A San Diego Hangover Without Traveling

without travel this time. So, for the first time in 23 years i'm going to be missing the San Diego Media Con and, not to put too fine a point on this, I have utterly mixed feelings about it.

Let me try to explain.

There are rituals and there are rituals. Long after Iron Man #72 introduced me to the idea of attending the convention, then still located in the old San Diego Convention Center in the middle of downtown, I attended my first convention in 1988. I was an unpublished neophyte sleeping underneath my leather jacket on the floor of the Westgate Hotel thanks to the generosity of Ron Lim. I believe that i picked up the splash page to Master of Kung fu #40 that year, as well as watching the classic Gil Kane cover to Iron Man #66 get sold right before my eyes.

Did i mention that it was a heady experience? Oh, and i would have to wait a whole nother year before meeting Jack Kirby for the first time.

This set a pattern. For the next two decades plus I've journeyed each year down to SD for a variety of reasons. And I recall them all for the touch points on my life: meeting Jack for the first time in 1989, hanging with Dringenberg and buying Sandman #8 pages in '91, meeting David Lapham in '92, drinking with Wrightson, Russell and Kaluta at the Omni in '94, signing at the DC booth with my Batman book about to hit the stands two weeks after the con in '00, taking the chance of missing my wife going into labor with our second child in '03. I've been going down there longer than i've been married, had children, pretty much longer than anything.

And this is the first year that i'm not going down. And I'll miss it. But there are a ton of things that i'm not sure i'll miss. I'm going to miss all my long time contacts that i see once a year on that packed convention floor. I'm going to miss the ease with which i navigate those aisles to get where i want to go. I'm going to miss taking down a new pitch as i did with lis fies in '08 and taking meetings. I miss the smell of belonging.

but I'm not going to miss not belonging. This business is merciless, and despite inking part of Palmiotti and Gulacy's Timebomb for Radical, I'm not part of their marketing on the book. No one gives a shit that i did those pages. I got paid well for them, but, lets face it, my ego isn't getting stroked for helping to get the book out.

I want to matter more. I love this medium and as i sip some tequila and draw a bunch of new pictures on paper hoping that some will care and yet caring not because it feels so good to be drawing and having something cool appear out of nowhere on a blank sheet of paper, I miss the getting on the plane with my portfolio tomorrow morning, as i have for 23 year, and landing in the humidity of SD.

I want to contribute to the graphic novel market that i swore would come back in 1996 when i sat in the bullpen at Valiant and tried to convince everyone that the day would come. That the market would eventually accept us. I SAW this, I saw this all. And i wish that i had the time to make more pages, to convert the stories ion my head into physical books faster.

I want to matter more. And its hard not to.

So I won't be be walking aisles of SD this year, critiquing the new hardbacks, trying to figure out which party to crash, which packed san diego restrauant to slide into. Dick's Last Resort will have to do without me.

I want to matter more. And its hard not to.

Fuck.

We Warned You: The Death Knell of the Pamphlet

There is a Seismic Change happening around us in the American Comic Book Industry and, oddly, many of the comic blogs and comic news sites are strangely silent on the topic. The comics Journal is reporting it, and that small niche publications that no one pays any attention to, Publisher's Weekly, is running an article. The rest? Scattered reports here and there. but we should be paying attention to it. I've been talking about this for years, and blogging about it for months now.

Trades have taken over. The triumph of a long time, supportable and marketable form over that slim and rather tatty pamphlet. And the numbers will continue to grow for quite a while, since, as the numbers being reported by Milton Griepp show that we are educating a graphically literate audience who will likely be reading comics, in a square bound format, for the rest of their lives.

We should be paying attention, as this is the sound of plate tectonics happening under our feet. And while the pain of changing the economic model will be felt for a while, we are seeing a long term future for comics that didn't exist 15 years ago, let alone 30 years ago.

Journalista sums the oddity of major comic sites on the web ignoring this change:

Industry analyst Milton Griepp’s assertion that the graphic-novel market was now larger than the comics-pamphlet market, news that met with silence from news-sites far more obsessed with writer Steven King’s tenuous connection to a licensed comic book than an epoch-changing event almost certain to determine what the comics industry will look like ten years from now.

How long has this been coming, and how many years have the publishers been avoiding it? I've posted more than once on the format wars, and how it effects both preception of the work as well as the marketing and warehousing and displaying of the books.

I have gotten into discussion with plenty of long time comic fans over the demise of the pamphlet, and for many people it boils down to needing that weekly/monthly fix for the books, for the cliffhanger, but that doesn't acknowledge the economics inherent in creating a long lasting work, both for the publisher and for the artist.

I cracked open Jane Austen the other night, and ask yourself, should I bother reading Sense and Sensibility if I have to track down the 6 issues to find out what Mr. Darcy is really up to? No, its a contained work with a beginning, middle and end. Is there any reason that I shouldn't be reading it because the author is dead? No, the book is a good read, and will always be new to the person that picks it up tomorrow. So will Maus, so will Dark Knight, so will Watchmen. Can you imagine trying to get an adult to read Watchmen if they kept trying to hunt down all 12 issues of a 20 year old mini-series? The publisher should be able to keep good works in print as long as there is demand, which benefits their back catalog and makes a good artist/author something to potentially live on more than the next paycheck for the next 22 page story.

Welcome to the world of adult publishing, comic companies. It may make you less reliant on gimmicks and endless cliffhangers, but you're creating a long term future for the business and for the readers who care about the medium.