FULL BLEED: IN BLACK WAS A COLOR BLACK WAS YOUR COLOR
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Flew down to attend Wonder-Con last week. Well, and to spend a few days seeing friends and LA and eating a lot of Mexican food because my family doesn’t like it as much as I do. I’ll spend most of this one talking about Wonder-Con as a show. Not sure I’m going to write up the other stuff so much except to wrap up everything in passing. Part of what I’ll talk about there is the root of the problems that I’ll talk about with the show in this part.
I did, however, take quite a few pictures in LA. You can see them here:
It’s also pinned to my profile if you’re on Bluesky. That’s the only social media I spend any time with currently. I keep trying to see if anything’s going on over at UpScrolled and folks, it is grim over there. Everyone and I mean everyone in the Books section is trying to be the first to build up a group of followers (with repurposed Instagram content) or selling clumsily past one another. It’s a disappointing experience so far.
I want to say a few things first. What I’m saying now comes from a place of love. I love going to comics shows. I like the floor and running into people and seeing all kinds of art and pawing through boxes of cheap old comics or trade collections or old random assortments of movie merchandise or bins of forgotten plastic action figures. I like the sort of physical incarnation of everything that I got into comics for, the fantastic and weird and yeah, the cheap and tacky and borderline tasteless. The stuff that’s being left behind.
I’ve been going to Wonder-Con since 2004 for sure. Okay, 2005. By that time it had moved from its original location in Oakland to the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I wrote up some of those shows back when I was doing regular near-daily comics blogging and writing for a handful of sites along the way. So yeah, some of the tension between that and what I’ve been seeing in the show for the last few years is on me. Not everyone is old. I get it. And like I said, I like comics shows. I’m not interested in dumping on things just to do so. I like to think that I’ve outgrown that.
I had a good time at the show this year, though I was only down for a day. I’m not sure how I’d have stretched it into two or three unless I was running a table (which I did at artist’s alley and even a regular old booth in the SF W-C days) or on a bunch of panels (I’ve been on… one at this show). There was lots of stuff to see. Even some deals to be had if you turned over rocks and went to the really very quiet comics back issue corner of the show. At least on Friday. It could very well have been much more busy on Saturday and Sunday.
The issues that the show faces come from a variety of different angles. Some are much more easily addressed than others. I’m not privy to convention operations and what it takes for the organization to decide what is a success and what isn’t.
There was a great comics presence there. There were no big publishers. Now this is something that’s been endemic to comics itself for a long, long time. It used to be that when someone said “comic books” they meant “the Big Two and some other publishers in the front of the Previews catalog.” Those might be the biggest players, but they’re not the whole thing, not even the most interesting stuff that’s going on in comics.
Side-track here: the panel I attended on Friday, Women in Comics, kind of nudged up against this but didn’t come right out and say things. The Direct Market/Big Two are not all of comics. They might be the most prominent in most comics fans’ minds, but I bet Scholastic does way bigger numbers with its comics and comics-adjacent work (and these are books that don’t really move in the Direct Market). I’ve talked exhaustively about the Direct Market in my time as a comics commentator. I’m not going to rehash it all now, particularly since the upheaval of Diamond going into bankruptcy and I’ve only paid cursory attention to it since. The Direct Market might have been the salvation of the comics pamphlet (oh, such a galvanizing term) after newsstands walking away from in the eighties into the nineties, but it’s also become a calcified market.
Again, I love Direct Market comic shops. They have some structural issues which prevent them from growing and expanding and demand a certain mindset of their customers, one which is not to be found in the entertainment on demand philosophy that’s ruling, particularly now. Plan your reading four months in advance? Pre-order? That’s not anyone’s thing out in the public sphere. Sorry. It’s pull. It’s I want to watch something now. What’s on streaming?
All that said. There were no big publishers at the show this year (and haven’t really been for some time.) Prism was there, soldiering on and unstoppable. I think I saw an Aspen booth or maybe I just hallucinated it. No Marvel. No DC. No Fantagraphics. No Dark Horse. No Boom. No Dynamite. No Bad Idea. No DSTLRY.
Comics publishers were being represented by an assortment of solo artist or small teams comics who’d put stuff out in the back of Previews (yes, I’m dating myself here – I’m old as dirt) if Diamond would pick them up. I know because I was one of those guys from 2008-2013. Strangeways from Highway 62 Press. Look it up. Now, not all of this stuff is to my tastes or will entice me into paying the cover price for it, but I’m glad it’s out there because that’s someone’s individual voice or a small team of voices doing what they want done. That’s to be celebrated. Because only those folks determined enough to do this sort of things will be able to continue on when things really crash out. Yes, things are bad now. Not as bad as they could be or maybe might even get.
Without those big publishers, I don’t know. The show feels like something else. Not necessarily something bad. Just different. To be fair, when I attended, Marvel never came. Those were kinda grim days for the House of Ideas, financially (though they were putting out a bunch of great comics, and a bunch of really successful ones that were less great.) DC usually showed. Now, it wasn’t with a big production like for SDCC. But they’d have a respectable lineup of artists and writers and editors. They’d have sample books. There would be large panel presence.
Image used to show up, too. Pretty sure Dark Horse did for a time. Boom did. Fantagraphics did. Oni, etc.
I’m going to suggest that part of the reason why goes beyond the show being expensive for publishers (which it is – you’re not selling merchandise, by and large; you’re there for advertising.) A number of those publishers above were acquired by capital or media groups. And you can argue that DC was by being more aggressively overseen by WB, which may or may not be looking at new ownership. Marvel certainly was when it was acquired by Disney in 2010. (An aside – I was made fun of for suggesting that the Marvel/Disney story was the most important story in comics for the noughties. But I was right and all the critics can suck it.) It could be that the penny-pinching owners of these companies just don’t see value in going to any show but SDCC and NYCC, even with the expenses involved. This is observation slash Kremlinology so take it with a pinch of salt. Either way, there were no large publishers with visible, tangible floor presences.
Now, I did see a few wannabe IP publisher booths. You know them when you see them. Slick graphics, slick product, looks professional. You’ve never heard of it before. You’ve never seen it in the marketplace. It doesn’t employ any writers or artists you recognize. It exists to manufacture a series of intellectual properties that are there to be bought out and then the owners can cash out. They have large booths and lots of giveaway merch. And yes, they’re publishing books. They’re not publishing. They’re in the game to be acquired. Sort of a reverse Mimic, if you will. A capital honeypot.
Yes, I’m mean. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s kind of a mean world out there.
As for the other smaller but not huge publishers, maybe it just doesn’t make sense to go do these shows anymore. And by these shows, I mean larger regional shows, but not quite the crown jewel, s-tier shows in the comics world. Fantagraphics is probably better served by going to indie/artcomix shows with smaller budgets or to traditional publishing/book shows as they really make a living off of books and material that feels more like a book than a serial chapter. Either way, they just don’t go.
Same goes for media. The only real media presence I saw was a booth for Send Help which was talking about how it’s out on streaming now. No small studios just trying to get attention or even SOV/VOD studios, much less the big ones. Again, they’re probably just going to SDCC which became a replacement for Show West or whatever other consumer-level media shows have come and gone in the last couple decades. They’re simply not there.
The vacuum left by those entities stepping away has to be filled by someone or something, right?
Sure. Just that it’s mostly very small shops, single artists, POD comics, assorted merchandise. I joked on Friday that probably something like 40% of the booths by floor space were indie artists or publishers or writers. I think I misjudged it and it’s probably closer to 60%. No I don’t have numbers in front of me.
Again, I don’t believe this is a bad thing, per se. It makes for a very different show. Back when I was selling my horror/western OGNs at shows big and small, I talked about the importance of comic cons as an alternative marketplace to both big book distribution and brick/mortar stores. That hasn’t changed. In fact it’s become more important, even though everyone has internet storefronts thanks to Shopify, etc. But these sellers have become more critical to the convention organizers in terms of buying up booth space and being part of the show since the larger publishers can’t or won’t do it.
Now, are any of these small artists actually making back table and costs of eating and sleeping and travel assuming they aren’t from in town? I never did, but I was idiotic enough to believe in OGNs as an evergreen product and didn’t sell t-shirts or prints or whatever else. But I’m absolutely serious in saying that these vendors and creators are the ones keeping this show together. Whether this is worth celebrating or cause of worry is something folks can only answer for themselves.
I did see a fairly brisk trade at all the speculator-driven back issues, variant covers and hot books, etc. I feel about those now as I felt about them then. They’re actually extracting value out of the business and not offering anything long-term. Just because a book is a hot number one doesn’t mean it won’t have orders diminishing at #3 so that #4 might not even get offered. Sorry. I know that some publishers and artists and creators are helped out by variant covers. I think all the gains that they offer are ephemeral at best and perhaps toxic in the long run. But they were probably going to cover their booth costs and be back for next year.
There were plenty of import Gunpla kits and imported art book booths (though no Stuart Ng Books, which I thought odd and suspect that there’s a story there, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that the store was offering a sale at their location in Torrance the same weekend, but I didn’t get over there.) Lots of Kpop Demon Hunters merch and fan stuff. Sony, you absolute goobers. You walked away from so much money. Haw haw haw.
It feels like a lot of the problems that folks are pointing out with the show stem from a couple different things. One of these is self-inflicted. The Comic Con organization brought this show from San Francisco to here because they wanted a LA-based show. (There’s problems with that in that most folks in the business don’t want to stay in town on business, they want to go to Vegas or some other place and have fun. Also, Anaheim is on paper a great place for a show. In reality it is isolated and kinda sucks and is inconvenient.)
So, when you want to hold a big show in Southern California indoors (because it was already hot in March, so you gotta) you have very few options. Three really. The convention centers in Los Angeles and Anaheim and San Diego. SD is out for obvious reasons. LA is harder to hold a show at than you might think. Yes, there’s lots of hotels in LA, resort hotels even. There’s only so many in downtown and most of those are not compatible with a Comic-Con crowd. So you gotta drive in from Universal City or Burbank or god help you Glendale. That’s not convenient. It’s also crazy expensive to eat and entertain there. It’s been cleaned up, particularly since the advent of Staples Center, but for out of towners, going a block in the wrong direction is likely to be a hair-raising experience (but nothing like the nineties.)
There are no other convention centers big enough to handle the crowds that the organizers want to draw. This is an immutable fact. The facilities do not exist. Being a certain size brings on certain needs and that can’t be changed. Fun aside: when Wizard had their Wizard World LA shows at the LA convention center, the mismatch of crowd to venue was so obvious as to be laughable, with halls you could have fired a rocket launcher down and not hit a single person even on a Saturday. Being too big is just as much a problem as being too small.
So the organizers are stuck with Anaheim’s convention center. And the dates that they can get. I’m not sure there’s a way out of it other than changing up things completely and say working with the city of Sierra Madre and having a big outdoor festival (kidding – Sierra Madre would never survive and there’s not enough transit/parking.)
Size might be the show’s enemy. Particularly without any big and I mean big draws.
And yeah, this seems like a real Gordian Knot. Size requirements, publisher retreat, and I’ll note the other unspoken truth. Everything is too goddamn expensive. That mean everything. The hotel, the food, the travel, the gas, the patience in driving down and parking in a giant structure and waiting in the giant holding area. It’s expensive to do all these things, to show up at a show. That one I sure as hell don’t have a solution for. Sorry. That’s everyone. Everywhere I looked in my 3 days in LA, everyone was being squeezed by the ownership class for every nickel they had. I paid forty dollars for a sandwich and fries and a Coke at Cole’s this weekend. Yes, they’re an institution since 1908 and they’re closing and I wanted one last visit. I get it. But twenty bucks for a chili burger from Tommy’s. Twenty bucks for a lomo saltado burrito at a stand by Circus Liquor in North Hollywood. I can’t imagine what rents are anywhere I was staying at or drove through. Vacated business real estate everywhere as owners had driven out renters and were hoping for someone else to come buy them out so they could escape. It sucks all over. The economy isn’t working for everyone, most everyone. Maybe it’s that simple.
As for Wonder-Con, I’ll still go. I’ll still hunt for five dollar books and cheap treasury edition comics (lowest I saw for beater copies was twenty bucks and no). I’ll still go to look over what young artists are doing. I’ll still maybe have lunch at the food truck food court. I’ll still get the hell out of dodge because you couldn’t pay me to stay at Downtown Disney and there’s a million great places to eat at in Garden Grove and Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa and even Placentia if you have a car and a phone to look them up. It’s a marketplace now, a big enclosed art mall that happens to be populated by a lot of my friends and cool other folks making art. I hope it still gives those folks a chance.
Oh, final note about the show. I'd worried that there were going to be a bunch of artists out there selling AI slop as their own work. There were a few, but as it turned out, it was just indie authors using AI for their book covers and it showed. Don't do that.
Now I gotta start prepping for the Kickstarter for My Gifts Are Hungry. You know, the latest of my books, this one about a girl who runs away to the coolest club in Hollywood in the eighties and finds a crash pad in one of those old houses in the hills. It turns out the house has been waiting for someone like her for a long time. It’s a good time. Haunted houses, overnight stardom, being friends with the most powerful witch in Los Angeles and then learning that all of it expensive, costing more than you might be willing to pay.
Not all houses are haunted by the dead, so the tagline goes.
I’d though I’d have to change the start date from May 1. I think I’m going ahead with it, only the next book might take more than a year to get out. But one step at a time.
Until then, folks.
