I've always had a bit of a soft spot in my (head?) for comics, so I thought I'd check out the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con last weekend.
Parking in San Diego was scarce that weekend. I took a hint from the Comic-Con web site, parked in a distant lot (still paid $14 for the day), and walked to the covention itself.
I registered on-site and although the line looked like it could represent a 2-3 hour wait, it moved so fast that I was inside in more like 30 minutes.
I only budgeted about four hours for my entire visit, so I skipped the many presentations and classes and confined myself to the exhibition floor.
I think on some level I imagine myself making a comic of my own some time down the line. I found myself interested not so much in the slick presentations of major corporations, but in the stories of the smaller imprints.
Here's a sampling of some of the people I met:
Joshua Cottingham and Stephanie Lantry came to the convention to build awareness for an anthology of stories called Journey Into Misery (a play on the old Marvel Comics title, Journey Into Mystery. According to Mr. Cottingham, they launched their new title at WonderCon, where they sold about a hundred copies. That sounds like a pretty good start.
Next I spoke a bit with Karen Knighton (left). She and four other graduate students in animation at a Southern California film school have pooled their resources and put together a presentation in the small press pavilion at the convention. Their main goal wasn't so much to launch a particular comic, as to network and expose their artwork to a wider audience.
Hae Eun Park uses small self-produced comics to sell merchandise. (Or is it the other way around?)
She's spun imaginative stories about the world in which her plush toys live.
She makes each toy by hand, and I can personally report that "Beetamim" is a big hit with my daughter.
At the other end of the extreme, Robh at Broadview Graphics likes to make slick posters in a cartoony vintage style of books that don't actually exist. I like his drawing style.
Not nearly as slick (and all the more charming for it) is the work of Dan Goodsell.
I hadn't seen Mr. Toast and company before (so they may be bigger than I realize), but Goodsell seems to have created a set of characters people instinctively enjoy.
I never had more than a vague notion of what H. P. Lovecraft was all about, but I am from Providence, so I picked up Mac Carter and Adam Byrne's preview issue of The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft. Tickled with the idea that it might actually hang in Providence, they wanted me to take a poster instead, but I live in Los Angeles now, so I opted for the comic. Besides, I already have a Providence poster.
The creators describe the comic as a sort of Shakespeare in Love take on his biography in which supernatural elements from his fiction are based on real and secret events in the author's own life. I usually like that sort of thing.
Some more established artists at the Comic-Con whose work impressed me included Brandon Ragnar Johnson, Tara McPherson
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UPDATE 3/27/2009
The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft just got optioned by Ron Howard.
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