* Comic-Con criticism I can get behind: Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken calls out some of this year’s most prominent press pitfalls, including bad wireless access, press passes that really don’t do much for those who hold them, and line-control policies that prevent adequate Hall H access for press and public alike.
Last year there was a lot of kvetching from the nerd press about access, a lot of which I thought was a simple failure to take into account the size and scope of the 21st-century Comic-Con experience. And honestly, I was pretty surprised that Rob’s corporate overlords expected him to cover the thing all by himself–that’s exactly the lack of realistic expectations I was talking about. (They could at least have sprung for a guestblogger to keep the home fires burning with links while Rob was out and about at the show.)
But I also pointed out last year that the show’s press pass is pretty much useless as anything but a regular pass that sometimes can get you into the building, though not the exhibit hall or panels, a little early. When you’re handing out 3,000 press passes out of a total attendance of 125,000, why bother? So I agree with Rob and Tom Spurgeon and (I think) Heidi MacDonald and probably plenty of other people that the Con needs to be way more stringent about press credentials, scale back the number of press passes they issue accordingly, but then scale up the rights and privileges afforded to the press they do let in. I appreciate the show’s egalitarianism w/r/t the pass policy currently, but I think the costs outweigh the benefits at this point.
Meanwhile, the way I was able to get done all the coverage I needed to get done last year was by sitting on the floor and posting stories using the convention center’s free wireless whenever I could. When you’re on deadline in the midst of an event the sheer physical size of Comic-Con, being able to post wherever, whenever as opposed to schlepping to the press room or god forbid your hotel can be the difference between success and failure. This year, not only was the wireless completely unreliable, but I’ve also heard that security would prevent people from simply sitting down in the hallways from time to time. Either one of these scenarios would have been a complete dealbreaker for my ability to get my work done last year, and it’s imperative that the show solve these problems next year.
Finally, between the Iron Man 2 debacle Rob describes, in which the room wasn’t cleared beforehand and therefore thousands of people who spent hours waiting in line in the sun to get in couldn’t get in, and Tom Spurgeon’s anecdote about how halfway through cartoonist Richard Thompson’s panel security started letting in people for the next, very different, panel, it seems that the increased number of security personnel/traffic wranglers didn’t translate into an increased quality of security or traffic flow. Now, moving that amount of people around quickly enough to start things on time is a very difficult challenge; and suppose you really want to see two things in a row, you’re not just in the first thing to save yourself a seat for the second thing, but you’re forced to choose because they clear the rooms each time? So maybe they need to make exceptions with obvious crowd magnets like Iron Man 2, I dunno. But it’s a problem, and in that particular case it seems like it was an anticipatable problem. If they can shuffle around panels on the fly to avoid a Twilight/Avatar collision, surely they can put a little thought along similar lines into everything else going on in Hall H at the least.
* Comic-Con criticism I can’t get behind: Avoiding the usual variations on “Twilight is icky,” Chris Butcher deploys a novel line of attack against that franchise’s presence at the show: 6,000 Twilight fans at Comic-Con only for Twilight take 6,000 tickets for potential comics buyers out of circulation. Which I suppose is true, strictly speaking, but only if you buy the many, many assumptions that go into that statement, which I don’t.
First, how do you know that the majority of fans at the Twilight panels didn’t buy comics–or any of the many, many other products on sale at the Con?
Second, how do you know that if they were all magically vaporized, their thousands of tickets would be snapped up by comics fans, as opposed to people who are just there to see James Cameron or Peter Jackson or the Venture Brothers guys or any of the countless other non-comics fandoms at the show?
Third, now that I mention it, why single out Twilight in the first place of all of said countless other non-comics fandoms? I don’t think Chris is at all on the “ewwww Goths/girls/tweens” tip that lots of other Twilight critics are on, but at the same time, how many members of the 501st Stormtrooper Legion do you see at the Fantagraphics booth?
Now, you could easily answer the above questions like so: “First, I don’t care about the non-comics stuff on sale at the show, only comics matter; second, and third, we should try to reduce the presence of all those other fandoms too.” This is what Chris appears to be advocating with his call for an ideological litmus test to be applied to potential Con exhibitors–an Office Space-style mantra of “Is This Good For The Comics?” This is more coherent point of view than simply singling out the Frowned-Upon Fandom of the Year, but it’s not a terribly valid or useful one.
Comic-Con has always been a cross-media extravaganza–it’s just gotten much better at being one in recent years. It never was and will never be Angouleme, or Heroes Con for that matter. You could look at the Hollywood/videogame/assorted-nerdery component as the tail that wags the dog if you want, but at this point the dog is a chihuahua and the tail is like one of those 200-yard-long Batman capes drawn by Todd McFarlane. It doesn’t make sense on a business level, or on an overall customer happiness level, to start asking Robert Pattinson if he read Asterios Polyp before you allow him to attend the show. And it doesn’t make sense to hold Comic-Con to a “for comics, by comics” standard which has little basis in the fact of the show as it’s existed for years, and which would make it an entirely different and less successful show.
That said, there are a lot of things that can be done to preserve and enhance the comics component of Comic-Con within the Con’s current identity and framework. Most of them involve not penalizing the movie fans and gamers and Klingons and whatnot, but boosting cooperation between the Con and the comics industry, or just within the comics industry itself, to make sure that the art form’s anchor presences at the show are respected and perpetuated. Here’s another idea: Nine Inch Nails is releasing tickets to its final concert tour in three waves–first through a NIN.com members-only presale on the NIN.com website, second through a password-protected presale on the Ticketmaster website, and third through the usual Ticketmaster/box-office procedure, all staggered by a week or two. Plus, most venues hold back a handful of tickets that they release only on the night of the performance. Couldn’t Comic-Con do the same in order to accommodate different demographics with different levels of advance awareness and interest in the event, thus (ideally) giving casual fans who are more likely to swing by and browse for books rather than camp out overnight for the Lost panel a foot in the door?
The point is, pointing the finger at specific fandoms isn’t the answer any more than pointing the finger at all fandoms is. Comic-Con is what it is; it’s easy to go there and have a tremendous show as a comics reader; it’s harder but still eminently doable to make the comics component of the show stronger and more accessible. Twilight has nothing to do with it.
* Part 3 of Matt Maxwell’s cyclopean Comic-Con report is up. The meat of this one centers on two very different “breaking into comics” panels.
* Experience Comic-Con through the eyes of Ben Morse. I think that was a Faye Dunaway movie, no?
* Alien director Ridley Scott will be directing an Alien prequel. Hm. (Via Jason Adams.)
* For some reason, Entertainment Weekly talks to Neil Gaiman about the vampire craze. Is anyone else surprised that we haven’t seen more people dipping into the ‘Salem’s Lot “Dracula meets George Romero” well recently? (Via Jason Adams again.)
* As you probably discovered yesterday, which was when I meant to post this, the trailer for the Coen Brothers’ upcoming movie A Serious Man is pretty terrific.
* If you click here you’ll see a stunning image by Renee French.
* If you click here you’ll see a stunning image by Frank Santoro.
* Hey, The Comics Journal #299 features my interview with Skyscrapers of the Midwest author Josh Cotter!
1) Loose ital tag somewhere.
2) Dude. “Cylopean.”. Awesome.
3) Surprised to hear the same complaints about lack of Press resources that I heard last year. Maybe a concerted effort by a group of big press outlets might be required. Something to watch.
As I recall, most of the press complaints last year seemed to be of the “I’m a comics presser that can no longer swing by the movie panels whenever I want” variety. These seem more substantial, and focused on the TV/Film room clusterfuck by those reporters expected to cover that stuff.
I have almost no interest in that part of the convention, but I can’t imagine that some people haven’t figured out ways around that and there isn’t an insider/newbie split in access. Is Whitney Matheson (whom I like, she just pops to mind) really waiting outside at 3 AM? Maybe she is, I don’t know.
I don’t know how many press there are — a couple years ago I was told 3500, which I don’t think is reflected in the amount of coverage they get. I figure they could cull a lot of that, restrict access and give the press walk-in abilities with panels and exhibition floor access like exhibitors and no one would know differently. Of course, I’m not sure where I’d end up in a major culling!
Here’s a question – Comicon is still run by the non-profit Comicon organization, right? Is it possible that one of these years they might just step back, say enough is enough, and put an end to the show? It seems as if it has run its course.
You have an interesting definition of “run its course” as well as an intriguing amount of faith in the likelihood of people throwing themselves out of work.
You’re not from Alaska, are you?
“I have almost no interest in that part of the convention, but I can’t imagine that some people haven’t figured out ways around that and there isn’t an insider/newbie split in access. Is Whitney Matheson (whom I like, she just pops to mind) really waiting outside at 3 AM? Maybe she is, I don’t know.”
Well, Wired couldn’t get into the Iron Man 2 panel, and from what I read on Ryan Penagos’s Twitter, it was touch and go for Joe Quesada for a while. So the insiders had some trouble too.
When you reach your peak it’s time to die.
I’d love to watch your beer commercials, Tim.
For what it’s worth, I was following Whitney’s Twitter stream and at one point she was tweeting about not having a ticket to the Lost panel, and later, standing in line a couple of hours ahead. Of course then she was in the press room with Josh Holloway, so it all ended up okay. But it wasn’t an automatic, even for Whitney.
That’s actually good to know, thanks, Heidi. I wondered.
I think if they gave me money to make a beer commercial it would probably consist of a man inserting a power drill into his forehead while drinking a PBR. Maybe with the Carpenters’ “Superstar” playing.