Home and Happy

I didn't run into my pal Mark Waid at Comic-Con but he's reporting he has COVID, whereas I am still testing negative. The convention did everything possible, short of calling off the whole event to keep folks healthy but with 130,000 people (give or take a cosplayer) crammed into one building, there couldn't help but be some infections. None of us, of course, spent every minute of our San Diego stays in the convention center. We were in hotels and restaurants and off-site events and at parties that weren't as diligent.

If it turns out I totally avoided The Plague, it might be because I mostly avoided the main exhibition hall. I was in there for about 90 minutes on Friday and not at all on Saturday and Sunday. What I couldn't avoid was getting so tired that once I got home to my own bed, I decided to take a brief nap, woke up seven hours later, then went back to bed for six more — and I'm a person who's usually fine with five hours a night. For me, thirteen hours is one short of a coma.

I was exhausted every minute of the convention so if you came to Quick Draw! or a Cartoon Voices Panel or any of the events I was on and you heard me slurring words or using the wrong ones, that's why. I wasn't drunk. I wasn't ill. I was just fatigued from the moment the hotel made me park my car in a lot so remote that I could hear music from Tijuana brothels and then we had to shlep our suitcases up to the room owing to a dearth of bellhops. I am not thinking of not attending Comic-Con again but I'm sure going to think of ways to make it less tiring. Fewer panels might help but having them closer together would be better.

I did enjoy the panels, especially Quick Draw! (which managed to be pretty funny despite its dearth of Sergio), the two Cartoon Voices panels and the Jack Kirby one. Here's a shot of the Saturday Cartoon Voices Panel.  I'm the guy in the green shirt who looks like he's falling asleep…

Photo by Bruce Guthrie, of course.

The other folks in the back row are Shelby Young, Brian Hull and Townsend Coleman.  In the front, left to right, we have Alicyn Packard, Phil LaMarr and Gregg Berger.  Brian is a new guy in the business who's getting lots of jobs he can't talk about yet.  He's the one responsible for this video which has 1.6 million hits so far…

To anyone who wonders, "Why can't he talk about what he's doing?" — as I explained on both panels, voice actors are often under NDAs…which stands for "Non-Disclosure Agreements." They've done a job for a producer or videogame company and that employer doesn't want the project or the actor's involvement in it publicized yet. So the actor has to agree not to disclose that involvement until the company announces it as per their own schedule.

Later Saturday afternoon, I got to spend an hour interviewing my pal Phil LaMarr. I enjoyed it very much even though as you can see below, I really wanted to sneak off to my room and grab a nap…

Photo by You-Know-Who

What Phil is holding is an Inkpot Award which was presented to him by Comic-Con at the beginning of our chat. Inkpot Awards have been presented by the convention since 1974. I got mine in 1975 and there was a point in the con's history where I thought they were kind of meaningless and silly…which is far from the only opinion I've had which I later decided was meaningless and silly. Many times when they've gone to the right people at the right time, they brought a lot of joy and satisfaction to their recipients. And that's neither meaningless nor silly.

I need to go resume my post-convention hibernation so I'll leave you for now. More on the con in the days to come.