“In my last Mage review, I said maybe I’d do a little thing about old comic cons versus new. And it’s later, so here we are!
Cons use to come in two basic varieties. There were shitty cons. I don’t mean they were a bad time, I just mean there was not a lot of what I’d call “glamour” to them. These were usually in a Holiday Inn basement (I didn’t even know a Holiday Inn HAD a basement convention center, but I learned. Oh, did I learn). And the only focus was commerce, buying and selling comics. You MIGHT get the occasional bootlegger selling Star Wars Holiday Specials or the self-published dude who happened to live in that city. But for the most part, there were not celebrities, and there wasn’t a lot besides comics.
These usually cost a small, token amount to get into, like $10 bucks or something. Sometimes I paid my cash and then didn’t even spend $10 inside. But hey, you got exactly the goods you were sold: A roomful of comics.
Then there were big cons. This would be San Diego, NYC, and a few others, including Wizardworld Chicago, which I went to after graduating high school. I had a pretty good trip with a good buddy, and this one was a little different. It would still be totally unrecognizable to most people today, but there were a few celebrities there, like the dude who was the voice of Space Ghost, and there were some photo ops, and you could get your shit signed by the authors and illustrators, usually for free! You just had to have the guts to go up to them and ask. I wonder if the, erm, quality of these interactions has gone up, on the artist side, now that you have to buy special tickets and shit. Some people would charge for a picture and whatnot, and I do remember they brought out this super old dude who was an original Green Lantern artist, and of course he made absolute shit money for all his work, so you could get a drawing from the guy for a price that was too high for me, but I was tempted. I didn’t even know the dude, but I felt bad for him. There were a couple other events, kaiju wrestling league, a live gameshow, shit like that. There was also some merch for sale, but the real key stuff was comics.
I didn’t go to cons for several years, and then I went to Denver Comic Con. I won’t say I hated it or anything remotely like that, and all the people there were nice. But they officially changed the name to Denver Pop Culture Con a few years back, and that’s definitely more accurate.
Comic book culture has expanded in some ways, but…I’m not sure if its expansion has been a net positive.
I think it’s awesome that people are into comics now because of the movies and shit. I’m not really worried about the Johnny-come-lately thing or the authenticity of fans. It’s more, for me, that I like comics, and I’m less interested in movies.
I heard an interview with an adult, gay man, and he was speculating about gay culture being sort of absorbed by straight culture. When things like drag shows become normal, when people bring their kids to a drag queen storytime at a suburban library, does that help gay culture, or does that alter what it is? I don’t have an opinion on that as it relates to gay culture, but I saw something like this in another culture, which is video game culture. Arcades, in the 80’s, were seedy places. You didn’t necessarily want your grade school kids hanging out there. And then, probably due to home consoles and gaming becoming a more widespread thing, the culture changed, and arcades were bright, clean places for families. And there are good and bad aspects to that.
My question applies to comic book culture: Does widening comics’ place in pop culture improve and increase the audience and the comics, or is comic book cultured consumed by this much larger cultural juggernaut? Is widening so that you can buy comic book t-shirts at Target a good thing for people who love comics? And is it a good thing for comic books?
From my perspective…it’s not without its problems. For people who really love comics, these new cons are not great. They’re a lot more expensive, it’s harder to get passes, and they’re a lot more crowded. And that’s not due to the comic content. It’s because a television star is appearing. Or there’s a panel with movie stars.
And this means there’s not as many places for the people in the comics world who I consider stars, but who are not a big draw to cons. Writers and artists, people I would LOVE to meet, but who aren’t the draw an Andrew Lincoln is.
My ultimate hope is that comic cons will go niche again. Now that there’s a pop culture con, comics can say, “Fuck it, let’s do our own thing again, just like we did before.” And I think one might find great success with a “meat and potatoes” approach to cons where it’s a comics-first approach. And I sincerely hope that people who’ve experienced pop culture cons will try it out and see if they like it. They might not. But I think some of them would.
Of course, the other big problem is that with the existence of eBay, it’s harder to have a commerce-based con where the primary activities are buying and selling. But I think there are some ways to manage it.
For example, if you live-auction a premiere book, like an Amazing Fantasy 15, and if SOMEONE in that con is walking away with that, you might drum up some interest. If you’re selling dollar books, you might get some collectors filling in series gaps where selling dollar books via mail is tough. If you set up an alley for regular folks to sell off their collections, I think that could provide some interest, and it would give some people who maybe aren’t so hot on computers a chance to show off their stuff.
That’s my admittedly selfish hope. I don’t know if anyone else would want to go to that con, and I wouldn’t try to convince anyone that it was better. Comics culture just used to be more its own thing. Now it’s kind of a component of the Voltron that is geek culture. Maybe it’s time to split apart for awhile. “