comic con leche
That’s me and Power Girl on Saturday down in San Diego. You can check out more photos from CCI 2006 here. We had a really good time, but I think next year we’re just gonna go for it, get the four day passes, stay at the Hyatt down the block and do it right.
This year was cool because we actually attended quite a few of the panel discussions, which were more interesting than one might assume. Whit got a whole new perspective on the various storylines that are going on in the books, and she really enjoyed how the readers are able to give direct feedback to the writers, artists and publishers. It’s a totally different vibe from other shows, where it’s mostly about kissing the asses of your favorite directors and actors--here people criticize the writers, ask about their choices and explain what is or is not working for them. Of course there were the hardcore people who would complain about how Wonder Woman’s eagle was different in this panel of one book than it was in this panel of her own book and why oh why can’t they just get this right? There were some really lively discussions about bringing more diversity into comics, not only as far as the characters were concerned but why the writers were (seemingly) mostly white guys with goatees. One guy asked the panel if Superman still stood for “the American way” to which the writers got really irked by...what is the American way these days? Would Supes support what goes for “American” these days? When one of the guys on the panel asked the audience member if he worked for Fox News, the dude admitted he was an O’Reilly fan, and, when the audience groaned and started sneering, went on to say that maybe Superman should just “stand for the French way, and just surrender every battle” or something like that. The crowd went ballistic and started booing--it was awesome.
Thursday and Friday’s events and talks were a bit more comic related than the rest of the weekend, which had discussions about science fiction in television, discussions of future movies from Marvel and other more consumer friendly media topics. I found an internal document from the convention management--apparently they were expecting 106,000 people to attend the conference over the weekend!
Some good sightings of course. We had a great time talking to Kurt Busiek, who is a really amazing writer and was really cool to us (he signed his book, “To Whitney and Mike -- kinda”), we saw Brian Singer, Stan Lee, Sarah Michelle Geller, Jorge Garcia, Elvira, Grant Morrison...a ton of people. Grant Morrison was particularly entertaining during the seminars--the guy’s a maniac! I could go on but it would be really geeky and there are a lot of other sites out there that will drop the “real” knowledge a lot better than I can, so check ‘em out if you care at all. Oh, we did get some really good pieces of art, which was cool. My big moment was meeting Matt Wagner, who did a quick sketch of Batman for me, signature and everything. I’ve been a fan of his since I was a teenager and have read almost everything he’s written, so that was a pretty big deal for me personally.
On the way back we went to La Jolla, which was really pretty. After walking for hours over the weekend, it was nice to just sit on the beach and read and sleep. Traffic was insane, so we took some side streets to Dana Point, had dinner, then drove back into LA via the coast for a bit.
It was a great weekend, all in all. Apparently it was hot as hell in LA, so I am glad I spent it in relative comfort (along with 100,000 other people) indoors...
By the way, I know that the comments thing is not working. This iComment does not seem to do anything but mess up my page; I am working on it.
Monday, July 24, 2006