SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 10 AM

Pleased at the success of the opening reception for “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, I remained there until the party finally broke up around 1:30 in the morning. That meant that eight hours later I was trudging from Penn Station to the Javits Center for the second day of this year’s New York Comic-Con. I’d already been keeping late hours that week putting finishing touches on the wall texts for the exhibit, and now I was definitely falling well into sleep debt.

Still, I was better off than the folks standing out in the February chill in the long, long line waiting to get in. It was about 10:10 AM when I arrived, and the con had been officially open for ten minutes, and yet the line was so lengthy that I could not see where it ended. Lucky for me I had my all-powerful press badge, so I could walk right in. Inside the Special Events Hall, the panel “Slayer Tales with Xander, Kendra and Drusilla” was already in progress. The auditorium seemed half empty, not surprisingly, with so many people still stuck outside on line.

“Slayer Tales” marked the tenth anniversary of the debut of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, and there was even a birthday cake. Ten years already!? But the panel’s title turned out to be a misnomer: Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander, one of the leading characters, didn’t make it, either because he was stuck in traffic, or due to illness, according to different reports. (Brendon did show up to sign autographs later, and reportedly was clearly somewhat ill.) The other actors who showed up were all minor players on the series, including Bianca Lawson, who portrayed the short-lived African slayer Kendra, Larry Bagby, Dennis Christopher, James Leary, and Jonathan Woodward.

The exception was Juliet Landau, who memorably portrayed the recurring vampiress villainess Drusilla. Wearing large glasses, with her hair pulled back, and speaking in an open, friendly American accent, Landau was unrecognizable as the half-mad, British Dru. She recalled that once she was doing a “press thing in England” and the interviewer was “floored” to discover “I was American.”

Of all the panelists Landau made the most interesting comments. When a fan inquired about whether the actors could improvise dialogue, Landau explained that they could not change the dialogue, but they had considerable freedom of interpretation. “If I feel like dancing on the table” or “rolling on the floor,” she said, she could do it. Landau said that early on she had a “creative meeting” in which she was confused by the seeming contradictions in Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s description of Drusilla as both “childlike” and “sexual” and as both “sweet” and “innocent” yet “diabolical,” but that she eventually got a handle on playing these dualities in the character. “It was really collaborative,” Landau said, “but the words were strictly the words.” The “growls” and “giggles” that she put in, she added, were “not scripted.”

Another fan informed Landau that “my eight-year-old daughter does Drusilla impressions.” “Oh, no!” exclaimed Landau.

Of course, inevitably, Landau was asked to do Drusilla’s voice, and though she cautioned that she hadn’t done it in a long time, Landau shifted with apparent ease into Drusilla’s eerily sing-song British accent, and then shifted back to herself, smiling, as the audience applauded.

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 11 AM

On that morning, outside the Special Events Hall, I saw two celebrities showing off their legs. The first was Hayden Panetierre, who plays the super-powered cheerleader on the NBC series Heroes. She was a vision of beauty with her blonde hair, minidress and boots, as she was escorted past the Special Events Hall by security. (See for yourself. Here’s a photo of Ms. Panetierre talking with comics writer Peter David in the Con’s green room).

Yesterday I had seen a Silent Bob impersonator, but later this morning I saw Quick Stop’s lord and master, Kevin Smith himself, in his trademark long black coat, shorts, and sneakers outside the Special Events Hall. Didn’t he get cold outside? (But I commend Ms. Panetierre’s decision to sacrifice her personal comfort for the sake of aesthetics.)

Between admiring Ms. Panetierre and sighting the Quick Stop’s founder, I made my way over to the Javits Center food court, which opened at 11 Am, and devoured an early lunch, knowing I wouldn’t get another break for eating until 7 PM. At one point I looked up and saw my favorite member of the Flash’s Rogues Gallery, the Mirror Master, walking over to the food court. Well, I’ve never seen him at a comics con before. He passed by a table where Supergirl was having lunch. She didn’t seem to notice the notorious super-villain; well, I guess she was off duty. This was one of three Supergirls I would see this weekend, as if she were Triplicate Girl as well. The mainstream media would have you believe that virtually everyone at a comics con is in costume, and this is far from true. But I rather enjoy seeing a familiar costumed character nonchalantly pass by at these conventions.

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 12 PM

Studying the program book I noticed that tickets were required for the next panel I intended to attend, “MARVEL: Stephen King’s Dark Tower–The Gunslinger Born,” which would start in an hour. But how would I get a ticket? Returning to the lobby area just outside the Special Events Hall, I saw there was already a long line snaking back and forth, waiting to enter for the King panel. I asked one person in line when the con had begun giving out tickets; he replied, somewhat contemptuously, “Eight A. M.” Two hours before the convention opened!? Considering how long the line was to get in shortly after 10 AM, just how long did people have to wait out in the cold to get tickets for the King panel?

I soon located one of the red-shirted volunteers who was in charge of distributing tickets for the King panel, showed him my all-powerful press badge, explained my connection with Publishers Weekly, and after consulting with other parties, he gave me a pass for the panel. Although I joke about the Red Shirts at the New York and San Diego Cons, he was gratifyingly helpful, and explained to me that the meeting rooms were cleared at the conclusion of each panel. The Red Shirt was quite surprised when I told him about the “camping” phenomenon that the San Diego Con encourages in its largest auditorium, the humongous Hall H. Not only are no tickets necessary to attend the movie preview panels in Hall H, but many, many conventioneers settle into Hall H on Saturday morning and never leave till the final panel of the day concludes. That’s why I never got into the Spider-Man 3 panel at last year’s San Diego Con (see “Comics in Context” #146).

I wonder if, as attendance continues to mount at the San Diego Con, whether its organizers will also have to issue tickets for certain Hall H presentations (as they already do for events such as the Masquerade) and clear the hall afterwards. But I expect that if tickets are given out a full two hours before the Con opens for the day, I still won’t be able to get into these panels. (The San Diego Con doesn’t make exceptions for press people trying to get into Hall H.)

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 1 PM

The large audience in the Special Events Hall broke into applause as the creative team for Marvel’s Dark Tower comic walked onto the stage. There was Stephen King’s research assistant Robin Furth, who plots the comic, and who turns out to be an attractive, smiling woman with long blonde hair (as you can see here). There were also the comic’s scripter Peter David, illustrator Jae Lee, colorist Richard Isanove, letterer Chris Eliopolous, and editor Ralph Macchio.

“There’s Joe!” exclaimed a guy who was sitting near me and who was ecstatic at seeing Mr. Quesada, Marvel’s editor in chief. But there was one person still missing, King himself, whom Quesada proceeded to introduce as “one of the greatest authors and creators in the last fifty years, maybe ever!”

Now wait a minute. I haven’t read widely in horror prose fiction, and, for all I know, Clive Barker, for example, may be a superior writer to Stephen King. But I’m very fond of The Shining and The Stand, so I have no trouble accepting the idea that King may be the greatest contemporary writer of horror fiction. But “one of the greatest authors and creators in the last fifty years, maybe ever”? Maybe not.

Where to begin? Well, I could start at the top: is Stephen King in the same league as Shakespeare? Or perhaps I could start listing authors who are greater than King in roughly chronological order: say, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and so on. It’s a lengthy list.

Or I could refer to the celebrated Yale scholar Professor Harold Bloom, who recently listed his “five most important books” in Newsweek: the complete works of Shakespeare, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Homer’s Iliad. Why, how strange that Professor Bloom did not mention Mr. King!

There are all sorts of ways to come at the question of who’s a greater writer than Stephen King. For example, I could refer to the title of last week’s “Comics in Context,” which I took from Walt Whitman: he’s a better writer than King, too.

And I should think that Mr. King would agree that all the people I’ve named are superior to himself. Years ago I saw the British playwright Tom Stoppard being interviewed onstage at Columbia University. The interviewer started comparing Stoppard to Shakespeare, and Stoppard clearly looked embarrassed, presumably because Stoppard, one of the leading contemporary playwrights, surely realized he was still nowhere near being a match for the Bard.

And hey, Quesada referred to King as “one of the greatest authors and creators. . .maybe ever,” so that takes in creators of any form of art. So is Mr. King superior to Ingmar Bergman, or to Leonardo da Vinci, or to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Or to the Creator of the heavens and earth? This is fun.

But, you may be saying, I shouldn’t make too much of Mr. Quesada’s remark as signifying Marvel’s limitations in appreciating literature. Oh, look, here in the second issue of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic is a house ad for the company’s new Marvel Illustrated line, comics adaptation of what the ad calls “literature’s greatest stories.” First up: The Man in the Iron Mask. It’s as if I wasted my time studying James Joyce’s Ulysses in school instead of the oeuvre of Alexandre Dumas. (And shouldn’t Marvel be adapting The Three Musketeers before its sequel?)

“I’ve been saying ad nauseum,” Quesada continued, “that being able to publish The Dark Tower is a coming out party for the comic book industry.” In his six years as editor in chief, Quesada said, his goal has been “reaching out into the mainstream.” Publishing The Dark Tower comic, Quesada declared, demonstrates that “We’re a very serious art form and one to be reckoned with.”

And here I thought that Art Spiegelman’s Maus winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 had proved comics could be a “very serious art form.” Or maybe when Time Magazine named Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen as one of the hundred greatest novels published between 1923 (when Time started publication) and 2005 (when the list was made). (Mr. King isn’t on this list, either.) Or Alison Bechtel’s autobiographical graphic novel (graphic autobiography?) Fun Home being named as one of the New York Times’ “100 Notable Books” of 2006? Or the success of the “Masters of American Comics” traveling museum exhibition (see “Comics in Context” #151-156)? Or the widespread appreciation of comics professionals such as Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Neil Gaiman, Scott McCloud, Harvey Pekar, and Will Eisner in the worlds of academia, museums and the mainstream media in recent years.

Certainly King is now a mainstream writer, and not simply read by a niche audience. But would the literary world consider comics to be a “very serious” artform simply because there is now a comic book based on King’s work? Quesada is probably unaware of the controversy that erupted in the literary world when King received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Awards in 2003. I think that King deserved the award, but it’s important to realize that many people in the literary community did not.

So thus I am reminded once again why I’ve always felt somewhat out of place in the world of comics, whose study I regard as my life’s work, but where I remain on the periphery. I’m a man with three Ivy League degrees in English literature who works in a field in which the major publishers couldn’t care less about my academic background. We just don’t think alike.

The literary world is quickly learning to take comics seriously; the real question is when the comics industry itself will recognize what it truly means to be a serious artform.

And let’s appreciate Stephen King for his genuine achievements in popular culture, without indulging in unfounded hyperbole.

Finally Stephen King came onstage, and the audience gave him a standing ovation, cheering more loudly than the audience did yesterday for Stan Lee. Once again, people crowded down front, flashing their cameras in the panelists’ faces. Quesada told them “Thank you” over and over, as an obvious hint to sit down, but these amateur paparazzi kept on flashing. Unlike yesterday during the Stan Lee panel, this time convention staffers cleared the space in front of the stage.

And you know how I keep joking in my convention reports that the Red Shirts seem like fascist stormtroopers? The con actually stationed people in Star Wars stormtrooper costumes in front of the King panel dais as guards! Over the weekend I would continue to see Star Wars stormtroopers actually acting as Con security. (If they unmasked, would they all turn out to be clones?)

When I saw King at Radio City Music Hall last year (See “Comics in Context” #148), he was giving a performance, acting the role of the scruffy, macabre prankster, who delighted in scaring and grossing out his audience. At the New York Comic-Con he was more serious and subdued, but still in character.

The first question was from an audience member who said he hadn’t read The Dark Tower novels and wondered if the comics contained any “spoilers.”
“Spoilers!” King retorted. “There are no spoilers!” King continued. “You might as well say ‘I’m never watch The Wizard of Oz again because I know how it comes out!” Summing up his opinion of Marvel’s Dark Tower, King declared, “The comic book just kicks ass.”

Another audience member asked if Peter David was “intimidated” by working on a comics adaptation of “a serious book that’s reached this many people.” (Here we go again. What makes Stephen King’s Dark Tower any more or less “serious” than Peter David’s Hulk?) David replied that “What’s intimidating is it’s a book that’s going to one particular person,” indicating King. David said that King “goes over everything.”

Another audience member asked KIng, “If I donate one hundred dollars to your favorite charity, will you autograph my copy of The Dark Tower?”

King quietly replied, “No,” to appreciative audience laughter,

A questioner asked about the theme of the final novel in The Dark Tower series. King explained, “if there’s an overall theme to The Dark Tower, it’s one of evolution. You don’t get what you want immediately. . . .Sometimes you don’t get it right the first time or the second time or the fiftieth time. There has to be an evolutionary process.”

Then, observing that there were Harry Potter fans in the audience, King said that “when you do a long body of work. . . .when you get to the end, you’re going to piss off a lot of fans. They are pissed off because it’s over,” or because it ended differently than “whatever they had built up in their minds.”

Peter David interjected that he “thought the ultimate theme of the books” was the futility of “obsession, and how it turns back on itself.”

After Quesada made another of his respectful references to “Mr. King,” King threatened, “If you keep calling me Mr. King, I’m going to kick your ass.” Peter David suggested “your lordship” as an alternative mode of address. (I see that the New York Comic-Con program book’s biography of King, on page 10, refers to him as “Stephen Edwin King.” Edwin? What kind of novels would you expect from a writer who called himself “Edwin King”? Now there’s an alternate reality to contemplate.)

Another audience member asked if King had planned certain events in The Dark Tower saga in advance, but King said no, explaining that “The story tells itself in a sense, and it’s your job to stand back and let it be what it is.” King compared it to a “hunk of granite,” saying you “know there’s a guy” in there. (Although King did not credit him, this is a paraphrase of a famous statement by Michelangelo about sculpting. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo)

The other panelists were asked what it was like to sit on a convention panel with Stephen King. “His lordship?” asked Quesada, who replied that years ago at the San Diego Comic-Con he was asked “what’s the Holy Grail in comics?” Quesada told us he replied, “To work with Stephen King.”

Then King was asked if he was interested in working on any Marvel characters. “I never say never to anything,” King replied. He observed that he had written his novel Firestarter about a character, Charlie McGee, who could mentally set fires. “I’ve done the Torch, what’s the point?”

Asked about what comics he had read in the past, KIng named Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, and Garth Ennis’s Preacher, as well as Spider-Man.

King then addressed why he had so long refused to permit adaptations of his Dark Tower series of novels. “This is my life’s work,” he explained, stating that he had started it when he was twenty and finished it in his fifties. “So it’s very important to me,” and until recently, he had “said no to everybody” who asked to turn it into a movie.

“But when the chance came to do The Dark Tower as a comic book, I thought this was the best of all possible worlds. This [the characters?] will look the way they’re supposed to look. And when they brought in Jae Lee and Peter David, I just thought, ‘This is as good as it gets.’ If you guys have ever seen some of the movies that have been made from Marvel comic books. . .a lot of times the books are better than the movies.”

Now there may be a Dark Tower movie as well, made by J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindehof, co-creators of the television series Lost. “I trust these guys,” King told us. “And they said, ‘How much do you want for an option?’ And I said, ‘nineteen dollars.’ And that’s what they paid me and that’s where it is.” (The significance of the number nineteen here is as mysterious to me as that of those cursed numbers on Lost.)

Towards the end King was asked if when he was writing a character, he ever imagined he ever imagined the character looked like a specific actor. “I never see them,” he replied, suggesting they were “behind my eyes. Maybe if they looked in a mirror I would see them.” Here King seemed to be moving toward the notion that all of his characters are actually parts of himself.

And, oh yes, King said that just before the panel, he and the panelists had been discussing possibly doing a Marvel adaptation of The Stand!

SATURDAY FEB. 24, 2 PM

Weeks before the New York Comic-Con, I had been asked to moderate a panel titled “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The Classic Age of Comics,” which had a stellar lineup of giants of the Golden and Silver Ages, including Murphy Anderson (Hawkman, The Spectre), Arnold Drake (Deadman, Doom Patrol), Irwin Hasen (Wildcat, Green Lantern), Carmine Infantino (The Flash, Adam Strange, Batman), and Jerry Robinson (Batman). I eagerly accepted, but then, a week before the Con, noticed that its online schedule didn’t list me as moderator, or Anderson, Infantino and Robinson as panelists. I contacted the con organizers, and was told that they had lost my contact information, and had reassigned the role of moderator. (This is especially too bad because I missed my opportunity to interview Arnold Drake, who died shortly after the convention.)

However, on Friday I was asked to moderate a Saturday afternoon panel called “NYCC’s Behind the Panels: The 80s Superhero Renaissance” featuring Brian Bolland (Batman: The Killing Joke), Bill Sienkiewicz (Moon Knight, The New Mutants, Elektra: Assassin), Walter Simonson (Thor), and Rick Veitch (The One). After rearranging my Saturday schedule, I again eagerly accepted.

And so, on Saturday at 2 PM, I took my position behind the lectern in Room 1E14, before a large audience, and waited for the panelists to show up.

After a few minutes I informed the audience that I was simply holding the start of the panel until the artists arrived.

Several more minutes passed. I told the admirably patient audience that I had had experiences at the Big Apple Con when I was supposed to interview a guest who never turned up for the panel, but this was the first time that I had four–count ‘em, four–absentees!

I introduced myself to the audience, giving many of my credits, and was quite surprised when they applauded my mention of co-authoring DK Publishing’s recent Marvel Encyclopedia. At 2:10 PM I asked for, and got, a volunteer to go up to Artists’ Aerie and find the missing artists. Then, having conducted that year-long series of lectures, “1986: The Year That Changed Comics” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, I improvised a lecture about superhero comics in the 1980s on the spot. I also answered questions from the audience. One person wanted to know what I thought of Marvel’s Civil War, I denounced it, enumerating many of its faults, and a good portion of the audience applauded its approval, again to my surprise.

I succeeded in holding the audience’s attention until, finally, at 2:30 PM, my volunteer arrived with Walter Simonson, who explained that no one had told him that he was supposed to be doing a panel. I subsequently learned that this was not an unusual happenstance at this year’s New York Comic-Con, and, in fact, some panels had to be canceled because the panelists didn’t show up. Keep in mind that it’s not just that these comics pros weren’t told that they were scheduled to do panels; presumably, this means the Con organizers hadn’t even asked them if they would do these panels!

Walter Simonson is a brilliantly entertaining raconteur. I asked him only two questions, and he filled the remaining half hour by himself; all I had to do was sit back and enjoy. Without his realizing it, much of what Walter said confirmed what I had been telling the audience about the comics of the 1980s during the first half hour! In the 1980s Walter, Howard Chaykin, Frank Miller, and James Sherman worked together in a Manhattan studio under the name “the Upstarts.” Walter concluded his talk with a dynamite anecdote about how one day he went to a videogame arcade near the studio, racked up an extraordinarily high score, and turned around to see the other people in the arcade looking at him in awe. And that, I told the audience, concluding the panel, is an example of a real life superhero of the 1980s. Thanks again for coming to my rescue at the Con, Walter!

SATURDAY, FEB. 24, 3 PM

Then I headed next door to Room 1E12/13 for “Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT Movie Spotlight.” Last summer at the San Diego Con I had to miss the panel previewing the forthcoming Spirit movie because I was doing signings at the same time. This time I wasn’t about to miss it.

It turned out to be an occasion for nostalgia. The moderator of the panel was Michael Uslan, one of the executive producers of the live action Batman movies, who was also one of the producers of the projected Spirit film. I recall that decades ago I saw Uslan speak at a comics convention in New York City, talking about his intent to make a Batman feature film. This movie, Uslan assured the audience, would treat the character seriously, and he cited as inspirations the Batman comics stories by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, and the six-parter in Detective Comics by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers (see “Comics in Context” #84). Many years later, there was Uslan’s name in the credits of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie, an enduring classic that did so much to wipe the stigma of “camp” off Batman in the public imagination.

When I heard Uslan speak at that long-ago New York convention, I hoped that his dream of doing a serious Batman movie would come true, but I doubt that I felt certain that it would happen. In the case of The Spirit movie, I am confident that it will indeed come to pass.

After all, just look at the huge grosses piled up by Warner Brothers’ movie adaptation of the graphic novel 300 in its opening weekend: seventy million dollars, twice what the film industry had expected. In its March 12, 2007 article on 300’s success (“Surprise! Spartans Assault Box Office”), The New York Times showed that, despite its major recent advances in appreciating comics, it still doesn’t entirely Get It. Reporter Michael Cieply wrote, “The movie defied the odds in that it had no star bigger than the Scottish actor Gerard Butler (The Phantom of the Opera), Mr. [Dan] Fellman [Warners’ president of theatrical distribution] said, it was made by the relatively untested director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead), and it carried the added handicap of an R rating.”

The real “star” of 300 is Frank Miller, the writer and artist of the 300 graphic novel, whose popularity with moviegoers was “tested” and proved by the success of the Sin City movie, which was, like the 300 film, based in story and in visual design on his work in comics (see “Comics in Context” #78, 79, 83). And Miller is the director and writer of this Spirit movie in the works, about which I will say much more next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Prodded by yours truly, former Marvel comics writer Peter B. Gillis, who used to work on Captain America, has posted his reflections on the character’s apparent demise on his blog, under the title “The Assassination of Captain America as an Extreme Downhill Skateboard Race”. In the course of the piece you’ll see his brilliant analysis of the essence of Captain America as a character, which makes him different from other major superheroes. You’ll see some further observations by myself about Cap in the “Comments” section, as well, and I will have more to say on the subject in future installments of this column.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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