How better to begin this, the last of my reports on the 2003 Comic-Con International in San Diego, than by referencing a novel about which few of you have heard? Tristram Shandy, the classic 18th century satiric novel by Laurence Sterne, purports to be the title character’s autobiography. However, the narrator is so obsessed with detail, and spends so much space explicating his family’s background, setting his scene, and embarking on interminable digressions, that scores and scores of pages pass by before he gets around to reporting his own birth. And from there on, his pacing problems only become worse. It becomes evident to the reader that it is taking the narrator far longer to write about the events of his life than it did to live through them.
That’s somewhat how I feel about my reports on the Comic-Con. My agent advised me when I started my (unpaid) column for FilmForce that I should go ahead, as long as I didn’t spend too much time on it. And here I thought the San Diego columns would be easy. It’s just transferring my notes to the computer, writing them up, and doing commentary, right? I didn’t realize that writing about each panel I attended would be like a column in itself.
But it has been fun to attend these panels, and fun to write about them, and I hope that those of you who wondered what Comic-Con was like have enjoyed them, too.
I had come to Comic-Con this year with my colleagues in making the comics documentary Sex, Lies and Superheroes. Now it was Sunday, and the rest of them were flying out of San Diego that afternoon. But on their way to the airport, they dropped me off at the Convention Center. Our producer/director, Constantine Valhouli, observed, “You’re really happy you’re spending another day here.” Oh, yes.
MEMORIAL GAMES
Arriving shortly before noon, I moved quickly by the meeting rooms upstairs, and looked in momentarily on Room 8. Here Comiculture magazine was staging Comiculture Squares, a variation on the TV game show Hollywood Squares. Contestants from the audience chose various comics pros, including my old friends David Wohl of Top Cow, Jim Salicrup, formerly of Marvel, and artist Kieron Dwyer, to answer questions on comics trivia.
As David confirmed to me later that afternoon, Comiculture Squares was done in a nod to the late Mark Gruenwald, the editor who was his and my friend and boss at Marvel, who was the first person to organize a comics-oriented version of Hollywood Squares at conventions. Mark didn’t believe in just doing convention panels that followed the same old formula of promoting the company’s new projects and taking questions from the fans. He wanted to entertain the audience, and so he came up with all sorts of novelty panel ideas, from The Plotting Game (a variation on The Gong Show, with fans coming up with ideas for Marvel stories, often with Marvel writer Roger Stern as emcee, impersonating Gary Owens, and sometimes me as a plant suggesting a particularly ludicrous idea) to the Marvelympics (unusual games inspired by different Marvel characters) to various playlets about the world of comics, such as the semi-legendary Planet of the Fans (climaxed by the cameo appearance of John Byrne as Pope of the Marvel cultists).
I think that Mark probably looked upon these stage shows and games as an extension of what Stan Lee did in his letter pages, in his asides to the readers in the stories, and in the Bullpen Bulletins pages: forging a personal connection with the fans, conveying a sense of fun, and drumming up excitement in the audience. DC was traditionally the stodgy, distant, company; Marvel sought to convey that it was innovative, fun, youthful, more spontaneous, casual, and communal.
I should add that Mark was also the mastermind behind many parties both at Marvel and at his own home, and at the time many of us probably took for granted the degree to which he helped keep morale high at Marvel and by extension the New York comics community. Yet times were changing rapidly even before Mark’s death.
At Mark’s memorial at the New York Film Academy, as the vast audience watched home movies of some of the office hijinks Mark staged, his former assistant Mike Carlin said he knew while they were happening that those were the good old days. But how many of us realized that the memorial itself (along with the one for Archie Goodwin) would be the last great gathering of the NYC comics community?
The world of comics in New York is now very different. I wonder how much, if anything, of Mark’s legacy remains in today’s comics industry. Mark Evanier is the Baby Boomer comics professional who heads panels every year that remember and honor the achievements of the comics writers, artists and editors of the previous generation. And he was a prominent member of the panel that memorialized Mark Gruenwald at the Comic-Con following his death. Who will act as the Evanier for the Boomer generation of comics professionals in years to come?
I may not have stayed long at Comiculture Squares, and it was not well attended, but it was a pleasure to see it there. Perhaps someday the pendulum will swing back.
That reminds me. Neil Gaiman was telling us at his panels about the new children’s book he had done with Dave McKean, The Wolves in the Walls. Well, I’ve tried my hand at a children’s story, too. I call it …
THE EMPIRE’S NEW BOOTH
Once upon a time there was an empire that was mightier and more prosperous than any other nation in the known world. Every year the kingdoms of the world sent their representatives to a grand trade fair beside the sea to display and sell their artists’ wares. Devoted pilgrims would journey from far and wide to celebrate the beauty of these artists’ works.
For many years the empire had sent a delegation to the fair, and housed them in a large and imposing booth. But behind the scenes, the empire had been in turmoil for a decade: many rulers had risen only to fall victim to new conquerors. Finally a new committee of emperors restored economic stability to the realm.
But then came time for the annual trade fair, and the emperors were displeased. Why must they associate with the representatives of less powerful and prosperous kingdoms? Why must they deal in person with the common people who purchase their goods? If only they could find a new way to demonstrate the empire’s superiority!
Then, the imperial committee met with a trickster, who proposed that they purchase from him a great and glorious booth, so marvelous that only people who are the coolest and on the most cutting edge could see it. The committee of emperors could see nothing, but that did not disturb them. They had never seen what was so cool and cutting edge about the best of the wares created for the trade fair anyway. So the committee agreed to purchase the booth from the trickster and set it up at the trade fair. But in fact the cunning trickster had brought no booth.
And when the trade fair opened, the pilgrims who journeyed there every year were surprised that the empire did not appear to be there. Well, they thought, if the empire does not wish to show us its wares, then we shall give our business to the other kingdoms. “The empire has no booth!” they cried. But the imperial committee did not hear them, for they had remained at their palace, and would not have been interested anyway.
A SURPRISE ON THE SCHEDULE
I arrived at Ballroom 20 at about noon, planning to get a seat for the 12:30 PM panel, and there on stage was Quentin Tarantino, director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. He wasn’t supposed to be here! The program book listed his panel for Friday. Today’s daily convention newsletter didn’t mention his appearing today. And yet there were hundreds and hundreds of people in the Ballroom who had somehow found out about this. That’s right, I recalled: Ben, our cameraman, met Tarantino yesterday, and said Tarantino told him he had a panel on Sunday. I quickly found a seat.
This panel was “Miramax: Kill Bill,” apparently postponed from Friday, designed to promote Tarantino’s long-awaited next film, which opens this fall, or, rather, half of it does. Tarantino explained that his movie was so long that he persuaded Miramax head Harvey Weinstein (whose voice he imitated repeatedly and with relish) to let him split the film in two rather than cut it down.
Kill Bill does contain animated footage done in the style of Japanese anime, but it is mostly a live action revenge thriller, and as such really does not fit into the purview of this column. So I will not devote much space to it, other than to outline the premise. Uma Thurman plays a woman who, on her wedding day, witnesses the massacre of the groom and all the entire wedding party by an enemy. Undergoing training in martial arts and swordsmanship, she seeks out revenge. (The premise reminds me of Francois Truffaut’s film The Bride Wore Black, except that its vengeful bride had no apparent interest in Japanese combat methods.)
This panel was the setting for the world premiere of a trailer for Kill Bill that Weinstein did not like. Tarantino had designed the trailer to make Kill Bill look like the sort of pulpish B-movies that he loved (as indeed it did), but Weinstein, he said, felt this approach would not go over with general audiences. So they compromised, and this version of the trailer will only be shown in a limited number of art theaters, while a different trailer will go into mainstream theaters. There’s a paradox here that Tarantino did not mention: the general audiences will get the trailer that I assume will make Kill Bill look like an art movie, while the arthouses get the one that make it look like a low-rent action flick. What does that say about the tastes of cineastes?
A number of Kill Bill‘s cast members were there, including Daryl Hannah and Michael Madsen, but they mostly sat quietly at a table while Tarantino prowled the stage, talking nonstop. Tarantino’s high voice, his motormouth speaking style, and his unrestrained excitement for his movie and its genre, are all the sorts of things that, were he not a famous writer/director, would lead many people to label him a geek. If he usually acts like this, I expect it would become very wearying very quickly. Yet during this panel he was quite entertaining, and his intense enthusiasm surely helped charge up the audience’s anticipation for his movie. Tarantino was yet another of the Comic-Con guests who treated their convention appearances like theatre. Neil Gaiman said yesterday that he would not want to be a stand-up comic; I suspect that Tarantino, who has a very different speaking style, might actually like the idea.
The only thing that I disliked about this panel was when Tarantino went off on a tangent about how he (unlike most people) loved Gus Van Sant’s remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It seems Tarantino believes that classics should be tampered with simply for the sake of tampering. Sounding like a prankster carried away with his own cleverness, Tarantino said he’d love to get his hands on Citizen Kane just to “f*** with it.”
So here’s one of my principles. Even in the field of comics, I’ve seen too many professionals trying to undo another writer’s story, subvert it or have it dropped from the official canon. I believe in an artistic community whose members respect tradition and honor the good work of their peers and predecessors. Creative artists should build on the work of those who went before, or create something new, rather than waste their time taking apart someone else’s achievements just because they can.
BUFFYCON PART 3: KEEPING THE FAITH
Staying put in Ballroom 20 after Tarantino and his troupe made their exit, I was ready for the 12:30 PM panel, titled “Eliza Dushku: Tru Calling.” Actually, this panel was organized by Fox Television to promote three of its forthcoming new dramatic series. But the organizers clearly knew that the big draw for their panel was the personal appearance by Eliza Dushku, the young actress who plays Faith, the other vampire slayer, on Buffy and Angel.
Over the past year, as speculation mounted that Buffy would not return for an eighth season, it seemed that many of the show’s fans hoped there would be a spinoff featuring Faith. Some months ago Joss Whedon and others admitted in interviews that the idea of a Faith series had been under consideration. But Eliza Dushku chose to play a new and different role, the title character of Fox’s Tru Calling.
The panel included a screening of the pilot episode, which introduces Tru, a recent college grad based in New York and seeking a career in medicine. Her mother died when Tru was a child, and, through no fault of her own, she has strained relations with her sister and brother. She is no “bad girl” like Dushku’s Faith, but has much of her forcefulness, as well as sharing Dushku’s ability to make even her expository dialogue seem sultry.
Working in a morgue, Tru discovers that she can “hear” the recently deceased speak to her. Moreover, she can then relive the previous day and attempt to stop that person’s death from taking place.
The pilot episode was intriguing and well-made, apart from an irritating mannerism of recurring sequences of Dushku running from one place to another; later, during a question and answer session, an audience member asked the Tru panel if this was copied from the movie Run Lola Run, and we were told this gimmick would be dumped from the series.
I thought a more important potential problem was that it appeared that each episode would follow the same plot formula – Tru going back in time to prevent a death every week – which would quickly grow tiresome.
This may have been a Fox Television panel, but it also turned out to be a kind of sequel to yesterday’s Buffy and Angel panels, showing what three of the shows’ alumni had moved on to do.
Before the Tru Calling panelists arrived, two other upcoming series was previewed. The first of these was Wonderfalls, introduced by its executive producer Bryan Fuller, formerly of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, who now does Showtime’s Dead Like Me series. And, it turns out, former Angel writer Tim Minear now works on Wonderfalls.
We were shown the first six minutes, which introduce the young heroine, who, much like her counterpart in Dead Like Me is a sardonically witty young woman who finds herself in a mind-numbing regular job that brings her into contact with eccentric people, and is simultaneously involved with the supernatural. In Wonderfalls‘ case, the heroine works in a shop by Niagara Falls selling tacky souvenirs, and discovers that inanimate (but computer animated) objects speak to her, commenting on her life. Whereas it took me a while to warm up to Dead Like Me, I took a liking to the first six minutes of Wonderfalls right away. Once the heroine described herself as “overeducated and underemployed,” I knew we had something in common.
Next, in an unannounced surprise, came Marti Noxon, formerly show runner for Buffy, to introduce a trailer for the new series she now works on as executive producer and a writer, Still Life, which will debut in mid-season. This was yet another sign of Comic-Con’s increasing importance to the world of television and movies, since, as far as I knew, Noxon had come down to San Diego solely for the purpose of talking to us for a handful of minutes.
“Hi, I’m Marti, and I’m an alcoholic,” she began. “Oh,” she corrected herself, “wrong meeting.”
“I just wanted to come and introduce Still Life to you guys.” Noxon said. After leaving Whedon’s Mutant Enemy Productions, “I had a lot of options because I was so blessed being on Buffy and this is the show I chose to write on.” It is not her creation, but one she found appealing: “It is a heartfelt family drama, but the twist is that it’s shown and narrated through the eyes of the son who was murdered the year before, and he is still a spirit; he’s still around.”
A trailer for Still Life followed, and it seemed as if it would be too sentimental for my tastes. It’s not a genre that interests me, but I’ll probably give an episode a try if for no other reason than to follow Noxon’s work.
Finally, out came the Tru Calling panel: star Eliza Dushku, executive producer Jon Feldman, and cast members Jessica Collins (who plays Tru’s sister), Shawn Reaves (her brother), and comedian Zach Galifranakis, who portrays a co-worker. The supporting cast said little, and Reaves, I think, did not speak at all; it was Dushku whom the audience had come to see and who got the majority of the questions.
As noted in the last column, Joss Whedon often talks like one of his own characters, Xander. And we in the audience discovered right away that Eliza Dushku’s style of talking is not unlike Faith’s. Sounding genuinely excited to be there, Dushku exclaimed, “Hello, hello. . .This is my first time here. This is a trip! Thank you guys for coming. This is awesome!”
Since we had already seen the pilot, the panel went almost immediately to taking questions from the audience. Now, as my readers know, I detest blanket condemnations of fans. But, yes, there are indeed fans with various problems, who lack self-awareness and seek the spotlight, thereby inflicting their failings upon us.
So it was that the first person in the question line asked Dushku if her brand new series failed, would she consider doing a Buffy spinoff about Faith?
The audience, appalled at this woman’s faux pas, booed. But Dushku handled it quite well. Her initial words look stern in print, but they were delivered calmly, without anger in her tone. “You know, I’m trying to be optimistic here, so those kinds of questions aren’t appreciated, no. We’ll see. I wanted to take a ride. That’s what I’ve always done in my career, and I feel like what’s there to be afraid of? What have you got to lose? Go big or go home, right?” Dushku had quickly turned an understated reprimand into a positive declaration of her philosophy on life, one we could admire, and the audience applauded in pleasure.
Then came a guy who said he really liked Bring It On, a recent movie in which Dushku and others played cheerleaders. In fact he seemed to like it a little too much, and he wanted to know if Dushku would do another cheerleader movie.
This time Dushku defused the problem with humor. “I’m sorry, what?” she asked, pretending she hadn’t heard him correctly. “You want to do a cheerleading movie? Come up here and show us some skills, my friend. Let’s see what ya got.”
“No, thanks,” said the fan, who still hadn’t gotten the point. “Would you do a cheerleading TV show?”
Dushku turned to her producer, “Jon, can you add cheers to the show at some point to satisfy this gentleman?”
“Episode 7,” Feldman responded.
Then there was a woman who didn’t know when to stop talking, whom Dushku treated with admirable patience. Not so with another guy in line was a fan of Zach Galifranakis, but somehow thought it was funny to tell him to his face he was ugly. The audience rumbled its displeasure, and Dushku, seeming amused more than angry, told the guy he had “lost” the crowd and got him to sit down.
Finally the level of questioners improved. Dushku had played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter in James Cameron’s thriller True Lies, and an audience member wanted to know if she would be interested in doing True Lies 2.
“I would love that, too,” said Dushku. “That was kind of a killer job, and if Jim Cameron hits one of these conventions anytime soon, would you go ahead and ask him for me?”
A question that followed tied into the previous one. Would Dushku’s schedule shooting Tru Calling allow her to do movies during the summer?
Dushku said that having a break in her TV schedule “was one thing that was important to me, whether it’s a hiatus to do a movie or a hiatus to just chill. I ran into Sarah Michelle Gellar recently, and she just started dying laughing when I saw her,” Dushku said, amused herself, “and I was like, ‘What’s so funny?’ And she said, ‘Honey, get ready to say goodbye to your life” since starring in a TV show like Buffy consumes ninety hours a week. “And so she’s kind of prepared me that I might want to use my time for a break, but I might throw out some kind of flick if it’s cool.”
A new questioner, thinking along the same lines I was, wondered if the series would just be about Tru trying to save a different person each week, or if there would be a continuing story arc over the entire series.
Producer Feldman replied, “The answer is both. Every week she will have the opportunity to save or not save someone and it’s real important that she’s not going to be able to save some of these people. And we do have a sort of overall arc mythology that sort of explains how she came to receive these powers from the universe and who’s responsible as well as what happened to her mom.”
Then there was a young girl – could she have been the same little Faith fan from Joss Whedon’s panel yesterday? – who asked how Faith was different from Tru.
Dushku began, “Sometimes I feel like, you’ve heard it before, art imitates life, and when I first started playing Faith I was a little bit more insane than I am now, just from being 17 and going through high school. How old are you?” she asked.
“Eight,” replied the little girl.
“You’re eight?” asked Dushku. “Yeah, high school. Get ready, honey, like strap on your coat of armor because it’s not fun for a lot of people. I was kind of playing out my anger and my fear, my frustration and insecurities sometimes in the early days of Faith. And a lot of people thought she got soft when I came back for the season finale this year. I think that as I’ve grown up. I think that it’s opening more doors for me to play characters who are still strong, who are still bad-ass, kick-ass, but who – ”
Dushku suddenly stopped, looking at the child who asked the question. “Oh, pardon me, you’re eight?” “I’ll never be invited back to Comic-Con again!” Dushku laughed. She then rephrased the offending words to “Kick butt!” and carried on.
With Tru Dushku wanted to be “keeping that strength, but also taking a little bit more responsibility. . .I think that she’s also strong; I think she’s more of a problem solver. I think that she’s going to try to think and talk out her problems as opposed to beating them out. And that might be nice for some people to see, and send a bit of a better message. Thank you,” Dushku said, smiling at her young fan, adding “tell your mom I’m sorry.”
Actually, if that had been the same girl from the Whedon panel, then she had already heard Joss discuss attempted rape the day before. So, really, in comparison, Dushku’s “kick-ass” remark doesn’t seem so bad at all.
Dushku had actually just answered the question, but someone still asked why she chose to do the Tru Calling series.
“It all started with the script, I guess,” she replied, referring to the pilot. “I mean, I couldn’t put it down. There were so many elements, there was humor, there was drama, there was suspense; it just seemed to have the whole package. I really hadn’t done other previous TV except for Buffy and I knew that coming from that my stakes were pretty high, and the script really had it. Sometimes you just go with your gut and it just felt like the right thing to do.”
At the panel’s end Dushku enthusiastically thanked the audience, who clearly loved her. She’d been just what you might hope from an actress whose work you admire: friendly, funny, full of energy, with the courage to follow her instincts and ambitions and a positive attitude towards life that was genuinely infectious. She could not have made a better impression.
NEILCON DAY 4:
Eliza Dushku’s panel ended by 2 PM, and I headed over to Room 6A for the final hour of a panel that the program book dubbed, “A Sunday Afternoon Chat with Mr. Gaiman and Mr. McKean,” giving me another chance to observe the rapport between the comedy team of Neil and Dave. The program book advised us all to “bring your own tea.”
I arrived just in time to hear the following question from the audience: was it true that Neil and Dave got their first DC Comics assignment when they “mugged Karen Berger” – a DC editor, now head of its Vertigo line – “in her hotel room?”
“Dave held her down and I hit her till she said yes,” replied Gaiman.
But it took Gaiman a moment to come up with the real story, if indeed that is what it was. It’s such a long time ago, he explained, “I remember not what happened but what we said happened at cons.”
McKean started the tale by recalling they were “knocking on the door of Karen Berger’s hotel room” when she and Dick Giordano, then a DC executive, were visiting London in the 1980s.
His memory apparently sufficiently prodded, Gaiman then proceeded to tell an anecdote I’ve heard and read him tell several times before. He and McKean has “plotted a great Phantom Stranger four-parter” and “pitched it” to Giordano and Berger in the latter’s hotel room. Gaiman then shifted into his Dick Giordano impression (which does not actually sound like Giordano but is amusing nonetheless), telling them that Grant Morrison had “just pitched” a Phantom Stranger series, too, and that “We got Paul Kupperberg doing one.” (Yes, this is a long time ago, when Paul Kupperberg ranked more highly than Neil Gaiman in U.S. comics.)
McKean said they became “desperate.” “We’re throwing characters at them,” said Gaiman. What about the Forever People? No, J. Marc DeMatteis was doing a series about them.
Finally, Neil suggested Black Orchid.
“Blackhawk Kid,” Neil quotes Karen as saying, “who’s he?”
And Black Orchid is the character they were allowed to do. And here’s part of the story I hadn’t heard before. After the meeting with Giordano and Berger, McKean told Gaiman, “They didn’t really mean it. They’re just being polite.” Gaiman insisted, “They meant it.” And then, according to Gaiman, McKean asked him, “Who’s Black Orchid?”
Well, the Black Orchid was this beautiful and mysterious woman in costume who would assume various disguises to investigate crimes. “Dave said he didn’t want to do cheesecake for four issues,” Gaiman told us. McKean wanted “to do something important, like the fate of the rain forest.” So, Gaiman said he’d “put it in,” and that’s why the Gaiman-McKean Black Orchid mini-series has a subplot set in the South American rain forests.
Now keep in mind that Gaiman tipped us off at the beginning of this story that it is not necessarily true, at least not entirely. He said something similar during the MirrorMask panel, when he indicated that his version of what happened during the writing sessions differed from McKean’s. Mind you, in any case, this is the sort of thing that drives historians, journalists, biographers and other scholars crazy. But Gaiman himself would address this topic a bit later.
Someone asked what Gaiman thought of the similarity between J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Gaiman’s Books of Magic comics miniseries, which predates them. This, it seems, is a familiar question for Gaiman. In fact, I even got asked about it myself by a friend at dinner that evening. Tim Hunter, the central character in Books of Magic, was a young British boy with glasses who has tremendous potential as a sorcerer, and, in Gaiman’s original series, encounters various mystical characters from the DC Universe who teach him about magic. Sounds a lot like Harry Potter, doesn’t it? “And they both have owls!” exclaimed my friend over dinner.
In yet another example of the smallness of the world, Gaiman remarked that McKean was a production designer on the “Harry Potter movies” and “did the spiders in the last one.” McKean added that he “did the Dementors in the next one and some work on the Hippogriffs.”
“People say she ripped off Tim Hunter,” Gaiman said about Rowling. But, he said, if she had ripped it off, “she’s clever enough to have changed more. I think it’s pure coincidence.”
Well, maybe. Are there any indications that Rowling is or was a comics enthusiast? Here’s a big sign that she might not be: Rowling controls the Harry Potter publishing rights, and yet there has been no comic book adaptation of the Harry Potter saga.
And yet – Rowling’s school for young people with paranormal abilities, where the kids are taught how to use them? The fact that her school is headed by a wise man with great paranormal powers of his own? Rowling’s theme of racial prejudice, in which “muggles,” people without magic powers, are bigoted against people who do have such powers, and in which some of the people with magic powers despise those of “half-Muggle” descent? Doesn’t this sound like X-Men?
But the theme of wise older mentors training students recurs throughout the history of fiction, and neither Rowling nor X-Men creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby invented bigotry as a theme in fiction.
And, for that matter, it may be pure coincidence that Harry Potter and Ben Grimm in Fantastic Four each have an Aunt Petunia. Or maybe it isn’t.
Beyond these matters, though, I can’t think of parallels between the Rowling books and comics series I know.
Critics have commented that Rowling draws considerably from mythology, fairy tales and legends, and her Hogwarts school milieu obviously is derived from a long British tradition of stories about boarding school life.
Maybe Rowling does know Books of Magic, but, if so, it is only one of the many, many sources of inspiration that influenced her books. She drew upon and combined inspirations from all her many sources to construct a vast, highly detailed fictional universe within her books. If she was aware of Tim Hunter, I think the point is not how much about Tim she changed, but how much she added around him: the other characters, the school and its history, the various kinds of monsters, the entire alternate society of sorcerers living amidst “normal” people. The Harry Potter books don’t read anything like Gaiman’s Books of Magic, even if their heroes do look alike.
The theme of parallels between Gaiman and Rowling now continued down an unexpected path. “Mr. Gaiman,” piped up a fan from the audience, “I think you’d make a great Professor Snape.”
“One day,” Gaiman predicted, “Alan Rickman” – who plays Snape in the Potter films – “will be playing me in the biopic. Kenneth Branagh will be playing Dave.”
“Not Danny DeVito?” McKean wondered aloud.
I would guess that before I arrived, it had been revealed that Mr. McKean has unusual tastes in food, inasmuch as the next person in the question line commented that the “more creative a person is,” the more eccentric his tastes, and “the weirder the food is.” Having just been criticized by a dinner companion for my own carnivorous predilections only the night before, I found this observation quite refreshing. I suppose, though, Mr. McKean must be far more creative in his fields than I am in mine, since his tastes are considerably weirder than my own.
“The first time we went to dinner at his house,” Gaiman groused, “we had pizza with apricots on it.”
As usual, McKean was not only unperturbed but cheerful. “You think they were apricots,” he noted.
The next question enables me to return to the previous topic of the embroidered anecdote. Referring to the graphic novels Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, written by Gaiman and illustrated by McKean, this audience member wanted to know to what extent they were autobiographical.
Gaiman asserted that “Violent Cases and Mr. Punch are both autobiographical but unreliably autobiographical.” He contended that “even an autobiography that purports to be true” departs from exact fidelity to the facts for artistic reasons. Gaiman recommended the recent graphic novel Blankets‘ by Craig Thompson (who was on Comic-Con’s graphic novels panel the previous Friday). Blankets is an autobiographical work about Thompson and his brother, and, Gaiman said, “seems so true and real.” Yet, he went on, Thompson had stated in an interview that in order to make the story work he had to omit the existence of his sister. “Once you try to make life into art,” Gaiman contended, inevitably, “you’ll [end up] f***ing with it.”
So, I suppose, the same principle applies to some of Gaiman’s anecdotes, like the next one, perhaps. An audience member asked Gaiman and McKean how they met, and Gaiman replied that he found McKean as a “drunk” lying “in a gutter.”
“That’s absolutely true,” McKean happily agreed.
Gaiman briefly described his new Sandman graphic novel, Endless Nights, which has seven different artists each illustrating a story about one of the seven members of the Sandman’s family of deities, the Endless.
It will be released in September (around the time this report is posted on the website, and I will undoubtedly be reviewing it in the next few months).
Next someone wanted to know if Gaiman’s home was full of Sandman-related paraphernalia. Gaiman said that artists would give him the original paintings for covers, so there were a lot of Sandman paintings and such in his house.
McKean interjected that Gaiman’s mantelpiece was lined with toys and dolls and dubbed it “the shrine.” Gaiman explained that people made these items and gave them to him.
In fact Gaiman has even been given a doll of himself, which he said he once carried about in Las Vegas. A waitress saw the doll, Gaiman said, and said (as Gaiman slipped into yet another voice), “It’s you.” Gaiman agreed. She went on, in broken English, “You John Lennon’s son.” This he did not agree with, but she assured him, “I not tell anybody, John Lennon’s son.” She then asked for his autograph, he signed “Neil Gaiman,” and, he recalled, “she didn’t seem to mind.”
McKean claimed that the doll talks to Gaiman. Quoting the doll, McKean said, “They all hate you, you know. They laugh at your jokes, but they don’t like you at all.”
Remember what I said in a previous report about Gaiman’s distinctive mode of dress? Now someone asked, “Do you have a particular brand of sunglasses?”
Genuinely trying to come up with an answer, Gaiman confessed, “I’m not very good at brands.”
The questioner persisted: “Do you get them at gas stations?” (Now, was that nice?)
Gaiman examined his frames, “Carrera, made in Italy, this one says.”
A new question: Why was a movie of Alan Moore’s comics series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen done before a Sandman movie?
“Not surprising,” said Gaiman. “Sandman is big, confusing,” a “huge, great thing.” He continued, “Filmmakers have to try to figure out [what] to throw away. On the other hand, he said, League is a simple idea. “You don’t even have to make it cool and smart like the comic was,” Gaiman pointedly observed.
Now that’s a lesson in how moviemakers can warp their source material (as we shall examine in a future column).
Perhaps keeping that in mind, Gaiman said he hoped that McKean would get “powerful enough in Hollywood” so that he could ask McKean to direct a Sandman movie.
Already thinking Hollywood, McKean proposed, “Schwarzenegger as Sandman.”
Proving once and for all he is the graphic novelist of a thousand voices, Gaiman turned his voice into Arnold’s as Morpheus: “Pleasant dreams, motherf***er.” If this writing career of his ever goes south, he has a brilliant future as an animation voice actor lying before him.
Shifting back to his normal voice, Gaiman declared, “This is one of the strangest panels I’ve ever been on. I love it.”
And this panel was now drawing to a close. Gaiman directed our attention to the line of people against one wall, and told those who did not know that at the end of his panel yesterday there was a line of Klingons there. Well, now the mystery was solved: Gaiman explained that these people were there to escort McKean and himself to the autograph line. (Yes, but why were the people yesterday dressed and made up as Klingons?)
It was mentioned that one of McKean’s short films was shown at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival (making him the envy of a documentarian like myself). Gaiman had already informed us that McKean had an “obsession with masks,” and now someone asked him why, in one of his short films, “God is in a mask and fishing.” “It’s autobiographical,” McKean calmly replied. (Don’t worry: this may be another case of the unreliable autobiography.)
McKean wanted to become a film director, but no one would just give him money to do one. So, McKean said, he “had a five year plan, which is ridiculous”: he would make “two short films” on his own, “people would love them,” and as a result he would “get to make a big budget film. And it happened.” Not only that, McKean said, but, alluding back to the MirrorMask panel, putting little pieces of a paper in a line “really helped.” (Faithful readers, be advised: if you haven’t figured it out by now, I have running gags and continuing themes all through these Comic-Con reports.)
Now, how can I end this section on the Gaiman-McKean panel on just the right note? Perhaps by reporting on one of the very last questions asked, about how Gaiman does his research.
Gaiman replied, “I have a head full of bizarre s**t, but I also have shelves with stuff on them.”
There! As he said, it was one strange panel, and eventually, you will have the opportunity to see at least some of it for yourselves, since Gaiman told us it was being filmed for inclusion as a feature on the DVD of his and McKean’s forthcoming film MirrorMask.
CLOSING TIME
I’ve wondered in the past what it would be like going to a major film festival like Sundance, rushing from one movie to the next, hoping to see as many as I could. Now I know: it would be like this Comic-Con, as I rush from one panel to another for hours on end.
The Gaiman and McKean panel ended at 3, and I decided to spend the rest of my afternoon on the main convention floor, hoping to make contact with as many people whom I knew but hadn’t encountered yet as I could. At this I was fairly successful, although there were still plenty of people I hoped to see but never found.
In past years it used to feel sad watching the Convention wind down in its final hours, and Sunday, surprisingly, seemed less busy a day than Thursday. So usually I would go somewhere else on Sunday afternoon, so that my last memory of that year’s Con would be of it still busily going on; five years ago I even flew back to New York on Sunday morning.
Once again, though, things had changed in the intervening half-decade, and now the Convention was bustling with activity to the very end.
As closing time approached, a female voice on the public address system began warning attendees to make their final purchases now. Shortly thereafter, apparently not having observed enough movement towards the exits, she directed fans whom she described as being in a “daze” to start heading out. It reminded me of Majel Barrett Roddenberry as the Star Trek computer voice counting down the self-destruct system.
And still the aisles were full of people. I was making arrangements to have dinner with my friend Meloney Chadwick, her ex-husband Jim Chadwick, among others. Meloney took off to make a circuit of the convention floor and do last minute shopping; considering how little time was left and how enormous the floor was, this seemed a dubious prospect. With less than fifteen minutes before closing, Frank Miller came by, he and I chatted briefly, and he headed out the doors. I thought, if I only had a few more hours here, I’d get to talk to everybody!
Less than five minutes now. Meloney had returned, purchases in tow, and our group headed out the doors, with what seemed huge numbers of people still swarming about the Convention. I expected to see Daleks from Doctor Who advancing down the aisles, shooting their disintegrator rays, sweeping the aisles clean of fans who remained beyond closing time. (I was once personally threatened by a Dalek at the Museum of the Moving Image in London. But that’s another story.)
Following dinner with my friends, I went to the hotel I was staying at, and tried to remain awake past 11 PM, but it was no use. With the Convention over, my accumulated sleep debt over the last five days weighed heavily upon me and I gave in. I awoke the next day, refreshed enough for an enjoyable return visit to the San Diego Zoo (where I saw the giant panda that had been born there, and was now fully grown, and a hippo that had been born only 14 days before, and was the size of a housecat). And then it was off on a series of sleepless night flights back to New York (perusing one of Rowling’s Harry Potter books for light reading), where, as soon as I got back home, I went to sleep till dinnertime.
It was a very satisfying trip indeed. (I even finally realized where the Marvel booth was: in our memories.)
THE COMIC-CON PARADOX
Years ago Todd McFarlane repeated to me an observation he had once heard: that the San Diego Con, which then attracted 35,000 attendees per year, would always have 35,000 attendees; the difference would be that in future years those would be the only people left in America who still read comic books. Sales were plummeting, and people worried that the comics business would never recover from the crash.
Yet now a paradox presents itself. A decade ago the comics industry was booming, some issues sold millions of copies, and many comics creators (not me, of course) had become rich. And yet the Comic-Con attracted less than half the number of attendees that it does now. In 2003 over 70,000 people attended, far, far more than the paid circulation of most individual comic books. How can this be?
During the speculator boom, many people were buying multiple copies of comics that they had deluded themselves into thinking would someday be worth big money; hence, though some books sold millions of copies, there were not millions of actual buyers. Even so, the comics audience then appears to have been far larger than it is today.
Mark Evanier once pointed out that the attendees of Comic-Con constitute not a single audience but many, and he suggested that many people at Comic-Con had not bought a new comic book in twenty years.
This makes a good deal of sense to me. Surely many of the people attending Evanier’s own panels honoring Golden and Silver Age comics creators have little interest in contemporary superhero comics, and many of the younger fans attending the current hot creators’ panels have little or no interest in comics published before their births. Just as there are aficionados of independent cinema who disdain Hollywood studio movies, so too, as I have shown in these columns, there are alternative comics enthusiasts who cannot stand mainstream superhero books. And the reverse is true: most X-Men fans probably have no interest in the works of, say, Chris Ware.
I also expect there may be a good number of people who have little or no interest in comics but are big Buffy buffs and came specifically to hear Joss Whedon speak. Or they are intense Star Wars fans who came for the Star Wars Fan Film Awards. People with no interest in comics but considerable fervor for fantasy and s. f. movies could go to Comic-Con on Saturday and fill their whole day with panels on movies and television series. Put all these groups of fans of things other than comics together, and this may be why Comic-Con’s attendance has doubled in five years.
It is amazing: Comic-Con’s continuing transformation into what one friend terms “a multimedia con” creates a situation in which people who don’t read comics will pay money to enter a convention where exhibitors will do their best to sell them comics. Comic-Con is no longer preaching simply to the converted. It is a place where comics can be promoted to masses of fans of movies, television shows and videogames that deal in the same sorts of genres.
San Diego’s Comic-Con International has not only endured but grown for over thirty years, and, instead of slowing down in the 21st century, has been expanding at an astonishing rate. By diversifying into covering other media, Comic-Con has renewed and reinvented itself. Attending Comic-Con, it seems mature and yet still growing, still vital, and surely it has not yet reached its peak.
Will I attend next year’s Comic-Con? Now that I’m back from this year’s Con, my long-unrewarded hunt for a day job resumes, and that’s a prerequisite for future trips to San Diego. I’d sure like to go back, though.
Besides, there are the rickshaws. There only seemed a few five years ago, but now they are all over downtown San Diego, perhaps demonstrating that it is indeed part of the Pacific Rim. Young people on bicycles pull open rickshaws in which passengers sit. It looks like fun, and I didn’t get a chance to use one. Next time for sure.
But there may be no next time for another pop culture convention that I’ve attended many times over the last two decades. The next column will examine what it is like to attend a convention whose organizers have already announced its end.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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