* Suddenly I’m a lot more sympathetic to Con Flounce: Tom Spurgeon and Tom Neely have both written rather soul-crushing con reports that give credence to the notion that the Hollywood contingent really, truly is crushing the the comics out of Comic-Con.
* Here’s your requisite on-the-other-hand: Peggy Burns’s upbeat report can be summed up thusly: Drawn & Quarterly sold through all but one measly boxful of comics, and the report contains the phrase “COMIC-CON LIKES COMICS” in all caps. So, y’know, it’s entirely possible for an event involving 130,000 people to result in different experiences for different people, even people keenly interested in precisely the same aspect of the show.
* But the Toms have me concerned over a couple of things. First, I’m concerned about the future of the show’s comics content. Not the comics-that-are-also-movies stuff, I don’t think Marvel’s going anywhere and nor are all the little outfits who are happy to serve as IP farms, but the comics-that-are-comics stuff, from self-publishers like Neely to retailers whose presence used to be my favorite single section of the show. The news that in the absence of Comic Relief and with a smaller Bud Plant booth there basically wasn’t a go-to comics retail area is the most disturbing single thing I’ve heard about the show ever. If you can’t maintain a place where people at the show can go to buy pretty much any of the comics they might be interested in buying, which is how that area used to function, then that’s a major structural failure for the show. And needless to say, a comics show without a vibrant small-press and alternative comics presence isn’t a comics show I’m interested in.
* But that leads me to the second thing I’m concerned about, which is that due to the kind of person I am, I never paid enough attention to this all along. See, I am an all-purpose nerd. I love going to Comic-Con to talk to Jordan Crane and load up on all the Fanta and D&Q debuts and get Bowie sketches from Jaime Hernandez and all that wonderful stuff. But in all honesty, if all that were gone, I’d still enjoy the show, because I also love superheroes and hearing announcements about the future of the Batman books and catching previews of big action-fantasy blockbusters and seeing people in costume and geeking out over Lord of the Rings replicas and on and on and on. I’m not like either of the Toms in that I don’t find any of that stuff infuriating and that it is, in part at least, something that excites me about art and culture.
* So I guess what I’m saying is that in retrospect, I should have stuck a big fat caveat lector atop my dismissal of the post-show pique that flares up after each year’s Con. Don’t get me wrong, I do think a lot of that stuff really is just pique (and pandering for hits). And in fairness to myself, whenever I talk to people who haven’t been to the show, I warn them that there are lots of people who are just not constitutionally suited to that level of crowd and media and visual overload, so it’s not like I’m totally head-in-the-clouds about the inhospitability of the show for some people. But I’ve been far too willing to ignore the fact that there are people with perfectly reasonable and even noble expectations for the show for whom those expectations are now going unmet.
* In other Con news:
* Sean Belcher caught a bunch of Grant Morrison newsiness I missed or forgot: He’s still planning a Wonder Woman story, he’s still working on Multiversity which will include a Frank Quitely issue that Sean says will be the Charlton/Watchmen riff though I don’t know the source for that, he’s planning a big joint project with Geoff Johns.
* Here’s everything Kiel Phegley did at the show.
* Guillermo Del Toro says inter-studio politics between MGM, New Line, and Warner Bros. are responsible for delays to The Hobbit and his subsequent departure, not just MGM’s financial problems.
* They’re making another Battlestar Galactica prequel series called Blood & Chrome, a webisode-type affair set during the early days of Bill Adama’s military career in the First Cylon War. I still haven’t bothered finishing the first season of Caprica so it’s tough for me to get too excited about this.
* Man, Frank Santoro’s Silver Surfer strip for Strange Tales II is gonna be something else.
Was it really that negative? I thought I was sure to say I had a fantastic time. Because I did. And I went to WonderCon and HeroesCon this year; I don’t mind a superhero-driven con!
Maybe it needs a rewrite.
There was a part where you said the only thing keeping you alive was the thought of killing other people, so yeah, pretty negative!
Joking aside, the picture I got was that you had a good time in spite of the show’s best efforts, so that’s what I was reacting to.
I love that Cameron Stewart tweet. What an awesome guy! Clearly he enjoys this material on the same level that the rest of us fans do. And it really comes through in his work with Morrison.
That was only when I was walking around at the other end of the hall! Everyone hates walking around that end of the hall!