Beginning June 22nd, you'll be able to hear the Secret Origins of Comic-Con International on a Sirius XM radio podcast mini-series called Comic-Con Begins. In fact, you'll be able to listen to it for free even if you don't subscribe to Sirius XM radio. It'll be in six parts with bonus episodes later.
A nice, smart gent named Mathew Klickstein interviewed dozens of us who were at or around the early Comic-Cons and I suspect there will be overtones of Rashomon in there. He wisely lassoed the lovely actress Brinke Stevens to do the narration and you'll hear her, you'll hear us and you'll hear audio artifacts (excerpts from speeches, commercials, etc.) that will give you some sense of how and why this astounding annual-when-there's-no-pandemic event came to be.
One educational point! I suspect a lot of folks who gripe how Comic-Con used to be just about comics and is now about movies will be amazed to learn the following: That it was always trying to be somewhat about movies…and science-fiction and other related arts.
When we get closer to 6/22, I'll tell you how and where to hear it. Right now, you can listen to a brief teaser over on this page.
I'll confess here that the teaser makes me a teensy bit worried that the documentary will lean a bit too far into a notion that has long bothered me about comic book fandom. It's this acceptance — to the point of almost sounding like a brag — that we are a merry band of misfits and outcasts from society who found each other. It's the caricature of comic fans (or s-f fans or Star Trek fans, etc.) as bespectacled guys who live in their parents' basement, confuse fantasy with reality and couldn't get laid to save their pathetic lives.
I don't like words like nerd and geek and dweeb. I don't like hearing them applied to any group, especially one that includes me and my friends.
In a lifetime perhaps longer than yours of being around people who get described as such I've never felt it was valid…or at least any more valid than it was of any assemblage of folks of like specialized interests. When I was in high school, it was as true of the males at University High who didn't read comics as it was of the ones who did. There were some who if you made an 80's teen comedy film about them should have been played by my pal Eddie Deezen…but not many.
I really don't get why so many of my fellow followers of comics and allied art forms seem to self-identify with that view of us. Humility can be a good thing but I don't think it's healthy to think of one's self as a permanent member of some loser breed. In and around comics, I have met people who are brilliant…and not even just brilliant at comics — brilliant at whatever they've chosen to do in life.
Every year when there's Comic-Con, I get a few calls and e-mails from strangers and near-strangers who want to know if I can get them in. Last time there was Comic-Con, one fellow called me and asked if I could get him passes to "Nerdtown" because he wanted to get his "dweeb" on. Or maybe he wanted to get into "Dweebtown" to get his "nerd" on. I forget. I told him, "Even if I could get you in, I wouldn't."
I'm probably worrying needlessly that the Comic-Con Begins podcast will do that to us. But next time some form of Comic-Con convenes, which is looking more and more like the day after Thanksgiving, someone will. We have to stop letting them do that to us and we really have to stop doing it to ourselves.