New York Comic Con report

I stopped by NYCC on Friday evening. Here’s what I saw.

* The on-site press pass situation is hilarious. Anyone could walk in off the street and grab one if they knew where to look. While I was getting mine, I watched some loudmouth gamer basically annoy a staffer into giving him one for his buddy despite both he and she acknowledging that the buddy was not press. (He walked away saying “Thank you, sweetheart,” like he was Roger Sterling.) All I needed to get mine was the outdated business card I paid $10 for on the internet. “Do you need to see my credentials?” I asked. “Um, okay, if you have ’em,” was the reply. When I actually took them out, she waved them away.

* Best cosplay: Solomon Grundy on built-in stilts. Runner-up: Ms. Marvel With Her Ass Hanging Out. As one commentator put it, “She looks like a Mike Deodato drawing, but in this case it’s okay, because she has agency.”

* From a look at their table, I’m pretty sure the Suicide Girls were 14 years old.

* Some people smelled bad. The rain on Friday did not improve the aroma. I don’t go in for the smelly-nerd stereotype, but for what it’s worth, I pass through Penn Station twice a day every day and don’t encounter the Pigpen-like clouds of stink, so it’s not just a phenomenon of crowds, I don’t suppose.

* I walked past an enormous cosplay group photo session for some anime I didn’t recognize at all. Nerddom is bigger than ever and there are worlds within worlds, man, worlds within worlds.

* The picture of comics presented at this thing makes San Diego look like the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. I wonder if the show could make a go of building up an alternative or literary comics presence if they put their mind to it. I sort of doubt it. As a NYC metro-area commuter show, it’s competing for those readers with more targeted area cons like BCGF, MoCCA, and even KingCon. For those traveling longer distances, including some of the bigger publishers, the larger East Coast also offers SPX and TCAF. It’s great to see Top Shelf and NBM tabling next to each other, but you’d need Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly at the very least to approach some kind of altcomix critical mass, plus a dedicated programming slate, and no one involved appears to have much interest in that. This is one situation where I think Tom Spurgeon’s frequent suggestion of independent counterprogramming that cross-honors passes from the main event might make a lot of sense, but you’d be fighting for PR oxygen against a show that’s damn near San Diego in size without people’s ingrained inclination to go to San Diego no matter what.

* I spent about two hours walking the floor. I could have spent a lot more than that, hours permitting, I’m sure, because I do enjoy the sheer spectacle of it all. That’s just one of those things you either like or don’t, like how for some people Guinness is too heavy to drink and for others you can knock down pint after pint. But the spectacle is the extent of what it offers, to me at least. The flea market of back issues, original art, t-shirts, toys, and tchotchkes; the big booths hawking video games or wrestling or cartoons or whatever with loudspeakers and music and women in tight clothes; long lines of readers excited to meet Marvel and DC creators; cosplay, cosplay, and more cosplay; Nerd Nation at its best and worst, from happy teen couples to middle-aged men loudly complaining about Ryan Reynolds’s CGI Green Lantern costume and everything in between. I left at closing, knowing I wasn’t missing much by not going back again the rest of the weekend, but also knowing I could probably quite happily spend days and days in there.

* If you like talented superhero/genre artists, then Artists Alley was pretty terrific, if you ask me. I met Chris Burnham and walked past David Lloyd and Geof Darrow, just for example. There were definitely dozens of people hawking sad-looking self-published indy superbooks, but there were also some real talents in there.

* I went to a wonderful party on Friday night thrown by some of the younger Wizard alums that encompassed representatives of Marvel, Dark Horse, CBR, ComicsAlliance, The Comics Journal, Hasbro, Diamond Select, and MTV; scheduling conflicts were all that kept DC, Archaia, Archie, and Newsarama from having staff there as well. We’ve done alright! There and elsewhere, I met for the first time people I’ve talked to online for literally years. For the first time I met Sean Mackiewicz, who had been my source for dozens of DC freelance assignments over the course of two or three years, and Steve Wacker, who’s my editor on the Spider-Man comic I wrote that comes out in a couple weeks. Twice I bumped into my old boss Pat McCallum, who now works at DC but whom I hadn’t seen in years, possibly since the day he left Wizard. Moreover, I think this is what I like best about NYCC: It brings people I know and love in the industry together in Manhattan. It’s a rare case where I really do prefer the socializing surrounding the event to the event itself.

Tags: