As the cool light of day starts to warm sleepy San Diego, I struggle to collect my thoughts about the convention over the last weekend and to shake off the effects of a half-dozen White Russians (or caucasians, if you will). This year’s San Diego Comic Con was the best for me ever in some ways. I think I even learned a few things.
The show started slow for me with myself, Brad Thomte and Bill Willingham rolling in from Las Vegas in the afternoon on Tuesday. While Bill was off to dinner with his Fables editor the charming Shelly Bond, Brad and I set off for drinks downstairs at the Hyatt bar. I was supposed to catch dinner with Thom Zahler who I lean on heavily for graphic support and occasional sage advice. Who should walk in but Mark Buckingham, artist extrordinaire and FABLES penciller. When Thom arrived, we four caught a cab to a nearby restaurant and chatted our time away before ending up back at the Hyatt for more drinks after dinner.
On the Wednesday before the San Diego show, everybody is in their own world. Freelancers and fans need badges. Vendors need just a little more time to set up their booths because the doors open at 6PM for the ‘Preview Night’. We started the morning with breakfast with Shelly and she was glad to have Mark Buckingham and Willingham in the same place for the first time at the show. And here I can let you in on a little secret. Meetings, meetings and more meetings take place between freelancers and editorial staff as the next year’s worth of comic books are planned. Projects are pitched, shot down, and retooled to be pitched again to someone else. Some freelancers love to come to the show for the spectacle of it all and some come just to line up work for the next year. The thing is, most of the meetings are planned a long way in advance. Many freelancers feel ‘scheduled within an inch of their lives’ by their publishers.
Me, I took a nap.
Sometime before 4PM, I wandered over to the convention hall and looked around for the booth where Thom graciously let me hawk some of my books. He was set up with Paul the owner of Pop Fun Merchandising and maker of the fine Toon Tumblers glasses. I introduced myself and helped Paul get ready for the show and when Thom came by, I set a small rack of books on his shelf. The PANTHEON trades had still not come in. They did arrive air freight from Hong Kong in time to be out for sale on Thursday, but the cost of the shipping limited me to one case which was really all I needed. You really consider how much of a product you can sell when the air freight cost per case is $275.
So, the Wednesday night crowd crushed into the hall devouring product the way Godzirra eats those little Japanese trains. I watched Thom pitch his wonderful series Love n Capes to person after person and by the end of the show I could sell it as well as he could. After the show closed at 9PM, we wandered out to dinner again, joined by Brad Thomte, the wise-beyond-his-years retailer Randy Lander and eventually Chip Mosher and some other guys from the Boom Studios booth. (And Chip has spies reading the web for mentions of the company. They may be looking over my shoulder even as I type. <Everybody waive to Chip!>)
Thursday morning, the case of books showed up from Hong Kong and I could stop in to pick them up from the Business Service office as soon as they opened. But first, I was kindly invited to breakfast as a part of the pre-FABLES meetings. So, I inhaled eggs with Buckingham, Willingham, their editor Shelly Bond and of course the ever-charming Brad Thomte. The service was weak and the wait was long so by the time I got to the Business office to get the box from HK, I was running late. After paying the $10 to get my books (yes, the Hyatt charges you to receive your packages there), I headed out to the show floor and racked out some books.
Some time during the tail end of the day, I tried to get into the Dexter panel. I walked to the door of the room where the cast and crew would be giving a talk and then I saw the line. Then I walked and turned a corner and another corner and another and there was still a line as far as the eye could see. There was also a security guy telling people that the people waiting would not get in even if they lined up, but people were lining up like someone was giving away winning lottery numbers. I dragged my way back to the booth. If you have to spend an hour in line to see an hour’s presentation then only half of the programming is accessible.
Thursday night was the night of the Clockwork Dinner. Years ago, Willingham and I started a tradition of making it to the Ruth’s Criss Steakhouse on Harbor every time we were in town for the show and this time Matt Sturges, Chris Roberson, and Brad Thomte came along making it a quorum of the Clockwork guys. We kicked around a project or two and listened to a hilarious take on the Star Trek universe by Roberson. After dinner, we cabbed it back to the Hyatt for more drinks. The bar at the Hyatt was the home of the Boom Studios party and I drank like I had just walked from in El Paso.
Friday at the show was insane. Since Willingham was not in the list of Fables creators up for an Eisner, we all caught dinner at AquaBlue and had a generally fine time. This time Buckingham caught up and hung out as well. Later at the bar, I ran into my old pal Derec Donovan and he pointed me at the wonder that is Bobby Diaz. I wandered that way and we hugged and chatted and I finished my Guniess. While waiting at the bar, Bobby started chatting with a guy I recognized and I joined them. The ‘guy’ went on about how Bobby looked enough like Robert Loggia to be his son. We agreed and then I cautioned them against owning a HD TV and watching the Sporanos. Some heads are not meant to be seen the same size as a beach ball. After we left, Bobby asked me who that was and I answered Bob Burden, creator of Flaming Carrot and the Mystery Men. A few drinks later and totally at random, Bobby was hanging on my shoulder imploring me as only a drunken artist can and making sure that I understood him. He said, ‘don’t quit inking, man’ a few times and when I told him I had no plan to quit drawing, he repeated himself. And I repeated myelf, but in a slightly different way and so it went until I drifted up-elevator to sleep.
On Saturday, Bobby claimed to have very little memory of the conversation. He dropped off a few pages and I paid him what I owed him for the work and went back to hawking glasses. Sometime on Saturday after the show, I walked in a daze to the Hyatt and met Marv Wolfman while I was hanging with the bulk of the Clockwork Crew. Then I went up to my room and by accident, I stared into THE ABYSS and it called my name. I ran some numbers and fell into a funk that lasted until maybe this morning. (Some ghosts are hard to shake.) But in the face of the darkness, I came to some realizations and that clarity informed my conversations for the last day (and night) of the show.
Sunday started slow and ended with the hardest work of the show. During the set-up for the show, you schedule the amount of work against the deadline for the opening of the show so you can proceed at a reasonable pace. Teardown is exactly the opposite. As soon as you’re done, you get to go home. There is that carrot of sweet release to get you to work like a fiend. And, there is the prep for next year. I know of one small publisher that is holding onto their booth space to the dismay of the Alex Ross booth workers. (Is it my imagination or is Alex Ross just doing painted versions of Wayne Boring’s Superman? Are they Boringesque?) Anyway after 5PM, I helped Paul tear down his display and pack away the unsold tumblers. I helped Thom load his stuff out to the waiting car of the ebullient Bob Ingersoll and they were on the road.
After a bit of wheeling and dealing, I retired to my room to get some rest before the suite party. For the second year in a row, Willingham threw a party so that the people who had worked 50 hours in 5 days could get a bit of rest before heading home. A good time was had by all including far too many guests to name here. I bailed at 1AM and missed the guest appearance by Chip Mosher that I had waited for. But by then I needed the sleep more than the company.
Early in the AM on Monday, I started this post before heading over to Willingham’s room for one last sit down with Buckingham and Sturges and Thomte before the spell of the show finally broke. This note finished on Tuesday night after seeing the Dark Knight again. And taking a nap.
Anyway, I came to some overarching conclusions based on my observations at the show…
1) The growth of the San Diego show is over. Meaning, there is no more room to grow, it is capped. While the Hyatt can add rooms and floors, I don’t see the convention center growing a single bit. The convention floor was full of people spending cash and trying to get jobs. Jeff Parker described it like he was a mouse caught in a pinball machine. I know that my two attempts to cross the convention floor during the heat of the show was a miserable experience. People with full bags of carp would stagger a few steps before coming to a dead stop in the middle of the aisle. For a hothead like me, it was a vision of purgatory.
2) Publishers do not go to the shows to get rich, they go to get readers. Most if not all of the publishers I talked to were just praying to cover most of the cost of doing the show. On Sunday night and after a few beers, Fletcher Chu-Fong told me that DC goes to the show for the fans. They promote the upcoming books and take advantage of the chance to interact with the fans to keep them happy for the rest of the year. At least that is what I can remember of what he said. I was drinking. The soldiers in Artist Alley and the vendors selling back issue comic books and trade paperbacks sometimes spend all year getting ready to profit from that San Diego show. Publishers bank afterward if they are lucky.
3) Small operators will continue to get squeezed out. For 2008, a corner booth (after early bird discount) is $2250 for the full show. On top of that, throw in $1000 for travel and shipping for the product sold, another $1000 for hotel costs and a touch more for food and surprise ‘problems’ and you have to do $5000 in sales to break even for the expense of doing the show. Not to mention the manufacturing cost of goods sold. Try relaxing with a $4 Coke. As a mostly webcomic guy, I had a hard time selling air or floating digits. I noticed a lot of smaller webcomic guys absent from the show. (That was not an invitation for tiny webguys to tell me how large they really are.) Expressed another way, the DC booth can compete with the SciFi Channel booth. I cannot.
I have other opinions that I cannot commit to print because they will negatively impact people that put some trust in me and in some cases, I know that I do not have all of the facts. I don’t want to pick a fight with bad information.
To sum up, the San Diego Comic Convention will continue to be expensive, cramped, crowded with high end booths that promote projects with a tenuous connection to the comics medium. But I ran into Marv Wolfman a couple of times and he might even write a blurb for the next PANTHEON trade. You can’t get that done anywhere else. Ah, San Diego, a necessary evil.
