The following events took place between Saturday, July 22 at 6:40 PM and the present.

“You’re still living in San Diego!” exclaimed the Beat in shock (and an admirable metaphor) a few weeks ago. But as Ed McMahon might have said to Carnac the Magnificent, “I hold in my hand”–metaphorically speaking–“the final installment of this year’s San Diego Con reports,” whereupon applause sounds through cyberspace. Some of you may be thinking, “Didn’t he tell us that he’d be spending fewer pages writing about the San Diego Con this year? But in 2003 and 2005 he took only six weeks to do it, and this year it’s eight.” Ah, I reply, sneaking through a well-planned loophole, but you’ll find that most of this year’s installments are shorter than last year’s.

This week, therefore, marks my final attempt this year to persuade my fellow Quick Stop columnist, Fred Hembeck, who, despite being the Consummate Comics Fan, has never, ever been to the San Diego Con, that he should, nay, must go there someday. Fred already replied to my campaign on his blog (http://www.hembeck.com/FredSez.htm) on August 18: “Sorry, Peter–as long as I can’t carry on polish for my Stan Lee Press On Nails, I ain’t getting aboard!” But, Fred, there are other ways to go than by plane! You could follow the example of Lewis (not Lois) and Clark by undertaking a cross-country road trip. Driving out to Comic-Con, staying its length, and then driving back: why it’d only take roughly three weeks out of your life. Bring a laptop and you can blog en route.

SATURDAY 6:40 PM
If you read last week’s report, then you recall that I waited over two hours to get into the San Diego Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H, hoping to see director Sam Raimi give a presentation about the forthcoming Spider-Man 3 movie. (The Comic-Con asserts that being a member of the press does not ensure admission to Hall H. Well, why not?) But instead I got to see this other guy, who looked a lot like that character Silent Bob in those Clerks movies, who bestowed his wisdom about life upon the crowd. For convenience’s sake, let us continue to call him Mr. Smith.

At the point at which I pick up my report, Smith had already been asked
“what made you want to direct?” Smith said it was seeing Richard Linklater’s movie Slacker (1991), which has no plot in the conventional sense and consists of a series of dialogues between different characters. “God, if this counts as a film,” Smith said; the connection to Clerks is clear.

Now another audience member asked Smith, what would he have done if directing hadn’t worked out for him as a career. “Before I wanted to be a filmmaker, I thought I wanted to own a deli,” Smith replied. (This too illuminates the Clerks movies.) “I didn’t really have a backup plan,” he confessed. it’s a good thing that following his dream paid off.

The next fan wanted to know if Smith would be writing more comic books.
“Me and comics, not a great mix,” Smith began. “Mostly because I–Where the fuck’d you go?” The fan had already obliviously wandered away from the microphone. “We were having a conversation,” protested Smith. You can become prosperous and famous and still end up with people walking away from you while you’re still talking to them.

Smith pressed onward: “Because I have a hard time sticking on schedule.” He brought up his Spider-Man/Black Cat limited series, whose final issue was a full three years late. “You’re not supposed to take three years off,” he pointed out. Then he told us the price of missing deadlines: “For three years I was fuckin’ persona non grata at comic book conventions. ‘Where’s Spider-Man/Black Cat, tubby? Jersey Girl fuckin’ bombs and Spider-Man/Black Cat isn’t finished!’”

Smith concluded, “Dude, I’m gonna get you laid and you won’t care about Spider-Man.” (This obviously hasn’t worked for Mr. Smith.) The fan, continuing to demonstrate his lack of manners, asserted that he’d heard Smith say that before. “I do,” Smith retorted proudly: “That’s one of my bits.”

Next Smith was asked what he thought of being badmouthed recently on the HBO series Entourage. “I thought that was a compliment,” Smith contended. But wasn’t that negative publicity? “No fuckin’ such thing,” Smith declared. “They said my name on TV.”

The next audience member in line spoke in praise of Jersey Girl, Smith’s film that centers on the relationship between a widowed father and his young daughter. “People who are not parents don’t get Jersey Girl,” she said. “People who are parents do get it.” Smith thanked her and the others who liked Jersey Girl. Despite its bad reputation, I rather liked Jersey Girl, too, and I’m not a parent. Maybe it’s because I’m middle–uh, I mean, have a mature outlook.

Another fan asked what was Smith’s inspiration for Clerks II. “I opened up my mortgage bill,” Smith said, adding, “Back to the well.” (Smith and Bruce Timm have the same problem.) Then Smith said that he wanted to examine “what it was like to be in my thirties,” since the original Clerks was about life in his twenties. So I wonder if in ten years there will be a Clerks III about entering middle age.

The next questioner wanted to know how “first time filmmaker” could break into the business. Smith said, “I don’t know the way in. I just made Clerks. So my advice to you is just make Clerks.”

Smith wound up by talking about his recent dispute with Joel Siegel, the movie reviewer for Good Morning America. Siegel, Smith told us, “walked out of our movie the other day.” In Clerks II, as the centerpiece of lead character Dante’s bachelor party, his friend Randal arranges for “the donkey show,” which one might describe as bestiality as performance art. (Gee, whatever happened to hiring strippers?) This offended Siegel’s delicate sensibilities. “He said, ‘That’s it! I haven’t walked out of a movie in thirty-seven years!’’ Smith told us, but Siegel walked out of this one.

Now it seems to me that the strange thing about this is that Clerks II shows us the two participants in the donkey show, but does not actually show them Doing It. Smith knows where to draw the line. So Clerks II is therefore no more or less offensive than The Aristocrats, in which bestiality, among other non-G-rated activities, is repeatedly mentioned but never shown onscreen. Did Siegel walk out of that movie, too?

“It was weird,” Smith told us. “I grew up watching this dude on TV.” What upset Smith was not that Siegel walked out but that he was rude enough “to be disruptive in the middle of the press screening.” Smith was on the Opie & Anthony radio show and they asked him if he wanted to call up Joel Siegel and so they did. “It was one of the rare times I got to confront” a critic, Smith said. “I felt like I was arguing with my father,” Smith told us, “if my father had a big cowcatcher mustache.”

And thus the day’s events in Hall H came to an end, and the campers could at last decamp. I may not have seen Sam Raimi and the Spider-Man 3 leads, but had it not been for my lengthy wait outside, I would not have seen Kevin Smith perform for the first time. Convention presentations should entertain as well as inform. Smith is a master of the con appearance as stand-up comedy act, and his casual way with profanity even gave me a bit of a sense of what it must have been like to see Lenny Bruce perform live.

And then, as we filed out of Hall H, we were all handed Spider-Man 3 caps. It was as if that really had been the Sam Raimi panel after all.

SATURDAY 8:00 PM
But since I stayed to hear Kevin Smith, I was late getting to the restaurant in
the Gaslamp Quarter restaurant where the Comic Arts Conference was holding its annual Saturday night dinner. In fact I arrived just as the Conference attendees were divvying up the check. So I headed over to Horton Plaza to get a quick dinner and then turned back towards the Convention Center.

SATURDAY 9:00 PM
I arrived back in the Sails Pavilion to watch the annual Masquerade, which was already in progress. Actually, the Masquerade took place in Room 20, the site of the Eisner Awards the previous night. But there is such demand to attend the Masquerade that tickets are now required to get in, and people without tickets can instead watch the proceedings on large video screens in the Sails Pavilion and Room 6A. Last year there was only a relative handful of people watching the show on the Sails Pavilion screen, but this year virtually every seat at the many tables arranged in front of the screen was occupied. This was yet another sign of how Comic-Con attendance continues to grow at so rapid a pace. This also set me thinking about why the entertaining but empty-headed Masquerade is so popular and yet the Eisner Awards, which are much more significant, could not even fill half of the same venue, Room 20.

Among this year’s contestants were a group who purportedly enacted the plot of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie within five minutes or so. At the end the names of the masqueraders were projected onscreen, and, to my astonishment, they all turned out to be women! How aware is Disney of the gender-bending appeal of their current flagship films? SpongeBob SquarePants cavorted onstage, perhaps in the vain hope that his number one fan Fred Hembeck would be there. At another point, a human-sized Pikachu was beheaded onstage, to tumultuous applause from the audience. Justice had triumphed at last.

SUNDAY 10:30 AM
There was no crowding at all on the main convention floor when I entered this morning. it’s a pleasure walking around. Well, Sunday is supposed to be a “slow” day at Comic-Con.

SUNDAY 11:00 AM
I returned to the DK Publishing booth to do another signing for my book X-Men: The Ultimate Guide. This time I was seated at the front of the booth. Carrie Fisher wasn’t at the next booth this morning, but directly in front of me, at the Lego display, a Lego version of SpongeBob was grinning at me, as if he considered me the next best thing to Fred.

Again I found myself enjoying doing the signing and experiencing a small sliver of what it must feel like to be famous. Two young women even asked if they could have their photograph taken with me. See, Fred, here’s another reason you should come to Comic-Con: you too could get to feel like a celebrity for an hour!

As I sat at the booth, I saw the traffic in the aisle in front of me grow heavier. It wasn’t even noon yet and the crowds looked like Saturday’s.

On Friday night I’d spoken by phone to Quick Stop editor Ken Plume, and we had arranged that either he would stop by the DK booth between 11 and 12, or I would borrow a cell phone, call him, and find out where to meet him. He didn’t show up, and when I phoned his number, I got a recorded message that he was unable to take my call. This was strange. (Ken later informed me that he had to leave unexpectedly early for Los Angeles.)

Once more I stayed longer than my allotted hour. I had a goal: I would keep on signing until we sold the last remaining copies of X-Men: The Ultimate Guide at the DK booth. And I’m happy to say we succeeded!

SUNDAY 12:30 PM
On Thursday my friend Meloney had told me I should go to the Inkworks area (since she freelances for them) on Sunday to locate her for our traditional Sunday afternoon get-together at the Con. But she wasn’t there, nor did the
people on duty know where she was.

Yet again I was forced to recognize that unless you set a definite time and place to meet someone during the Con, you are likely never to run into that person. My tentative plans for Sunday afternoon–getting together first with Ken and then with Meloney–had fallen apart. What could I do instead?

SUNDAY 1:00 PM
I would have felt my 2006 Comic-Con experience was incomplete had I attended only one of Mark Evanier’s panels. Mark has attended the San Diego Con every year starting with its very first, long before Hollywood publicists discovered it. I consider the panels he hosts to be the heart of Comic-Con, carrying on its tradition of honoring classic comics and animation. However gratifying it is to see movie directors and stars coming to San Diego to acknowledge us as their audience, to my mind they remain a sideshow. Panels like Mark Evanier’s are the main event.

I arrived in Room 6CDEF shortly after 1 PM for Evanier’s final panel of this year’s Comic-Con, “Cartoon Voices II.” I’d attended one of his panels of voice actors for animation back in 1997, and in the intervening years they’ve justifiably grown so popular that this year Comic-Con held two of them, each with a different lineup of actors. Today’s panel had the largest audience in the largest room I’d ever seen for an Evanier-led panel.

Since by his own account Mark has been losing a pound a day, Sunday he was two pounds lighter than when I’d last seen him at the Eisners. But then, we may have all lost weight waiting through the Eisners, and, for that matter, getting through the crush of people at Comic-Con.

Evanier introduced the panelists, who included Bob Bergen, who recreates the voice of Porky Pig/the Eager Young Space Cadet for the Duck Dodgers TV show; Wally Wingert, who does voices for Family Guy; the attractive April Stewart, who performs voices on South Park; Quick Stop editor Ken Plume’s good buddy Billy West, who is not only the original Stimpy but also took over Ren, who performs Fry and other members of the Futurama cast, and who has on occasion been Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Popeye; and another pretty voice actress, Kimberly Brooks, who performs on Mucha Lucha.

Ms. Brooks said that for the direct-to-video animated feature Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003), she voiced the character of Kathy Ducaine, who “kinda sounds like me but very breathy,” as she proceeded to demonstrate. Evanier observed, “There are people who would pay $19.95 to hear that,” whereupon Wingert began breathing hard.

Then the panel turned to some of the odder aspects of the voice acting profession. Take the Hanna-Barbera character Captain Caveman, whose only comprehensible dialogue consisted of yelling his name. Evanier said that Mel Blanc “yelled it once,” and Hanna-Barbera simply played the recording “over and over.” Then Evanier told us how Ted Cassidy did the roars for Godzilla on the character’s animated show. After Cassidy passed away, Evanier continued, the show “auditioned soundalikes until somebody realized” that they had “three hours” of Cassidy’s recorded roaring that they could simply recycle. So, Evanier concluded, “people who auditioned got beaten out by a dead guy,” who, he added, “didn’t get health benefits.”

Bob Bergen recounted how he used to do voice work on Star Wars videogames and “got memos from George Lucas” saying he sounded as if “I didn’t believe in the Force. And I couldn’t argue with those memos,” Bergen said with deadpan irony.

Then came the centerpiece of the panel: the actors would perform an old time radio script that they had never seen before in what Evanier termed an “ice cold reading.” In past editions of this panel, Evanier said, they had performed a Superman radio script, but this time they were doing Flash Gordon. In fact, this seemed to be Flash’s first episode.

Evanier then assigned the roles. Bergen would be Flash. Wingert would play “Announcer #2” who should “talk very fast.” Stewart would portray the heroine Dale Arden, whom Evanier characterized as a “good girl” in her “mid-20s.” Evanier assigned Brooks to do Aura, whom he described as “the sluttier woman in this,” whereupon Brooks fixed the audience with a look of understated irony. Evanier told Billy West, “You’re going to be everyone else,” including “Announcer #1,” Dr. Zarkov, whom he described as having “a slight German accent” (But wouldn’t “Zarkov” be a Russian name?), “Slave #1” (who West made sound something like Droopy) and the archvillain Ming the Merciless.

Evanier explained that in assigning roles his intent was to “try not to have an actor talk to himself,” although he confessed that he once asked the late Paul Winchell if he minded talking to himself (in separate roles) and Winchell said, “What do you think I did for a career for 55 years?” (The answer: being one of the world’s most famous ventriloquists.)

To enliven things further, Evanier introduced what he called “an improv game”: whenever he said “change,” the voice actor would “read the same line again in a different voice,” and then return to the original voice thereafter. Perhaps taken aback by the complexity, Bergen asked, “Are we getting paid for this?”

Since my column doesn’t have an audio track, there is no way I can convey to you just how much fun this reading proved to be. The actors took every opportunity to play the script for laughs. For example, when Flash and Dale’s aircraft was being knocked about, April Stewart emitted groans that sounded somewhat suggestive. “Was it good for you, too, Dale”? ad libbed Flash/Bergen.

Many laughs resulted from Evanier’s well-placed orders to “change.” For example, when West was performing Dr. Zarkov, whose “slight German accent” was, in practice, amusingly over the top, Evanier called “Change!” and Zarkov immediately morphed into a perfect imitation of a laid back George W. Bush, who had just located “a new planet, Ah guess.” At another “Change!” command, Kimberly Brooks’ sultry Princess Aura shifted into a villainous Valley Girl: “You are going to totally love me or you are so going to die.” Similarly, Wingert’s fast-talking Announcer #2 briefly became Paul Lynde, noting about two characters, “They’re both bitches.”

Following the well-received reading, the panel took questions from the audience. Inevitably, the topic of getting into the voice acting profession came up. Bergen asserted that “Everybody in this room has a great voice,” but that is not enough: it’s necessary to study acting. Stewart agreed that the voice alone isn’t sufficient, saying, “It’s like saying I have a pencil, I should be a writer.” West urged people to “Keep trying. Don’t listen to what anyone tells you,” that there was “so much media out there” that are “always looking for voice people.” Stewart warned, “Don’t listen to any negativity” and to “walk out of the room” if you get any. Stewart and Brooks agreed that you should “Believe in yourself,” which is good advice for any field of endeavor.

Evanier then singled out five great people in the history of voice acting for animation. The first was the late Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and so many other Warners characters, “who invented” the “kind of voice acting” used in animation today. Next was the late Daws Butler, whose name was applauded by the audience, the voice of Yogi Bear and the majority of early Hanna-Barbera characters, whom Evanier called “a wonderful actor and teacher.” Evanier contended that the “quality of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon” is “proportionate to the amount of work” Butler did in it. This is not as much of an overstatement as it might at first seem. The third was Butler’s frequent Hanna-Barbera colleague Don Messick, also deceased, whose name also received applause. So did that of the fourth, June Foray, the voice of Bullwinkle’s Rocky and Natasha and Nell, whom Evanier said he was assisting in writing her autobiography; he said that next year she will be at Comic-Con signing the book. The fifth was Lennie Weinrib, the voice of H. R. Pufnstuf, among many other characters, who had recently passed away.

One audience member told the panelists, “You guys have the coolest job in the world.” Subsequently, Bob Bergen recounted an anecdote that illustrates one reason why. He said that shortly after the 9/11 attacks, “four of us went to Krispy Kreme,” where he ordered donuts in the voice of Porky Pig. They ended up being given two dozen donuts for free, because, one of the Krispy Kreme staffers told them, “That’s the first time we’ve laughed in days.”

By the panel’s end, one could agree with the audience member who told the panelists, “I came here for Billy West and found out I’m a huge fan of everyone else.”

Even so, I was paying particular attention to West, whom Ken Plume has been praising for years in his phone conversations with me. West revealed on the panel that the following week he would start working on a new Futurama series that Comedy Central will air in early 2008, and that there will also be a Futurama movie. At one point West talked about being a Three Stooges fan and did a perfect imitation of Larry Fine’s voice for us. He explained that Futurama’s “Fry sounds like a 25-year-old me” and described himself thus: “I’m 55 years old and I’ve got the body of a 16-year-old. . . in the trunk of my car.” What an amusing and talented guy.

But it appears that voice acting, like freelance writing in the comics biz, isn’t the most stable of careers. Wingert noted that “videogames have saved a lot of us” when voice work for animation was scarce. West then said, “I didn’t go to college, I feel grateful for any work.”

And then I had an epiphany. Fred and I only know Ken Plume as a voice on the telephone. We’ve never actually seen him. Lately Ken has started to compare himself to Charlie, the unseen boss of his Angels. (Well, Misty looks the part but not Paul Dini, Fred or me.) Mysteriously, I keep missing seeing Ken when we’re both in San Diego, or so I thought. It’s no wonder that when I asked Mark Evanier if he had seen Ken Plume, he gave me a meaningful look and told me to look for Billy West. For all I know, Billy West is moonlighting at Quick Stop to supplement his income, and “Kenneth Plume” is no more than one of West’s innumerable voices. Ken, it is now up to you to prove this isn’t true. The ball is in your court.

SUNDAY 2:30 PM
I decided that before Comic-Con ended, I should make my way across the sections of the gargantuan main floor that I hadn’t yet explored this year, including Artists’ Alley, which was way off to one end, against the far wall. I wouldn’t be surprised if many attendees never found it.

If Sunday is still the “slow” day at Comic-Con, it’s only in the sense of how long it takes to move along the main floor. The aisles were so congested that it was like Saturday afternoon at its height. (Indeed, I learned that the Con stopped selling tickets on Saturday because the Convention Center was so packed with people.)

Amidst this sea of humanity, I sighted a reminder of conventions past. Back in the 1970s, before women dressed in Princess Leia’s slave girl costume at comics conventions, some female attendees came wearing Red Sonja’s iron bikini. There, moving slowly through the masses of fans ahead of me was a shapely 21st century Sonja. Though she was surrounded by male fans, no one, to their credit, was hassling her; on the other hand, no one seemed to notice her either. Are convention attendees becoming too jaded?

I spend most of my time at Comic-Con attending panels, in Hall H or the upper floors, and this year, when I ventured onto the main floor, it was to sit at a booth and sign books. Now, trying to move through the swarms of people on the main floor wasn’t pleasant at all. At San Diego Cons in the 1980s I was rather sad to leave the main floor on Sunday afternoon. This year it came as a relief.

SUNDAY 4:00 PM
The convention would end in an hour, but I was already out of the building.
Instead I was sitting at an outdoor restaurant at the nearby Marriott, looking out over the pleasure boats docked at the harbor, and the blue water and bright sky beyond. I was here for a Publishers Weekly meeting, attended by editor (and Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award winner) Calvin Reid and his wife, manga reviewer Kai-Ming Cha, and the ubiquitous Beat to discuss our coverage of the con for PW’s online newsletter Comics Week.

It turned out I didn’t get to write any Comics Week pieces about the con. Mark Evanier has sagely observed on his blog (on Friday, July 21 at www.newsfromme.com) that “one of the problems with covering this mega-gathering is that it’s really about forty conventions in one.” Comics Week’s limited space would be devoted to news about Marvel and DC, manga, and alternative comics from panels I had not attended: those conventions were more important to them than the con I had attended. The Beat used my observation about “pirates, pirates everywhere” observation but that was it. As for what I’ve chosen to report on here in my column, my readers should decide for themselves how significant it is.

SUNDAY 5:00 PM
It was closing time for this year’s Comic-Con, when traditionally a swarm of Daleks are released to exterminate any congoers who hadn’t heeded the commands to Convention Center. Seated in the Marriott’s outdoor restaurant, looking out over the peaceful harbor, I was just too far away to hear the fans’ high-pitched shrieks. I had other things on my mind. Having planned to spend the evening writing Comics Week articles, what would I do instead?

I chose to do some San Diego things I’d never done before. First on my list was finally taking a ride in a pedicab, the combination bicycles and rickshaws that are used as open-air taxis. My pedicab driver was an attractive and strong-legged young woman, who was a much better conversationalist than your typical New York City cabbie. She was from Poland, and had only been in America for six months, but since Europeans put more importance on being multilingual than Americans do, she had become fluent in English before arriving here.

SUNDAY 9:00 PM
After dinner at Horton Plaza, I returned to my hotel on Coronado Island after dark. Discovering that the swimming pool was open at night, and that it was heated, I decided to spend a few hours out there. This was one of my best experiences on the trip. Although the pool seemed nondescript by daylight, at night it was magical, lined by silhouetted palm trees, with the lights of the San Diego skyline, including the Convention Center, off in the distance. There were only a relative handful of other guests using the pool, so it was quiet and peaceful. Wondering where guests kept disappearing to around a corner, I finally discovered the outdoor jacuzzi/spa, and I’d never been in one of them before either until that night.

The whole experience was so soothing and relaxing, banishing the accumulated stress of the Con. Even returning to my room and discovering that the hotel bill had been screwed up again did no more than briefly interrupt my blissful state.

MONDAY
Last year I fantasized that after 5 PM on Sunday the entire Comic-Con is swept up in a gigantic tornado and vanished into a hole in the sky. Looking around on Monday morning, it was if there really had been such a storm. After checking out of the hotel, I was the sole passenger on the water taxi that took me to the mainland. There was not a single person on the sidewalk outside the Convention Center. Indeed, during my entire last day in San Diego, I saw no more than three people who gave some sign like commenting on my Dark Horse bag, that they had been to the Con. (By the way, remember those TokyoPop bags from last year’s Comic-Con, that were big enough to hold small children? They were missing from this year’s San Diego Con, so I had to find substitutes. Warner Brothers’ bags had handles that broke almost immediately. But my Dark Horse bag remained intact until I got all the way back home.)

Did Annette, my new acquaintance from my flight to San Diego, follow up on my offer to show her the sights of the city on Monday. Of course not; I’m not that lucky.

So, since I don’t believe in going to Southern California and spending all the time inside, I went off to the San Diego Zoo on my own. Unusually for San Diego, there was a downpour for an hour, and afterwards some of the animals seemed oddly, ah, frisky. I found myself standing in front of the enclosure for large African tortoises, two of whom were engaged in what Kevin Smith might call the Tortoise Show while another tortoise looked on. He wasn’t the only voyeur. Other zoogoers, some of them children, were watching the Show; photographs were taken. I wondered: what would Joel Siegel think? Life is a Film by Kevin Smith. (Like myself, you may have assumed that turtles have no voices. But now I have heard the grunting of a male tortoise in the ecstasy of love.)

Then it was off to the airport, where in the security line I had my first encounter with one of the new “puffer” machines. They emit bursts of compressed air, presumably to upset any snake that may be hiding on your person in order to smuggle itself onto a plane. I would discover that the friendly white-haired gentleman at the ticket counter had listed the wrong gate for both my departing redeye flight from San Diego and my connection at Philadelphia. As I wearily logged all of my heavy carry-ons all the way across each terminal, I told myself: good thing I brought this laptop with me to no reason, eh?

TUESDAY
When I arrived home I was welcomed by an array of unexpected problems: my phones had gone dead, my desktop computer’s keyboard no longer worked, a record-shattering heat wave was about to begin, and so much more.

NOW
So I think back over all the hassles and hardships I endured preparing for my trip, flying out, dealing with problems at the hotel, missing connections with friends, inching through crowded convention aisles, dealing with more trouble on the way back, and I wonder: Is Fred Hembeck right after all? Is going to the San Diego Con more trouble than it’s worth?

In the line outside the Convention Center on Saturday afternoon, I discussed with people around me how the Con could deal with overflow crowds for Hall H events. Should they pipe the audio outside, as Symphony Space did with the Whedon-Sondheim meeting I missed? Should they telecast the panels into another room, as they do with the Masquerade? (But it was pointed out to me that then it would be harder to stop people from making bootleg videos of the preview footage.) If attendance for Comic-Con continues to grow at this rate, what will happen next year? ( I think of the new stadium across the street from the Convention Center. Could they use that?)

Michael Eury and I were recently commiserating over the unpleasantness of cross-country travel. Ken Plume has told me he doesn’t intend to return to the San Diego Con since it is so hard to get business done there nowadays. (But I bet Billy West will continue to show up.) On her blog (http://trishm.blogspot.com/) in August, colorist Patricia Mulvihill explained why she didn’t go to the Comic-Con this year: “at a certain point last year it became more wearying than wonderful. It was all just TOO MUCH. So when I decided to skip this year, it was as if a giant weight had been lifted.” She pointed out, “So much preparation goes into attending it almost feels like training for an endurance event. . . .just traversing the con floor has become a test of will.”

I’ve already decided that it is simply too expensive to attend Comic-Con unless I can get one of my clients to pick up part of the bill. Besides, within five years, the new New York Comic-Con may evolve into the East Coast equivalent of the San Diego Con, and even Fred is seriously considering attending the next New York Con.

And yet, what little I know about next year’s Comic-Con already makes it seem like something I’d want to see: Neil Gaiman and Roy Thomas as special guests, June Foray publicizing her autobiography.

Mark Evanier, as always, is right about the San Diego Con: “once you get to the convention center here, you pretty much have to find the parts of the convention that matter to you. If you do, I think you can have a very good time.” I really liked the parts of the convention that mattered to me. Maybe one of my publishers will want me to go next year. I just hope that Comic-Con follows Mark’s example: the time has come for Comic-Con to do something drastic about cutting down its size.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
On Monday evening September 25 the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org) in New York City will hold another session in my lecture series “1986: The Year That Changed Comics.” This time my topic is Will Eisner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel The Dreamer, about the early days of the comics industry. And my New York University course “The Graphic Novel as Literature” will commence two days later–if enough people sign up for it.

-Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

« Trailer Park: Greg Grunberg Is Reading Your Mind: Part 1 of 2 | Home | Weekend Shopping Guide 9/22/06: Instant Karma »

Comments: None

Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ