For over a decade starting in 1982 I regularly attended the San Diego Comic Convention, the largest comics convention in the United States, and could not conceive of not going every year. How could I not go, and miss seeing all the friends who went there, the great panels with major figures in cartoon and comics art, the parties, the dazzling tourist attractions of San Diego, and the sheer excitement of it all? What was wrong, I thought, with the people I knew in comics prodom who did not attend? Well, at that point I didn’t yet know about the tendency towards cocooning that comes with middle age. I also didn’t realize that when the comics boom went bust in the 1990s, paying for plane fare and the ever-rising hotel bills would present a problem. So I took a break for a few years in the 1990s, attended two more Comic-Cons in a row, and then stayed away. And when 2003 came along, I was shocked to realize I had not attended for a full five years.
This year, though, I had a reason to go: the Comic-Con now holds an event with the long-winded name of the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival – CCI-IFF, for short, and it would be showing the documentary I worked on as a writer, interviewer and executive producer. This is Sex. Lies and Superheroes, directed by Constantine Valhouli, and he, I, and our director of photography Ben Jackendorf were all going to attend.
THE THREE AGES OF COMIC-CON
How, I wondered, would the San Diego Con have changed in the half decade in which I’d been absent? Certainly I’d witnessed changes over the two decades I had been going, and the Con had even then evolved drastically from its tiny beginnings.
“Did you ever go to the Con at the El Cortez?” one friend asked me at this year’s Con, clearly eager to learn what it was like. Unfortunately, I never did. The Golden Age of the San Diego Comic-Con, as befits Golden Ages, I suppose, took place before I attended my first, and so I know it only as a legend. In the Con’s early years in the 1970s it was held at the El Cortez, a hotel a good long walk from the San Diego shore. The one real piece of information I have about those early Cons is that the convention area was apparently laid out around the swimming pool, with certain convention activities actually taking place at poolside. (There are also anecdotes about certain female members of the comics professional community making memorable appearances in swimwear along the pool.)
I expect that the real reason why the El Cortez days have the aura of legend would be that the attendance at the Con back then would have been considerably smaller, so it would have been a much more intimate event. Indeed, it has been reported that the first San Diego Con, in 1969, had only 300 attendees. Attendance grew considerably over the following decade, but the relatively small size of the Con still afforded greater opportunities for fans and young comics pros to mix with the great names of the artform.
When I attended my first San Diego Con in 1982, Reverend Sun Yun Moon, head of the “Moonies” religious cult, had bought the El Cortez. Perhaps Reverend Moon disapproved of comics, or perhaps the Con had simply outgrown the El Cortez, but the Comic-Con had now moved to the Civic Center, which provided large but functional and undistinguished facilities. Perhaps we could call this the Silver Age of the Comic-Con.
In those years downtown San Diego was somewhat appalling. Oh, there were the grand hotels from the early part of the last century, like the U. S. Grant and the celebrated, castle-like Hotel del Coronado, backdrop for the movies Some Like It Hot and The Stunt Man and alleged inspiration for San Diego resident L. Frank Baum’s Emerald City. And there were spectacular areas of San Diego: the beaches, the San Diego Zoo, with which no other zoo I’ve visited can compare, and the museums and Spanish-American architecture in Balboa Park, the outdoor Shakespeare performances at night at the Old Globe complex. But most of downtown looked shoddy and run down, and it all seemed symbolized by a large billboard atop a building near the Civic Center that various Con attendees found amusing, promoting the virtues of “Hypno-Sex” (complete with staring eyes). Could this really be one of the largest cities in California, and indeed, in the whole country?
In the late 1980s San Diego began to undergo an extraordinary transformation. There was the creation of downtown’s Horton Plaza, an outdoor, upscale shopping mall that was a postmodern architectural wonder: a shopping center as multi-leveled theme park, bursting with color, an entertaining melange of buildings old and new, crisscrossed with tilted walkways, as if M. C. Escher had returned from the dead to design public spaces. There followed Seaport Village, which took an opposite tack, concentrating on small specialty shops and an array of restaurants, and imitating the look and layout of a picturesque seaside town. San Diego finally got a real skyline, as a forest of high-rise hotels went up, in a variety of handsome modern and postmodern designs. In my previous visits, I had seen publicity for the renovation of the Gaslamp Quarter, a section of downtown that dated back to Victorian times, but I was singularly unimpressed. This year, however, I was delighted by the variety of restaurants and shops that had sprung up throughout this compact area.
The centerpiece of the San Diego renaissance was the brand new San Diego Convention Center, itself a startling postmodern work whose large exterior decorations mimicked sails, and whose colossal round windows evoked portholes; it was as if the Convention Center were an enormous ship, at once retro in design and futuristic, cast up upon the shore of the harbor, filled with real sailboats, that it overlooked. (And, indeed, the Convention Center turns up as a building in the future world depicted in the movie Demolition Man.)
In the Civic Center days, the San Diego Con was already clearly the best of the big comics cons: spacious, well-lighted, clean, with a wide array of intelligently conceived panels and the largest and most stellar roster of guests from the worlds of comics and animation. When the Con moved to the new Convention Center, it now had something of an epic setting and scale, and seemed the equal of the other massively scaled events held there. (In 1996 the Con had to be held unusually early in the summer to make way for the Republican National Convention held at the Convention Center in August. I recall, watching the GOP’s convention on television, that Bob Dole was now standing more or less where a Vampirella model had posed only weeks before.) I suppose we might call this the beginning of the Platinum Age of the San Diego Comic-Con, its current period, when its scope and significance began to reach beyond comics fandom.
Along the way the convention also changed its name from the unpretentious San Diego Comic-Con to the more grandiose Comic-Con International (though people still familiarly refer to it by the original name). Speculation had it that the Comic-Con people wanted to drop San Diego from the title in case they ever decided to move the convention somewhere else. However, the move has never taken place and I know of no reason to think it ever will.
A CONVENTION IN PARADISE
I think the fact that the Comic-Con is in San Diego is one of the foremost reasons for its success. Considering that the two major comics companies, Marvel and DC, are based in New York City, it has long been a puzzle why New York is no longer able to sustain a first-class comics convention. It used to: there was another Golden Age of comics cons, and in this case I was around for the tail end of it. These were the annual Fourth of July comics cons in New York City run by the late Phil Seuling, the pioneer of the direct sales comics market. Again, I suspect that the smallness, intimacy, and newness of these Cons are what have made them nostalgic legends, but they were already in decline when I started attending in the late ’70s. The Seuling cons were supplanted by Creation Cons, back before Creation abandoned comics cons for sci-fi, and though large, there were probably too many of them per year, and they lost the cachet of being special events. For years now, there are comics conventions, some large, and others merely a Sunday gathering of back issue dealers, in New York City, but they all seem cheesy, crowded and undignified. (I went to one years ago that was held in the Madison Square Garden complex when the circus was in town, and people remarked on the strong scent of elephant urine.)
There are, of course, other major comics conventions around the country, but San Diego has the choice location. Decades ago, I went to several Chicago Comicons, long before Wizard took them over, when they were located in a hotel across from downtown Chicago’s Grant Park. This enabled me to witness the startling sight of a neo-Nazi demonstration from a hotel window (The Blues Brothers movie didn’t make that stuff up). On the other hand, by midday on Sunday, when I had become saturated with comics, I would just walk down the street to the Art Institute of Chicago and immerse myself in its copious Impressionist collection. On returning to the Chicago Comicon years later, I found that it had moved out to a hotel by the airport in Rosemont, a long and surprisingly expensive taxi ride from Chicago’s Loop. Now it was really the Rosemont Comicon, and for someone who went to the con in large part to explore Chicago, this severely downgraded the value of bothering to attend the con.
In contrast, going to the San Diego Con in the 1980s it was like going on vacation with one’s friends: I happily recall heading out to the beaches, the zoo, Sea World and Old Town with friends from New York, and large gatherings at local restaurants at night. Nowadays the Comic-Con is far busier, and most people seem too heavily scheduled with manning booths, appearing at panels or having business lunches to take an afternoon off to head to the beach. But still, it’s San Diego, and even if we spend most of the day inside the Convention Center, there is the brilliant sunshine and the rows of palm trees when we arrive in the morning, or if we go out on the terrace in mid-day, and the perfect temperatures at night. The advantages of escaping to humidity-free San Diego in the midst of the endless sauna of a typical New York summer are not to be underestimated.
Moreover, now that the Comic-Con has oriented itself more towards films and television, and now that Hollywood is considerably more interested in comics properties, San Diego’s nearness to Los Angeles is a considerable advantage, as we shall discuss.
Why the Comic-Con now calls itself “International” is a conundrum. I noticed how much space is now devoted to anime at the Con, and certainly there are tables where foreign graphic albums are sold, but the Con is still predominately concerned with American comics. Similarly, when Mort Walker’s Museum of Cartoon Art moved down to Boca Raton – where it has since closed – it became the “International Museum of Cartoon Art,” despite a collection overwhelmingly devoted to American works.) What do the attendees of major foreign comics conventions like those in Angouleme and Lucca think of the San Diego Con’s attempt to make itself sound like the United Nations of comics? And how many people from other countries come to the San Diego Con? (Answer: relatively few as far as I can tell.) How many European and Japanese comics companies exhibit there? (Answer: same as before). In both the Comic-Con and Museum’s cases, the claim to being “International” strikes me as being a chest-thumping bid to assert itself as the biggest and best of its kind in the world, while mostly ignoring the rest of the world. It’s like the way baseball has a World Series that defines the world as limited to America.
Although I had not attended Comic-Con in five years, I had been monitoring its schedule of events each year as posted on the Con’s website. In my experience, there have always been numerous panels and events going on simultaneously at any point during the day at the Con. But this year, surveying the schedule on the website, I wondered if it was my imagination or whether there would actually be far more going on at once than in any of my previous visits.
The Comic-Con is like one massive “Which Way?” game. There are so many possibilities that despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of attendees, I can feel positive that not one of them duplicated my individual and convoluted path through the schedule of events.
On Friday night I was talking with Peter Coogan, one of the heads of the Comic Arts Conference, an academic conference on comics that is held each year at the convention. At one point I heard him reassuring some of the conference attendees that he quite understood if they did not attend every session: there are simply too many noteworthy panels and events going on simultaneously, and he wished he could attend more of them himself.
For example, I chose to attend Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s panel in the vast Room 6CDEF from 3:30 to 4:30 PM on Saturday. But during that same hour, I could have been at a panel reuniting science fiction legends Ray Bradbury, Julius Schwartz, and Forrest J. Ackerman in Room 6A. Or I could have listened to Will Eisner discussing his new graphic novel, Fagin the Jew in Room 8. Or I could have attended the presentation of more papers at the Comic Arts Conference in Room 7A. Or gone to Sony’s presentation on its upcoming films Spider-Man 2, Hellboy, and Underworld, with Spider-Man producer Laura Ziskin, Hellboy comics creator Mike Mignola, and actors Alfred Molina (who plays Doctor Octopus) and Kate Beckinsale (from Underworld) in the biggest of the ballrooms, Room 20. Or gone to the panel of animation voice actors hosted by Mark Evanier, complete with live performances, in Room 6B. Or seen two more short movies at the con’s Independent Film Festival in Room 4. Or watched a PowerPoint slide show of early Marvel artwork from 1939 to 1959 in Room 2. And there were nine other panels going on during this very same hour, along with the ongoing do-it-yourself pleasures of exploring the dealers’ and companies’ booths on the main convention floor. Daily Variety (July 17, 2003) referred to the “sensory overload” of Comic-Con, and you can see the point.
FilmForce’s own Ken Plume tells me that most Con attendees do not bother to read the Comic-Con schedule. (Available at registration, the schedule booklet now seems to me at least three times as thick as it did five years ago.) And I did indeed observe people wandering into a room, apparently with no idea of what was going on in there, briefly checking it out and then departing again, presumably to wander aimlessly into the next room. To my mind, though, planning was essential, to avoid missing out on important panels because I did not know they were going on.
Luckily, the Con now begins posting its schedule a little over a week ahead of time on its website, so I could work out what felt something like a battle plan: making decisions as to which of the many competing panels I could attend, in whole or in part, with alternative options listed in case I decided (as I did at one point on Saturday) to revise part of my own schedule. Since simultaneously held panels do not all start and stop at the same time, I can attend part of one and then see the rest of another. Hence, going back to the Saturday afternoon schedule, I could see the beginning of the Bradbury panel, which began at 3, before rushing off to a nearby room to find a seat for the Whedon panel, which started at 3:30 PM.
But still, I have a wide scope of interests, and there was so much that I would like to see but would have to miss. In past years I have found transcripts from Joss Whedon and X-Files creator Chris Carter’s Con panels posted on the Net. And now there are comics websites and mainstream media reporting on the Con, though primarily on the movie companies’ panels. This still leaves so much that is said at so many panels of which there will be no published record and thus will be lost. I’m doing my part by writing columns reporting on what I saw and heard at this year’s Con, but I – or anyone else – can only cover a small fraction of what takes place there.
A CITY OF COMICS
Preparing to fly out to San Diego, I wondered just how crowded the Con would be this year. When last I attended, five years ago, its attendance topped out at 35,000. My understanding was that in 2002 65,000 people had come to the Con; this is a small city’s worth of people. (And I learned after this year’s Con was over that 2003 attendance was over 70,000 people.)
In times past I found many aisles on the convention floor virtually impassible at the Con’s peak time on Saturday afternoon, and I wondered how much worse it would be now. But, in fact, only a few times this year did I have trouble navigating along a crowded aisle. Now I had heard that the Convention Center, already quite large, had undergone an expansion. But I did not realize until I got there this year was that in 2001 the San Diego Convention Center had doubled in size through the construction of an extension as large as the original building. The convention floor was now twice as long, and I certainly felt it when I made my way from one end of the floor to the other.
Clearly the Comic-Con has become a major event for the city of San Diego. One hotel employee told me the Monday after this year’s Con that it had been the hotel’s busiest weekend in the last twelve months. I heard elsewhere that virtually every hotel room in San Diego – and in nearby towns – had been booked up that weekend. (Constantine had to make last minute arrangements for hotel rooms for us, when our initial plans for accommodations fell through, and we ended up in Alpine, California, which, you are correct, does not sound close to the San Diego shoreline.)
In the 1990s I was already amazed and pleased to see Comic-Con ads, with artwork by Alex Ross, on the sides of San Diego buses, and banners promoting the Con along the main streets.
This time I was startled while riding to the Con with the car radio on, to hear an announcer alert her audience that today was the last day to attend Comic-Con. This sort of thing just does not happen in other cities I’ve been to that have major comics conventions.COMIC-CON IN THE NEWS
So, will the national news media take notice of such a massively attended pop culture event? In past years I have rarely seen much mainstream coverage of the Comic-Con, and running a Google search when I got back from this year’s turned up disappointingly little (outside websites that specialize in comics news).
Indeed, I find it annoying to see what some media outlets consider to be conventions more worthy of their attention. I recall that years ago The New York Times ran an article about a convention in Chicago for aficionados of the works of P. G. Wodehouse, and the Times was all aflutter that (if memory serves) over forty people attended the event. Gosh. The Wall Street Journal, on July 23, 2003, ran a piece about a convention of fans of the Coen brothers’ movie The Big Lebowski, which grew from 150 people last year to 800 this year. Well, that’s good for them, considering their subject. Yet I repeat; this year’s Comic-Con attracted over 70,000 people (way more than the circulation of most comic books these days).
Nonetheless, 2003 appears to be the year when the San Diego Con first made real inroads into the consciousness of the major news media.
As should be no surprise to readers of this column, some people take the opportunity to belittle comics. What is a surprise is that a culprit this time is Entertainment Weekly, which is usually enlightened on the subject of comics. The Aug. 1, 2003 issue of EW subtitles its report on the Con, “Studios and stars gave it up for the geeks at America’s biggest comics convention.” The report also seems puzzled that the film The Last Samurai was previewed at a comic book convention, as if comics could not be about samurais (Lone Wolf and Cub, anyone?), or, actually, any other subject imaginable. Elsewhere in the same issue, EW runs a schizoid review of the Daredevil DVD, which shows respect to Frank Miller’s Daredevil comics but criticizes the film’s director, Mark Steven Johnson, for acting “as though he’d never decided whether he was aiming it at geeks, a mass audience, or both.”
In sharp contrast, the issue of Daily Variety that appeared on the Con’s opening day (July 17, 2003) observed that “They may have been derided as geeks in the past, but now the diehard fans of sci-fi, comics, fantasy and horror that flock by the thousands to Comic-Con Intl. [sic] are important enough to warrant personal attention from Hollywood’s biggest studios.” That issue featured a special section on comics and animation, spotlighting the Comic-Con, treating it very respectfully. One headline even ran: “Comic-Con a nexus of all things cool.”
On a stopover on my flight to San Diego on the Con’s opening day, July 17, I was astonished and pleased to discover that the day’s USA Today was running a positive article about Comic-Con. Nevertheless, the article’s opening hinted at an unfortunate trend: “Once upon a time the Comic-Con convention was about comic books.” Actually, it still is principally about comics, as artform and as business. By stating that Comic-Con is no longer about comics, USA Today is just projecting its own lack of interest in comics onto reality. Like other mainstream reports on the Con, USA Today focused on the movie companies’ presentations at the Con, and pretty much ignored comics; The Hollywood Reporter and even EW took the same approach. (Admirably, Daily Variety dealt with comics in its July 17th section on the Comic-Con, even including interviews with comics stars Alex Ross, Brian Michael Bendis, and Paul Dini.)
USA Today even projected its skewed vision of the Con into the past. The article states that “Hollywood did not pay much attention to the convention until the mid-1970s, when directing legend Frank Capra and comic fan Frank Capra began showing up to talk superheroes. Since then, the convention has become as essential to studios as the Cannes Film Festival and the ShoWest exhibit for theater owners.” Well, the mid-1970s were before my time, and I am surprised and delighted to learn that Capra went to Comic-Con. But I have been going since 1982, and I can assure you that Hollywood was not much in evidence at the Con until recent years, and if the Con were as important as Cannes or ShoWest, we would have seen a lot more film company booths at this year’s Con.
Still, USA Today hits the nail on the proverbial head in pointing out that Comic-Con’s “Clout stems from the boom in comic-book films and the surging power that film fans are exerting over the Internet. “They will be at home the day after Comic-Con giving their opinions on their Web pages,’ convention spokesman David Glanzer says.” (Or in my case, a week after the Con.)
Certainly I am pleased to read USA Today’s quote from Paramount vice chairman Rob Friedman, who once worked at Warner Brothers and showed clips from the first Superman movie at the Con in 1978: “The fans weren’t happy that I didn’t know more about the history of the comic book, and they told me so. That’s when I knew we were going to have to take Comic-Con seriously.” The comics aficionados, the core audience for such projects, once (and still in some quarters) scorned by the suits for taking comics seriously, are now getting some respect for their points of view. (Perhaps the makers of the Hulk movie should have paid more attention to what Hulk readers would have liked to see, hmm?) And, since I was unable to attend Sony’s presentation on Spider-Man 2 at the Con, I was grateful that USA Today gave it extensive coverage in its July 21 issue.
On Friday morning, on our way to the Con, Constantine Valhouli and I encountered a gentleman from Publishers Weekly, who informed us that the magazine had sent a number of people to report on the convention – not on the movie presentations, but on the books – comics – being sold. After returning home, I found the first of these reports, on manga, on the Publishers Weekly website. I find Publishers Weekly‘s interest satisfying because it directs mainstream attention to the comics themselves, which, however the Con may diversify its scope, remain the heart of the convention.
THE HUNT BEGINS
But enough talk of past Cons and anticipations for this one. My plane arrived in San Diego at quarter of 4 in the afternoon on Thursday, June 17, with the Comic-Con already well under way on its opening day. By 4 PM my cab had pulled up at the San Diego Convention Center and I was ready to begin.
For the first hour and a half I explored the convention’s main floor, surveying the territory, getting a sense of where the major exhibitors had set up their booths. I was also going to see for myself if the stories I had heard were true: I had been told, more than once, that there was no longer a Marvel booth at the Con.
Now, how could that possibly be? The San Diego Con is by far the leading comics convention in North America, and Marvel is the continent’s leading comic book company. Surely it is inconceivable that Marvel would not have its own area on the convention floor!
Let’s look in the program book. No, I can’t find Marvel’s booth marked on the map of the convention floor, but then, there are so many exhibitors here. Let’s check the index of exhibitors. Hmm, I don’t see Marvel listed here, either. But there are Marvel panels listed on the schedule, complete with appearances by editor in chief Joe Quesada. Surely Marvel would arrange for a spot on the convention floor for him to sit. Marvel must be somewhere. Just where is it?
Back in the 1980s even big companies like Marvel had low-tech set-ups at the major conventions that basically consisted of long, plain tables at which comics pros sat, with photocopies of their latest work arrayed before them, signing autographs. I did not attend the Con for a few years in the early 1990s, during which time the era of the big booths arrived. In my absence I had heard about them, and they lived up to my expectations when I finally returned to San Diego and saw them. I suppose the big booth is a kind of trademark of the Platinum Age of the San Diego Con.
DC Comics had by far the best booth set-up: a large rectangular area with tables where writers, artists, and editors sat giving autographs and talking to fans, big, prominent images of the characters, and video screens playing new animated shows featuring DC characters. There might be a model dressed as Wonder Woman posing for pictures with fans; one year there was even a full-sized Batmobile in the middle of DC’s public square.
Across the way in one direction would be Dark Horse’s area, similarly set up, with life-sized statues of, say, the Mask. And in another direction was Marvel’s booth, the same size as DC’s, and trying to do many of the same things, but without the same style and handsomeness. This was not really surprising: in 1986 the mantle of being the cutting edge mainstream comics company had shifted from Marvel to DC, and so it made a symbolic kind of sense that the Marvel booth seemed a paler imitation of DC’s. Moreover, whereas every year DC flew out much of its staff to appear at its San Diego booth, by the mid-1990s Marvel was hiring locally based temps to man its San Diego booth, not quite the sort of people fans hope to meet at conventions.
The rise of the big booth coincided with the boom in comics sales in the early 1990s, when there was plenty of money in the business to spend. The boom is over, but the colorful booths still seem right. The long, plain tables of the 1980s conventions to me symbolize a period when comics were still a very minor business, and even the San Diego Con was still not far enough removed from fan gatherings in crowded dealer’s rooms in shoddy hotel facilities. Today’s booths, on the other hand, make the major comics conventions look more like trade shows for mainstream book publishing. They signify prosperity and prestige and a bid for greater respectability as an artform and as a business. DC’s booth area is still by far the best of the comics’ companies, and I like Dark Horse’s and CrossGen’s.
And it’s not just comics companies that are exhibitors. The Hollywood Reporter (July 20, 2003) quoted Marvel’s Avi Arad as telling one of this year’s San Diego Con audiences, “I have to congratulate you because you are the first community ever to manage to bring Hollywood to them.” So, it would make sense that if Disney, DreamWorks, New Line, and Artisan all have booths at the Con, then Marvel, with its own burgeoning film division, so much more tied in with comics properties would, too, right?
Oh, I suppose I could understand there not being a Marvel booth if the company was still in bankruptcy. Then again, Fantagraphics nearly went under this year, and they have a big booth area: presumably they reason that in times of financial stress it is even more important to make a public appearance to promote and sell their wares (and Chris Ware books, too). But lately Marvel has been trumpeting its return to profitability and success. So then there must be a Marvel booth! Mustn’t there?
I mean, really, there have long been Marvel-haters who probably wondered what it would be like to have a major comic book convention without Marvel being the dominant presence. Maybe they even wondered what the American comics industry would look like if Marvel suddenly disappeared. But we would never actually see a major comics con like that, would we?
THE GENERATIONAL SHIFT
There were other things I observed as I wandered about the convention floor on Thursday and the next several days. It was amazing to see the displays and booths from film companies and non-comics publishers, though I also had the feeling that there were far fewer actual comics companies exhibiting. In my last few visits it seemed as if there were a vast number of comics companies, big and small, represented. Have so many of the smaller companies gone under?
Then too, whether I was searching the convention floor or the program book, there were far, far fewer professionals from the Baby Boom generation attending the Con. So many people had lost staff jobs or freelance work during the bust of the comics boom, the turmoil that ensued at Marvel, and the narrowing of the business. On my last few visits to the Con I still saw numerous familiar faces, presumably there because of the Con’s reputation as a nexus for networking. And now so many of them were absent. Had they given up?
A LONG COLUMN ABOUT NEIL GAIMAN
At 5:30 PM began the first of the panels I had put on my schedule to attend. Now, one could even view the Comic-Con as a grand conglomeration of smaller conventions. For example, someone could spend his whole time just attending the Comics Art Conference’s discussions, or watching the movies running day and night at the Con’s Independent Film Festival.
The aforementioned Bradbury and voice actors panels were part of what we might call EvanierCon, an astonishingly long list of panels in which Mark Evanier acts as moderator or major participant, dealing primarily with great writers, artists and editors of the Golden and Silver ages of Comics (the mid-1930s through the 1960s) and animation.
This year, one of the components of the Con was, in effect, NeilCon: according to the program book, Neil Gaiman appeared on more panels this year than anyone else. I managed to get to one of the NeilCon panels every day. In fact, since Gaiman is one of the most prominent interviewees in Sex, Lies and Superheroes, I suppose my movie could even be considered part of NeilCon.
For some years now, there have been attempts to make a movie of Gaiman’s comics mini-series, Death: The High Cost of Living, that would be both written and directed by Gaiman himself. Now, it appears, it looks as if the film might actually happen. In his introduction, Gaiman recounted that his longtime friend and collaborator Dave McKean had suggested that Gaiman try directing a short movie of his own for practice. As Gaiman explained, McKean expected he would just shoot some simple short material. But instead, Gaiman found outside funding and conducted an elaborate experiment in documentary cinema, A Short Film about John Bolton, concerning the British comics artist and painter of the same name.
After the screening, Gaiman cautioned the audience that it was important to him that they knew little about the movie beyond the title before seeing it, so as not to ruin the surprises in tone, style and narrative that the film offers. This, of course, handicaps the reviewer, since, in order to honor Gaiman’s intentions, I can’t discuss how the film evolves and certainly not its denouement. I can tell you that it is entertaining, intelligent, surprising, and satisfying; I just can’t tell you why.
But there are some aspects of the film that intrigued me that I think I can explore without giving the show away.
In part this film is an acknowledgement of the growing mainstream interest in and acceptance of comics-related art. Here is John Bolton, a leading British comics artist, having a major gallery show of his paintings: fantasy art depicting women in the horror genre, notably as vampiresses. And it seems entirely credible that he would and should have such a show.
The film also deals with the idea of the creative artist who has no interest in or motivation to analyze his own work. Bolton, as depicted in the film, keeps being asked questions about the deeper meanings of his work and its psychological implications but he seems oblivious to anything beyond the surface imagery. Bolton simply contends that he paints what he sees.
But I wonder if Gaiman is also expressing a storyteller’s impatience with having his work subjected to critical or academic analysis. This may be the stance of the artist who presents his work and does not want it explained or dissected. Perhaps the idea is that the writer or artist feels that the story as presented, or the visual imagery, is rich enough in meaning on the surface, and that looking for more is unnecessary and perhaps inappropriate. The argument might go that if the creator intended to say more than he could in the format he chose, he would have written an essay instead, or that audience members tend to ascribe meanings to the work that the author did not intend and which therefore are simply not there. Certainly, the onscreen interviewer, gallery owner and gallery attendees, for their part, babble on amusingly about what they think the work is about, and cannot venture beyond cliches. It would seem they cannot grasp what the artist they purport to admire is doing. (And the gallery owner is barely disguising the fact that her own interest in the work is solely in its potential monetary value.)
As a critic and former academic myself, I naturally disagree. Some critics and academics may go off on wrongheaded theories about the work they study, but a good critique of an artwork illuminates its meanings, and can even reveal aspects of the work of which the creator himself was unaware. A good critic is, in a sense, a good collaborator with the artist. The artist creates a treasure – the artwork –and the insightful critic uncovers facets of the treasure that might otherwise escape the observer’s notice or understanding, thereby revealing more of its true value.
Gaiman told the audience that the British company that produced his film, the same people who did Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, are too busy with their new movie project to do anything about getting the Bolton film released on DVD or video. Let’s hope that they find some spare time soon, because you all should see this little film for yourselves.
STAR WARS ON SPEED
Another Con within the Comic-Con would be what I’ll call LucasCon, programming devoted to Star Wars and its various spinoffs; indeed, Friday was designated Star Wars day, with panels on the theme all day long.
For reasons I will explain later, I was looking for a way to pass the time Thursday evening, and, not knowing quite what to expect, ended up at the “Star Wars Fan Film Awards,” in their first appearance at Comic-Con, presented by the online film site AtomFilms.com and Lucasfilm itself. Lucasfilm has clearly made the right move by embracing its fandom to the extent it has rather than acting the role of the forbidding corporate monolith, fending off contact from its audience and suppressing their well-intentioned efforts to play with the mythos. (And that’s why Marvel, would surely heed Lucasfilm’s example and have a booth in San Diego from which to greet its audience. Surely.) Even George Lucas himself appeared on video to present one of the awards.
This was one of the two events I attended at the Con whose audience seemed the most “fannish” in a negative sense, by which I mean that audience reactions seemed excessively exuberant compared to the quality (however good) of what is presented onstage. In other words, Star Wars seems to be a way bigger part of these people’s lives than it is of mine (and I used to be assistant editor on the Star Wars comic book!). Jokes were even made onstage about how Jeremy Bullock, who played bounty hunter Boba Fett, has spent so very much more time at conventions over the years compared to the tiny number of moments that Fett spends onscreen in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Bullock was the master of ceremonies, charming, witty, and soft-spoken, and definitely different from the kind of person you might expect was inside Boba Fett’s armor.
It was odd to watch various Lucasfilm personnel announce each recipient of an award, then applaud the winner as he went up to accept his trophy and only then get shown the film that had earned the prize. (It seems the nominated films could be seen on AtomFilms.com, but, as I discovered later, the site refuses to recognize my elderly browser.) I felt I was applauding only out of politeness in the hope that the recipient turned out to deserve it. But in fact the winning films proved to be delightful. All of them were comedies (and hence, I suppose, as parodies do not violate Lucasfilm’s treasured copyrights) and all were inventive and funny. I especially liked Trey Stokes’ Pink Five, which places a Valley Girl behind the controls of one of the Rebellion’s spacecraft in Episode IV’s climactic battle, Jeff Allen’s Trooper Clerks, which substitutes Imperial stormtroopers in a familiar Kevin Smith milieu, and, my favorite, John E. Hudgens’ The Jedi Hunter, fusing Boba Fett (Him again? What is it with the Boba cultists?) with Animal Planet’s Crocodile Hunter, complete with Australian accent and comely wife.
Thinking about these comedy shorts, I realized that these were not parodies that undercut or trivialized the characters or the Star Wars films. Rather, in an odd way, they demonstrate the strength of the mythos: the archetypal nature of the characters and situations are so strong that it functions effectively even in satiric and comedic contexts far removed from the tone of the original films. Yes, there is a considerable amount of comedy and wit in the Star Wars movies, but they are still basically adventure melodramas that verge at times on tragedy. These fan comedy shorts extend the Star Wars mythos by giving it a fully comedic side. In ancient Greece, a trilogy of tragedies would be followed by a bawdy “satyr-play,” that dealt with mythological material in a comedic way. These Star Wars shorts play a similar role in a pop culture context.
And speaking of theatrical comedy, the award ceremony ended with a small acting troupe from Los Angeles performing the Star Wars Trilogy in Thirty Minutes (the original trilogy, that is: what aficionados now call Episodes 4 through 6. There were visual gags and over-the-top acting moments, to be sure. But the main source of the humor was the sheer speed at which the actors performed, most performing multiple roles, and all rushing from one familiar incident from the story to another. Playwright Tom Stoppard designed a version of Hamlet that compressed Shakespeare’s play into a matter of minutes, to comedic effect, and even a thirty second version (which, as I recall, has Hamlet walk out on stage and drop dead, whereupon Fortinbras comes out, as a signal for the curtain to fall.) Oedipus Rex performed at this kind of speed would be funny; tragedy must be slow.
And again, this was a comedic riff on Star Wars that also served as a tribute to it. I was surprised that not only did the actors manage to cover all major incidents, but also, it seemed, every famous line of dialogue. It had the effect of demonstrating just how well structured the original three films were. Moreover, whereas George Lucas’s ear for dialogue has long been criticized, and often justifiably, the performance also demonstrated how strong and memorable so many of the lines from the films are. (So here’s the test: will these actors try a 30-minute version of the new trilogy once it is finished, and will that source material prove to be anywhere nearly as strong?)
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
With the tumultuous (and thoroughly deserved) applause for the Star Wars Trilogy in Thirty Minutes actors, the “Star Wars Fan Film Awards” ceremony came to an end near 11 PM. Since our producer Constantine had arranged for hotel accommodations under his name, I couldn’t get to the hotel until after he arrived, and he, Ben, and their intern Lyman did not land in San Diego until after dark. Now, I had been up all of the past night, in part to finish work before my departure, and in part because I had to be at the airport by 6:30 AM. And, no, I can’t get to sleep on planes. So getting to the hotel was a priority for me.
I met up with all of them close to 11:30 PM outside the Convention Center, but, perhaps understandably, Constantine and Ben were so excited about being at their first San Diego Con that they insisted on trying to find and get into the parties they had heard about. (That evening Ben had already experienced Everyfan’s dream: by sheer accident he was seated at a restaurant next to Stan Lee, whom he had never met, and struck up a friendly conversation.) So, despite my grumbling that we were approaching midnight San Diego time, which translated to 3 AM New York time, I accompanied them off to Dublin Square, an Irish restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter that, it turned out, had been the site of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund earlier that evening.
Unwilling to brave the noisy bustling inside, I waited outside with Lyman the intern, and there unexpectedly had one of the chance meetings characteristic of Comic-Con. First there was colorist Patricia Mulvihill, who, as she pointed out, hadn’t seen me in a long time, and then there was writer Paul Jenkins, whom I’d only met over the phone, over lengthy consultations on Marvel history. I was happy to see them both, but each left and in effect, was swallowed up by the teeming mass of humanity that is Comic-Con. I never ran into either one again in the course of the convention, because there are just so many people there now, and so many things to do. Daily Variety‘s interview with Paul Dini quotes Paul as saying, “Now it’s so huge, good luck finding your friends.'” It’s true: I only got to see Paul from afar, such as when he was on a Cartoon Network panel and I was in the audience. My funniest near miss at the Con was my encounter with Kurt Busiek, as I was going down one of the long, steep escalators at the Convention Center, waving to him as he was passing me going up an escalator across the way.
By the time I finally got to the hotel and went to sleep Thursday night – or, rather, Friday morning – I had been up for a grand total of 43 hours straight, my all-time personal best. This is longer than any of my all-nighters in my younger days at Columbia University. It is longer than when I stay awake on overnight flights to London and remain awake until past 11 PM London time. I don’t normally work such feats of physical and mental endurance; ordinarily I start winding down once the sun sets. But not on this trip. In time I came to realize I was living more intensely at this Comic-Con than in my everyday life. How could I have stayed away for five years?
There are still three days to go, each to be covered in a succeeding column. Who knows, perhaps I will find out where the Marvel booth is yet!
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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