Yet another San Diego Comic-Con report...
The 2007 San Diego Comic-Con International ended about five days ago, and I since I've read convention reports from each of the 150,000 other people who were there, I guess it's my turn.
As always, I went to San Diego as a representative of the Cartoon Art Museum in an effort to spread some goodwill and raise some funds. Artists sketched at CAM's table throughout the weekend, and we pulled in more than twice as much money as we did last year, and we'll repeat the same formula next year (and hopefully double this year's totals). Big thanks to Alison Bechdel, Steve Lieber, Spike, Dirk Tiede, Brian Kolm, Alan Groening, Alex Schumacher, Morrie Turner, Daryl Cagle, Derek Kirk Kim, Batton Lash, Jesse Hamm, Shannon O'Leary, Leia Weathington, Luke Feldman, Travis Hanson, Debbie Huey, Rick Geary, Keith Knight, Tom Beland and Eric Powell for donating their time and services to the museum.
As for the rest:
*Every time I go to Comic-Con, I do a little bit of advance research and set out with a list of special guests, cartoonists, editors and other people that I hope to meet. Every time I go to Comic-Con, I end up meeting about 10% of the people on that list.
On the other hand, I always seem to meet about a dozen people that I didn't expect to, and that always manages to make up for my ten poorly-planned non-meetings.
*Shaenon and I spent Wednesday at the San Diego Zoo. The zoo's a lot like Comic-Con. The food's overpriced, you're occasionally confronted with some of the worst social behavior and odors that you've ever experienced in your entire life, and the long lines for everything there can drive you nuts, but...I'll have to think a bit to figure out where I was going with that.
*I've seen my mother once since Christmas. I've seen Herbert "Boomer" Jefferson three times, and Peter Mayhew twice.
*At various points when I was caught in a massive, unmoving knot of people and physically unable to get from one end of the convention floor to the other, I found myself cursing Star Wars, Hasbro, the Adam West version of Batman, video games, free toys, and scantily-clad women. My twelve year-old self would have chopped off his own hands before writing that.
*Within five years, Artist's Alley will be renamed "Artist's Hallway" and moved into the lobby area on the main floor.
Two years after that, "Artist's Hallway" will be retired, but Ron Lim and Tom Yeates will be given table space at the Exhibitor Registration area to work on commissions.
*From now on, I'm letting Shaenon double-check the hotel reservations before I book anything anyplace. I thought that "Full Bed Half Bath" meant that we'd get a big bed, and a not-so-big-bathtub. It actually means that we got a tiny little bed and a sink, and that we had to share our shower with about six other rooms.
Every time I start feeling nostalgic about college, I need to remind myself that there was a time in my life that I was content to have about six square feet of living space, an uncomfortable mattress and a fifteen-minute wait for the shower in the morning as long as I had a stack of comic books to keep me happy.
*Our hotel flaked out on three-out-of-five of our wake-up calls, which wouldn't have been so bad if not for the fact that we didn't get an alarm clock in our room, either. Fortunately, I managed to wake up within five minutes of our intended wake-up call time each morning, which qualifies as the least exciting superpower of all time: ability to sense when you should have gotten your wake-up call.
*No matter how worldly I become, and no matter how refined my palette becomes, I'll always be a midwesterner at heart. Two things I always look forward to when I go to San Diego are Dick's Big Pig sandwich at Dick's Last Resort (pulled pork in barbecue sauce topped with coleslaw) and the fried green beans with wasabi dipping sauce at T.G.I. Friday's. Diner food, burger joints and just-barely-above-fast-food-sit-down-chain-restaurants are pretty much the fanciest places that we ate growing up, and I'm still perfectly happy to sit down for mall food when dinner time comes around.
*If I had to ban one thing from the convention halls, it would be any company that gives out those gigantic four-foot-by-four-foot canvas bags that have been cropping up at every Comic-Con for the past three or four years. How many people have to die in tragic stepping-on-a-giant-bag-being-dragged-on-the-floor-by-some-little-kid accidents before the madness stops?
If you're buying enough stuff to fill that bag, then you've obviously got too much money, and you should give some to the Cartoon Art Museum, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Friends of Lulu or the Hero Initiative.
If you're picking up enough free stuff to fill that bag, then you're beyond help. What do people do with all of those promotional postcards and posters when they get home, anyway? Do they spend a week after they get back checking out all of the websites that are being advertised? Do they give them away as birthday presents throughout the year?
*I didn't go to Comic-Con last year, and through the Internet and local conventions, I managed to pick up just as much freelance work this past year as I had the year before. While there's an outside chance that someone I talked to this past weekend will hook me up with some work sometime in the next year, it seems just as likely that any good assignments tht come my way between now and next July will be from people that I haven't met face-to-face, and, for that matter, might never meet face-to-face. I suppose that unknown creators occasionally hook up with editors and leave San Diego with big contracts, just like ugly guys will occasionally go to nightclubs and hook up with supermodels, but you shouldn't stake your livelihood on it.
*Anyway, despite all the craziness, the ever-increasing, ever-ominous Hollywood presence and the fact that I'm going to get a phone call next week warning me that the 2008 Comic-Con exhibitor space has almost filled up, I still enjoy Comic-Con. I may take another year off (or five), but I'm looking forward to my next trip to the home of Dan Fouts, Zorro and Brick Tamland.
Stay classy, San Diego.
As always, I went to San Diego as a representative of the Cartoon Art Museum in an effort to spread some goodwill and raise some funds. Artists sketched at CAM's table throughout the weekend, and we pulled in more than twice as much money as we did last year, and we'll repeat the same formula next year (and hopefully double this year's totals). Big thanks to Alison Bechdel, Steve Lieber, Spike, Dirk Tiede, Brian Kolm, Alan Groening, Alex Schumacher, Morrie Turner, Daryl Cagle, Derek Kirk Kim, Batton Lash, Jesse Hamm, Shannon O'Leary, Leia Weathington, Luke Feldman, Travis Hanson, Debbie Huey, Rick Geary, Keith Knight, Tom Beland and Eric Powell for donating their time and services to the museum.
As for the rest:
*Every time I go to Comic-Con, I do a little bit of advance research and set out with a list of special guests, cartoonists, editors and other people that I hope to meet. Every time I go to Comic-Con, I end up meeting about 10% of the people on that list.
On the other hand, I always seem to meet about a dozen people that I didn't expect to, and that always manages to make up for my ten poorly-planned non-meetings.
*Shaenon and I spent Wednesday at the San Diego Zoo. The zoo's a lot like Comic-Con. The food's overpriced, you're occasionally confronted with some of the worst social behavior and odors that you've ever experienced in your entire life, and the long lines for everything there can drive you nuts, but...I'll have to think a bit to figure out where I was going with that.
*I've seen my mother once since Christmas. I've seen Herbert "Boomer" Jefferson three times, and Peter Mayhew twice.
*At various points when I was caught in a massive, unmoving knot of people and physically unable to get from one end of the convention floor to the other, I found myself cursing Star Wars, Hasbro, the Adam West version of Batman, video games, free toys, and scantily-clad women. My twelve year-old self would have chopped off his own hands before writing that.
*Within five years, Artist's Alley will be renamed "Artist's Hallway" and moved into the lobby area on the main floor.
Two years after that, "Artist's Hallway" will be retired, but Ron Lim and Tom Yeates will be given table space at the Exhibitor Registration area to work on commissions.
*From now on, I'm letting Shaenon double-check the hotel reservations before I book anything anyplace. I thought that "Full Bed Half Bath" meant that we'd get a big bed, and a not-so-big-bathtub. It actually means that we got a tiny little bed and a sink, and that we had to share our shower with about six other rooms.
Every time I start feeling nostalgic about college, I need to remind myself that there was a time in my life that I was content to have about six square feet of living space, an uncomfortable mattress and a fifteen-minute wait for the shower in the morning as long as I had a stack of comic books to keep me happy.
*Our hotel flaked out on three-out-of-five of our wake-up calls, which wouldn't have been so bad if not for the fact that we didn't get an alarm clock in our room, either. Fortunately, I managed to wake up within five minutes of our intended wake-up call time each morning, which qualifies as the least exciting superpower of all time: ability to sense when you should have gotten your wake-up call.
*No matter how worldly I become, and no matter how refined my palette becomes, I'll always be a midwesterner at heart. Two things I always look forward to when I go to San Diego are Dick's Big Pig sandwich at Dick's Last Resort (pulled pork in barbecue sauce topped with coleslaw) and the fried green beans with wasabi dipping sauce at T.G.I. Friday's. Diner food, burger joints and just-barely-above-fast-food-sit-down-chain-restaurants are pretty much the fanciest places that we ate growing up, and I'm still perfectly happy to sit down for mall food when dinner time comes around.
*If I had to ban one thing from the convention halls, it would be any company that gives out those gigantic four-foot-by-four-foot canvas bags that have been cropping up at every Comic-Con for the past three or four years. How many people have to die in tragic stepping-on-a-giant-bag-being-dragged-on-the-floor-by-some-little-kid accidents before the madness stops?
If you're buying enough stuff to fill that bag, then you've obviously got too much money, and you should give some to the Cartoon Art Museum, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Friends of Lulu or the Hero Initiative.
If you're picking up enough free stuff to fill that bag, then you're beyond help. What do people do with all of those promotional postcards and posters when they get home, anyway? Do they spend a week after they get back checking out all of the websites that are being advertised? Do they give them away as birthday presents throughout the year?
*I didn't go to Comic-Con last year, and through the Internet and local conventions, I managed to pick up just as much freelance work this past year as I had the year before. While there's an outside chance that someone I talked to this past weekend will hook me up with some work sometime in the next year, it seems just as likely that any good assignments tht come my way between now and next July will be from people that I haven't met face-to-face, and, for that matter, might never meet face-to-face. I suppose that unknown creators occasionally hook up with editors and leave San Diego with big contracts, just like ugly guys will occasionally go to nightclubs and hook up with supermodels, but you shouldn't stake your livelihood on it.
*Anyway, despite all the craziness, the ever-increasing, ever-ominous Hollywood presence and the fact that I'm going to get a phone call next week warning me that the 2008 Comic-Con exhibitor space has almost filled up, I still enjoy Comic-Con. I may take another year off (or five), but I'm looking forward to my next trip to the home of Dan Fouts, Zorro and Brick Tamland.
Stay classy, San Diego.