By Shaenon K. Garrity
I was all set to declare this year's Wondercon in San Francisco the first Wondercon I actually enjoyed, because usually Wondercon sends me into a comics-industry shame spiral that ends with me weeping into a seven-dollar cheese pizza about having wasted my life, and not even pudgy guys in Wolverine costumes can cheer me up. This year I had a good time, met a lot of great people, and had only one or two complete psychological breakdowns, so I was all poised to give Wondercon 2008 the thumbs-up.
But you couldn't let that happen, could you, Wondercon? You had to deliver unto me the worst case of con crud I have ever experienced. I've been miserably sick for a full week now, and any fleeting warm feelings toward Wondercon have been washed away in a miasma of ache and goo. Forget it, Wondercon. You're still on my enemies list. And a pox on whatever Typhoid Mary Sue dragged his or her disease-ridden corpse to the Moscone Center for the express purpose of infecting me and Uatu knows how many other nerds with the Black Plague.
I wasn't always a mucous-encrusted ball of hate, you know. There was a time, oh, so long ago, when I looked forward to comic-book conventions. When I attended
voluntarily. In high school, I adored nothing more deeply than the opportunity to spend a Saturday afternoon crouched on the cement floor of a suburban community center, sifting through damp cardboard boxes of Byrne-era
Fantastic Four. I gawked at inkers. I spent my college fund like water. I went on dates with guys who picked me up at the snack corner by describing the totally deep plotlines of
Dawn. I was happy. What went wrong?
One big change, of course, was that I moved to the other side of the booth. Conventions aren't quite the same when you're selling. Some cartoonists—horrible, horrible cartoonists who should die in fires—thrive on convention sales, love interacting with their fans and recruiting new readers. I'm not one of them. When someone walks up and asks me why they should read my comic, I consider the question seriously, and usually I can't come up with an answer that doesn't involve a lot of stammering qualifiers. Also, working a booth, unless you're one of those hateful
popular cartoonists, usually includes long stretches of boredom, just standing at attention and staring into space. I've invented many games to pass the time. One is to scan the crowd for people who look like characters in my comics, in case I need to cast a movie on the fly. Another is to burst into silent tears.
Beyond that, though, I think something more fundamental has changed in my relationship with conventions. I don't want to do the things people do at cons anymore. Buying comic books, for instance. Sure, sometimes I find myself in desperate need of back issues of
Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, and then I'll root through longboxes as happy as a pig in slop. But with so many classic and not-so-classic comics now readily available in reprints, and my personal apartment filled from floor to ceiling with sequential art, I no longer feel that old OCD urge to add to my collection. The day Last Gasp put out
Goodnight, Irene, a paperback of the Irene van de Kamp stories in Carol Lay's
Good Girls, I knew an era had passed. Assembling a complete run of
Good Girls had been one of my back-issue-bin obsessions, and now here were the stories I'd been searching for, in one handy volume for easy reading. What more did Super-Con hold for me?
Movie previews? Whatever. Manga and anime imports? They're already cluttering my office space at Viz. Meeting the pros? I can't get them out of my apartment. I might as well face the hard truth: I can't be a fangirl anymore. I'm too close. I'm married to comics, and that means that every morning I wake up to comics' bad breath, unkempt hair and magnified pores. The romance of a con is for other people, people who wisely restrict their affair to Wednesdays at the comic shop and an annual, passionate San Diego tryst.
Wondercon 2003 was my lowest point. I caught the con crud that year, too, and by Sarturday I was wheezing and snorting my way through the sparsely packed corridors of nerdom. It was the lowest point for Wondercon, too, the year the organizers were barely able to fill half the convention hall with J-pop tchotchke dealers and DVD bootleggers, the bottom-feeders of the great con food chain. A huge curtain was drawn over the disused half of the hall, and on the other side lay a bleak expanse, the land of wind and ghosts. The populated side wasn't much better. Blinking blearily around runny eyes, unable to find much in the way of comics at this nominal comics convention, I seriously questioned my devotion to this bastard art form.
That Saturday night, Andrew and I trudged out to Berkeley, in the dark and the rain, for a screening of
American Splendor, the new film adaptation of Harvey Pekar's life and comic.
American Splendor, the movie, is about a born loser whose life changes, mostly for the better, when he starts writing a comic book about himself. At the end, he's still a loser, but he's a loser with a comic book, and that makes all the difference.
American Splendor saved comics for me. That time. This time, I recovered a lot more quickly. I've still got the con crud, but I've also got comics, and comics and I are forever. Whether I like it or not.
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#11, The Webcomics Cartoonists' Choice AwardsShaenon 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
