It is now almost a full week after the convention, and I am still worn out. I stayed up later and got up earlier, walked more miles carrying more weight, pushed my way through more people than I have… well since last year’s con. But despite my physical fatigue, the convention was a rejuvenating experience. Emotionally and mentally, my faith in comics has been reaffirmed in a number of ways.
First of all, Artist’s Alley served as a beautiful reminder of why we should advocate comics. For those who don’t know, at most major comics conventions, there is a section of the con floor devoted to small press folk. These are people who do comics for the love of the medium above all else. I met people like Chip Zdarsky there, writer of a fantastically twisted book called Prison Funnies, which is basically like Oz but funnier. People like Chip toil in obscurity yet remain dedicated to the stories they want to tell (and in Chip’s case, it’s a perverse kind of enthusiasm). Their devotion is a testament of the greatness of comics.
I also spoke with other creators outside of Artist’s Alley about their work very briefly, and all but a very few were enthusiastic and personable. One prime example that people can’t stop talking about is Craig Thompson, writer and artist of Blankets from Top Shelf. The Top Shelf booth had a line all weekend long because Craig was there selling his book. When you bought a copy of Blankets, Craig would sketch in it, stamp it, and sign it, and all the while he would chat with you, about you. Meeting Craig Thompson was one of the best con experiences I’ve ever had, and I came away from it and similar creator meetings with a higher regard for the medium.
I saw very little of the egos you normally see in other mediums like with actors or athletes. Sometimes I hear that at cons the big names act like they’re above it all, but I really didn’t see that. Mark Millar bought me a drink, and both Brian K. Vaughan and Brian Michael Bendis acted as glad to see me as I was to them. Alex Ross and Jim Lee even—two of the biggest of the big name artists who both have reps for being a bit testy at times and who you could really see acting arrogant—both of them struck me as very giving to the fans. Sure you had to have armbands to see them, but that was out of necessity to the sheer demand their signatures commanded. They both cheerfully signed for people and posed for pictures without any apparent display of conceit.
The breadth of material available at the con proves the depths the medium is capable of. It didn’t take much of a search to find a vast realm of comics outside of superheroes. Now sure, the majority of the dealers only sold mainstream books (or actually toys based on the TV shows based on the mainstream books). But there are others out there (like a booth called Mostly Independents) that were very grateful for business and sold plenty of stuff outside the mainstream. I bought my issues of Teenagers from Mars from them and was incredibly grateful to have found them.
Best of all was the power of the people. The fans themselves that I met, every one of them, were incredibly positive and welcoming. Denny Hayes, Bendis boards mod and internet maven extraordinaire, noticed me walking by on Sunday and stopped me to chat for all of two minutes. I met a great deal of Millarworld posters, and all were very nice. Lately the ‘Net comics community has been getting a bad rap for being negative, but that has not been my experience at all.
Every single person I met at the con, fan and pro, were incredibly cool, and my encounters with complete strangers I passed while walking around were extremely polite. I bumped into people often while lugging around my bags of loot, and many times the people apologized to me as profusely as I did to them. Etiquette was in full force.
And is it bad of me to admit that I was surprised how many women I saw at the con this year? The sheer volume of people at the con this year (definitely an increase over last year) is a good sign for the state of the industry, but the fact that so many were women, when comics used to be considered inaccessible to lady-folk, was definitely encouraging.
In the end, it just made me think: What other medium offers this? No other type of entertainment has a sense of community that is this welcoming and diverse (despite reports to the contrary). No other form of literature offers this much contact with the stars of the medium, stars that know and respect their fans, that are as devoted to the medium as the fans themselves. Nothing else can do what comics do… and the convention reminded me of that fact.
