NYCC Report
Lots of stuff happened over the weekend, which is largely still a blur to me. As mentioned last week, I moderated Webcomics: Threat or Menace? on Saturday, during which I was so intent on not sucking that I didn’t really store any of it in long-term memory. Rick Marshall from ComicMix was in the audience and has promised a write-up, but if anybody happened to record it, let us know. For the record, The Frontingest Man Alive said that I didn’t suck, so yay.
The panel consisted of Rich Stevens, Robert Khoo, Richard Brunning (Senior VP — Creative Director for DC) and Jeremy Ross (Director, New Product Development for Tokyopop); Brunning and Ross were very nice guys, not taking the “webcomics are evil” tack that the session description promised (found here), and Rich and Robert were very good about not claiming that webcomics would eat the firstborn children of the dead-tree publishers. We never did get a consensus on threat or menace, but seemed to agree that media are all shifting towards a long-tail, some-degree-of-free, and the old and new schools are going to have to meet in the middle. For more on this topic, come back tomorrow for an interview I did with Joey Manley and John Boeck on where ComicSpace is headed, six months after the big merge.
And on the off change that Jeremy Ross is reading this: you guys really need to get the rights to Kimagure Orange Road.
Others seen around the con: Brian Warmoth, Scott McCloud, Jennifer Babcock (who did a terrific job with the How to Make Webcomics panel on Kids Day), DJ Coffman, Brad Guigar, Ryan Sohmer (who risked a savage beating by defying the convention center union guys who wanted like 85 friggin’ dollars to plug in a light fixture), Chris Hastings, Raina Telgemeier, a healthy-looking Dave Roman, (Dave and Raina did about 83 sessions between the two of them, including a very noisy Avatar:The Last Airbender session that sounded really good through the walls and totally didn’t drown out my session, not that I am bitter), and the Jellabalicious Keen Soo. I was pleased beyond measure to finally make the acquaintance of Amy Kim Ganter and Kazu Kibuishi, and I understand that the inimitable Jonathan Coulton was at the show, but I missed him. If anybody knows JoCo, kindly ask him this for me — What’s Soterios Johnson really like? Besides dreamy, of course.
Finally, Fleen announces the Webcomics Partner of the Year Award to Caroline Guigar, who figured out that Brad was running out of books, and wrangled two toddlers and several boxes, sending replenisment stock on a Greyhound so that Brad would have something to sell on Sunday. If you want to succeed in webcomics, I strongly advise you to find somebody that supportive to help you.
You were great Gary. I hope you are able to moderate many more panels about comics- you were great with summing up questions like… “In short, the question is, why does Tokyopop suck?”- HAH!
I didn’t think about the union guys up there.. WOOPS! I know when we were short a chair in my booth, someone said it was like 100 bucks for a friggin chair, but I went over and grabbed one of the nice padded ones from the food area close by- someone warned me not to do it like i’d get in trouble, but the rebel I am, I just said if anyone says anything, blame it on me and I’ll play dumb. Now I’m picturing what could have been with me being beaten to death by big guys who look like THE GOON. — Sohmer and I could have tag teamed though! We could have taken ALL of them– right…right?
By DJ Coffman on 04.21.08 1:54 pm
Thanks again for the donut, Gary! It’s always nice running into you at cons, you’re always in such a happy mood!
By Raina Telgemeier on 04.22.08 11:20 am
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