Hard to believe it's less than three weeks away. Everyone I know who's attending is, first of all, asking "Didn't we go to the last one, like, two months ago?" And secondly, they're looking forward to it. I sure am. For those of you wondering, the programming schedule will be up soon and on it, you'll find thirteen events either hosted or co-hosted by Yours Truly. They include the annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and one in memory of the late Gene Colan. There's Quick Draw! (Saturday morn at 11:45) and two of our gala Cartoon Voices panels (Saturday at 1 PM, Sunday at 11:30 AM), plus a longer-than-last-year panel Sunday afternoon about how to break into the field of cartoon voicing. Marv Wolfman and I are co-moderating spotlights on Paul Levitz and Roy Thomas and there are a number of other fun events.
Early warning: There will be no Golden Age Panel this year. I kinda doubt there will ever be one again. To those who complain about this, I have a simple reply: "Fine. You find me 4-6 people who will be at the convention and who worked in comics before around 1960." If there are such folks, I don't know about their presence at the con. At the moment, I'm only aware of two…and two is not a panel, especially since one of them (Jerry Robinson) will be the subject of his own spotlight interview on the schedule. (The other, before anyone asks, is Ramona Fradon.)
The annual Golden Age Panel used to be a treat. In fact, the thing that was once wrong with it was that it had too many Golden Agers on it. Someone had the idea that the Golden Age Panel should include everyone at the con who'd worked in comics during that glorious era so they just put everyone on it. The first of those panels I was asked to host had, I think, about eighteen panelists…and since two of them were Julius Schwartz and Gil Kane, sixteen great writers or artists didn't get much chance to say anything.
One of the things I learned early about running panels on any topic is that you have to keep the number down. Six is a good number. Five is okay. You can get along just fine with four if a couple are decent talkers. Seven is pushing it.
If you get up around seven or above, you don't just lose the audience. You lose the panelists, especially if they don't have an awful lot in common with one another. They go so long between opportunities to speak that even they don't pay attention…and if the bodies on the stage aren't paying attention, the audience sure won't. So the year after I got stuck with that 18 (or so) member gang bang, I told the programming folks that I'd take over the panel on an annual basis and even program it if they'd let me whittle it down to a manageable roster. This was done and there was much happiness, even from potential panelists who thus were excluded some years.
The one exception? Julie Schwartz. He kvetched something awful whenever we had a Golden Age Panel without him on it. He'd sit in the front row and participate unofficially to the point where I'd just give up and invite him up onto the dais. One year when he couldn't attend the convention due to a problem with his legs, he called me several times in the weeks before the con to ask why he couldn't appear on the panel via phone from New York. Today, I'd take him up on it.
But that was then, this is now. A bittersweet aspect of those panels flowed from the fact that the average panelist was in (approximately) his or her late seventies. We had a few panelists in their nineties. Each year when I went to assemble the Golden Age Panel, I'd note that someone on the previous year's dais had passed and several others were no longer well enough to fly out…or interested. There are more Golden Age writers and artists alive than you might think but very few who journey far to conventions.
When the talent pool began to get shallow a few years ago, we quietly changed the event to the Golden and Silver Age Panel so as to incorporate folks who'd worked in comics in the sixties. For your information, I define a Silver Age creator as anyone who was in comics before me. That's a joke but it coincides approximately with how others would define it. I started in 1970 and most would say the Silver Age ended between 1968 and 1970. Alas, I decided that extending the cut-off into the Silver Age would still not yield a decent panel this year so I made the decision not to have one. Before a certain person I know starts blaming the convention, let me make clear that this was my recommendation. The con actually cleared room on the schedule for a Golden Age Panel and we're instead using the time 'n' space for the Gene Colan Tribute. That same day though, we will have a panel of comic creators who broke in during the seventies.
I'll be telling you more about the programming — my hunk of it, anyway — in the weeks to come and I'll let you know when the full schedule is online. I highly recommend taking the time to browse it and make a list of panels and presentations you might like to see. Several will be scheduled opposite each other…but you won't be able to get into everything anyway. Last year I mentioned that there were some folks who'd taken to just following me around. I thought they were avid fans who'd discovered that was a great way to see the best program items at the convention. Now I'm starting to wonder if they aren't just Homeland Security agents who think I'm up to something.