Patchwork Earth Purposeful Solipsism, Nostalgic Ephemera

C2E2 Wrap-Up, Post Illness

Well, that was a pleasant bit of fuckery.

Anyone following my Twitter feed this past week caught the news already, but I spent about half of the con too sick to participate, and the other half dazed and confused. I apologize again to the people I was supposed to meet up with in some capacity, but I was an absolute mess.

That said, as far as my impressions of the show are concerned... The inimitable Matthew Brady has been giving his own breakdown of the show over a few posts this week, and I encourage you to visit his site for his take, because it was a great deal more optimistic than mine was.

I freely admit that a great deal of my ambivalence may be due to how goddamned sick I was all weekend; other than catching up with rising star and old friend Jeremy Haun and giving the floor a cursory once-over, I barely took in a lot of the show. McCormick Place has a patio that looks out over Lake Michigan, and it's a beautiful view, so I wound up sitting out there and reading comics for a lot of the con's duration. The fresh air was better for me than the crowds, which made me dizzy.

But... I did get a feel for the tenor of the show while I was there, and I wasn't totally impressed. Reports of the turn-out are high (27,000 is about what I keep hearing) but what I tended to hear from most booths and tables at the show was that the crowd seemed consistently sparse. The mood, as well, seemed very laid-back, and very going-through-the-motions... it was nice for creators, to some extent, because they got to interact with pleasant fans. You'd have to ask some of the folks who were selling, how it went business-wise.

I was on a shuttle bus sitting in front of some folks working a dealer's booth, and they were lamenting the turn-out on Friday. To make the trip worthwhile, they were going to have to do six times as well the following day, and I'm fairly certain that it didn't happen. Part of the problem in the dealer's pavilion was that compared even to Wizardworld, it seemed like the retailers were dumping their garbage stock. The time that I spent in that part of the show, I had specific items in mind, and I found most of them after a bit of hunting:

• The "Dark Knight, Dark City" arc in Batman, an interesting piece of Peter Milligan work which is a cornerstone to Grant Morrison's current Batman and Robin run.
• The Brendan McCarthy issue of DC's Solo, which should not really be sitting in a dollar bin, but that's typical--
• The new Simon/Kirby omnibus, this time focusing on The Newsboy Legion,
• And a DVD set of Cowboy Bebop, which I embarrassingly didn't own until now, and which I was reminded of by this great piece of writing by Sean Witzke.

And, of course, I picked up great books by Richard Carbonneau and Steve Bialik over at the Cellar Door Publishing booth, but they're both friends, and that was the first place I stopped when I got to the show.

C2E2 fulfilled its main promise, in that the show minimized the non-comics bullshit part of these types of cons... celebrities, gimmicks, this stuff was shoved off to the side or was not present at all. It was comic-focused, and that was great. But it was a mainstream show, and so it had the same problems that all mainstream shows have. I've reached an age and a temperament where three days of superheroes is just far too much. Obviously, there were other things there, people were showing other stuff (I liked seeing the "webcomic pavilion") but those other things are always an afterthought, a stowaway passenger. I haven't been fortunate to go to those shows that have a less mainstream focus, due to any number of factors over the years, and I know that I'd find a little more of what I'm looking for there... but when a show is as large as this one is, you really wish that meant it was all-inclusive rather than just a reflection of what comic retailers stock for what are, realistically, similar reasons. The presence of manga and anime, for instance, was limited to a few retail booths and a Funimation table that all looked like they got lost on their way to ACen.

My wife attended a number of the educational panels, and they were wildly up and down, which is to be expected from the con panel experience. For my part, I attended the AV Club panel, which was nice enough but skewed towards the movies in order to accomodate their primary skillset; I wanted to ask more questions, but they were ushered out quickly when it was through.

I think what surprised me the most was Artist's Alley. They were some incredible creators there, and they mostly seemed to be having a good time, but what I only saw rarely was people pushing self-published and indie fare at their tables. There were a couple, but it was mostly folks "dancin' for dinner"--doing sketches and selling prints. The "streets of Calcutta" feel was largely absent, because nobody was there to start out. It may have been the high cost of entry--just to get a chair for your booth at McCormick was something like $70--but without the eager energy of newcomers with strange and occasionally wonderful work on photocopies and in POD copies, the show felt airy and diminished.

A couple of years in, C2E2 may grow to the point where some of these issues are resolved, but I'm not yet sure. It's an expensive venue, and despite being downtown, it's no more convenient to get to without a vehicle than out in Rosemont (from my address, it's almost more difficult - we wound up stowing away in the hotel shuttles). If C2E2 leans too far mainstream to offset the costs, it could become Wizardworld all over again down the road.

It's the best show that Chicago has had since Wizard took over the original Chicago Comic-con, but I do wonder if its standards are low, or just too different from my own for me to enjoy it fully.

UPDATED: The Beat offers a fairly even-handed take on the event.