The wonderful Heidi MacDonald of Publishers Weekly has posted her long report on this year's Comic-Con. I agree with darn near everything Heidi ever says about anything but I have to address something about one thing she said in this piece…
It's quite disheartening and demoralizing to look at all the major media coverage of the con and not see a single comics-only project or personality (unless you count Stan Lee) getting coverage.
Yeah, it is. And equally disheartening is to see Heidi MacDonald, whom I adore, write her major overview report on the con without mentioning Jerry Robinson or Russ Heath or Nick Cuti or Doug Moench or most of the comics-only guests or events. In earlier coverage, she mentioned a couple because they were onstage at the Eisner Awards but I think that was about it.
The place was crawling with comic book folks, past and present, and there was plenty of interest in them. They just get ignored in the fan press because, I guess, it's more interesting to cover Robert Downey Jr than it is to cover anyone who ever drew Iron Man. I got Stan Freberg, who is kind of a legend in animation, down to the convention and he was mobbed and we turned away hundreds of folks at the Freberg panel…but that's received nary a sentence in the convention coverage. We had a Golden Age Panel that has gone largely uncovered. I did a panel with comic creators from the seventies that has been noted on one website so far, and a particularly historic panel — the first-ever reunion of the three main "Bob Kane" ghost artists on Batman — that I've yet to see mentioned anywhere online…
…but I sure see a lot of people complaining there's not enough emphasis on comics.
There's plenty of comics content at that event. It's there and if you decided to only attend programming that was wholly about funnybooks, you could do that and easily fill four days…and I don't just mean with my panels. One of the many things I love about Comic-Con International is that they don't just schedule and support the programs and guests who are likely to pack Hall H. They spend money to bring Lew Sayre Schwartz and Jack Katz to the convention.
That's not going to change so I have no complaints in that area. Those folks are getting plenty of attention from the convention. They're just not getting much from reporters, even those who lament that Comic-Con puts too much emphasis on movies and "hot" non-comic concerns.
One actually came up to me on Sunday and started bitching about all the focus on the movies and the Hollywood celebs and such. Now, my attitude about the Comic-Con (oft-stated) is that the con is really a dozen or more cons rolled into one. There's an anime con in that building, an animation art con, a small press con, a Golden Age comics con, a gaming con, etc. Some of them don't interest me in the slightest so I sidestep those aisles and find the con I want to attend. I always seem to be able to find it. Unless you're dying to attend a sparsely-attended gathering, the one you seek is in there somewhere. Don't let all those other conventions annoy you or distract you.
But this guy was upset that so much of the Comic-Con wasn't about comics and he felt, I guess, that I'd concur and would rush off to do something about it…maybe throw Robert Downey Jr out of the hall or something. Instead, I told him about that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that. I then said to this fellow who was complaining about the con not being about that kind of thing, "I didn't see you there."
And so help me, he replied, "I couldn't be there. I had to get in line to see the 24 panel with Kiefer Sutherland."