First day of the con. Some members of the staff seemed a bit surprised by how many people were in attendance today at what was supposed to be the "non-busy" day. Does this bode ill for tomorrow, which is supposed to be the "busy" day? We shall see, we shall see.
I attempted — foolishly, I might add — to live-blog from the convention floor earlier but a wireless Internet connection I tapped into kept cutting out on me and I lost the post I'd composed. It was a list of folks I'd spent time talking to and it included Russ Heath, Gene Colan, Nick Cardy, Al Feldstein, Al Gordon, Trina Robbins, Steve Leialoha, Tom Yeates, Ernie Chan, Tony DeZuniga, Mike Royer, Paul Power and an awful lot of others whose names were in that list the first time I typed it.
I hosted three panels today and was pleasantly surprised at the turnout for all three. That goes double for the first one, which the con billed as "When Historians Clash," a discussion of comic book history between myself and Gerard Jones, author of this fine volume. We discussed a number of things but kept drifting back to a little-known facet of funnybook heritage which Gerry delved into when he wrote his book. It's how many of the early comic book publishers had previous (and sometimes, concurrent but concealed) careers publishing what then passed for pornography. That was part of, or in addition to, what enabled some of them to get their wares distributed…connections with what some might term "organized crime." Once upon a time, magazine distribution was a pretty dirty business and so, by extension, was comic book publishing.
Later, I did a panel with Sergio Aragonés about our work together and then a panel with Al Feldstein about his work on the classic EC comics like The Vault of Horror and Weird Fantasy. Tomorrow, I interview Nick Cardy on one panel, Gene Colan on another and we have a MAD panel with Al and Sergio. If you can make it for any of these, you'll probably enjoy yourself a lot.
No real news on the convention floor…or at least, none that reached my ears. Nice to meet so many of you who read this silly stop on the World Wide Web, and I hope to see more of you tomorrow.