I didn't hear an official announcement but word around the hall was that admissions had hit capacity and had to be capped off in some way. If you tried to make your way down the aisles of WonderCon yesterday, that was easy to believe. It seemed like everywhere I tried to walk, I was blocked by someone's photo-op as folks with digital cameras clogged foot traffic to take pictures of other folks in interesting costumes.
Outside the convention hall, by the way, the key word seems to be "milk." On Friday, there was a person dancing about dressed as the rabbit from Nestle's Quik while associates handed out free samples of chocolate milk. Yesterday, men with huge, refrigerated milk cartons strapped to their backs offered you little cups of soy milk. Today, I'm expecting to get there and see live cows.
The soy milk dispensers were very odd. The men filled little cups for you via a hose and spout that came around from the containers strapped to their backs. In most cases, the spouts were positioned almost between their legs so from certain angles, it looked like they were giving urine specimens. Like some of us needed yet another reason not to warm to the idea of soy milk.
Inside, most exhibitors looked to be doing brisk business…though one small press publisher who flagged me down seemed distraught that he'd been there a whole day-and-a-half and no one had come by to option his character for a major motion picture. If I had to single out trends in the category of New Stuff Being Promoted, I would say that zombies are still big, as is making your character easily mistakeable for Hello Kitty. Needless to add, there are a few entrepreneurs who are attempting to do both with the same property.
I did my four panels. The first was about the history of WonderCon…and I think some in the audience learned that running one of these shindigs ain't as easy as they thought. It was a good panel, plus there was cake.
This was followed by The Sergio and Mark Show. I refer you to this report, though I caution that a few of the remarks attributed to Sergio were uttered by me and vice-versa. Also, our collaborators are Tom Yeates and Tom Luth, despite how their names are spelled at this moment in that article.
Next up for me was a panel on Creators' Rights, which largely amounted to reminding creators that they have rights. A couple of folks in the audience seemed puzzled at the difference between placing your work on the Internet and releasing it into the public domain. These are not the same things even if some who then use your work without permission think so. The panel featured Marv Wolfman, Joe Field, Mike Friedrich and Michael Lovitz and some of us had to explain things like that. (A big question on these panels always seems to be "How do I prevent my work from ever being stolen?" That's a lot like asking how you can make sure that no one ever steals your car. You can park it in the safer places and you can put an alarm on it…but that doesn't mean someone can't steal it. It also doesn't mean that you never really owned the car to begin with or were wrong to try and protect it.)
And I rounded out my panel-hosting day by interviewing my friend of more than four decades, Len Wein. I found out that Len's favorite food is meat loaf. Or was that his favorite singer? No matter. It was a fun chat even if we never got as far as Wolverine.
Back I go for another day of this. I'm enjoying myself and from what I can tell, just about everyone else is, too.