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ivyficYou remember my drawing of the line for last year's New York Comic Con? Well, today I got to Javitz at ten and saw that the line was outside the building. It went from approximately the middle of the building (circa 35th Street) down to 34th then back up to 40th Street where it turned West for half a block. So I it took me twenty minutes to walk to the convention…and then twenty to find the end of the line. At this point I called ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trakkie and made her very glad she hadn't come.
The line only took a little over an hour—everyone in it had a ticket, so we were basically just bottlenecked trying to get in. And although there are many more doors to the Javitz center than the one they were letting us through, I can't fault this plan. It meant that once you were in, the flow of people was pretty easy to navigate. You could go to a panel, bop up to the booths, and get back for another panel in a half an hour, a feat which was just not possible last year.
The rooms for the panels were also much better set up (AV equipment that works! Yay!), and they assigned rooms of appropriate size. There was none of the "let's but the twelve most popular names in comics in a room that seats twenty and see if the fans at the door will start death matches to get in" stuff that they did last year. And no showing up at a door and being told you needed a special ticket. I didn't try to go to any of the celebrity things, but it looked like people were getting into those OK, too.
Most surprising of all—the panels were actually good. Last year I went to maybe two panels that were interesting over two days at the con and spent the rest of the time hearing the same damn Tokyopop pitch or being subjected to pretentious nonsense so boring the panelists were falling asleep (see last year's report). This year, they had a lot more panels scheduled with interesting topics, and a lot fewer "We're VIZ and this is our fall line-up" panels.
The crappy panel
The first panel I went to was the worst—"Drawing Heartache." I only went because the author of "The Squirell Mother" was supposed to be there (a book that I reviewed and absolutely adored), but she didn't show. Instead it was two artists I'd never heard of talking pretentiously about independent comics. "It's only the artificiality of so-and-so's drawing, that self-referentially calls attention to itself, that allows it to access the core emotions…" "Peanuts is as emo as they come—it's the agony of adult life reflected into childhood and held up for ridicule." "Oh, I believe that the European comic artists are just so much truer" etc., etc. Fortunately the moderator noticed the audience nodding off, asked if there were any questions, and when no one raised their hands, ended the panel twenty minutes early, presumably so the two artists could continue their conversation without victims.
The one amusing story is one woman had written a comic called "Cheat," about an unfaithful wife, and now people come up to her all the time at cons and tell her that that comic really spoke to them because they committed adultery.
Don't Quit Your Day Job
I have a guilty pleasure. It's "how to break into publishing panels." I know how to break into publishing. I'm not, at the moment or any time in the forseeable future, going to attempt to get fiction published. I'm never going to try to get comics published. But I love going to these things. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's a feeling of superiority over the unwashed masses in the room, reeking of desperation. I think it's to listen to someone else lecture people on the things I would like to lecture people on all the time.
Good advice was dispensed at this one: advice like if you are trying to break into comics, you are a one person business venture. Manage your money. Plan for dry spells. Have a support system. (They highly recommended marrying rich.) There was other advice: "Any opportunity you have to not be a dick, don't be on. I know a log of succesful creators who are dicks, but they kept it in for years first!" I learned one new thing: Stephen King used to write for fanzines. Who knew?
This panel also had the worst question of the con. Colleen Doran started out the panel by saying there are 300 million people in the U.S. Of those, maybe a thousand work in comics. Of those maybe a few hundred make a living at it. Spurious statistics, but she's making a point: you have a one in a million shot of making enough money to live on by doing comics.
The first person to step up to the microphone asked this: "You said 300 million people in the U.S.—is that adult population or working population? And out of that you said a few hundred make a better than average living in comics—can I get a definition of a few hundred?" "I don't know. A few." "How many is a few?" "A few." "Like, five hundred?" "Like a few hundred."
First off—you can look up the population of the U.S.? Second off—she was making a point! The numbers don't matter! Colleen later said that establishing trust is important in comics since in this industry you meet a lot of people who are "eh." The asker of the previous question stood up and asked, "Could you define 'eh?'"
The questions after that turned into thinly-veiled pitches, so I left.
Worldbuilding
Brian K. Vaughan rocks. He rocks. I've only read one volume of Ex Machina (making me feel like a total poseur, sitting in the audience) but I now feel I must be his fan for life.
This panel was J. Michael Straczynski (of Bab 5), Jeff Smith (of Bone) and Brian Vaughan, all of whom were interesting and funny. Calvin Reid was moderating, but he didn't even really need to jump in. They discussed some about worldbuilding, but mostly told anecdotes and ragged on themselves. Every time it came around to Vaughan he'd say, "I don't know why I'm on this panel. I have no imagination." He also completely shut down someone asking "where do you get your ideas?" (Schenectady). Straczynski also shut someone down when their question made it obvious that they only did research to avoid writing.
But for the most part, despite my aversion to Q&A's, the questions were good. People were asking about specific works by all three panelists. And then one person asked what they thought of fanfic. Not in so many words—she asked specifically about Bab 5 video parodies—but the intent of the well-worded question was what did these guys think about other people playing with their toys.
Straczynski said he still hadn't decided, but "it was fun to see that what I wrote has taken root, even if I don't like the shape of the tree." This is the best-worded creator response I've heard to date. Then Vaughan says he knows people write really dirty fic for "The Runaways," and since he can't write that stuff, they absolutely should.
Star Wars!
I have been burned by Star Wars panels before. Star Wars may be my first sci fi love, but oh, lord, other Star Wars fans scare me. But this panel, surprisingly, was actually really good. Possibly because it was about the Extended Universe and not the movies. About a decade ago, I would have known every damn thing discussed—I read literally every Star Wars book that was published prior to 1999. But since then, I haven't read any except Jude Watson's. New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force, all these Sith Wars and Old Republic stuff? Greek to me. Somebody mentions an obscure character that had a walk-on role in a recent book though, I immediately know she's from the "Young Jedi Knight" series, which I suffered through all eight? Books of.
Nevertheless, tons of fun. The panelists were half from the fiction side, half audio. The guy who reads the Star Wars books (Jonathan Davis) is hilarious. He did his Yoda and C-3PO impressions, then said he'd been working on his Neil Diamond impression. He just really wants someone to write a Neil Diamond character for him: Darth Diamond. He sang a sample of what this would sound like. Timothy Zahn looked horrified. If you want to see how adorable this guy is, go here.
I asked how they dealt with the fact that the prequels directly contradicted much of the continuity of the books—which made the book editor put her head in her hands. Mr. Zahn sort of laughed that anyone who'd written background on Boba Fett was screwed—I don't think any of his books were jossed. Afterwards he said that he's been given a golden trowel by fans for his brilliant ability to "spackle" (retcon). And believe me, this guy's books go into the Star Wars extended universe and explain away the inconsistencies in everyone else's books. He's a good spackler.
I also learned that his character, Joruus C'boath, which is pronounced "Jor-us Se-bo-eth" on the audio books was intended to be pronounced "Hor-us Sah-bay-oth," which sounds a whole lot cooler. Zahn has apparently added characters from fan-made spoof movies in his most recent books.
Deadline Horror Stories
This one started out fairly tame—with Peter David, Colleen Doran and Matthew Clark talking about accidentally throwing out the art (Doran) or being asked to fly to the studio to view the script for a media tie-in book (David). Peter David was also, fittingly, late.
It soon turned into "I Have Ruined My Health for Comics." There weren't that many people in the audience, so I got the feeling that these were not the normal sorts of stories these people talked about on panels. For example, Doran said she used to live on garlic chips, moose pate, port wine cheese and lots of soda when she was working. She had a ridiculously low page rate, so she had to take on up to eleven projects at a time to pay the bills. She said she'd work through the night but put on her pajamas at midnight to trick her body into thinking it was sleeping. Then she'd walk in her pj's to the airport at 5 a.m. to overnight ship the finished pages.
Once she was working for so many hours straight, when her mother came to pick her up to take her to a con, she tried to stand and landed flat on her face because she couldn't feel the lower half of her body.
Clark countered with a story about working 68 hours straight and having to tape the pencil to his fingers because he couldn't hold it anymore. It's not that 72 hours without sleep had happened to both these artists, it was that this was fairly normal for their working habits.
This is all fairly horrifying, right? But it gets better (or worse). You see, Doran for two years was getting by by taking a Chinese herb (all natural! must be safe, right?) that was the natural form of ephedra. You know, speed. When she figured out what it was, she went cold turkey and spent most of a decade getting back to normal. She also had chronic fatigue syndrome for a decade before that.
Then someone asked what Clark had done that was worse than three all-nighters in a row. He said, calmly, that eight months ago he'd had a heart attack. At thirty-five. He was literally working himself to death.
I have never seen Peter David so thoroughly upstaged. There's really nothing you can say to top that.
I think Doran should have shared these stories on the How to Get into Comics Publishing panel—it might have been more effective at scaring people off. Cause, seriously. There's no way I'd ever work that hard for anything.
Saturday was much more sedate—I spent a half hour in line withdotfic, then hung around and went to gryphonrose's signing. I went to a few panels, but all the panelists were falling asleep into their microphones. Chip Kidd was far less entertaining than I'd hoped, and the panel he did on superheroes in literature was not helped by the extreme awkwardness of one of the authors (whose book I still want to read) and the fact that Paul Dini had a glazed look and answered all the questions by rote as if he'd answered them a hundred times previously that weekend (which he probably had). At another panel, I got to ask one of the screenwriters for "Law and Order: SVU" how he manages to make an hour-long exposition dump dramatic. His answer: always have the speakers walking or doing something else, keep the scenes really short, and make all the people the police interview contentious. There's no drama if everyone's helpful.
There were tons of cos-players around: your stormtroopers, though I didn't see a Vader, someone dressed as Anakin who'd looked freakishly like Hayden Christensen in Revenge of the Sith, a woman in the Princess Leia slave outfit who actually pulled it off (she didn't have a wrap, though, and that's an awful lot of skin to be showing in February), a Princess Amidala, an Obi-Wan, various women and men in spandex unitards (all of whom had the bodies to do it, too, which, believe me, is not easy for the men), and my favorite—a woman dressed as a tentacle. Not a tentacle monster, just a tentacle. With suckers all down the front, clearly a home-made costume. I wanted to take a picture, but she was on the phone.
Next year, at least, they seem to have come to their senses and are having it in April. We may still have to stand for a few hours in line, but at least it won't be twenty degrees with a cross-breeze.
trakkie and made her very glad she hadn't come.The line only took a little over an hour—everyone in it had a ticket, so we were basically just bottlenecked trying to get in. And although there are many more doors to the Javitz center than the one they were letting us through, I can't fault this plan. It meant that once you were in, the flow of people was pretty easy to navigate. You could go to a panel, bop up to the booths, and get back for another panel in a half an hour, a feat which was just not possible last year.
The rooms for the panels were also much better set up (AV equipment that works! Yay!), and they assigned rooms of appropriate size. There was none of the "let's but the twelve most popular names in comics in a room that seats twenty and see if the fans at the door will start death matches to get in" stuff that they did last year. And no showing up at a door and being told you needed a special ticket. I didn't try to go to any of the celebrity things, but it looked like people were getting into those OK, too.
Most surprising of all—the panels were actually good. Last year I went to maybe two panels that were interesting over two days at the con and spent the rest of the time hearing the same damn Tokyopop pitch or being subjected to pretentious nonsense so boring the panelists were falling asleep (see last year's report). This year, they had a lot more panels scheduled with interesting topics, and a lot fewer "We're VIZ and this is our fall line-up" panels.
The crappy panel
The first panel I went to was the worst—"Drawing Heartache." I only went because the author of "The Squirell Mother" was supposed to be there (a book that I reviewed and absolutely adored), but she didn't show. Instead it was two artists I'd never heard of talking pretentiously about independent comics. "It's only the artificiality of so-and-so's drawing, that self-referentially calls attention to itself, that allows it to access the core emotions…" "Peanuts is as emo as they come—it's the agony of adult life reflected into childhood and held up for ridicule." "Oh, I believe that the European comic artists are just so much truer" etc., etc. Fortunately the moderator noticed the audience nodding off, asked if there were any questions, and when no one raised their hands, ended the panel twenty minutes early, presumably so the two artists could continue their conversation without victims.
The one amusing story is one woman had written a comic called "Cheat," about an unfaithful wife, and now people come up to her all the time at cons and tell her that that comic really spoke to them because they committed adultery.
Don't Quit Your Day Job
I have a guilty pleasure. It's "how to break into publishing panels." I know how to break into publishing. I'm not, at the moment or any time in the forseeable future, going to attempt to get fiction published. I'm never going to try to get comics published. But I love going to these things. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's a feeling of superiority over the unwashed masses in the room, reeking of desperation. I think it's to listen to someone else lecture people on the things I would like to lecture people on all the time.
Good advice was dispensed at this one: advice like if you are trying to break into comics, you are a one person business venture. Manage your money. Plan for dry spells. Have a support system. (They highly recommended marrying rich.) There was other advice: "Any opportunity you have to not be a dick, don't be on. I know a log of succesful creators who are dicks, but they kept it in for years first!" I learned one new thing: Stephen King used to write for fanzines. Who knew?
This panel also had the worst question of the con. Colleen Doran started out the panel by saying there are 300 million people in the U.S. Of those, maybe a thousand work in comics. Of those maybe a few hundred make a living at it. Spurious statistics, but she's making a point: you have a one in a million shot of making enough money to live on by doing comics.
The first person to step up to the microphone asked this: "You said 300 million people in the U.S.—is that adult population or working population? And out of that you said a few hundred make a better than average living in comics—can I get a definition of a few hundred?" "I don't know. A few." "How many is a few?" "A few." "Like, five hundred?" "Like a few hundred."
First off—you can look up the population of the U.S.? Second off—she was making a point! The numbers don't matter! Colleen later said that establishing trust is important in comics since in this industry you meet a lot of people who are "eh." The asker of the previous question stood up and asked, "Could you define 'eh?'"
The questions after that turned into thinly-veiled pitches, so I left.
Worldbuilding
Brian K. Vaughan rocks. He rocks. I've only read one volume of Ex Machina (making me feel like a total poseur, sitting in the audience) but I now feel I must be his fan for life.
This panel was J. Michael Straczynski (of Bab 5), Jeff Smith (of Bone) and Brian Vaughan, all of whom were interesting and funny. Calvin Reid was moderating, but he didn't even really need to jump in. They discussed some about worldbuilding, but mostly told anecdotes and ragged on themselves. Every time it came around to Vaughan he'd say, "I don't know why I'm on this panel. I have no imagination." He also completely shut down someone asking "where do you get your ideas?" (Schenectady). Straczynski also shut someone down when their question made it obvious that they only did research to avoid writing.
But for the most part, despite my aversion to Q&A's, the questions were good. People were asking about specific works by all three panelists. And then one person asked what they thought of fanfic. Not in so many words—she asked specifically about Bab 5 video parodies—but the intent of the well-worded question was what did these guys think about other people playing with their toys.
Straczynski said he still hadn't decided, but "it was fun to see that what I wrote has taken root, even if I don't like the shape of the tree." This is the best-worded creator response I've heard to date. Then Vaughan says he knows people write really dirty fic for "The Runaways," and since he can't write that stuff, they absolutely should.
Star Wars!
I have been burned by Star Wars panels before. Star Wars may be my first sci fi love, but oh, lord, other Star Wars fans scare me. But this panel, surprisingly, was actually really good. Possibly because it was about the Extended Universe and not the movies. About a decade ago, I would have known every damn thing discussed—I read literally every Star Wars book that was published prior to 1999. But since then, I haven't read any except Jude Watson's. New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force, all these Sith Wars and Old Republic stuff? Greek to me. Somebody mentions an obscure character that had a walk-on role in a recent book though, I immediately know she's from the "Young Jedi Knight" series, which I suffered through all eight? Books of.
Nevertheless, tons of fun. The panelists were half from the fiction side, half audio. The guy who reads the Star Wars books (Jonathan Davis) is hilarious. He did his Yoda and C-3PO impressions, then said he'd been working on his Neil Diamond impression. He just really wants someone to write a Neil Diamond character for him: Darth Diamond. He sang a sample of what this would sound like. Timothy Zahn looked horrified. If you want to see how adorable this guy is, go here.
I asked how they dealt with the fact that the prequels directly contradicted much of the continuity of the books—which made the book editor put her head in her hands. Mr. Zahn sort of laughed that anyone who'd written background on Boba Fett was screwed—I don't think any of his books were jossed. Afterwards he said that he's been given a golden trowel by fans for his brilliant ability to "spackle" (retcon). And believe me, this guy's books go into the Star Wars extended universe and explain away the inconsistencies in everyone else's books. He's a good spackler.
I also learned that his character, Joruus C'boath, which is pronounced "Jor-us Se-bo-eth" on the audio books was intended to be pronounced "Hor-us Sah-bay-oth," which sounds a whole lot cooler. Zahn has apparently added characters from fan-made spoof movies in his most recent books.
Deadline Horror Stories
This one started out fairly tame—with Peter David, Colleen Doran and Matthew Clark talking about accidentally throwing out the art (Doran) or being asked to fly to the studio to view the script for a media tie-in book (David). Peter David was also, fittingly, late.
It soon turned into "I Have Ruined My Health for Comics." There weren't that many people in the audience, so I got the feeling that these were not the normal sorts of stories these people talked about on panels. For example, Doran said she used to live on garlic chips, moose pate, port wine cheese and lots of soda when she was working. She had a ridiculously low page rate, so she had to take on up to eleven projects at a time to pay the bills. She said she'd work through the night but put on her pajamas at midnight to trick her body into thinking it was sleeping. Then she'd walk in her pj's to the airport at 5 a.m. to overnight ship the finished pages.
Once she was working for so many hours straight, when her mother came to pick her up to take her to a con, she tried to stand and landed flat on her face because she couldn't feel the lower half of her body.
Clark countered with a story about working 68 hours straight and having to tape the pencil to his fingers because he couldn't hold it anymore. It's not that 72 hours without sleep had happened to both these artists, it was that this was fairly normal for their working habits.
This is all fairly horrifying, right? But it gets better (or worse). You see, Doran for two years was getting by by taking a Chinese herb (all natural! must be safe, right?) that was the natural form of ephedra. You know, speed. When she figured out what it was, she went cold turkey and spent most of a decade getting back to normal. She also had chronic fatigue syndrome for a decade before that.
Then someone asked what Clark had done that was worse than three all-nighters in a row. He said, calmly, that eight months ago he'd had a heart attack. At thirty-five. He was literally working himself to death.
I have never seen Peter David so thoroughly upstaged. There's really nothing you can say to top that.
I think Doran should have shared these stories on the How to Get into Comics Publishing panel—it might have been more effective at scaring people off. Cause, seriously. There's no way I'd ever work that hard for anything.
Saturday was much more sedate—I spent a half hour in line with
dotfic, then hung around and went to gryphonrose's signing. I went to a few panels, but all the panelists were falling asleep into their microphones. Chip Kidd was far less entertaining than I'd hoped, and the panel he did on superheroes in literature was not helped by the extreme awkwardness of one of the authors (whose book I still want to read) and the fact that Paul Dini had a glazed look and answered all the questions by rote as if he'd answered them a hundred times previously that weekend (which he probably had). At another panel, I got to ask one of the screenwriters for "Law and Order: SVU" how he manages to make an hour-long exposition dump dramatic. His answer: always have the speakers walking or doing something else, keep the scenes really short, and make all the people the police interview contentious. There's no drama if everyone's helpful.There were tons of cos-players around: your stormtroopers, though I didn't see a Vader, someone dressed as Anakin who'd looked freakishly like Hayden Christensen in Revenge of the Sith, a woman in the Princess Leia slave outfit who actually pulled it off (she didn't have a wrap, though, and that's an awful lot of skin to be showing in February), a Princess Amidala, an Obi-Wan, various women and men in spandex unitards (all of whom had the bodies to do it, too, which, believe me, is not easy for the men), and my favorite—a woman dressed as a tentacle. Not a tentacle monster, just a tentacle. With suckers all down the front, clearly a home-made costume. I wanted to take a picture, but she was on the phone.
Next year, at least, they seem to have come to their senses and are having it in April. We may still have to stand for a few hours in line, but at least it won't be twenty degrees with a cross-breeze.