* Many of my friends aren’t yet back and/or mobile following Comic-Con, but the consensus seems to be that it was a slow-news con.
* Marvel’s Marvelman announcement, though light on details regarding the character’s most contentiously litigated material, seems to top the comics list. I’d imagine a lot of folks are excited about Fantagraphics’ plans to reprint Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and I was pretty struck by Daniel Clowes’s move to Drawn & Quarterly with Wilson. DC’s biggest announcement appeared to be the foregone but welcome conclusion of Geoff Johns writing an ongoing All Flash series.
* On the film and TV end, I don’t think there were any big surprises. Various movies screened fun-sounding footage, and Lost‘s final season will pull as many final-season “look who’s back!”s as you’d expect them to.
* That said, I haven’t heard much grousing at all. The main complaints I’ve heard–aside from the usual aesthetic/philosophical objections about what Comic-Con has become, some of which strike me as reasonable, others like a race to be the first person to stop applauding–seemed to be overzealous security, an overcrowded floor on Preview Night (due to the lack of an aggressive programming track in the panel rooms), dauntingly long lines for even more things than usual, and an organizational clusterfuck at the Iron Man 2 panel. It’s still early, though, and maybe we’ll get a wave of press-access complaints like we did last year, perhaps backed up with more specifics this time.
* The biggest and best news I hadn’t heard in any official capacity is that the great Eric Reynolds has been promoted to Associate Publisher of Fantagraphics. I guess when you promote your PR guy, your PR may momentarily suffer, but now that I’ve heard this, I couldn’t be happier. Is there a person in comics who’s better at his/her job, or more universally beloved, than Eric?
* One of the neater bits of news to come out of the con is Ubisoft’s Scott Pilgrim video game. My pal Kiel Phegley talks to SP creator Bryan Lee O’Malley about the game and the “indie video game” movement.
* Kiel also speaks to Geoff Johns about his All Flash plans. What I’m most curious about is whether he’s going to pull a mythos-expanding rabbit out of his hat for the Flash like he did with Green Lantern.
* A very busy boy indeed, Kiel also spoke with Comic-Con PR maestro David Glanzer about this year’s show. I was interested to hear Glanzer’s response to Kiel’s question about press run-ins with security couched in terms of dramatically increasing the number of personnel to help manage traffic. It does seem to me, however, that press passes probably need to be afforded more privileges, perhaps accompanied with more stringent guidelines as to who can get them.
* I don’t think this qualifies as a Comic-Con announcement, but Jim Rugg has revealed that AdHouse will be publishing a full-color hardcover Afrodisiac book by Rugg this December. Nice.
* Speaking of AdHouse, Tom Spurgeon reports that they’ll be putting out a Rafael Grampa art book…eventually, while Grampa’s Mesmo Delivery is moving from AdHouse to Dark Horse as an expanded edition (via JK Parkin).
* By popular demand, Chris Butcher liveblogs the July 2009 Previews catalogue. It’s very funny and angry as usual, particularly regarding Marvel’s decision to give work to serial robber of freelancers Pat Lee, but sprinkled in there are a couple of genuine news items (at least they’re news to me), namely that Ex Machina is ending with #50 (less than a year from now if it resumes a monthly schedule) and original artist Cory Walker is replacing subsequent mainstay Ryan Ottley on Invincible.
* Tim O’Neil continues his exquisitely nerdy examination of the X-Men, this time comparing the work of Chris Claremont to his successors like Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza.
* Curt Purcell continues his examination of Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night, first by a close reading of the book’s use of horror tropes, and then by sizing it up in terms of the much maligned “superhero decadence” movement. It’s a horror-insider/comics-outsider one-two punch.
I thought SDCC was in great for comic fans, in large part because of the way the con was physically set up. All the movie/TV/video game stuff was segregated to one incredibly bottlenecked section. This cleared out a LOT of traffic in the comic-centric section, so there was plenty of room to breath and move around. The retailer booths were on the other side of the comics section, so they were a bit of a hike, but also most uncongested. If you were a comic book person, the only kinda shitty thing was that Artist’s Alley was on the other side of Hollywoodland, so getting there and back was not so much fun.
But if you came to check out comics or were working for a comic company, great con (if you were there to meet celebs, maybe not so much, I dunno).
The only thing I really heard people complain about (myself included) is that the bathrooms at the convention center were HORRIBLE. it looked like they had not been cleaned out regularly or at all. Heard one attendee even say that they were a mess before the hall even opened one day.
I very much agree with Ben but I think it’s worth pointing out that while structurally the show rewards comics fans who can attend, it also structurally keeps a significant number of fans away because of the major investment in time and advance planning required. Eric Reynolds talks about this in his piece, and I agree it’s a problem.