NYComic Industriousness

I got a letter to the editor regarding this blog the other day. "My dear Wetzel," it read. "How come you tease us with mentions of high-profile New York city comics panel appearances only to provide us with nothing but fruity homilies about the beauty of central park and music videos featuring Turkish men in disco outfits?"

It's a good question. I realize I've been a bit remiss when it comes to posting about the actual fun and exciting events in life, such as last week's visit to New York. Many outlines of blog posts unfinished litter the desks and tables of my apartment, tucked into drawers or scribbled on the backs of envelopes and theater billings. Most of these will remain unpublished, and it's probably best this way. But since you asked, I'll go ahead and tell you about my little trip last week.

I went to New York for a business trip, but as far as the comics industry goes, it's hard not to mix in some pleasure, laughs and drinks, and a sunny streak of days made the city a pretty nice place to be. I went to dinner with a couple of the cartoonist on Universal Press's roster, including Mark Tatulli (Lio, Heart of the City) and one of my other heros, Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug). The rest of the time I hung out at our booth at the event or just walked around picking up various comic books and either putting them back down with a polite smile or ponying up for my own copy. It's fun to buy stuff directly from the creators, especially if they draw a little picture for you on the inside cover.

Even though it's larger each year, New York Comiccon is much more endearing to me than the giant one out in San Diego. In San Diego the gaslamp district is literally overrun by freaks, kids, acned manga princesses, 12-year-old Sith lords, paunchy superheroes and people who would probably be wearing a cape anyway. The San Diego event has a glizy Hollywood feel to it, with tons of movie stars, video games and all the pop-cultural cotton candy one can imagine. The New York event, by contrast, is only visible immediately surrounding the Jacob K. Javitz center. Once you've walked a few blocks away, the crowd fades quickly from sight, like an isolated little enclave of freaks in the much larger freak colony that is New York City.

The event gets pretty packed by Saturday, but it's easy to move around and talk to people for most of Friday. I met a bunch of peeps and took part in the panel discussion about the history of comics along with some other folks in the industry. We had a good chat, with a fair amount of lamenting how stagnant comics pages have become.

For example, Mark mentioned that you can't send Beetle Bailey to Iraq because that would totally mess up the universe Walker has created for that strip. And you can't drop Beatle Bailey from the newspapers because an elderly will write in or call and complain. And the kids these days don't read the newspapers, and they're running out of money, and nobody wants to offend anybody. Basically the same old laments as well as a bit of hypothesizing about future profit models. We had a good discussion, but it would have been fun if we'd had time for more than one audience question/rant. As we're often reminded, people don't really care about syndicates. They just want to read the comics they like -- a fact that the new gocomics.com Web site is planning to accomodate with a number of Web 2.0 bells and whistles.

The conclusion, if there was one, was that syndicates will adapt with changing markets. The three or four-panel formats we're used to seeing comics in will carry on for at least a while yet, even as the Internet opens up the playing field to all varieties of creators, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and innovators, several of which are linked to on the "Funny Pages" sidebar on this site, by the way.

I didn't attend many other panels except for a group chat with Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card, who shared some writing advice and gave an update on the Ender's Game movie, which no longer has director Wolfgang Peterson attached ("It will be made brilliantly, or it will be made after I'm dead," OSC said).

I realize that this is probably not terribly interesting so far, so I'll close the Comic Con-related half of this New York post with a few of the most interesting sites I've come across at the conventions I've attended so far in both San Diego and New York.

-- A fat stormtrooper eating a burger in the Javitz center food court, all by himself and looking very tired

-- A fit-looking stormtrooper posing by the crosswalk outside the Javitz center, like an aberrantly attired and futuristically armed member of the Port Authority, occasionally posing with civilians and/or pretending to gun them down while their friends took pictures

-- Along the train tracks outside the convention center in San Diego, a large crowd gathered to watch as a man in a superman outfit "held up" a BNSF train that was stopped on the tracks

-- A zombie walk through San Diego with probably close to 100 people taking part (I've heard rumors of a Westport zombie walk in May, by the way, so keep your eyes peeled and your dead buried)

-- A black Vietnam veteran wearing army fatigures, marching down the sidewalk in the dead of night, saluting invisible comrades and shouting out orders to no one in particular.

(actually, that last one was something I observed from my front porch in Kansas City, but I think it fits in there somehow)

I'll finish up with a few notes about the city and hopefully a few fun-saver pics once I pick those up from the photo place.

In the meantime, I just put some new strings on my old classical guitar so I'll probably be playing that if anybody wants to like, jam or something.