Not comical
Last week, I did not feel great. Was, in fact, partially laid up here and there for days. Stomach virus? Or: was it weighing on me that Comic-Con was canceled?
To give you a sense of the role of Comic-Con in my life: I’ve been married to my wife only one year longer than I’ve been married to Comic-Con. Comic-Con and I have been an item since July, 1988; I got married the previous Halloween, so there’s not even a full year between these two anniversaries. Not celebrating the one felt wrong.
Oh, to be sure there was “Comic-Con @ Home,” in which the people behind the Con put together digital versions of what they could of the Con. And I give huge props to the very nice people who run Comic-Con for making the effort. Untold millions of people who’d wanted to attend for years and years (and years) were finally able to get some semblance of Comic-Con (even though that semblance essentially boiled down to watching prerecorded videos of people talking about comic books and, I guess, other, lesser, pop culture).
I too partook.
- I watched a panel covering the debate over who deserves what credit for the Marvel Age of Comics, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby. (On which panel former Marvel editor Danny Fingeroth, who worked with Stan, said the intellectual property was jointly created, but the brand was all Stan. He gets points from me re the brand statement — the way covers were designed and written with blurbs seemingly ripped from the sort of movie posters young people couldn’t resist in the 1960s, and the way the urgent, melodramatic dialogue separated the entire line from, say, the assembly line monotony of Justice League of America dialogue, in which every character, whether Batman or Wonder Woman, had all the personality of See Spot Run, Run Run Run — but re the IP, i.e., the characters and storylines, I’d have to point out that Kirby did that for decades before Stan, and also for decades after Stan, and Stan was part of that only with Kirby. Kirby invented whole genres of comics that are now generating billions of dollars of revenue, while Stan was succeeding mostly at promotion.)
- I started watching a panel on the recently deceased Denny O’Neil, one of the most influential comics writers. I knew Denny when I was much younger (as I wrote about here), and although I knew he wasn’t well these past few years, his death still felt like a shock, like another part of my own history slipping away. (One advantage of Comic-Con @ Home: I can watch the rest later.)
- And I completely loved the latest iteration of Scott Shaw!’s “Oddball Comics” slideshow. I’ve seen this presentation of the strangest, wackiest, lewdest, most just-plain wrong comics almost every year for 30 years, and can testify that this year was the best presentation ever. (Here, judge for yourself.)
But what made that so completely hilarious? Yes — Scott’s clever deadpan narration. And all the new books slotted in this year. But also: I was a little down in the dumps about not having a physical Comic-Con to go to — and so enlisted my friends Paul and Joe, who also love Scott’s show, and the three of us watched it at the same time and group-texted throughout. So: For those 80 minutes at least we had a more vibrant simulacrum of Comic-Con.
Because without driving down in a vehicle stuffed with friends and suitcases, and a suite we’d all be staying in, and cigars, and drinks and poker in the room, and meals around San Diego, and laughing our fool asses off for five days… it just wasn’t Comic-Con. I congratulate the Comic-Con organizers for making their best attempt, and they accomplished a lot, and a lot of people, including me, are grateful. Moreover, they made the entire affair free.
But it wasn’t Comic-Con.
The other thing I missed about the Comic-Con that wasn’t? Getting to spend hours pawing through thousands of glorious moldering old comic books. So I decided to pull out 15 of my own long boxes (about a third of my collection — er, “investment,” in case my wife reads this) and “reorganize” them.
Which not only made me feel physically better — but enabled me to make a list of the comics I’m going to look for at the 2021 Comic-Con. In person.
July 28th, 2020 at 1:01 am
Expresses exactly the limits of the virtual fun we are having while hankering desperately for the sheer physicality of events. Looking forward to your 2021 report of the real thing Lee. Looking good at the merch table there too!
July 28th, 2020 at 5:25 am
I wonder how the vendors are handling this?