Well, I spent more of it on the freeway than I'd have liked. Rolled out of the hotel in San Diego a little after five, pulled up at the old homestead close to Midnight. In there were one stop at a favorite Japanese restaurant (Samurai Of Japan, in the shopping center at 979 Lomas Santa Fe in Solana Beach), one stop in San Clemente for supplies and to let a traffic jam abate, and one stop in Lakewood to get out and walk around the car a few times. Some traffic is described as stop-and-go. This was more like stop-and-stop-and-stop-and-go-a-little-and-stop-again. Anyway, it's nice to be home even though as I write this, my right foot is tapping on a brake pedal that isn't there.
About two dozen e-mails informed me that my Day Two posting somehow disappeared from this site, and one of you (David P. Murphy) was nice enough to send the text of it, fresh from his browser cache. I have reposted it in its proper time sequence.
Only two panels today…so you can tell I've begun sloughing off. First up was the Julius Schwartz Memorial, with Len Wein, Paul Levitz, Elliot S! Maggin, Marv Wolfman, Mike Carlin and Forrest J Ackerman. Forry, who only knew Julie for a hair over seventy years, closed the proceedings by addressing Julie…and showed great affection and trust in his old friend by calling upwards, not down. He said (approximately), "In twenty or thirty years, I'll be joining you and I'll need an agent." Before that, we all swapped stories about the legendary comic book editor…who, by the way, has now been reincarnated as the old guy in the Six Flags commercials. I believe Alter Ego is going to be printing a transcript of this panel and I'll let you know if and when they do…or if not, who does. (We had one nice surprise guest in the audience: Joanne Siegel and her daughter Laura. The widow of Superman's co-creator had only nice things to say about Julie, the long-time editor of The Man of Steel.)
Then I spent 75 minutes interviewing two great comic artists, Frank Springer and Tom Gill. Tom's long and impressive career is chronicled in the new issue of Illustration magazine, complete with testimonials from a small but impressive fraction of the illustrators (mostly but not exclusively from comic books and strips) who apprenticed with and/or studied under this man. Frank Springer deserves a few testimonials of his own but for now, we have to settle for the interview I conducted, which traced his history from assisting George Wunder on Terry and the Pirates, on through drawing on his own for Dell, DC, Marvel, National Lampoon and many more. Two delightful gentlemen.
With such a minimal panel schedule, I was able to wander the hall, which seemed a bit crowded for a Sunday. One comment I heard from a couple folks was that the quality of material in the so-called "Small Press Area" was way up and so, apparently, were sales. In fact, most of the dealers I asked said they were quite happy with the amount of commerce they'd conducted in the past four days.
I enjoyed meeting a lot of readers of this weblog, including many with whom I've exchanged e-mail. Most of you look a lot better in person than you ever did in my mail program.
So I guess that's it for my 35th San Diego Comic Convention…and after the first half-hour on the freeway, it felt like I might as well turn back and wait for #36. That one will take place July 14-17, 2005. If you're going to need a parking space, you might want to leave for it soon.