I'm just about over my fatigue from Comic-Con…thinking back now more clearly about what a good time I had. I see some grumbling here and there on the 'net from folks who attended and didn't enjoy themselves. The crowds are an ongoing complaint from some quarters and, well…that's what happens when something is so popular. I suppose they could admit fewer people than they do but that would just inflame another ongoing complaint: How hard it is for some to get passes to the con. If you let in fewer guests so the aisles aren't so mobbed and the lines aren't so long, you just increase the vast number of folks who are perturbed because they didn't get to go.
To those of you who hate crowds, I have a simple, can't-miss suggestion: Don't go. This is not going to change. And I probably said this last year (and the year before and the year before) but people keep bitching about this…and they bitch about it to me as if I had any ability to thin out the throngs. In fact, to me part of the fun of Comic-Con is that to be there is to be surrounded by so many people having such a good time. It's better to be one of them than to cut yourself away from the herd by being a sour presence.
Photo by Bruce Guthrie
We had a nice panel on Thursday with Sergio Aragonés and myself. Tom Luth — the missing member of the team that makes comics about Groo the Barbarian — was home coloring something so the three of us talked about our work on that book, and Stan got to talk a bit about his wonderful feature, Usagi Yojimbo. A publication date should be announced shortly for the first issue of the Groo/Tarzan mini-series and another Groo mini-series will be scheduled at about the same time. I think.
Sergio and I talked a lot about our 50+ year friendship and the fact that in all that collaborating, we have had about three arguments. They collectively lasted about four minutes, neither of us raised his voice, and all three were about what Groo would eat in some story. I'm not kidding about that. They were all about what Groo was going to eat in some scene.
I enjoyed that panel. I enjoyed all the panels on the history of Comic-Con. I had a very good time. It's just that after it was over, I felt like I'd spent those hours unloading cinder blocks from a truck in the hot sun…and just writing about the con has made me tired again. More on this tomorrow.