Hope you enjoyed one or more of the panels I hosted for WonderCon@Home and posted here earlier today. They'll be on this website indefinitely so you can watch 'em all when you have time.
I've received a few e-mails from folks who like watching panels like these — not just ones I host — and wish all conventions would share their programming online this way. I expect that day will come but not for a while.
It complicates things a lot. It's pretty easy to just get all the panel participants and those who want to see the panel to schlep up to Room 16A (or wherever) at 3 PM (or whenever) and just do a panel. To put one online, you have to have a camera crew and set up audio and run wires and deal with what happens when attention goes to a screen and make sure there's a good Internet connection, which they don't always have in these places. Someone has to "direct" in some manner.
Wait. There's more. If you show clips from TV shows or movies, there are copyright issues involved with putting the panel online. And some convention centers and hotels have union contracts that mean that union personnel has to be brought in to do much of this.
It all gets very complicated and I'm not saying it can't be done or even that it won't be done…but it won't be the norm for a while.
And there's another matter that concerns me. To explain it, I have to quote something I've posted on this blog before. It's about a guy who approached me one year at Comic-Con in San Diego to bitch that too much of the programming was about things other than comic books and there especially wasn't enough about the history of the art form…
[He] was upset that so much of the Comic-Con wasn't about comics and he felt, I guess, that I'd concur and would rush off to do something about it…maybe throw Robert Downey Jr out of the hall or something. Instead, I told him about that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that. I then said to this fellow who was complaining about the con not being about that kind of thing, "I didn't see you there."
And so help me, he replied, "I couldn't be there. I had to get in line to see the 24 panel with Kiefer Sutherland."
I love doing panels about the history of comics. I love watching them and I love hosting them and I wish there were more of them. And you know why there aren't more of them at conventions? Well, part of it is that a lot of cons don't invite and pay for the kind of folks who would be interviewed for such panels but it's the same question: Why don't they invite more of those folks and why don't they have more panels with them?
And the answer is very simple. It's that comic conventions do not program for empty seats. The above anecdote is about a guy who said he wanted to see such panels but apparently didn't want that enough to show up in the panel room for one. I'm afraid there are a lot of people who are like him. They say they care about comic book history but they don't show up to fill the seats, which is the only meaningful way you encourage conventions to invite more folks of historical significance and to have such panels.
I know there are a lot of these people because they keep saying to me, "Gee, I really wanted to catch that. Did anyone record it?" Sometimes, they say, "I'll have to catch that on YouTube" and they're startled when I tell them it won't be on YouTube because it wasn't recorded…or wasn't recorded for that purpose.
Thousands of years ago when I last went to an actual comic convention, one fellow got somewhat irked when I told him the panel he wanted to see — but had something better to do while it was taking place — would not be available online. He said, "That's important history. Someone should have recorded it." To which I said, "Yes, and someone should have shown up for it." Because like I said, they don't program for empty seats.