Part 1 can be found here while Part 2 can be found here, Part 3 can be found here and Part 4 can be found here. Part 5 starts right after the line below and I think Part 6 will be the last part of this series, at least for a while. But don't hold me to that.
If you missed this past Comic-Con in San Diego, you can visit it from afar via YouTube. There are dozens of "walk-thru" videos online now showing what folks experienced while attending this year's gala event. Here are three such videos and as you'll see, they're all pretty long. Comic-Con is a vast environment peopled with unusual beings…
…and if you don't like these videos, you can easily find others. I've watched none of them in full but I've seen enough to know this: None of these even remotely resemble the Comic-Con I attended. I walked down some of those aisles. I saw some of those cosplayers. I glanced at some of those exhibitors and their wares. But I "made" my own Comic-Con — one tailored to what I wanted to see and do — and mine in no way resembled any of these videos. If you were there, you can probably say the same thing.
I am absolutely not suggesting that mine was better than yours or that you would have enjoyed mine. But I started this series of blog posts by saying that to "do" Comic-Con, you need to figure out what you want out of it and then engage in enough research to figure out how and where to find it.
As you've heard ad nauseam, I've been to every mid-Summer multi-day edition of the annual event now called Comic-Con International. This past one was #55 for me. Contrary to what you might think, I did not love every one of them but I loved enough each year to return the following year.
At some point, what I realized was that whatever I hadn't loved was my fault for (a) not getting truly in touch with what I wanted out of Comic-Con and therefore (b) not adequately planning how to focus my convention on that. I also realized (c) that sometimes not getting what you want in this world is a matter of unrealistic expectations. And I even realized a (d), (d) in this case being that I had to fully grasp the concept that Comic-Con wasn't just there for me.
It was, for example, also for people who love Star Trek, a franchise which at no time in any of its forms and incarnations has had the slightest interest for me. It was also for people who loved Tolkien or Star Wars or zombie movies or certain kinds of gaming or even comic books I never liked. There's tons of stuff in that hall and on that programming schedule that doesn't interest me and there's nothing wrong with that…
…because there's way more than enough that does. There are also people around that I just plain enjoy seeing and in many cases, the only time I see them is at Comic-Con.
When I attended the early Comic-Cons, most of what was there was of interest to me. It was mainly — mainly, not wholly — about the comic books I was then following and the comic books I grew up on, all of which were the output of a relatively modest number of publishers. As the years passed, there were hundreds and hundreds more publishers and thousands and thousands of new comic books, most of which I didn't read. In 1970, the first year of what's now Comic-Con International, I probably knew 80% of all the comics then being published.
I'd be surprised if there's anyone who follows more than about 20% of them — and that percentage is probably high. A lot of attendees who love comics have very little interest in the current ones. A lot of those who love the current ones have very little interest in the older ones except sometimes as backstory to the current ones. So even if every single dealer in that hall was selling only comic books and every single program item was about comic books and you weren't even allowed to cosplay unless you were dressed as a character from a comic book, most attendees would not be interested in a majority of what's there to be seen, purchased and experienced.
Of course, that's only one way to look at it. I've come to think that most of what's there these days is about comics — maybe not comic books but comics. Because I've come to feel that the definition of comics has expanded over the years and this is not an original thought of mine. I kinda stole it from the same person from whom so many people stole so much: Jack Kirby.
Not long before Jack passed away in 1994, he saw the redefinition in progress, identified it for what it was and expressed total approval. He always wanted comics to be bigger and bolder and covering more subjects and reaching a wider audience, He especially wanted them to escape the ghetto of being printed on the cheapest-available paper by the cheapest-possible method. He didn't even think they had to be on paper at all.
To Jack, a certain kind of movie was comics — and he didn't just mean a movie about Superman or Spider-Man. He also meant the kind of movie that captured the energy and supercharged storytelling of many comics. He meant films that featured the imaginative visuals that a great comic book artist could create on his or her drawing board. To Jack, videogames could be comics, TV shows could be comics, sculpture could be comics, dance could be comics…just about any means of expression. It didn't have to be something stamped onto newsprint with its narrative conveyed through a series of drawings with word balloons all over them. It just had to be imaginative in the way the best comics were and are imaginative.
And when Jack said these kinds of things to me, I thought: "Well, he's the King of the Comics. He oughta know."
Once I started to think of Comic-Con that way — as a festival of imaginative arts spinning off and around certain fundamentals of comic books and other visual arts like cartooning and animation — I began appreciating it more and more. But I also had to take a hard look at what I was doing wrong…at certain erroneous assumptions and bad choices I was making. I'll try to itemize and explain them in Part 6…which like I said, will probably be the last part of this series, at least for a while. But like I also said, don't hold me to that. I made a lot of mistakes.