San Diego ComicCon 2010--1

Then and Now
So I survived a one-day trip to the San Diego ComicCon. I rather expected to be bummed out, as happened previously. Instead I had a great time. The reason? I reconnected with two old friends and coworkers I hadn't seen in nearly 15 years. One was Stefan Martiniere, genius illustrator and computer-game art director; the other Ricardo Delgado, ace of screen, print and fossil records. It was such a pleasure talking with them that I felt elated the rest of the day.

I had half-hoped I'd run into fellow bloggers like Joakim Gunnarson. Having made no advance plans and given that the convention center didn't do paging, I didn't stumble into any of them. At least I finally got to meet Don Rosa. "I've admired your work for years." "Thanks. And you're...who?"

I first attended the Con back when it was at the El Cortez Hotel. Its attendees were 99% fanboys. Today, as everyone knows, the Con's a cross between a trade show and an advertising spectacular. All the big media companies roll out their latest and biggest products in hopes of sparking positive word-of-mouth. All the little companies try hard to look like big companies. And everybody wants to sell you something. It's mind-boggling: books, clothes, weapons, statuettes, posters, prints, DVD's, and on and on. At ComicCon you'll see more ways to present violent images of nearly-naked, huge-breasted women than you imagined existed.

It's both ironic and sad that the Dealers--once the mainstays of comics-related enterprise--have been relegated to a tiny ghetto at one extremity of the hall. One still finds long cardboard boxes full of bagged comics (much more expensive than they used to be, of course!), but now selling used comics is a quaint sideline. ComicCon today is about comic book characters, to be sure, but not about comic books themselves. Other livelier media have overtaken them.

Other livelier marketers have overtaken the dealers, too. The really desirable old comics are hermetically sealed in plastic crypts which treble their value but make them difficult to read. Prices on primo original art have risen so high that I can't even feel sorry about being unable to afford them (e.g. paperback cover art for $30,000). Above everything towers Heritage Auctions, whose huge display included priceless Golden Age comics and an enormous (real) safe.

I was surprised there weren't more full-out geeks. There were plenty of shoppers, but the number of hardcore decked-out costumed sword-toting fanatics was small. This may have been due to the convention's recent policy of selling all tickets in advance. No more spur-of-the-moment "Hey, let's put on our Star Wars shirts and stand in line for three hours to get into the Con!" Advance buyers tend to be older, more organized, more goal-oriented, and more affluent than your typical middle-school geek. Still there were enough underclad lovelies wandering around to make it worth cleaning my glasses (not too underclad, though; the convention has rules about that sort of thing).

Amidst the din of the media promoting games, movies, comics, and web series, anyone with half a brain could hardly miss the theme informing most of them: sexualized violence. If you'd taken away the images of bloodthirsty seminude women holding huge weapons and those of terrified seminude women being tortured or butchered, the entire Con would have fit into the local Denny's. But more of this in another post.

When I'd had enough Con, I wandered around downtown. San Diego is a visually delicious city. Many of its oldest buildings were saved from development (mostly thanks to the town's reputation as a shabby Navy port) until people appreciated them again. A neighborhood of nineteenth-century structures has been sanitized under the name "The Gaslight District." Like most Old Towns the district is filled with restaurants, bars, and upscale boutiques. A wine bar seems to occupy every other corner. Conspicuously absent were the drunken sailors. In fact, during an entire afternoon's stroll I didn't spot a single uniformed Navy man, drunk or sober. I don't know where the sailors party these days, but it sure isn't in the Gaslight District. Most of the patrons of the sidewalk bars were young, hip-looking men and women with expensive watches and television wardrobes. They probably live in the many condos filling the area's old office buildings.

But old San Diego wasn't far away. You could still turn a corner and catch a faceful of the aroma of sewage, beer and urine. A block beyond the Gaslight District's border, homeless men idled in front of hollow-eyed office buildings that had thus far resisted gentrification. Here were the dollar stores, the (sleazy, non-hip) tattoo parlors, and the mini-marts. The all-night cheapie theaters, though, are all gone. Like the waves on the nearby ocean, affluence in San Diego ebbs and flows.

Next: Girls, Gore, and G-Strings!

All Talk and No Pictures--2

The Con and the Big Con
A look at the blog of Irene Gallo, art director of Tor Books (http://igallo.blogspot.com/), brings into focus the fundamental changes the San Diego ComicCon has undergone since its long-ago El Cortez days. Gallo gives an enthusiastic catalog of deals made, dinners with clients and suppliers, and big upcoming projects. What's missing are the fans.

The ComicCon's model has morphed from dealers and fans to marketers and consumers. The Pros, as we reverently used to call them, appear not as individual creators enjoying a little hero-worship, but as suited representatives of commercial entities, be it Time/Warner/DC or Alex Ross Enterprises (or whatever the outfit was with the giant glitzy booth attended by slick three-pieced young men who weren't the artist). Long dead are the days when an unshaven Neal Adams sat behind a folding table and BS'd one-on-one with admirers!

Today the "Pros" are there to do business and the "fans" are there to buy stuff: books, trade paperbacks, limited edition prints, resin statuettes, videos, shirts, and especially tickets to the corporation's next movie.

Though I admit I miss the honest unscrupulousness of a dealer trying to fob a "fair" copy off as "near mint," I'm reluctant to blather on about this point because what I'm describing is simply the way things have changed in life as a whole. I don't like it, because I don't like the way America's national purpose has become the conversion of as many individuals as possible into undiscerning consumers with a built-in need to buy--and to keep buying--as much shit as possible.

Whether I like it or not, the mass market, the World Market, drives comics today just as it does every other entertainment medium. The entertainment industry suffers the same fundamental problem as corporate mass-market capitalism as a whole: the continued survival of a company depends upon the patently unusustainable model of constantly-increasing sales of increasingly-generic (and usually superfluous) products to a constantly-growing audience at an ever-increasing rate of profit.

Like everyone else I indulge in griping about the samness and often-low quality of the stuff out there, but I recognize doing so is foolish. As I've learned from the "grocery business," an attempt to meet the targets listed above on a global scale demands standardization and diminished quality. The best way to thrive--for a while--is not to adjust the product to the market, but to re-shape the consumer's tastes so that he or she demands the product that's easiest to produce. This includes the least possible variety and minimal localization. The entertainment industry, which 90% of the time means the American entertainment industry, has been working hard on this for over half a century, with considerable success.

American media, shows, music, fashion, story and character styles, and everything else have saturated the globe. Narrowing ownership of media outlets (TV, radio, print, Internet) aids the homogenization of audiences by training consumers from babyhood to expect a certain limited menu of content which the industry then delivers. Innovation and unique expression can only occur in a small-scale environment. That's why new ideas, be they stories, characters, or technologies, are usually created by individuals or a small group of people. The role of the mega-corporation is to acquire these successful innovations, reduce them to their most generic components, and feed the result to the world market.

One golden advantage of the small privately-held company is the luxury of saying, "this is big enough." The owner of such a firm may decide that feeding the family, providing for retirement and funding the kids' college is all he or she desires. As long as that standard is met the owner is satisfied and has no need to grow any bigger. Corporate entrepreneurs would gape at the suggestion that there could be such a thing as "big enough." As we said above the corporate organism's survival depends not upon profit but ever-increasing rates of profit. Enough can never be enough.

The Internet provides a way for creative individuals to get their stuff out without binding themselves to a corporation, and that's a great thing. It's disappointing that so much of the stuff they're getting out merely regurgitates what's already in the mass market. How many half-naked fighting anime dolls do we really need, anyway? But it's the best chance we have for interesting, personalized stories, providing we can find them. For now, the Web is the best way to sidestep the Big Con.

All Talk and No Pictures

ComicCon: A Time of Pros and Cons
I have been out of circulation recently, and haven't posted anything for a while. I just returned from spending a day and a half at the San Diego ComiCon, helping an old friend set up and tear down his booth. It was the first time I've attended the Con in some fifteen years. The changes were remarkable.

I first attended the San Diego Con back in the 1970s. It was held at a legendary run-down (now demolished) hotel from the 1920s called the El Cortez. The center of interests were the Dealers' Room and the guests' rooms. When the Dealers' Room closed everyone moved into the hotel lobby or up into the rooms; people wheeled and dealed, sang "filk" songs, traded, admired each others' purchases, and talked comics endlessly. Of course many also got drunk and rowdy, though in earlier years there was less of that than later as attendance grew.
The last time I attended the convention everything had changed, with even greater changes in the works. The physical setup was different: the Dealers' Room was now a big hall in San Diego's Convention Center. But the convention hotel was right nearby and there was still plenty of community activity. Attendees complained about the commercialization of the Con, but it was still essentially a fan event.

However the transfer of power was underway. "Mom and pop" dealerships (or rather, "just pop," since there were hardly any female dealers) were being elbowed out by big distributers and publishers, while media corporations were setting up booths to promote their s-f and horror projects. Comics were in the process of becoming big business. More importantly, the once largely separate fandoms of movies, comics and science-fiction were merging (thanks in a large part to Star Wars). Former fans had moved into editorial positions at the major publishers, putting a more fan-oriented spin on content and promotion. Movies were making overtures to the geek audience. In short, "pop culture" was beginning its move into the mainstream.

A decade and a half later the move is complete. Pop culture is the mainstream, and it's big, big business. The dealers of yore, with their rows of bagged comics and handwritten "Last Day! 20% off!" signs, have been relegated to a corner of an immense hall several blocks long. Even so, their numbers are small; most dealers this year sold toys, posters, and other tie-in items. Among them were numerous major dealerships displaying items no fan could have afforded in the El Cortez days: original magazine illustrations at $2000 and up, original comic book pages for $8000 and $10,000 each (what ever happened to the $5 bin?).

Now that anime/manga mania has consumed the entire world, the preponderance of dealers sold every conceivable kind of Japanimation item. Books, DVD's, statuettes, art, Pikachu hats (I almost bought one)...you name it. One guy sold authentic-looking (and very expensive) samurai sword replicas. Others sold costumes and props--steampunk was really big this year. And of all the independent publishers, of which there were a staggering number, it's fair to say 75 to 80 percent published manga-style comics.

The increased sophistication in marketing was visible in the fact that even the smallest "artist's alley" table was likely to have a flashy corporate-style backdrop with logo and framed art. This includes the guys whose stuff wasn't very good. I must say, however, that the number of "crud" artists was extremely small compared to years ago. This may be due to the fact that even tiny ComiCon booths are now quite expensive and there's often a long wait to get one. Only artists with some money can afford to present themselves. This doesn't mean they're all famous. Though out of touch with current comics, I still know many of the names and titles. At least half the artists in the alley were unknown to me, as were their characters and publications. My guess is that this is an aspect of how easy it is to self-publish these days. More people are "in print." In times gone by many capable artists and writers remained unseen because getting their work printed was prohibitively expensive. Of course, internet comics provide another opportunity to build a fan base, and some of these may have been electronic projects. I just don't know enough about that end of the business.

Tomorrow I'll go into the heart of the convention: the multinational entertainment corporation trade show. For now it's back to cleaning the garage.