The San Diego Convention Center offers 204,000 square feet of meeting space, approximately 72 meeting rooms and one men's room. No, it actually has plenty of men's rooms but at times it feels like there's only one and it's as far from you as it could possibly be in that facility. The number of meeting rooms is approximate because some of those rooms have movable walls so they can be carved up or combined.
Room 6 is the largest room on the upper level of the main building and it's 4000 square feet if you don't divvy up that space. In the early days of Comic-Con inhabiting that building, I interviewed Ray Bradbury in an unpartitioned Room 6 and it was so big — how big was it? — that about two-thirds of those in the audience couldn't really see us on the stage and had to watch us on huge projection screens hung at intervals from the ceiling throughout the hall.
These days, they chop up Room 6 into three rooms — 6A, 6BCF and 6DE. The largest of these is 6BCF which, depending on how they space the rows of seats, can often accommodate 2,160 audience members, give or take a Klingon or two. Each year on Saturday of the con, we pretty much fill it with two back-to-back panels I host — Quick Draw! at 11:45 AM, then it's almost immediately followed by Cartoon Voices I at 1 PM. There's a fifteen-minute interval between the two which I sometimes refer to as the busiest fifteen minutes of my year.
A lot of people come for Quick Draw!, then stay for Cartoon Voices 1. In fact, a lot of people enter 6BCF during the panel before Quick Draw! to claim good seats for the double feature. In case you're interested, this year the panel before us in there is for the animated series, The Dragon Prince. But let's talk a little about Quick Draw!
Each year, I lasso three cartoonists who are good at drawing under crisis conditions and they're challenged to create silly pictures instantly based on suggestions from The Moderator (that would be me) and The Audience (which might include you). Traditionally, two of the three are usually Sergio Aragonés and Scott Shaw! We plagiarized Scott's exclamation point and stick it at the end of the name "Quick Draw!"
This year, Sergio won't be on the premises. He's in fine health, which is more than I can say for the current nominees for President of the United States — and that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But my buen amigo has chosen to sit out Comic-Con again this year, as is his right, and we hope to have him back next time. Fortunately, we have Scott and two other contenders…
The man on the left is Floyd Norman, often referred to as "Disney Legend Floyd Norman" because he received that prestigious honor. Floyd started with the Disney organization in 1957, just in time to be an "in-between animator" on Sleeping Beauty and he later worked as an artist and/or story guy on 101 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, Mary Poppins and other classic films. He was, as Wikipedia put it, "…the first African-American artist to remain at the studio on a long-term basis."
The gent in the center is Lalo Alcaraz, nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist and the creator of the syndicated daily comic strip, La Cucaracha. Those editorial cartoons of his won him the 2022 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. His work has been featured in numerous museums, galleries and various publications, and his graphic novel and cartoon books include the New York Times bestseller A Most Imperfect Union; Latino USA: A Cartoon History, 15th Anniversary Edition; Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons On Immigration; and La Cucaracha.
And on the right we have Scott Shaw!, who's been my friend since…well, we met at Jack Kirby's house a month or two after Mister Miracle #1 came out. That's how long. Scott was then a beginning cartoonist and not that many years later, he became the professional kind with credits on comic books (including Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, The Simpsons and Sonic the Hedgehog) and TV shows (including Muppet Babies and The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley) and a lot of his own creations. He was also one of the founders of Comic-Con.
These three fellows will not be the only cartoonists on that stage this year. We have a few surprise guests lined-up to draw also. In fact, the whole panel is just one danged surprise after another. They never know what I'm going to tell them to draw and I never know what they're going to come up with. I also don't know what you in the audience are going to tell me to have them draw.
Come early to get a good seat for Quick Draw! because it usually fills all 2,160 chairs in there. Then stay for Cartoon Voices I where six gifted professional voice actors will work a different kind of magic right before your eyes and ears. Its annual sequel, Cartoon Voices II, is Sunday morning at 11:45 AM in Room 6A, which is not as large a chunk of Room 6 so you'll want to arrive early for that one too.