Jiggety-jig. Bad flight up and much trouble with the Internet connections at the hotel…but I have nothing but good to say about this year's WonderCon, held this past weekend in that city where Tony Bennett left his heart. Also: Carolyn and I ate almost every meal at the Canton Seafood Restaurant over on Folsom, a few blocks from the Moscone Center, and had great food. (So did all the friends from the convention we dragged along with us.)
The convention itself was so nice that I especially regretted missing Day One. I won't list all the folks I talked with because that gets boring but it was the kind of con where every time you turned around, there was someone you wanted to meet. And if you were just there to shop, the exhibit hall probably didn't let you down. I never made it to some aisles but the ones I walked were teeming with goodies. (Hey, here's a free thought that might make someone a nice piece of cash: Has anyone at a large con ever set up a booth for shipping? It would be like, "Make your purchases elsewhere, bring 'em to us and for the cost of postage/FedEx plus a small fee, we'll take care of shipping them to your home." I saw lots of stuff I might have bought but I didn't want to deal with lugging it all around the convention all day, then back to the hotel — in the rain, no less — and cramming it into my already-crammed suitcase, which was already near the airline weight limit.)
Mood of the con? Hard to say. As usual these days, there may be more interest in upcoming movies about comic books than in the comic books, themselves.
Hey, I'll make a prediction here and you can check back in a year or so and see if I'm right. My prediction is that very soon, the major companies — the ones that own or control characters of which a lot of folks would say "I loved that when I was a kid" — are going to experience a very real, impossible-to-ignore revulsion at some of the more warped interpretations. There was a time when DC, Marvel and others that took their leads from those companies were probably a little too fierce about the idea that there was one way to draw Superman, that there were certain things that Spider-Man shouldn't do or which shouldn't be done to him. Now, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far towards the notion that uglifying a character or building a mini-series out of some aberrant change in his or her mythos or life is saleable.
I'm not talking about regressing anything back to the way it was in 1964 or whenever. It is certainly possible to rethink an old concept and come up with the 2008 version, and some properties probably should exist in the "now." But what makes a great property great is a certain set of creative choices and constants…and if you make every single one of those subject to interpretation (or just plain inversion for the sake of a "stunt"), you dilute the basic concept down to the point where it loses its impact. Often, it's interesting to wring an interesting variation on the norm but if you wring enough of them, it can sometimes become difficult to even know what the "norm" is.
That's one of the things that struck me as I looked at some displays in the exhibit hall. Another was that I don't have the storage space for all the fine, hardcover art and strip reprint books I'd like to own. Yet another was that some industrious folks are producing some amazing books and art pieces and merchandise that I only see at conventions…which I guess brings me back to my idea about a service that would ship your purchases home for you.
So, all in all, a great WonderCon once we got there. I hope you got there, too. If you didn't, try to get there someday.