Yes, I was there. (You probably didn’t recognize me.) My general feeling is that this was the best Knights of Columbus show I ever attended.

If you’re of a certain age, you probably went to a convention like this a few times when you were young. Lots of fans, lots of comic book dealers, lots of pros and a few celebrities, and no big publishers. No movie companies. None of the corporate hard sell. Just enthusiastic people as far as the eye could see.

I found myself really having a good time there. Picked up a few trades at fire sale prices (which may be the new normal pricing– good if you’re buying, bad if you’re selling, dangerous if you’re producing), got to spend twenty minutes talking with Carol Cleveland about Monty Python and other work she’s done, shared some gossip with Rich Johnston (with each of us knowing we had juicy stories we weren’t going to tell each other), talked shop with the folks down Artist Alley making each other feel old (your daughter’s in college now? you’re forty now? I remember when you were a kid…) and did the comic book equivalent of walking into a Ferrari dealership, thumbing through Albert Moy’s original art for sale (holy cow, John Buscema pencils and Neal Adams inks? Original Watchmen pages? The cover to the first Superman/Spider-Man team-up?) The new location was a bit off the beaten path, but spacious and well filled.

I really had a much more enjoyable time than I expected. Which is why the concept of next year’s show being scheduled for the same time as New York Comic-Con is really ticking me off.

It feels like a dick move, a move done out of spite, a move that signals a war of attrition to see who goes bankrupt first. And we’re already seeing casualties: since the news of the show dates was anounced on Friday, I had a chance to ask a number of dealers which show they would attend. Many of them said they wouldn’t attend either show if they were both held the same weekend.

That’s a recipe for twin disasters. If neither Reed Expo nor Wizard World can fill their floor spaces, they’re both going to get clocked.

More wrap-up from Rich and Heidi.

The impulse to anecdote is ubiquitous in mankind; we all
want to tell our own stories. Since those stories happened to us, we naturally think that they’re fascinating…and
sometime are surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t agree with us. Comics
creators have been spilling out their lives onto their pages for a few decades
now – since the undergrounds, if not before that – and the autobiographical comic
is now its own cliché. But there’s still room to do interesting things with autobiographical
materials – at least, I hope
there is, since it seems that we’re destined to be deluged with books of true
stories…

Little Nothings, Vol. 2: The Prisoner Syndrome
Lewis Trondheim
NBM/ComicsLit, March 2009,
$14.95

Trondheim mostly makes fictional comics – Dungeon and Kaput and Zosky and Mister O and many more – but he also has kept a comics blog
in French, mostly focused on the small moments of his life. Three collections
from the blog have been published in his native France; the first two have been
translated so far for the English-speaking world. (I reviewed the first one
here back in March of last year.)

For the “Little Nothings” blog, Trondheim works in
watercolor, mostly in single pages – each one the record of a single event, or
a short conversation. The emphasis is on observation – each strip is a crystallized
instant, and clearly the blog as a whole is not intended to seriously chronicle
Trondheim’s life. As with the Dungeon
books, all of the people are drawn anthropomorphically – Trondheim and his
family are various kinds of bird, and most of the others look like different
kinds of mammals – rats and dogs and cats. (In the usual unsettling way of
anthropomorphic comics, Trondheim’s family also has a pair of real cats, Orly
and Roissy, and other actual animals show up from time to time.)

Either Trondheim travels an awful lot or travel is more
conducive to diary comics than his regular life, since a clear majority of the
comics here are about trips – to the Angouleme comics festival (a year when he
was the Guest of Honor), several other comics events, and vacation in Greece,
Guadeloupe, and Corsica. That does keep Prisoner Syndrome from being a succession of Trondheim-sitting-at-his-desk
pages – there are a number of those, of course, since that’s where a cartoonist
spends most of his time – and ties nicely into the title. In one of the early
strips in this book, Trondheim learns about “Prisoner Syndrome,” in which
people who spend all of their time in the same place gradually get more and
more tired from doing less and less – and so he decides to go to more comics
festivals, to keep himself healthy.

There are no grand gestures in Prisoner
Syndrome, no deep thoughts or big
moments – the series is called Little
Nothings for a reason. But there
are many thoughtful little moments, of the kind that make up all of our lives,
and Trondheim is an artful and nuanced portrayer of his own internal life. It’s
a lovely book of the small things that go together to make up an everyday life. (more…)

Pioneer comic book and newspaper strip artist George Tuska
died yesterday at the age of 93.

It’s hard to imagine an artist with a greater pedigree.
Beginning in 1939, George worked on such features as The Avengers, Black
Terror, Buck Rogers, Captain America, Captain Marvel (both Fawcett and Marvel), Challengers of the Unknown,
Doc Savage, Green Lantern, The Hulk, Iron Man, Justice League of America
(a.k.a. “The World’s Greatest Superheroes” newspaper stip), Luke Cage, Planet
of the Apes, Scorchy Smith, Sub-Mariner, Superboy, Superman, T.H.U.N.D.E.R.
Agents, Teen Titans, Uncle Sam… and that merely scratches the surface.

George was a gentle man who once had taken the
extraordinary step of punching out well-known wiseass cartoonist Bob Powell
while working in the Eisner-Iger shop. Will Eisner said Powell, as brilliant an
artist as anybody in that hallowed shop, absolutely deserved it. The stuff of
legend.

On a personal note, George was drawing the Buck Rogers
newspaper strip during its final years, from 1959 to 1967. During that last
year, I was an unpaid intern at the National Newspaper Syndicate and was
allowed to contribute story concepts and ideas. As a 16 year-old, I was amazed
and thrilled to be working anywhere near
George Tuska.

Emma Caulfield (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Robot Chicken), Mouse Guard creator David Petersen, comic
book artist/writer David W. Mack and others weigh in on comics with spandex. Ever wonder what
comics out there aren’t about super-heroes? Hosted by Alan Kistler and
Jose Ramos!