My First San Diego

(Tomorrow morning, earlier that any human being should be traveling, I’ll be en route to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con to cover it for io9.com, necessitating a few days of radio silence for this here blogarama – Normal Service (or some posting, at least) will resume at the start of next week, probably around Tuesday when the terror and panic has worn off slightly. But, until then, let’s look back – back! – to 2006, and the first time I ever went, and the report I wrote up about said trip for Newsarama.com. Since that site’s been relaunched, I don’t think this is even up there anymore, so here it is for your attempt at enjoyment.)

“So, how do you feel now that you’ve made your first public appearance?”

Heidi MacDonald says these things to fuck with my head, I think. The blogging panel at San Diego had just finished minutes earlier, and I hadn’t been thinking in terms of my first public appearance or anything similar at all, instead trying to concentrate on not shaking or saying anything entirely ridiculous. I’m still not sure that I accomplished either of those goals, to be honest – there was a point where I’d tried to have a drink of water, only to realize that my hands were shaking as if I was I was a character in a Scooby Doo cartoon who’d just seen the groundskeeper dressed up as Frankenstein’s Glowing Radioactive Monster, lumbering around and saying “Muuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh” – mostly because I have kind of blanked out the entire panel in my memory. I remember before the panel, meeting lots of people whose blogs I’d read online for years and swapped emails with for the first time (including Beaucoup Kevin Church, who invented a new musical genre just for me), and I remember Heidi announcing that we had to wrap things up and me thinking “Wait, it’s been an hour already?”, but most everything else? Lost to the mists of time until my subconscious has decided that I’m strong enough to remember every horrifying little detail.

Anyway, it was just after half past one in the afternoon, and I still had five hours or so to explore the San Diego Comicon for the first time in my life before catching a plane back to San Francisco and my visiting family. Five hours, I thought to myself, would be more than enough time to see the sights and say hello to everyone that I wanted to say hello to.

That sound you hear? That’s the laughter of everyone who’s ever been to San Diego, mocking my innocence and lack of time-planning.

Let’s start with the size of the damn place. It’s not something that you initially fully realize; you walk into the main hall and it’s this massive space that seems smaller than it really is – Even though you can stand at one end of the hall and not be able to see the other end, all of the booths and displays somehow manage to disguise just how huge the place is. Your eyes get distracted by the flashing lights, the Lego Batman or the weird thing that’s taken over the Sci-Fi Channel’s space like the end of Watchmen, or something, and your mind just sort of skips over the fact that Oh my God, the hall is far too large for any one event to take over like this and there’s the same amount of space upstair where all of the panels and presentations are taking place. It’s not until much later, when you’re over watching, say, Jon J. Muth create these beautiful inkbrush drawings where every single line is perfect, despite him not having made any pencil guidelines whatsoever and you remember that you said you’d meet someone at the First Second booth in ten minutes, and you spend what feels like twelve years just walking from one booth to the other, that you realize just how far away the booths are. It’s not until the next day, when your feet hurt as if you’ve just walked a marathon, that you realize the size of the damn place.

With something that big completely crammed with booths and creators and retailers (who seemed to somehow manage to sell things like Justice League of America #0 for five dollars even though it only had been released last Wednesday and should only be $2.99, which says a lot about how much comfort and immediacy must mean to the people who were buying the book instead of waiting a few days until they went home and could probably buy it for cover price) and people in outfits to boggle the mind and occasionally the hormones, it suddenly became clear that there was no way that I could probably even find half the people I wanted to see, never mind say hello to them. It became not even a case of prioritizing things as much as just taking things as they came, which is probably how I ended up spending so much time talking to Eddie Campbell.

Now, there are probably several books that could be written about my love for Mr. Campbell. There would be the one where I’d write at length about the way that my discovery of his Graffiti Kitchen one-shot changed the way I looked at comics forever, when I was just starting art school and therefore all impressionable and looking for something new and unexpected, introducing me to writing as honest and complex as the best prose I had read. Then there would be one where I’d expound about his artwork, the way that his scratchy line and uncomplicated page construction seduce the reader with what looks like a natural and uneducated style, much in the same manner – but entirely different look – that Alex Toth’s pages did. And finally, there would be a book where I’d go on and on about Campbell’s urge to challenge the conventional wisdom on a regular basis and instead follow his dreams and ambitions, even if they lead you to Australia and becoming a court artist, and the example that he sets in doing so. Not that I said any of this to him, of course; instead, we talked about our shared Scottish heritage, and the importance of shoes, all the while with me trying desperately not to say anything like “I love you, Mr. Campbell.” I may have gushed slightly, I admit, but come on. I kind of had to.

(In other “Oh, look, there’s one of my heroes” news, I was so awestruck by seeing Dave McKean and Kent Williams at the Allan Speigel booth that I clammed up and couldn’t even say hello, remembering a time when I’d met McKean and Neil Gaiman on their signing tour for Mr. Punch, years ago, when Neil was chatty and personable and Dave looked as if I had somehow accidentally killed his cat.)

(I had met Eddie Campbell at the First Second Books booth, where I also spent time with the wonderful Gina Gagliano and the equally wonderful Mark Siegel, talking about the books past, present and upcoming – American Born Chinese, which is coming out in September unless I’m completely misremembering, is something that lots of people should check out, in particular. That booth was also where I met Jim Ottaviani, of GT Labs, whose Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards book may be the best thing I picked up at the con – similar in tone to Matt Fraction and Steve Sanders’ recent Five Fists of Science, but with the added attraction of the story being true. As the back of the book says: “Cowboys, dinosaurs and scientists?!” Indians, too, if you’re wondering.)

(I know. No more of the parentheses.)

Anyway. One of the things that seemed odd about the booths was that, with the exception of the DC monolith, the comics booths were completely eclipsed by the toy people and the TV people and movie people; Marvel’s displays (at the Activision booth, I think? They didn’t really have one of their own, due to their incestuous relationship with Wizard) in particular seemed to consist of large versions of recent comic covers glued to cardboard that were already peeling off and curling up in the heat, and a TV screen advertising Civil War over and over again, which was kind of… underwhelming for the largest comic publisher in the country. But then, how to compete with the real life cars at the Hot Wheels display or half-naked women breeding worthwhile hatred for the entire male gender? One day, Heavy Metal fetish gear woman, there may come a day when you won’t have to pull the sweaty palm of someone dressed as Anakin Skywalker up from your ass to your hip because they’d thought that they could get away with some quick grope action. Keep up hope.

Anakin Skywalkers were all over the place, however. It seemed like wherever I looked, there would be an Anakin Skywalker accompanied by Amidala, or whatever Natalie Portman was called. Each time I saw them, I wondered just how so many cute young people could convince their equally cute partners that dressing up as Star Wars characters and wandering around a comic convention all weekend would be a good idea. Where were these people when I was young? Other popular choices for dressing up included the traditional stormtroopers, Darth Vader and, surprisingly, characters from Pirates of the Carribean, “Busty Wench” being, it seemed, the new fairy elf queen woman from Lord of The Rings.

Everytime I go to comic conventions, I never come away thinking of things comic-related; I always leave with misty water-colored memories of the people dressed in outfits doing things that just seem wrong. Chewbacca taking a ride on a rickshaw, while tourists yell “Hey, Chewie!” as he goes past, for example. Or the woman who’d spent the day at a booth dressed as She-Ra, Princess of Power, exhausted outside the convention center, cigarette hanging from mouth as she watches the fans walk past, giving them a look born of hatred and surrender to another two days of the same. It’s the way that seeing things like that – Your nostalgia made real and the way that it’s become twisted and kind of horrifying in the process – sums up the experience of something like Comic-Con, which is much too much of a good thing and then some, so that it comes out the other end like some kind of Fanboy Heart of Darkness.

Did I have a good time? I have no idea; parts of it – talking to Eddie, Gina, Jim, Mark, or Jeff Parker, or Heidi, Kevin Church, Tim Leong, or all of the other people I spent more than three words with – were great. Other parts were frustrating – sorry I couldn’t find you, Kirsten – or amusing or just plain weird. I flew out that night, as planned, completely confused about what had happened, and two days later, I’m still undecided. My first public appearance was, in the end, one of the more understandable parts of the day (and thankfully, no-one seems to have posted something on their blog along the lines of “Graeme was a dick”. Although there’s still time, I suppose); it’s the rest of the San Diego experience that’s left me bewitched, bothered and bewildered.

But I think I want to try it again next year. And for more than five hours, next time.