Comic Con

I went to Comic Con with Naima on Sunday. Actually I went alone while she was home doing her costume (Fiona dressed as Poison Ivy), and met up with her there.

It was rough. I went last year too, and my main objection to the whole thing is that it looks like a trade show. It was just like when I used to work at startups, and they'd send me to trade shows, and there would be these huge booths set up for all the big companies, each one trying to outdo the others, and the little ones all vying covetously for bigger and better booth locations. And all the high-tech geeks milling around, trying out the fancy new gadgets that hadn't hit the market yet, or that were hitting the market right at that moment in a precisely coordinated 'launch' event, timed to correspond with whichever particular trade show it was.

That's what Comic Con is. Same thing. Big booths everywhere, with the major brands all out in force pretending to connect with a fan base they only want to exploit.

The only reason I attended again this year was to see the "Artist's Row" - a special part of the convention area, segregated off from the main area, where actual real artists who have been working on their actual real art, get to set up really tiny booths and show off their unknown works to people who care about that sort of thing.

At least, that's how it was last year. The artists were there, doing their own self-published stuff, or working with a really small publisher to get their stuff out. It was great! All different styles of art were represented; all different levels of talent; all different ambitions for success.

This year, on the other hand.... no. The 'Artist's Row' was just a place for the famous successful artists who had already gotten picked up by the big companies, to sit around and be admired. I'm sure the fans loved it, but I was non-plussed. Where were the little people who worked so hard in the face of obscurity? Where were the artists who were also fans? Gone.

When I met up with Naima, her primary ambition was to meet Ross Campbell, author of 'Wet Moon' and 'The Abandoned'. Really lovely stuff. I've read it too. So we navigated through the thronging hordes to his table and she spoke to him for awhile. He remembered her because she'd done a costume of one of his characters awhile back, and put the photos on deviantart; and he's seen them and posted a comment about how much he liked her rendition. So they bonded over that.

It was a pleasant exchange, and I got to talk to him too. It turns out there will be no sequel to "The Abandoned" because of intellectual property issues that seem unlikely to be resolved. Too bad.

So that was one good experience; and it was also nice to see the various costumes that some of the people wore. Some of them had a lot of thought and ingenuity put into them.

But at bottom, it was just a trade show. Ross Campbell asked me how I was liking the show, and I told him how disappointed I was, and how my whole appreciation for that kind of event was centered around unknown artists showing off the stuff they were working on.

He confirmed that Comic Con was not the place to go for that, and said he preferred the quieter events too. He suggested that the smaller cons would probably have a lot more of what I was looking for.

So yeah. Big revelation. The enormous corporate-sponsored convention is going to be too corporate. I should've put it together before ever attending the first time; but my brain can be slow on occasion, particularly when it comes to anticipating the cultural aspects of something I haven't experienced yet. I know a lot of people who would have immediately and correctly assessed Comic Con without ever having attended. Oh well. My naïveté is also a great strength, so I won't beat myself up too bad about it.

But I think I'll be looking more towards smaller conventions from now on.