Another Damn Comic-Con Recap (part 1)
Comic-Con 2011 is now over, and as it drifts, ever so effervescently, into the ether dimension populated by my personalized heap of hazy memories, I shall attempt to capture, in brief, all the experiences I had there, and relate them to you, the dear reader who didn’t get to go, or perhaps did, and had a shockingly different experience than I. The Comic-Con experience is like a nightmarish King’s blend of all your favorite comics, TV shows, and secret fetishes all rolled into an event that resembles a combination of Halloween in West Hollywood, and that painfully commercial boat show in “Showgirls.” One minute, you’re geeking out because you accidentally bumped into Joss Whedon, and he was kind enough to pose for a picture with you, and the next minute, a creepy 60-year-old Asian guy, who is clearly not into comic books, TV or movies, is photographing, and pouring nervous lecherous sweat all over, the unsuspecting buttocks of some poor 17-year-old geek gal who dressed as Psylocke.
In short, it’s good fun. Here are some of the things I went through:
I got to man the Geekscape booth for sporadic periods each of the days I was there, mostly for one- or two-hour stretches. The booth was next to the Fangoria booth, across from the Troma booth, and catty-corner to the Full Moon Pictures booth, so I was in low-budget gore horror heaven. Lloyd Kaufman himself frequented the Troma booth, and while it was fun to see the man, he, like everyone working at Comic-con is there to make money, so he was in full-blown pitchman mode the whole time. He would indeed pose for a picture with you, but he would also shamelessly plug his book, or a Troma DVD. I missed Charles Band at the Full Moon booth, but the wide-eyed, bearded gorehound working the booth did give me a free DVD of “Subspecies” to make it up to me. I gave him the web address of the essay on the “Puppet Master” movies.
While sitting at the booth, I began to notice certain classes of people walking by, so I decided to come up with a tally. The tally after only about two hours read as the following:
Fat guys in superhero t-shirts: 5 (fewer than you’d think)
Redheads: 10
Goatees: 9
Wheelchairs: 2
Unidentifiable anime characters on white kids: 7
Asian kids dressed as Japanese characters: 6
Cat ears: 4
Actual black people: 5
That steampunk crap: 2
“Sexy” costumes, whether or not they were successful: 13
“Creative” facial hair: 12 (surprisingly high)
“Clever” t-shirts: 8
Note: here’s a surefire way to make your own geek t-shirt: take any two popular geek objects, however unrelated, and combine them. The DeLorean crashing into the TARDIS? Done. Darth Vader and Captain Picard playing poker? Saw that one. Why not The Green Lantern throwing a pumpkin bomb? Too brainy? Make up your own! Try to be absurdist about it! Draw a picture of My Little Pony stabbing Don Corleone! A picture of Jason Voorhees disco dancing with Gumby! A giant Andy Kaufman eating a miniature Godzilla! If you want to skew really obscure, have a picture of Mallard Fillmore playing kosho with the women from “9 Chickweed Lane,” while Bibleman keeps score. If no one gets your t-shirt over the course of the con’s five days, you win.
Also, a word on steampunk. I don’t get it. I really don’t. I mean, it does look cool, and I admire that people put so much hard work, time, and finance into making such detailed costumes, and have actually bothered to sculpt working gears and cogs and movable goggles out of real bronze, but I still couldn’t, for the life of me, tell you where it came from. One day it just started leaking into the geek community, and it hasn’t left. Like furries, they’re lurking about the fringes, getting a lot of pictures from fans, but unable to explain their meaning or origin. Here’s the best I can figure out steampunk: It’s an unexpected combination of the geeks who love to dress up, make costumes, and parade about in public, and the engineering nerds who hang around Radio Shack, and are really into soldering. They make costumes for the sake of showing them off, and not expressing their passion for any existent piece of literature.
A word on redheads: Has anyone else noticed the large, large overlap in the Venn diagram of women with red hair and comic book geekery? I live in a big city, and I see fewer redheads on the street in any given week than I see in an hour at Comic-Con. Not that this bothers me; I’m kind of drawn to redheads. But I’d love to see an anthropological study on the color of one’s hair, and how it relates to loving D&D.
The first panel I attended, I selected for its name alone: Sci-Fi that will Change Your Life, in which the people from a website called IO9 (including Zack Stenz who wrote “X-Men: First Class,” Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who writes “The Middleman,” IO9 editor Annalee Newitz, and a few others) discussed their favorite science fiction, and how it shaped them as writers. They, however, put a restriction on their choices in that it had to have been sci-fi from the last year alone (that is to say, since late July 2010). As a result, we had people choosing films like “Source Code,” (which was plenty good, but not necessarily life-altering), and the much-maligned “Sucker Punch” (which I myself maligned). The be fair, Mark Bernardin, the man who selected it, only cited it because it came close to being the over-the-top camp hit he was hoping for. There were a few good recommendations for the novelty-hungry sci-fi nerd, though, including “Tower Prep,” which is a forgotten and short-lived Paul Dini cartoon show about a bunch of superpowered boarding school students trapped in their Village-like school, and a book called The Quantum Thief about a future where you can control how you are remembered by people on a day-to-day basis, which is clearly a comment on the horrors of social networking.
And, since we’re all nerds, and we can’t really help it, the panel soon devolved into discussing the sci-fi that really changed their lives, including, naturally “Star Trek,” and, curiously, “Zardoz.” It was only then that the eyes on the panel really lit up.
Later that day I attended the panel for MAD Magazine, always an old standby, and an important piece of literature from my childhood. And while a lot of the people I grew up reading have, sadly passed on (Antonio Prohias, Don Martin, William Gaines), it was still a thrill to see the current staff of cranky Italians and enthused newbies talk about the magazine and how it’s still actually going strong after all these decades. I could write an entire essay on MAD Magazine, so I’ll try to be brief here. Sergio Aragones is still writing for the Magazine, and he is still a powerful presence at every Comic-Con, and Dick DeBartolo is still, to this day, one of the publication’s most prolific writers. Peter Kuper was there, talking about taking up the reigns from Prohias on “Spy vs. Spy,” and they all expounded very eloquently on the mission statement of MAD, in that they had to constantly remind the reader how little they were getting for their money. (i.e. 2.95! Cheap!)
The biggest problem the entire panel seemed to have was making the magazine much more course as the years have passed. William Gaines liked a combination of irreverence, borscht-belt humor, and playful ribbing. These days, the magazine has to compete with other “edgy” entertainments like “South Park” and just about any show that airs on Adult Swim, and have had to become a little more icky over the years. The writers feel they’ve found a balance. Pick up a copy sometime, though, and you’ll see that, even though the humor may be a bit more broad than you remember, it’s still largely in the same spirit as you remember from when you were a kid (and, let’s face it, we nearly all read it). I have decided that my 7-year-old nephew will get a subscription to the magazine come his 8th birthday.
The third panel I attended that day was for the new book Writing Movies for Fun and Profit (with the “Fun and” cleverly crossed off) by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant from the sketch comedy show “The State,” (which you ought to know about). Thomas Lennon, I have to say, has the uncanny ability to make me giggle just by sitting still, so it was a pleasure to see him in person. He ran out into the audience and gave everyone a high five, and he proceeded to offer a panel seat to someone who couldn’t find a chair. The fellow refused, which baffled everyone in the room, including Lennon and Garant. I guess there are some fans who would rather observe than participate.
The panel was mostly them talking about their job in Hollywood as screenwriters of forgettable comedies like “Taxi,” “Night at the Museum,” and “Herbie Fully Loaded” (Quote on the back jacket: “Lennon and Garant are the reason ‘Night at the Museum’ won so many Oscars.” -Ben Stiller). They do realize that they’re not making hard-hitting, edgy comedies by any stretch of the imagination, and have a very healthy, workmanlike attitude toward the movie business. Their book is fraught with practical advice, and is essentially an important lesson in swallowing your pride. Since they’re Lennon and Garant, though, they give their lessons with a stirring amount of good humor, wise irony, and hysterical flippant remarks. As a special bonus, they also screened a super-secret pilot for a super-secret TV show that has not yet been picked up, and whose content is super-secret. It’s a sci-fi spoof called “Alabama.” Which is awesomely hilarious.
CONTINUED IN PART 2…
