's chicken fried steak. Worse, none of the speakers get to speak very often, which means their minds drift.
General rule o' thumb: When your panelists aren't paying attention, neither is your audience. That is, if you can even keep an audience. I prefer panels with only a few participants. Seven is the max, five is better, three is just fine. Some of the best I've seen were just one guy interviewing one fascinating person.
The worst was so bad, it was actually funny. It occurred around 1974 — give or take a year — at one of Phil Seuling's July 4th New York conventions. The late Mr. Seuling ran wonderful cons but his idea of programming was to tell someone, "I want to have a Writers Panel at 2:00. Go down to the ballroom at 2:00 and do a Writers Panel."
That is pretty much what he'd said to, I believe, Mike Friedrich, who was then writing a couple of comics for Marvel. Mike rounded up Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Denny O'Neil and myself and told us all, "Meet me in the ballroom at 2:00. We're doing a Writer's Panel." At 2:00, Mike, Marv, Len and I showed up in the ballroom. Denny, displaying prescient wisdom, did not.
But a lot of other writers did. Dozens of them. And they all wanted to be on the panel.
It was a time when a lot of new writers were breaking into comics. Somehow — with the paucity of logic that often infects my occupation — some had the idea that if you weren't on the Writers Panel, some aspersion was being cast on your status as a professional writer. People were taking chairs from the audience, moving them to the stage and simply adding themselves to the discussion, sans invitation.
One was a fellow who had just made his first sale — to Warren Publishing for Creepy or Eerie. He'd earned the magnificent sum of twenty-five smackers and, though his story hadn't been drawn, let alone published, he was a Professional Comic Book Writer (emphasis, his).
By now, this panel had around two dozen scribes seated on a riser, waiting to orate into the one microphone. When Mike suggested to the new Warren writer that the event was overbooked, the panel-crasher sniffed, "I'm a professional writer. I have a right to be on this."
Mike shrugged. The thing was a shambles and it hadn't even started.
When it did, he started by asking each panelist to identify himself and list a few credits. Then he passed the microphone to the first writer who talked about himself for a minute or so.
Then the first writer passed the mike to the second writer, who talked about himself for a while.
Then the second writer passed the mike to the third writer, who talked about himself. (One thing I noticed: The less a writer had done, the more he talked. The guy with the one sale to Warren practically delivered his autobiography, passed out résumés and did six choruses of "Born in a Trunk.")
Finally, months later, the microphone reached me…and before I tell you what I did, we must pause for a bit of philosophical reflection.
In this world, we often encounter Stupid Problems. These are problems that don't harm human or animal life, don't cost anyone any real time or energy, don't mean spit in the grand scheme of our existence. It's stupid but it really doesn't matter.
Stupid Problems are annoying because they're stupid, but they have a number of obvious advantages over Serious Problems. Among them is that Stupid Problems give you a choice.
If you have a Serious Problem, you pretty much have to deal with it…perhaps even solve it. With a Stupid Problem, that's optional. You can solve it, you can ignore it…
…or you can do what I sometimes like to do, which is to see if you can make it worse.
Not all Stupid Problems lend themselves to this tack but some do. (There are also Serious Problems that are best-handled by making them worse. When they're small-to-medium in size, they're annoying and pernicious, and you're not always sure where the trouble is. But when you enlarge them, suddenly what's wrong becomes obvious, plus you're forced to find a solution.)
Had there been the slightest chance of salvaging this panel — of turning it into anything resembling that which the audience had come to hear — I wouldn't have done what I did. But I figured, "This thing's beyond saving. Let's see how much worse we can make things."
So I started inviting more people onto the panel.
My pal Tony Isabella was seated in the third row and even then, he had more professional experience than half the folks with whom I was seated. So instead of talking about my credits, I said, "Hey, folks! Tony Isabella is out there. He oughta be on this panel!"
The audience didn't particularly want more people on the panel but they clapped politely and Tony obligingly got up and headed for the stage. "You'll have to bring a chair," I shouted, and he went back for one.
While he was still getting seated, I spotted Don McGregor out in the house and introduced him, too. "Don McGregor! Let's get him up here! Bring a chair, Don!"
And before they yanked the mike from my mitts, I saw Gerry Conway in the back of the room and insisted, like the announcer on The Price is Right, that he "Come on down" (or up) and join us.
About a half hour later, it was my turn again to speak. By then, I'd spotted a dozen more writers in the hall and I began summoning them: "Hey, there's Nelson Bridwell! Nelson should be up here, too! And there's Archie Goodwin! And Paul Kupperberg! Come on up, guys — and bring chairs!"
I actually don't remember the specific names, Perhaps different writers were involved. But I do vividly remember…
- The writer seated next to me struggling to wrest the microphone away from me and someone screaming, "Quick! Get the mike away from him before he invites anyone else up here!"
- The few folks (on the panel and in the audience) who got what I was trying to do, laughing themselves sick. They figured out my objective, which was to transpose the room. We'd started with four people on stage and about four hundred out in the house. If that panel had lasted another half hour, I damn sure would have had those numbers reversed.
I think about that panel every time someone now asks me to moderate a convention panel and hauls out a prospective guest list of twelve people. That's never a good idea.
