Con-con reporting! Wish we could have gone!

Here's reprinted info. on this year's San Diego Comic-Con. From everything we read, the biggest concern was whether Hollywood and the gaming industry has taken over Comic-Con and the difficulty in finding and meeting the creators of smaller indie comics at the mega event. Ultimately, we think Comic-Con is good for the industry, but it should resist being swallowed up by other, competing forces.
Art Show Note: "Icons: Interpretations in Comic & Gaming Pop Culture" opens this Saturday Aug. 2nd from 7-9pm with an opening reception at Comics & Classics. Come support local art!

Comic-Con International 2008 Bursts at the Seams
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on July 29, 2008 Sign up now!
by Douglas Wolk, Calvin Reid and Laura Hudson -- Publishers Weekly, 7/29/2008 12:42:00

AMFor the first time ever, 2008's Comic-Con International was a complete sell-out--there were no passes available at the gate, and the San Diego Convention Center was jammed wall-to-wall for the entirety of its July 23-27 run. The curious thing regarding this is that quite a few of its attendees had no particular interest in comics. CCI has become a crucial spot for movie, TV and game studios to promote forthcoming major releases; there's still a huge chunk of the show that's devoted to comics, their artists and their publishers, but the banners promoting it in downtown San Diego don't have pictures of comic book characters on them any more.

The biggest book of the show was a trickle-down effect from the biggest movie of the show: Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel, came out over 20 years ago, and still sold well over 500 copies between various dealers on the floor (one of which marked up the $20 paperback to $30); the longest line at the con was for a showing of a few minutes of footage, whose attendees were rewarded with Watchmen T-shirts. Even MAD magazine got in on the action: a special giveaway issue of MAD included a Watchmen parody drawn by Glenn Fabry.
Comic-Con's biggest debut, though, wasn't a movie tie-in—it was a music tie-in. Comic Book Tattoo, a 480-page, LP-sized anthology of comics inspired by Tori Amos's music, was the anchor of Image's booth; the company sold around 400 copies of the $30 paperback and a generous stack of the deluxe $150 hardcover edition. (It helped that Amos was present for a panel to promote it.) Image also sold around 100 copies each of the Popgun 2 anthology and the long-awaited hardcover reprint of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! The Image-affiliated collective of artists Becky Cloonan, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Bá, Vasilis Lolos and Rafael Grampa were the buzz cartoonists of the week—after the Eisner Awards on Friday night, their table boasted trophies for Best Anthology (5), Best Limited Series (The Umbrella Academy) and Best Digital Comic (Sugarshock).

Oni Press announced a handful of forthcoming projects, notably Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe (the lines for O'Malley's signings were impossibly long) and Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth's detective series Stumptown; First Second debuted Chris Blain's Gus, and sold a sizeable stack of copies of Eddie Campbell's The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. Fantagraphics blew out piles of the debut of the Hernandez Brothers' Love and Rockets: New Stories, and featured constant signings at their booth; Drawn and Quarterly reported an excellent year, including debuts of books by Rutu Modan and Ron Regé Jr., and signings by Lynda Barry (the lines to get her book What It Is signed included a lot of other cartoonists).

Both the DC and Marvel booths were constant hives of activity, thanks to a perpetual stream of in-booth signings and events. They weren't selling their own books, though, and canny shoppers tended to head toward the end of the hall, where various vendors had large selections of Marvel and DC graphic novels discounted by 50% or more. DC also unveiled a new sub-imprint, Vertigo Crime, and announced forthcoming Batman projects to be written by Kevin Smith and Neil Gaiman. (If they sell one for every San Diego cosplayer in a Nurse Joker outfit, they'll do just fine.) The Batwoman series still hasn't been officially announced, but it's the worst-kept secret in comics; art collectors' jaws were dropping over the pages by J.H. Williams on display at the Naked Fat Rave booth.

At Marvel, the biggest announcement was a joint venture with Stephen King and Scribner to produce an online motion comic called N, based on an unpublished short story from King's upcoming prose collection Just After Sunset. N will be released in 25 installments by screenwriter and Young X-Men writer Marc Guggenheim, artist Alex Maleev, and colorist Jose Villarrubia. N is designed for viewing on the web and on more advanced cell phones such as the iPhone, with the first episode now available at nishere.com. N will be also be published as a comic from Marvel in early 2009.

Dark Horse was having a pretty good week of its own: Hellboy 2 may not have had quite the runaway success of The Dark Knight, but Hellboy creator Mike Mignola was effectively a rock star at the Con in terms of the mob scene at his signings, and so was an actual rock star: Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, who announced the second Umbrella Academy series and promoted it with an onstage conversation with Grant Morrison. (Morrison was the con's Conversationalist-in-Chief; he also had onstage chats with Deepak Chopra and Stan Lee.) And anything with Joss Whedon's name attached, from his Web musical Dr. Horrible to Dark Horse's Buffy series, set cash registers ringing at this show. Is he a mass-culture star or a comics creator? As far as Comic-Con's audience is concerned, there's not really a difference any more.