In this age of the Internet, you can find reports on events at major comics conventions within twenty-four hours of when they took place. Certain parties, such as the Beat, like to kid me for still writing about the San Diego Con weeks after it ended. But I like to think of myself as providing a service for those who you who did not, and perhaps could not, attend these major conventions, who want a sense of what it was like to be there, and who want to immerse themselves in detailed reports on panels of lasting interest. If you want to find out what the panelists said at the DC and Marvel panels about next month’s hot superhero titles, you can easily find that elsewhere. And that kind of news has a very limited shelf life. But if, say, you want to know what it was like to see and hear Stan Lee address audiences at this year’s New York Comic-Con, you will find it in my column’s reports. And this is a topic that people will still find interesting weeks, months, and years from now.

Checking around the Net for reports on the New York Comic-Con, I found many reports on Stephen King’s appearance promoting Marvel’s comics adaptation of his novel series, The Dark Tower. (Last year, when I reported on King’s appearance at Radio City Music Hall [in “Comics in Context” #148], some of you might have wondered what connection he has to comics. Now you know.) But I also discovered that other panels I attended, despite the importance of their subjects, received little or no coverage. So you are going to find information in my New York Comic-Con reports that you will have seen nowhere else. (But yes, I went to the King panel, too.)

Scheduling a major comics convention in New York for February is playing with fire, or, more precisely, snow. After a startlingly mild January, in which the temperature reached 72 degrees on “Twelfth Night,” January 6, the two weeks preceding this year’s New York Comic-Con (which was held from Friday, February 23 through Sunday, February 25) brought frigid temperatures and a major snowstorm. Another snowstorm struck the night of February 25, hours after the convention ended, although it did not prove to be as heavy as had been predicted. Through sheer luck, the convention took place during a stretch of sunny and relatively milder weather. Except when an occasional gust blew, the long walk from Penn Station to the Jacob Javits Convention Center did not feel like moving through an Arctic wind tunnel, as it did last year.

But if the con continued to be held in February, sooner or later it would coincide with a Northeast blizzard. Next year, the New York Comic-Con moves to April 18 through 20, thereby escaping the threat of this meteorological Sword of Damocles.

So, yes, the cold was bearable this year, as long as you didn’t have to spend too much time out in it. But on Saturday and Sunday mornings I arrived at the Javits Center to find a long, long line of attendees who stood outside, exposed to winds off the nearby Hudson River. Reportedly, those who got in line at 10 AM on Saturday, when the convention opened for the day, didn’t get in till noon. Keep in mind that Saturday was sold out in advance, so all the people waiting outside that morning already had tickets.

THURSDAY 11 AM
Luckily, I didn’t have to join this shivering throng, since I was the grateful possessor of an all-powerful press badge. In fact, for me the convention really started on Thursday morning, when I went to the Javits Center for a meeting of the writers for Publishers Weekly’s online newsletter Comics Week, who would be reporting on the con.

This is the only time all year that virtually the entire Comics Week crew gets together; there aren’t even as many of us at the San Diego Con, it seems. (I’d recommend that we all have a part after the New York Con, but we’re all too busy writing and editing articles for Tuesday’s edition of Comics Week.)

Presiding over this annual assemblage was Comics Week editor in chief Calvin Reid and his second in command, Heidi MacDonald, the Beat in person, who looked quite stylish, having let her hair flow over her shoulders, and wearing a patterned skirt and boots. Also in attendance were contributors such as manga maven Kai-Ming Cha; Laurel Maury of The New Yorker website; Tom McLean, who writes the “Bags and Boards” blog on the comics business for Variety (http://weblogs.variety.com/bags_and_boards/); and Salon comics critic Douglas Wolk (http://dir.salon.com/topics/douglas_wolk/index.html?ti=1), among others. Under Calvin’s guidance we once again figuratively fused into a great journalistic Uni-Mind, much like in Jack Kirby’s Eternals.

Last year Comics Week was still quite new, and not as yet well known. This year, though, it was rewarding to hear Calvin tell us how much Comics Week’s impact had grown; he even quoted one major comics blogger as saying that Comics Week was the equivalent of The New York Times for comics!

Speaking of the Times, this year, as it did last year, the New York Comic-Con shared the Javits Center with the annual New York Times Travel Show. Last year the Times had the main floor of the Convention Center while the Comic-Con was crammed into the much smaller lower floor. This year the Con and the Travel Show changed places: this time we were the main event!

This year the New York Comic-Con’s organizers, Reed Exhibitions, also avoided repeating 2006’s catastrophic blunder, when they grossly oversold the number of tickets, resulting in New York City fire marshals shutting down admission to the convention on Saturday: no one could get in, even if they had advance tickets, were comics professionals, or even exhibitors who had temporarily left their booths (see “Comics in Context” #123). This year there was no such problem, and Saturday-only admission tickets were sold out before the convention even began. This meant that on Saturday there were no longer any casual, drop-in customers. Bess Braswell of DK Publishing remarked to me that the New York Con audience seemed different last year. She suggested that last year many people had come to see the sheer “spectacle,” as she put it. I expect that year’s attendees, since they had to plan coming in advance, were much more seriously committed to comics.

After the Comics Week planning session ended, I headed off to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org) to work on editing the labels (or “story cards,” as MoCCA calls them) which I had written for “Stan Lee: A Retrospective.” For two last minute additions to the show, I ended up writing the final cards Thursday night, the night before the exhibition had its grand opening.

FRIDAY 2 PM
I returned to the Javits Center on Friday afternoon, and my first stop was at the Show Office, where the head of programming, Mark Dressler, asked me if I would moderate a Saturday afternoon panel titled “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The 80s Superhero Renaissance,” featuring Brian Bolland (Batman: The Killing Joke), Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin), Walter Simonson (Thor), and Rick Veitch (The One). This fit me perfectly as the man who recently gave the lecture serties “1986: The Year that Changed Comics” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. After rearranging the time of a signing I was scheduled to do for DK Publishing, I was happy to say yes.

FRIDAY 2:30 PM
My next stop was the panel “Comics Bloggers: Rewriting the Rules of Tastemaking and Trade Influence,” which was already in progress. The moderator was the omnipresent Beat, whose blog is one of the most widely read in the field of comics, and she was joined by Johanna Draper Carlson of “Comics Worth Reading” (http://comicsworthreading.com/), Chris Butcher of “Comics 212” (http://comics212.net/), and Ron Hogan, who writes about comics for the book industry blog “Galley Cat” (http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/).

I read “The Beat” regularly and have visited “Comics Worth Reading” in the past, but I confess that I’d never known about these other two blogs before this panel. And though the Beat certainly knows about me, I suspect the other three bloggers don’t know about “Comics in Context” either.

Loyal regular readers may even be wondering, hey, why weren’t you invited to be on this panel? Well, I don’t consider “Comics in Context” to be a blog. Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English defines a blog as “an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page,” and notes that it is “typically updated daily.” Instead, “Comics in Context” is “updated” once a week. Those who claim that “Comics in Context” installments run too long are mistakenly applying the “blog” model to my work. I consider “Comics in Context” to be a weekly column, the online equivalent of one of the review columns which appears in weekly publications like The New Yorker and The New York Observer. Nonetheless, much of what the panelists said about comics blogs could also apply to my online column.

One of the panel’s major points was that with the rapidly increasing mainstream acceptance of the comics medium, comics blogs are suddenly being read by people beyond traditional comics fandom. The Beat explained that within the mainstream book community, there “were people who were fans [of comics] all along,” but “now it’s cool to admit it.” Moreover, there are also “now people who are discovering it [comics] because it is the cool thing.” Later in the panel, Butcher held that it used to be that “anyone who works in comics” either “loves comics,” “loves the industry” or “stumbled into it”; “now,” he claimed, “people are getting interested in comics because they know it’ll be profitable.”

Hogan pointed out that there are “hundreds of thousands of readers out there who aren’t like us” and “didn’t know that Neil Gaiman wrote comic books” before he wrote his novels and screenplays. I’d go further, and say that Neil Gaiman is still far from being a household name (For example, do your parents know who he is?), and that you have to explain who he is to any readers who aren’t longtime comics or fantasy novel aficionados. Hogan warned comics bloggers against becoming mired in what he termed “fan isolation.”

In fact, Hogan’s own blogging is evidence that people beyond traditional comics fandom are paying attention to comics news: “Galley Cat” is aimed at the entire publishing world, not the comics subculture. As Hogan told the audience later during the panel, “I’m not really writing for a comics audience.” He explained that when he does a story about comics, it must be something that will “appeal to a mainstream audience.” Hogan joked that when he recently mentioned a certain obscure and absurd Wonder Woman villain in his blog, “I had to contextualize Egg Fu for my audience.”

Johanna Draper Carlson agreed that the audience for comics blogs was becoming “more diverse.” Chris Butcher said that “the biggest thing” he did in his blog “in the last year or two” was to “add more context.” It was a “huge change,” he asserted, in moving from writing something “really inside” for his comics fan audience to realizing that there are “a lot of people who aren’t hard core comics fans who are reading this.” Indeed, Butcher said that “more and more” he is contacted by members of the press and magazine writers with questions on subjects he has written about.

The Beat said that she was trying “to be more sensitive” to the needs of wider readership. Later, she noted that “I’ve become ‘more influential’”–drawing invisible quotation marks in the air–because her blog is now carried by Publishers Weekly.

Right from the start of my column in 2003, I’ve sought to make it accessible and comprehensible for anyone with little or no background in the subjects I address. That’s one reason why it’s called “Comics in Context,” so I’m pleased to see these bloggers likewise recognize the duty they have to their readers to “contextualize.”

Representatives of the comics industry now have to be more careful about what they say to the comics press. Butcher warned that “now not just the comics industry,” but the “whole publishing industry knows what you say” in a major comics blog. He referred to Bill Jemas and the controversial “things he said in public” only several years ago, when he was the head of publishing at Marvel. Now, Butcher averred, “he wouldn’t get away with” them.

The writers of blogs have to be careful, too. Hogan said that he would ask himself, “Is what I’m writing reasonably critical or veering into bitchiness?”
The Beat maintained, “I don’t write anything I wouldn’t say to someone’s face.”

Johanna Draper Carlson disagreed, asserting that she would “phrase” a criticism of a creator’s work differently in her blog than she would in conversation with the creator. Hogan concurred, declaring that “I’m not going to tell [Marvel editor in chief] Joe Quesada that Civil War completely sucked and it fell apart at the end,” which Hogan actually believes (adding that he had hoped in vain that the story “would be told coherently”).

Reconsidering, the Beat said that if “sometimes you will write something that’d get you punched in the face” by someone you know, “maybe you shouldn’t be that person’s friend.” But this suggests that a critic should only have friends in the business whose work he or she likes. Yet, as Carlson observed, “your opinion is not yourself; your book is not yourself.” Aesthetic differences shouldn’t get in the way of friendship.

The philosophy that I follow is that my duty as a critic is to critique the work, not the person who did the work. It should be possible to review a work of art without dealing in personal invective.

I’m also always aware not only that anyone could read anything I write on the Internet, but also that whatever I write there could potentially exist somewhere on the Net forever. (Isn’t that right, graduate students of the future?)

An audience member asked the panelists which blogs they read. The Beat mentioned the new ComicMix (http://www.comicmix.com/), but I was startled that otherwise the panelists did not mention any of the comics-related blogs I regularly visit. Not Mark Evanier’s “News from Me” (http://www.newsfromme.com), which until this point I had assumed was widely popular. Not even Neil Gaiman’s “Journal” (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/), which seemingly rivals his own fiction in popularity!

However, the Beat and the panelists seem to have focused their panel on blogs that deal in daily news and reviews. (So why didn’t they mention
Tom Spurgeon’s excellent “The Comics Reporter” [http://www.comicsreporter.com/]?). I find consulting one comics news blog, the Beat’s, usually sufficient for my purposes. Otherwise I enjoy blogs that provide entertaining personal perspectives on a variety of topics, not limited to comics, such as Colleen Doran’s (http://www.adistantsoil.com/blog/); Patricia Mulvihill’s (http://trishm.blogspot.com/); Peter Gillis’s, which is the most thought-provoking and superbly written blog that I know, whether dealing with comics or not (http://homepage.mac.com/petergillis/iblog/index.html); and, of course, Fearless Fred Hembeck’s (http://www.hembeck.com/FredSez.htm), which provides the same good humor as his column here at Quick Stop. I also regularly stop by Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi’s “Cartoon Brew” (http://www.cartoonbrew.com/) which is to animation news what the Beat is to comics.

Towards the end of the panel, a member of the audience asked the panelists a simple question, “Why do you blog?” “Because I can’t not blog,” replied Johanna Draper Carlson, who added that her work online “makes me a better writer, a better thinker.” her answer applies to me, too; I could stop writing this weekly column, but it means so much to me, and helps me develop my ideas about comics so effectively, that I would prefer not to.

The Beat told the audience, “I think I was born to blog.” Soon I imagined her armed with an electric guitar, performing this new variation on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” leading the bloggers in this, their new anthem.

3:30 PM
The panels are held on the Javits Center’s first level, which is below street level. Now I ascended to the Convention’s main floor, which was Level 3.

I was immediately greeted by sights reminiscent of the San Diego Con: volunteers and security people in bright red shirts, demanding to see admission badges. Even more ominous than the Red Shirts was the sight of the elder god Cthulhu, hovering above the convention floor, just as he does in San Diego. Oh, yes, I know he looks like a gigantic smiling Pikachu from Pokemon, but I am not deceived. He lurks in full view, poised to suck the brains out of unsuspecting convention goers. And why he is starting greedily over at the Marvel booths? (That’s right, folks! In sharp contrast to the San Diego Con, there was a large Marvel ara on the convention floor, right inside one of its two main entrances.)

Immediately outside the entrance to this hall was a familiar sight from last year’s New York Comic-Con: “Car Toon,” the automobile decorated with drawings of characters from the whole history of comic books, comic strips and animation (see “Comics in Context” #125). Posing for photographers in front of the vehicle was DC’s Power Girl, busty, blonde and smiling. Nearby I saw Silent Bob, backwards cap and all, although this was a mere doppelganger, and not the True Master of the Quick Stop.

On Friday until 4 PM only comics professionals, retailers, exhibitors, and press are allowed into the convention, and there were plenty of us: the hall was already crowded, but pleasantly so. Once the general public was let in, near-gridlock would develop here and there on the main floor.

In fact, near 4:30 PM, there was already a line waiting to go up the escalator to Artist’s Alley, which the Beat aptly renamed Artist’s Aerie, up on the fourth floor. On the way up to the Aerie, congoers passed by advertising for the Seven, a new project co-developed by Jim Shooter, and billed as “the greatest superhero team of all time.” In other words, it’s allegedly better than the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Justice League or the Incredibles. Even without seeing a Seven story, I find this hard to believe, but this won’t be the only case of hyperbole I’ll encounter at this year’s con.

If you walked all the way through Artist’s Aerie, you would find yourself in an enormous gaming area. Not interested, I turned back, failing to see that there were autograph booths along the sides of this gaming hall, to the left of its entrance. Thus, alas, I missed the opportunity to glimpse, in person, my hero Stephen Colbert, who was signing autographs at the from 4:30 to 5:15 PM on Friday, to promote Oni Press’s Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen, the comics mini-series based on his lookalike sci-fi hero. And why shouldn’t Dr. Colbert attend the New York Comic-Con? Is he not The Real Captain America?

Damn! I missed my chance to see an uniquely talented man who has devised a brilliantly comedic public persona for himself, and is a master of satiric irony. Would there be anyone else at the Comic-Con who matches that description? Yes, as you shall see.

The Javits Center is not only a long, cold walk from Penn Station, but also from any restaurants, and I hadn’t had lunch yet. Luckily, I reminded myself, there is an enormous food court on Level 1. I headed down there only to discover that, despite the presence of two major conventions, the Food Court wasn’t open. So I trekked back up to Level 3, where I was able to buy a sandwich, apple, and fruit juice for twice what they would cost at my local deli.

5:30 PM
The star of the next panel, “Jeff Smith Spotlight,” introduced himself to the audience: “I’m Jeff.”

”Hi, Jeff!” the audience enthusiastically called back, before breaking into applause for the writer, artist and creator of the comedy/fantasy/adventure comic book series Bone, who is currently providing his take on the original Captain Marvel in DC Comics’ Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil limited series.

Looking around Room 1E15, where Jeff Smith was speaking, presented an unusual sight for a comics convention. There were kids here! And I don’t mean teenagers. I mean there were a goodly number of small children, members of the demographic that was once the traditional audience for comic books. In a time when Marvel shows us Spider-Man’s eye being gouged out (in a canonical story) and Mary Jane grotesquely dying thanks to Spidey’s radioactive semen (in the alternate reality of Spider-Man: Reign #3), and DC’s Blue Beetle gets his brains blown out on-panel, Jeff Smith has performed the miracle of creating in Bone an entertaining comic for all ages that is not only an acclaimed work of art but a commercial hit.

Smith’s presentation consisted principally of a slide show via the newfangled technology of PowerPoint, pairing “images that inspired me” in the real world with their counterparts in Bone.

Most of the natural landscapes in Bone were inspired by Old Man’s Cave Park, near Smith’s home in Columbus, Ohio. In one direction, he told us, are the “nearby foothills of Appalachia,” with their “rolling hills.” Turn south, he told us, and you will find “waterfalls” and “cliffs.” Old Man’s Cave itself, after which Smith titled Book 6 of Bone, is “more like a huge overhanging, a huge ledge,’ as he showed us in a photograph projected onscreen.

As for the kingdom of Atheia in the last third of Bone, Smith said he didn’t want to do the “European kind of kingdom” that you see in Snow White. “I decided to make it something Eastern,” Smith told us. “So I went to Katmandu.” Describing the photos he was showing us, Smith said Katmandu was “like Atlantis,” in that it was “a place that used to be powerful” and “a great kingdom” that “has fallen down a bit in recent times.”

Stating that “Bone takes place in a medieval time,” Smith then showed us a medieval European painting of people separating wheat from chaff; he said he wanted to be accurate in showing how such things were done at that stage of history.

Smith next showed a slide of a “prayer stone” with the eyes of the Buddha, and amusingly showed how he had adapted it into the face of Bone’s Red Dragon.

Why was he showing us all of this? “When you’re drawing a comic,” Smith explained, “it really helps to look at stuff and make things real.”

This portion of his presentation wound up with a photograph of “the Standing Stones of Stenness” in the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland.
Smith spoke of “the quiet and the peace of that ancientness.” He continued, “You feel that kind of mystery,” which is “why you want to tell stories in the first place.”

For the second part of his visual presentation, Smith gave us a preview of the second issue of his Shazam series, which went on sale the following Wednesday. First, Smith explained the historical significance of its hero, the original Captain Marvel. Oddly, though, Smith referred to him as Shazam, which is actually the name of the elderly wizard in the series. By speaking Shazam’s name, young orphan Billy Batson magically transforms into the super-powerful Captain Marvel. (DC calls its Captain Marvel series Shazam in order to avoid violating Marvel Comics’ trademark.)

Each of the letters in Shazam’s name stands for a classical god or hero (or, in the case of S, the Jewish king Solomon), who represents a particular attribute. Smith tried to remember all of them, as the audience shouted out these he had forgotten. (“Zeus!” Smith exclaimed. “How could you forget Zeus?”)

Smith explained that in the 1940s “Shazam” “outsold Superman” and even “outsold Mickey Mouse,” and was the “most popular comic” ever, but had never since recaptured that level of popularity.

In the second issue of Smith’s Shazam series, Billy finds Mary, the sister he didn’t know he had. “I’m no Neil Gaiman,” Smith said, alluding to the Sandman author’s renowned expertise at performing his own work, “but I’m going to try to do a reading.” Actually, Smith proved to be quite good at it.

Reading his own dialogue aloud as he projected comics pages onscreen, Smith recounted how Billy, searching for his sister, visits a circus featuring “The Great Carlini and his world-famous Monster Society of Evil!!” The ringmaster’s name is a homage to DC editor Mike Carlin, but Mike’s cameo role does not last long, as he is gobbled up by talking alligators. (“The monsters have eaten the Great Carlini!”) This doesn’t come off as horrific, but as the stuff of traditional fairy tales. LIke the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” the alligators hunger for “Tender, juicy children!”

One of the alligators seizes little Mary Batson, but Billy turns into Captain Marvel and rescues her. Coming to his aid is Smith’s revamped version of another classic character from the original Captain Marvel series, Mr. Tawky Tawny, the talking tiger.

LIstening to the audience’s reaction, I could see how well Smith captures the spirit of classic children’s literature. As Captain Marvel battles the alligators, the adults at the circus flee for their lives. “All the adults just give up on the children,” Smith observed, and the real audience laughed knowingly. Smith’s voracious but cowardly alligators (“We’ve lost! Quick! Eat the children!”) likewise earned appreciative laughter from both adults and children.

Smith left us with a cliffhanger, as Captain Marvel sights an enormous humanoid figure, its head literally in the clouds. Unprompted, audience members reacted with BIlly Batson’s favorite expression, “Holy moley!” And with the PowerPoint presentation finished, the audience applauded.

Smith then took questions from the audience, mostly from kids. The first of these kids started out, “I’m not sure of you remember any of the Bone books,” to audience amusement. The questioner wanted to know which volume of Bone was Smith’s favorite; Smith said Book #4, which turned out to be the kid’s favorite as well.

A thirteen-year-old wanted to know if there would be a Bone movie. “If you won’t let them change it and make it bad, you can’t make a movie,” Smith replied. Stating that he used to run an animation studio in Columbus, Smith conceded that “It could be done if I did it myself, but it’d be so much work.” He then reassured the questioner, “Don’t give up hope. It may happen someday.”

Discussing his relationship with Scholastic, the publishers of the color version of Bone, Smith said that “someone” at the company “was worried” about beer being served in a tavern in Bone, and “wanted to change it.” Smith didn’t, and “to Scholastic’s credit it was not a problem.”

Here Smith revealed that “I didn’t originally write it [Bone] for children. I wrote it for everyone.” He said that he likes works such as Huckleberry Finn and Star Wars which “start out as adventures” and “become more sophisticated.” Smith declared that “It’s parents and teachers who made it [Bone] a children’s book, not me.”

In any event, Smith said, he pointed out that the “good characters” in Bone don’t drink beer. The beer stayed in Bone, and Smith also noted that there’s beer, called “butterbeer,” in the Harry Potter books (which Scholastic also publishes in America).

Smith originally did Bone in black and white, but Scholastic wanted to redo it in color. Smith said that Scholastic had hired Art Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly as consultants, and that “Art thought Bone should be in color.” Smith continued, “I resisted it at first.” He explained that “I spent a long time learning how to draw comics in black and white.” Smith told us, “I drew dawn in black and white. Do you know how hard that is?”

Smith also noted the irony that Spiegelman’s most famous work, Maus, is in black and white. But Spiegelman told him, “Bone is about life and it should be in color.” What finally convinced Smith, he informed us, was when Spiegelman told him, “It won’t be done until it’s in color.”

“I had a lot of concerns about doing it in color,” Smith concluded, “but in the end I’m really pleased with it.”

An eight-year-old in the back of the room asked, “How did you get the idea for Bone?”

Smith replied that “I was five or six when I was drawing different characters.’” One of them, “with his mouth open, looked like an old telephone receiver.” Smith therefore “called him Fone Bone” and “never stopped drawing him.” Fone Bone, he told us, “became a friend.”

Another questioner wondered, “Why do Smiley and Phoney”–the other Bone cousins–“wear clothes and Fone Bone doesn’t?”

“You’d probably have to ask my analyst,” replied Smith, who then said it was simply the “tradition” of funny animal stories according to which Donald Duck wears a shirt and no pants, and Mickey Mouse wears pants but often no shirt. Smith hypothesized that it seems talking animals must wear “just a piece of clothing” so we know this isn’t a realistic “nature” story.

Smith told the audience that he wanted his readers to “focus” on “character” and “the story,” not on how the book is drawn. This reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, in which one of his four categories of comics artists is the Animists, who are devoted to “putting craft entirely in the service of its subject,” so that “the teller of the story all but vanishes in the telling” (see “Comics in Context” #156).

Asked what he would be doing after Shazam, Smith answered that he would be “working on an independent project,” whose title he would announce “at the end of this year or next year.”

At the end of the panel an audience member recalled Smith’s previous statement that he had regarded Fone Bone as his childhood friend. The questioner insightfully asked if ending the Bone series was “like losing a friend.”

Smith replied that his “wife would say yes,” and that he would say “possibly.” But Smith “doesn’t think so,” and asserted he “had a great time” working on the comic. He admitted he “had trouble ending it, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wanted to end it right.”

Then he concluded, “and I can go visit Fone Bone anytime.”

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
On Monday March 5 at 6:30 PM I will be giving a lecture at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City in connection with its current show “Stan Lee: a Retrospective.” My subject will be the height of Stan Lee’s collaboration with Jack Kirby on “the Galactus trilogy,” “This Man, This Monster,” and other mid-1960s classics you can find in Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 3.

You can find my Comics Week reports on Stan Lee and Stephen King’s appearances at the New York Comic-Con here. For further details about their panels, please come back here next week.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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