I read with interest Graeme McMillan's piece on San Diego's Comic-Con International for the sci-fi site io9, as linked to enthusiastically by Heidi MacDonald and questioningly by Tom Spurgeon. Graeme's good people and an old comics blogging hand, but the experience he describes was so different than my own that I all but wondered if we'd attended the same show.

The thrust of Graeme's piece, which to be fair is mostly asserted through other people's quotes, is that it was so hard for the press to cover this year's show that something is clearly wrong with it--that the show has finally "lived up to the complaints" of being too Hollywood, too big, too crowded. Retail giant Chuck Rozanski says "the show is about to lose its crown as the top comics show in America," a commenter at Heidi's blog says "CCI does need to get its act together," Heidi herself argues that the show is primarily for press and marketing at this point, a guy from some SciFi Channel show that isn't Battlestar Galactica (or Ghost Hunters) says it can take fifteen, perhaps as much as twenty minutes to get into a party, and so on.

I heard plenty of press complaints about press passes not doing much and noted this in my show report; even then, fresh from the show, I was chalking up at least 50% of this to press narcissism. Now I'm leaning even further in that direction, because it seems to me that many of the complaints we're hearing and seeing stem from people wanting to do what is no more or less than a job on more or less entirely their own terms, which strikes me as unreasonable.

This was the first show I've "worked," and in order to do that properly I voluntarily made sacrifices. I did less socializing, both during and after show hours. I went to fewer "wish-list" panels, things I wanted but didn't need to attend. I did less eating--regrettable, and I don't recommend it, but I managed. I saved time that could have been spent schlepping to the press room or back to the hotel boat by simly popping a squat on the floor next to an outlet someplace in the Convention Center and filing half a dozen stories that way. I got to my assigned panels and events in advance, and had at least three other people scope out my main wish-list panel (Watchmen) so that I could combine working and waiting in the most efficient way possible. (I even filed a story while sitting in Hall H waiting for the presentation to start.)

And I was but a cog in the massive machine that was Comic Book Resources' presence at the show. CBR honcho Jonah Weiland treated the thing like a small military operation, with a staff of about two dozen people; redundancies and failsafes in terms of panel coverage, personnel, and equipment; rigorously planned schedules and deadlines; prioritization of panels and events; a swing-man (me) to pick up things that fell through the cracks and chase news; off-site reporters and editorial support staff, etc. Lo and behold, he's posted around 175 stories, plus however many blog entries and liveblog entries, with what has to be another 50 or so stories backlogged, and his traffic has now surpassed his main competitor's.

In other words, both myself on a micro level and Jonah on a macro level made choices we deemed necessary to properly cover the Con. Had I instead attended the biggest pop-culture convention in North America--with an attendance level of 125,000 including over 3,000 members of the press--with the expectation of waltzing in and out and around more or less as I pleased, going to everything I felt like going to, filing coverage at the time, place, pace, and level of my choosing, having a full dance card of social events every night and at mealtimes, and planning to cover 400 official programming hours plus however many exhibitors and guests and unofficial tie-ins and parties and whatnot with a skeleton crew, I would undoubtedly be complaining now too.

Moreover, I did what I did with the help of CCI's accessible and accurate panel and event schedule and floor map, and while repeatedly conducting 15-20 minute phone conversations with the organization's spokesman, who literally every time we talked apologized for not being even more accessible. Could the Con have had a better advertised, better located, and (from what I hear) better appointed press room? Sure. Did the lack of one, or any other CCI-based snafu, affect my ability to cover the show at all? No. As much fun as it would have been to relive my salad days of flying in on the corporate account, living it up in my in-room Jacuzzi, cruising from booth to booth and panel to panel on a whim, and gallivanting around the city while half in the bag, I had to do things differently to get my job done this time around, and that's fine. I don't expect the CCI organization, or almost any organization that isn't an all-inclusive vacation resort, to simply hand me my ideal experience, particularly when that ideal is an increasingly unrealistic one.

Meanwhile, I don't know how you look at a show that had spotlight panels for Jim Woodring and Lynda Barry, a show where Drawn & Quarterly and Buenaventura Press made a good go of things, a show where a 22-year-old superhero comic AND an anthology based on the songs of the woman who sang "Silent All These Years" AND new work by the most important pure-comics/altcomix practitioners ever completely sold out, and kvetch that it's in danger of losing its comics bona-fides.

Nor do I see why parties being too crowded is a problem for anyone other than the people hosting those parties and you, the person trying to get in.

Nor do I see any line of demarcation between shows and movies and swag that really have nothing to do with comics of old--like Lost, which during the year it premiered at San Diego had zero comics connections and was relying solely on the nerd-cred of J.J. Abrams and Dominic Monaghan; or the Lord of the Rings movies or gaming, because no matter how many adaptations or tie-ins there have been, these things were there in and of themselves not because of some tangential, tendentious relationship to comics--and the shows and movies and swag that really have nothing to do with comics of today--like The Office or Harold and Kumar, which have at least as much nerd appeal as Wanted if my friends are any indication. Once that door's open, open it wide, I say!

Nor do I think we should even be talking about the comparatively minor issue of the CCI press-pass situation when there's a far more pressing issue regarding the other 122,000 attendees: the sell-outs, and whether the need to be aware enough of the show to buy your tickets weeks or months in advance keeps out the kind of impulse/casual/mainstream attendee who in theory at least represent the future health of this art form.

When it comes down to it I love going to the San Diego Comic-Con; working or not, there's nothing else like it. And I have to admit I find it distasteful to watch paid media professionals insinuate that the most egalitarian, something-for-everynerd art-to-fans showcase in the country undergo a radical restructuring because there's a lot of stuff going on they're not interested in or that doesn't flatter their personal conception of what the Con is for--or worse, saying the whole affair has jumped the shark because they had a hard time getting into panels they just kinda thought it would be neat to see, and then maybe if they felt like it blog a bit about how cute Matthew Goode/Carla Gugino looked afterwards. I'm by no means saying that's the full extent of the complaints, or whether there are other complaints that are much more valid, but this is mostly the read I'm getting based on what I know to have been possible in terms of press coverage of this show, and I am very uncomfortable with slamming the Con based on a wholly imaginary alternative.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)