A number of people seem to be laboring under the impression that I'm the Complaint Department for the Comic-Con International down in San Diego. They're all wrong about that and most of them, I think, are wrong in their complaints…or at least, wrong to expect what they seem to have expected. In some cases, it's for the convention to be run largely according to their tastes with little or no attention given over to movies that don't interest them, guests they don't respect, genres for which they don't care, etc. To me, it's all Mexican Food. I may not like it but it doesn't threaten my life that it's there for others who do enjoy it.
Yes, the Comic-Con is no longer exclusively about comics. I'm not sure it ever really was. The fourth or fifth San Diego Con, back in the Paleolithic Era, I attended a very lovely talk by — and then had lunch with — Frank Capra. That was a somewhat more memorable moment in my con-going than any of those panels about how to improve comic book distribution. In fact, as I recall, a lot of those "Industry Future" panels were about how to get our medium recognized as an important one, ranked and reviewed alongside film and television. Maybe it's all one of those "be careful what you wish for" deals but comics now intermingle freely with other media…so freely that the other media feel welcome at something called a "comic book convention." Can't have one without the other.
If you'd like to attend a comic book convention that's only about comics and not about Nicholas Cage and Gwyneth Paltrow, they have them. I attended a great one just a few months ago in San Jose…the Super-Con. There are others and I think some of the complainers who wrote me would have been happier at one of them.
But I kinda think the genie's outta the bottle on San Diego. It is what it is, which is the most successful event of its kind in the world. One of my correspondents seems to think the convention operators should be holding emergency meetings, trying to figure out how to get it all back into the El Cortez Hotel and back down to a 3,000 attendance that includes Jack Kirby and Will Eisner. Ain't gonna happen.
What you can do is what I do, and I know I said this before but it bears repeating, is find your convention in that San Diego monstrosity. It may well be in there but you have to look for it. During one two-hour stretch when for some reason I didn't have a panel, I hiked down to the end of the room that housed Artist's Alley…and yes, I had to machete my way through the videogaming section to get to it. But once I was there, I happily roamed aisles that were busy but not crammed, talking with artists new and old. It was very much like San Diego Cons in days of yore. The only way it could have been more like The Old Days was if we'd all then traipsed down to Denny's for dinner, then hiked back to the hotel to sit around the pool and wonder why there were no women at our convention.