By Shaenon K. Garrity
I haven't been to the San Diego Comic-Con in three years now, and what I really miss are the crab cakes at Dick's Last Resort. I want those crab cakes so badly right now. And a Big Pig sandwich.
Previous columns have touched on my nervous romance with the convention circuit. I like the comics, the socializing, and the Stormtroopers; I hate almost everything else. In my ongoing hero's jounrey along the path of geekdom, I've accepted that, although I may blog about all the comics in the world, I cannot actually own them, not with the price of storage space in the Bay Area. At some point I stopped being a collector and became a connoisseur (or, if you prefer, a snob), and conventions lost a lot of their glib, glitzy charm. The consumerism built into any convention, the pressure to buy and sell, wears me out. Especially when nobody's buying.
Plus, once the excitement of winding up behind Gene Simmons on the escalator wears off, a long con weekend can get boring. I identified with the strip in the latest volume of Julia Wertz's
The Fart Party wherein Julia spends a convention going to the bathroom, just for something to do, and finally has the revelation, "This is just like high school!" You're reading
The Fart Party (
www.fartparty.org), right? Right.
One thing you can say for the San Diego Comic-Con: it seldom gets boring, except in the sense that tripping balls on mescaline for four and a half days straight can get boring. When I think of Comic-Con, I think of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Terry Gilliam movie version, which isn't exactly successful as a film but does manage to capture the grinding hallucinatory disorientation of total, relentless sensory overload. The ups, the downs, the paranoia, the circus of the thing. You can see Johnny Depp at Comic-Con, too.
I've got my favorite San Diego memories, like everyone. The thrill of stepping onto the floor for the first time Thursday morning. Seeing Gene Yang accept his Eisner for
American Born Chinese, sleepy kid in his arms, that was a good one. The Eisners always have their moments. There was the year the first
Flight anthology debuted and those damn kids ran through the halls like Christopher Robin through the Hundred Acre Wood, delighted to be bright and brilliant and better than everyone. Rory Root taking Andrew and me under his wing and introducing us to Neil Gaiman. Scott McCloud bumping fists with Jason Shiga. Elvis Stormtrooper.
Then there are the so-bad-it's-good moments, like the year Roger Langridge came out from England and had to crash on the floor of the filthiest hotel in San Diego (if you've been to Comic-Con, you know the one). There were roaches on the floor and we called the front desk to complain, and they told us it wasn't a problem because they were "water roaches." Water roaches. Well, that was okay, then.
Later that weekend, Andrew and I stopped by Roger's table at the back of the hall. A man came up and asked Roger to draw Wolverine for his son, and Roger admitted he didn't know how to draw Wolverine. The man responded, with that mixture of confusion and disdain so familiar to anyone who's been on the business end of a con table, "Well, what
can you draw?" Roger was back this year, this time as an official guest. I hope he got to draw some Muppets. And dance, he's an awesome dancer.
My first Comic-Con, in 2001, was the best. ModernTales.com had just started up, and webcomics were going to revolutionize the art form. You could strike sparks anywhere. All the online cartoonists—there weren't so many of us then—gathered in clusters, excited to meet in person for the first time. Lea Hernandez was thrilled by everyone and everything. James Kochalka said he didn't understand my comic, but he was friendly about it. We went to a Mexican restaurant in Old Town and Cat Garza had a margarita the size of his head. I drew everything. San Diego was like San Francisco, where I lived, only sunny and clean. Only happy.
I'm going to San Diego next year, but it's not going to be like that again. It never will be. Comic-Con is literally three times the size it was in 2001, when it was already huge. The big event this year was the
Twilight panel, which I guess is technically comics-related since they're making a comic book of it, but that wasn't why the fans were there. You still have to go. It's an experience. It's
the experience. Exciting things happen. Jeff Smith announced new
Bone books! That's enough to to keep the happiness spreading through next July.
But I worry, sometimes, that I'm never going to love comics in that pure hopeful way I loved them at my first Comic-Con. Love is more complicated now. I've put off going back for three years. My fear is that I'll be able to stand on a hotel balcony in San Diego, or maybe out on a fire escape with the water roaches, and look West, and see my personal high-water mark—the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
