I'm fairly recovered from Comic-Con 2023 where, as I've mentioned, I had a helluva good time. I ran myself ragged at times but it was a Good Tired. Right after the Sunday Cartoon Voices panel, I left Room 6A at 12:55 and sprinted down a corridor with an escort of convention staffers to overrule any security guards who might tell me I had to go via a different route. I stopped in a Men's Room but still started the Frank Miller panel at 1 PM sharp. Pant, pant, pant.
A couple of security guards gave me some grief at the con, and I also had some friction with folks who were doing panels in rooms before I was scheduled to do one. You're supposed to end the panel as per the schedule and I always do. But a lot of them think their panel is so f'ing important that it's entitled to five or ten minutes of the next panel's time. At times, I think they see more people coming in and they extend their panel a little bit. They think those new arrivals are there to see their panel instead of entering to get good seats for mine…just as I could delude myself into thinking the late entrants into my panels aren't just arriving for the one after me.
But that's about the totality of the negatives and it ain't much.
People ask me, "How can you deal with the crowds?" and the answer is that I couldn't handle a steady diet of them but four or five days a year is tolerable. It's especially tolerable when most of the folks who comprise that crowd are having such a good time. It's fun to be around happy people. They're also an indivisible part of something enjoyable enough to attract a crowd. If I wanted to go to the World Series or the Super Bowl or the big Las Vegas Grand Prix this November or some sold-out concert by someone wonderful, I'd just accept that I'm not likely to have the place to myself. If I want that, I need to go to lousier events.
The above photo is from The Groo Panel on Friday. It's me and then our new colorist, Carrie Strachan, then Stan Sakai.
I didn't spend a whole lotta time in the main hall; didn't even set foot in there Saturday or Sunday. It was easy to see on the other days that the sellers were doing brisk business and that most people were having a very good time. I signed a couple of Groos for a fellow from Lisbon who said that he'd been saving for years and dreaming of finally, some day, making it to Comic-Con. I asked him, "Worth it?" and he said, "When I get home, I start saving to come back some day."
No way can I pick one moment from the con as my favorite but this would be in the running: I had the pleasure — and it really was one — to interview Barbara Friedlander, who worked on DC's romance comics from around 1964 until 1970. She was delightful and funny and genuinely pleased that people turned out to hear her.
Once upon a time, my Comic-Con experiences involved interviewing men (and the occasional woman) who'd worked in comics in the thirties, forties, fifties or sixties. You name 'em, I got to interrogate 'em…but now they're either gone or too old to travel to the convention. Even folks from the seventies are in scarcer supply then you might imagine. I suspect that of the 130,000+ human beings who were in that convention hall a few days ago, Barbara had the oldest credits in mainstream comic books. If there was anyone else, I can't think of who it could have been.
And above now, we have the Quick Draw! panel from Saturday. The back row is me, Bill Morrison, Lalo Alcaraz and Lonnie Milsap. Front row is Tom Richmond, Scott Shaw! and Floyd Norman. I have no idea why we're making those strange gestures or why Scott has the expression he has. But the panel was a lot of fun and we did have Sergio Aragonés but only on the telephone. I started it by announcing, "We don't need movie and TV stars! We have CARTOONISTS!"
I'll probably write another post this week about the Cartoon Voices Panels. I'm getting a bit sleepy since I'm still on San Diego Time.