Fever Dream: San Diego Comic-Con 2009

It is with some hesitation that I start this article, given that Ron and Jimski have both written excellent Comic-Con overviews (click on their names to see ’em), but I’ll rationalize it this way: I went to a bunch of panels while the guys did their interviews, so I’ll try to go over what I learned before I pass out. Oh, for those of you who don’t know, I somehow managed to get sick–really sick, like 102° fever for at least two days sick and still feeling double plus unwell as I write this–during Saturday night at the Con.  I don’t know what it was, I mean, I tried for my sickest moves on the dance floor, but those are designed to convey sickness, not actually generate illness. (I was dancing to Paul Pope DJing a party on Saturday night, there’s a picture of him playing down at the bottom of the article.)

I tried to do my best and send out twitter updates throughout the panels, but I wasn’t able to share everything (yes, I know they are called “tweets,” but that sounds lame to me), so let’s see…

I went to at least two Marvel panels and continued to hear pretty much the same thing…nothing. I mean, everything they talked about they had already announced, so there wasn’t much news to be made other than they have finally gotten the rights to Marvelman, which is apparently quite a big deal, but unfortunately, the momentous nature of the announcement was lost on most people in the audience, myself included. They really should have talked about the history of the character a bit more to get us excited about him, and give us an idea of how they plan to use dude in the current universe.  (The pic of the guy below? The sleeping stormtrooper? That was after the Marvelman announcement, I kid you not.)

In fact, nobody at Marvel seemed to be that excited about anything, which is pretty much totally the opposite of last year. Perhaps the folks at Marvel are not able to get excited when they don’t have some kind of event to introduce?  Many of the panels opened up with little Flash-based animations, but they were mostly about web comics and upcoming animated flicks.  The talks typically had about 20 minutes of “content” then the rest of it was handed to Q&A, which, I will just say, is an easy out and pretty disappointing. I didn’t have my hopes up for anything, I admit, but still, let’s do something–it’s San Diego! Perhaps they want to do more of their announcements at WizardWorld?  I dunno…

I attended a few DC panels, including a Batman panel that was somehow completely devoid of Grant Morrison.  I am not sure how you can even begin to discuss the Batbooks without him, but they did it.  There was lots of backslapping about how great the books have been, and, well, it is deserved.  They completely changed everything and it somehow works.  I would have loved it if J.H. Williams III was there (his work on Detective Comics, as you know, is amazing, and apparently it just gets so much better), but there seemed to be (at least from what I saw) a lot more emphasis on the writers rather than the artists. They did have Phillip Tan there, who admitted that it was going to be really hard to follow Frank Quitely on Batman and Robin, he said something to the effect of, “Well, we’ll see how it goes.” Not very inspiring, to be sure, but he definitely got the short end of the “followup artist” stick (shaft?) on that one. 

Batbooks aside, it was clear that DC Comics might just call itself GJ Comics–Geoff Johns is really behind most of the exciting stuff going on right now.  There was some good discussion on the Blackest Night storyline, but most of it was in the vein of “which dead superhero do you want to see come back?” which I thought was tiring.  I did ask a question about when we were going to see Superman actually deal with the death of Batman–like, we’ve seen a few panels of him looking sad at a funeral, but really? That’s all we get as one half of one of the greatest superhero duos dies?  In response I got some mumbling then a “Oh, wait–we forgot to tell you about the new World’s Finest series!” which sounds compelling.  They are going to basically pair together members of the new Batman crew and members of the new Superman crew–for example, issue one will be the new Nightwing and Red Robin–but still, no answer to my question.

I also got a similar, but needlessly snarky non-answer from Bob Wayne, DC’s VP of Sales, when I asked when we were going to see an Absolute All Star Superman.  The exchange went a bit like this:

BW: Did you buy All Star Superman Volume 1?
Me: I did.
BW: Did you buy All Star Superman Volume 2?
Me (seeing where this was going): I did…
BW: Then take them both, glue the covers together and there’s your Absolute All Star Superman.

It was a lame jokey answer and the quality of the laughter made me feel a bit better; I mean, all I want to do is give him more money, you’d think I could get a more reasonable answer than that.

The best panel by far was the Wednesday Comics Panel, which, perhaps for obvious reasons, did not list who was going to be the in the show guide, because if they did, it would have been been impossible to get to.  They had editor Mark Chiarello hosting Mike Allred, Paul Pope, Jimmy Palmiotti, Dave Gibbons, Lee Bermejo, Kurt Busiek, Eddie Berganza, Amanda Connor and Ben Caldwell (there might have been one or two more but that’s most of them) and proceeded to have one of the most thoughtful panel sessions I have ever been to. It was a multifaceted discussion about how the project came about and Chiarello was beaming when he admitted that everyone he dreamed of having on the project pretty much is on the project (there was one or two people who didn’t want to because of the format, much to their lameness) and it was really interesting to listen to the artists and writers talk about what a different challenge these pages have been.  Many of the artists realized that there was at least one, sometimes two “beauty shots,” where the whole story is either introduced with or build up to, with only two or three panels in-between. Even actually delivering the work was a challenge; they still had to scan the pages, they couldn’t photograph them, like in the olden days, which apparently made for some very long afternoons at Kinko’s (most of the artists drew in the actual tabloid size, except for Caldwell (who is doing the Wonder Woman story), who drew on 8.5×11 stock. That was interesting to find out because the Wonder Woman story is already almost impossible to make out on the bigger format–he must sketch reaaaaaally small.  Similarly, the writers had to rethink how they wrote comics. They had 12 pages each, and some of the writers, admitted that each page could take as long as a day.  Busiek explained that for the first 4-5 pages it took him a day a page, then, once he kind of figured it out, he was able to write the remaining pages in three days.  I could sense  a bit of tension by Chiarello when the discussion went to scheduling–there are still a few pages that have not been turned in yet–and Paul Pope quickly explained that of the late people, he is the latest of the late, which kind of goes with what we know about him.  Chiarello did say that just in case pages are not turned in in time, he does have three pages at the ready.  For the record, Kyle Baker turned in all of his pages in 3 or 4 days.

All of the creators expressed  that it was a real honor to go “back to basics” with the project, and how it really felt they were connecting the dots between comic history and and present. It was great to hear how much these guys (and gal) talk about their love of the old newsprint medium (which costs more than regular paper, by the way, which is one of the reasons it is $3.99) and to get a chance to create comics almost in a different time. For example, Kamandi is more like Prince Valiant, where there are no text balloons, just narration boxes. This not only changes the tone of the story, but really allows the artist to fill up every inch of every panel since he has more room.

There was much discussion about how these will be collected, and Chiarello said they were looking into it, but they wanted to make sure the collection would be affordable.  Towards the end, a few members of the audience shared stories of how people would come up to them in trains or buses when they were reading Wednesday Comics and getting really excited about it and everyone wanted to know if this somehow would be integrated into regular actual newspapers in the future. I guess USA Today is carrying the Superman pages which is rad and apparently  enormously popular, which is cool (cool and rad!).  Dave Gibbons went on to
explain that back in the day, comics were used to help sell newspapers;
a bit of fun and color to go with the serious news of the day and asked
if perhaps projects like Wednesday Comics would be helpful in getting people back into print?  

I attended some other more Hollywood-focused panels as well, including a great voiceover panel, which was surprisingly entertaining and incredibly useful for people who want to know more about that very competitive business, and I even got the VIP treatment for the Chuck panel, where I was able to go backstage and talk to some of the actors and see what it was like behind the scenes in Ballroom 20 and the bowels of the San Diego Convention Center.  

I have more to write, but this is getting long, but suffice to say, I was again stunned by the love people have for all this stuff.  (You know when they get the casts to sign signature at the booth in the main hall? They don’t get paid for their time, they do it because they really want to meet the fans and, at least in the case of Chuck, thank them for their efforts to stay on the air.)  I met even more of you in the iFanbase and cannot thank you enough for the encouraging words, thoughtful discussion and occasional drink.  I am bummed I got sick; next year, I will just mainline vitamin C all week, but already I can’t wait for next year’s con.  Well, that’s not true. I can wait a few weeks.  But then–can’t wait.

Oh, and a special shout out to Paul Montgomery for rocking the site with new updates and his hilarious videos–well done, man, you made us all look very lazy.  You better come next year. You all better come next year.

See ya in seven!