This year, 2009, was the first of a few times I persuaded one of my heroes, Stan Freberg, to journey to San Diego and appear at the convention. It was also the year of one of the best "historical" panels we ever did: Three guys who'd ghosted for Bob Kane on Batman, all getting together to talk about what it was like to work for Bob.
On the Sunday Cartoon Voices panel, three of my five announced panelists were unable to make it for one reason or another so the dais wound up consisting of Earl Kress, Jess Harnell, Gregg Berger, Tom Kane and Greg Cipes.
And you'll see a panel down there called "How to be a Cartoon Voice Actor" which we now do annually, though it's now called "The Business of Cartoon Voices." A lot of folks who come to the Cartoon Voices panels want to get into that profession but imparting information to them tended to slow up the C.V. panels and we could not address the topic adequately. So my friend Earl Kress and I started the educational panel and it's on the schedule every year. I bring in some working actors and an agent or two and we tell the aspiring Mel Blancs who show up for the panel how to go about it…and more importantly, how not to go about it. I'm so pleased that several people have now gone from attending these panels to being on the Cartoon Voices panel…and I wish Earl was still around to see that.
We didn't know it at the time but this year would have our last Golden/Silver Age Panel. It started out to be the Golden Age Panel but after a while, it was getting harder to find panelists who'd worked in comics in the 1940s so we quietly changed it into the Golden/Silver Age Panel…but even that was a problem to fill the following year so it went away — sadly…
Sergio Aragonés, Stan Sakai, Tom Luth, Leonard Starr, Ramona Fradon, Jerry Robinson, Gene Colan, Murphy Anderson, Jack Katz, Russ Heath, Marv Wolfman, Doug Moench, Nick Cuti, Steve Leialoha, Sheldon Moldoff, Jerry Robinson, Lew Sayre Schwartz, Stan Freberg, Hunter Freberg, Scott Shaw!, Floyd Norman, Bill Famer, Laraine Newman, Fred Tatasciore, Vanessa Marshall, James Arnold Taylor, Chuck McCann, June Foray, Bill Stout, Mike Royer, Mike Friedrich, George Clayton Johnson, Lee Marrs, David Scroggy, Harvey Kurtzman, Dennis Kitchen, Paul Levitz, Charles Kochman, Nellie Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, Bill Mumy, Steve Saffel, Paul S. Levine, The San Diego Five String Mob, Hank Garrett, Charlie Adler, Greg Cipes, Susan Silo, Tom Kane.