SAN DIEGO BLUES

Submitted by Tom Batten on July 31, 2008 - 3:17pm

Another exciting Comicon has slumped to a close, leaving us in fandom left with nothing but to kick up our feet and ask, "What happened?"
It seems like all the talk around the shop this year is that nothing that exciting was really announced. Of course, this was the talk last year and the year before that, too, but forget those years, they were stupid and now they're behind us.
The situation seems to be this: The whole Comicon Paradigm is changing faster then anyone seems ready for it, and all this sad-sacking around is only helping in missing this point.

I went to San Diego last year, and I'll tell you won't they don't really come across with on G4: The comics content of the show is a little weak. Maybe that sounds too harsh...yes, Marvel and DC have big complicated booths covered with art and giveaways and high profile creators, yes Fantagraphics and other indie publishers have cool booths filled with books that are often unavailable in stores. True. You can eavesdrop on conversations between creators you've been following since childhood, you can get sketches from favorite artists and buy original art and all that.
But as cool as all that is, the movie/TV/video game stuff is AMAZING. Huge life-size spaceship centerpieces, Models, movie props...the big blue Sci-Fi channel 'thing' in enough to melt the mind of the mightiest of mortals. And guess what? THAT'S WHERE ALL THE PEOPLE WHERE. Last summer I would sit at my table on the comics side and wonder at the sheer throngs of fans, thinking that it was totally overwhelming, until I got up and walked over to the other side of the convention center where the movie stuff was, and it was like the entire planet Earth was being evacuated into that side of the room. It was so packed you could hardly even stop moving long enough to examine any of the cool stuff, because at any given moment there was something like six-thousand people trying to stand exactly where you were standing.
That's where all the action is. And as cool as it might have been to meet Mike Mignola and Geoff Darrow, I was only able to meet them because they were sharing a table that had no line at it at all.
Believe me, in another year or so they're going to ditch the "International Comicon' name and come up with something else, because anyplace that has Darrow and Mignola sitting side by side with no one to drool over them doesnt deserve to be called such.
It's no secret that the movie business has gotten a taste of the blood money gushing from the wound in the comic industries side. Half the people that came to our table last year identified themselves as producers or agents, and the only question they has was 'Who is your representation?"
It's just not the big deal for Comics that it used to be. I think there are a couple reasons for this. First of all, the convention season is now 11 months long, which means that any announcements have to be parceled out to make each show seem worthwhile. And every announcement that is made is made with an eye on the next show--look at Darwyn Cooke ending his press conference for his new 'Parker' adaptations by telling reporters that he'll have some creator owned stuff to talk about at Baltimore in a month.
Secondly, the rise of more and more websites devoted to comics news has also lead to news getting announced more frequently. Sometimes I wonder how people over thirty ever knew which creator was jumping to which book at what time. I loose sleep over this, I really do.
The internet and it's open access have also lead to a more informed fandom. Geoff Johns writing that new Flash:Rebirth book would have been an exciting announcement, but who in the world didn't see it coming?
Fans seem to get more excited about the movie stuff, anyway. Take the Stan Lee-Grant Morrison panel, a once in a lifetime thing, where some young buck asked these two comics legends wether or not Iron Man and Hulk would team up in any upcoming movies. Now, the reporter who covered that panel didn't mention wether or not the questioner was a nine year old boy, but I would be willing to bet my actual grown-up teeth it was some dude dressed up like the bad guys from Stargate. And it would come as no surprise to me to see that that same theoretical young man was in the audience screaming his head off with approval when Grant Morrison announced at another panel that he was tired of seeing comics that seemed like nothing but movie pitches, and that 'comics should be more like comics.'
This is the future, ladies and gents (mostly gents). I don't know what the future of the industry holds, but unless everyone managed to screw the pooch so badly that things collapse again like they did in the 1990's, it seems inevitable that the film industry will continue to squeeze comics into a smaller and smaller corner. I for one can't wait to see how comics fight back. It's increasingly the only point I agree with Frank Miller on, comics are outlaw literature, that's when they're at their best.