Comic-Con: A Retrospective

Sitting in the San Diego Airport, waiting for my flight to Denver and the connection to Chicago, I looked around at the other passengers. Most everyone was sitting around reading comic books or fantasy novels (a lot of George R.R. Martin). One guy near my had a Pan-Am collectors messenger bag stuffed with Comic-Con collector big bags. People were carrying on rolled posters and signed prints in safety tubes, and there were countless t-shirts, some of which were exclusive to Convention. There were a lot of knowing smiles and nods passed between strangers whose only connection were both being one of the 145,000 people per day that went through the Convention. Everyone looked tired, overstimulated and ready to go home, happy and full of new collectibles, books and t-shirts.

This is what the Convention, known to pros as "The Con," does to people: provides a sense of belonging on a massive scale. Hundreds of thousands of people descend upon the San Diego Convention Center, turning the grey, concrete structure into an epicenter of popular culture. Everyone is there for the same reason: to be at the crest of the next wave of popular culture. There were panels for new seasons of popular shows that have a connection to comics (some more tenuous than others). Actors and producers for shows like Game of Thrones, Big Bang Theory, Twilight, True Blood, Archer, Community, and the Adult Swim line-up showed clips from the new seasons and answered fan questions.

There are two massive ballrooms at the Convention Center that hold near 5000 people, and for the panels in these ballrooms, the lines started queuing hours before the doors opened. For the sneak preview of the next Twilight movie, dedicated fans lined up and camped out for two days, sleeping outside the Center in the warm San Diego nights, just for a twenty minute clip that these said fans could then claim to have seen while others have not. There were a few panels I wanted to see in these ballrooms, namely the Bones panel, so that I could kidnap David Boreanas for my Mom, and the Game of Thrones panel so that I could kidnap Emilia Clarke for myself (just kidding Catherine...or...am I?). However, as it becomes apparent to anyone having attended Comic-Con, these panels are essentially an all-day wait. Standing in line, alone, for upwards of four or five hours is not really why I went to the Convention. Ultimately, I had to pass on Game of Thrones for other activities.

My interest in the Convention is to find out about new books. All the publishers, both the massive, multinational conglomerates like DC and Marvel, and the smaller, more independent presses like Top Shelf and Drawn and Quarterly, have booths selling their wares. A good number of the books are unreleased yet. For example, Top Shelf was pimping Kagan McLeod's Infinite Kung-Fu, Nate Powell's Any Empire and a re-release of Craig Thompson's seminal Blankets in hardcover. The larger booths have a lot of name recognition, and lines for meeting and getting signatures from people like Alex Ross and Geoff Johns were quite long. However, smaller artists like McLeod, Powell, Anders Nilsen (and his INSANELY beautiful collected volume of Big Questions, which was just released by Drawn and Quarterly for the show), and even Thompson, on whose book Blankets I presented a paper, were at their respective publisher's booths signing books and answering questions.

This was a better use of my time. As an academic who is writing about living authors, it is essential that I make connections with these authors and artists so that I might get heads-up, early releases, interviews and what not for my work. Having these connections to living writers will give me an edge over other academics, both when I need to pull one in for a Convention or to help give my writing a more human touch.

Initially, I wasn't expecting so many creators to be at their respective booths. As I wandered the small press booths, I ran into the Flight booth, where Kazu Kibuishi and friends were selling their awesome anthology (now in Volume 8). There were a few other books published on Random House imprint Villard, one of which was Tory Woollcott's Mirror Mind. The book, with a stark black-and-white cover, caught my eye. The book tells the story about Woollcott's struggles with dyslexia while in primary school. I had been kicking around the idea of a paper on the representation of mental illnesses for a while, so I started to flip through. A woman behind the counter smiled at me, and asked if I was dyslexic (which I don't think that I am, but sometimes see letters and words upside-down). We got to talking, and I decided to buy the book. She asked who she should sign it to, and I paused.

"You're Tory Woollcott?" I asked.

"Sure am. And you are..."

"Keegan. This is great. I'm buying this because I want to write about how authors represent mental disorders in comics. Also, I want to look at how comics can be used to convey stories in a medium that might help those who struggle with reading."

We talked for some time about her choice to write the story in the comic form.

"Is there a way I can reach you later?" I asked. "Do you have a card or something?"

She proceeded to write her email address right in the book and told me that I should contact her if I have any questions. Which I do. And I will.

I went on to meet some other artists and authors. Some were new to me, like Nate Powell, whose book Swallow Me Whole has been on my Amazon Wish List for a while. Some were my favorites, like Nilsen and Thompson, both of who said they would try to make my talk (neither did, though Thompson signed a copy of his book for me, even saying as much in the inscription). Some were surprising, like Ryan North of the very excellent Dinosaur Comics. I got cards and email addresses for many of these authors and creators, and now can pepper my papers and publications with interviews and quotes from the authors I write about.

Beside meeting writers and cartoonist, the Convention also gave me an opportunity to meet with other academics. Peter Coogan and Randy Duncan have been putting this event together for several years, and every year there are more and more impressive academics that present papers and pimp their latest books. This year, I was really excited to hear David Beronä would be present, talking about his work in woodcut novels. Beronä, who has a book out, Wordless Books, is a formalist critic that I make use of in my own writing. His work on early woodcut novels of Lynd Ward and Frans Mansereel is groundbreaking.

One day, overwhelmed by the mass of people milling about the Convention Center, I decided to take a walk and get a sandwich. As I was cutting down a pedestrian path, I noticed Beronä crossing the street in the same direction, by himself. Now, randomly approaching strangers on the street has never been my forte, but this was an opportunity that I needed to take. So, with a deep breath and my balls up in my chest, I got his attention, introduced myself and started talking. We walked along the pedestrian path, discussing the Convention, comic criticism and San Diego. I found him to be far more approachable and down to earth than a lot of critics and academics who spend their time enshrouded in books and journals. Like the contacts I made among the creators, knowing Beronä is bound to help my career (in fact, he asked that I send my paper to him to discuss possible avenues of publishing).

On Saturday, when my friend Jonathan Talbert and his fiancee Lisa came to visit me, hearing my talk, we went to a party thrown by the Comic(s) Art Conference. I sat at a table with young academics, many of whom presented papers and posters at the conference, and we all reveled in our nerdity. One academic from North Texas was blissed out over having met Scott McCloud. Another was just excited to meet a popular and credible feminist critic. We talked about the new comics we bought and the panels we attended. I had gone to the party knowing Talbert and Lisa, but left having a table full of new friends.

Comic-Con, for all the press it gets for the weird things that happen at it (the costumes, the fanaticism, the stabbings over seats), is really a place were fans of comics and comic-culture can come together to enjoy the company of like minded individuals. On the bus one morning, three guys dressed like characters from Star Wars boarded the bus and made their way to seats behind me.

"Dude...nice Thundercats shirt," one said as he went by.

Sunday, at the Denver Airport, waiting for my connecting flight, I sat on the ground, watching the mass of strangers mill about going to hundreds of locations around the US. Most people didn't make eye contact, kept focus on finding their next terminal, the baggage claim, a taxi or what not. I started reading Ryan North's Dudes Already Know About Chicken when a young man walked past carrying a hard cover edition of Blackest Night. We nodded at each other, understanding the shared experience, and he disappeared into the disinterested crowd.

Repopulating

One of the first video games I truly loved was Super Metroid (on the Super Nintendo, who very cleverly just added "Super" to all the titles on the original Nintendo). I loved everything about it from the cutting edge graphics, the tight story and the easy game play. Because the Super Nintendo was the first game system I had after the Atari 400, I was pretty easily impressed.

One thing in particular that separated game systems by Nintendo from those by Atari was the saving capability. This allowed for much, MUCH longer games. It also allowed for some sort of character development. When you played Pac-Man, the little yellow circle with the wedge missing never changed. He continued to eat the little pellets, continued to chase ghost, and continued to hunt for the elusive fruits. In Super Metroid, Samus changed over the course of the game. Not only did her character encounter a litany of disastrous problems which altered the players emotional attachment to the faceless Samus, but her weapons systems were upgraded, her armors enhanced and so on. In the end, Samus was a veritable fortress storming after Space Pirates in search of her stolen Metroid Larvae.

Once I finished that game, the first thing I wanted to do was start over and do it again. I turned the game on, clicked new game and immediately tried to use all my armor and weapon upgrades, but instead found my newly re-oranged Samus essentially useless. I eventually quit playing because repopulating my armor and weapons systems seemed like more work than was worth it, knowing that I had already beaten the game.

In this same light, I find Google+ to be kind of annoying (though, I still have invites, if anyone wants to join me there). As far as I can tell, Google+ is essentially the same as Facebook: I can chat, I can post messages to my friends, I can share news and information, etc. Except in Google+, I have limited friends and a spotty understanding of the user controls. It just took me ten minutes to figure out how to post a message to two specific friends (Jamie and Rachel) regarding a Skype call. I wanted just to go to her wall, type in the message and tag Jamie in it. On Google+ I have to go to MY way, choose the friends I want to contact from my circles of friends (which are sparsely populated at the moment), and then type out my message. I can only assume it made it, though, because when I went to Rachel and Jamie's separate profile pages, there were no messages.

Like when I got tired of trying to get my less-optimized Samus to do wall jumps, I find myself just getting frustrated with Google+. Yes: Google is internet Utopia, and most of what they do is amazing (the Google Netbook looks sexy, and the Android is like the iPhone for regular people); Yes: Google's stuff works really well on average; Yes: it's nice to have options so that Facebook can't just decide what it wants and force us to all use their free program how they want to (which is another problem I have with people who complain about Facebook - no one is forcing you to use it; if you don't like the interface, don't use the program); Yes: the lack of ads is nice...for now, but honestly, ads have become such a ubiquitous part of my life I barely register seeing them anymore.

I guess my issue here is that I don't understand the difference or the need. Facebook works pretty well. There have been privacy issues (but why would you list information on-line that you didn't want everyone to know?), some of the games have asinine restrictions (I can only play Scrabble when I am here in the States, which puts my Epic Scrabble show down with John Zwarich on hold for six months at a time), and the ads sometimes assume that I am a lonely fat many in need of women and games that feature castles (which is only half true, and I'll let you figure that out); I get these issues, but again, Facebook is free, has been free, and shows no indication that it will be anything other than free. All these complaints about Facebook seem to me like someone complaining about the free cupcakes he or she has just eaten, and demanding more variety in the free cupcakes offered. Maybe a free cupcake that doesn't come wrapped in a paper that advertises for a dating service and is more open source.

As I type this, I realize that I sound quite crotchety. It might just be that I am getting old, and don't want to keep jumping around remaking friends in virtual spaces. I am fine working within the confines of Facebook because all my friends are there. It's a lot of work to reestablish these virtual friendships, making sure I don't leave anyone out. I find it especially redundant considering all of my friends on Google+ are on Facebook, too.

But, again, I realize the old-manish nature of these complaints, and in reflection it seems that my issue with Google+ is really just an issue I have in my life here: I am constantly jumping between two places that are filled with my friends. Both Chicago and Aberystwyth have people that I like to be around, and both places are places that I wish I could occupy at one time. In fact, I wish I could just take the two places and a roll of duct tape to make some sort of Franken-city filled with British and American people that I like to be around.

Like with Google+ and Facebook, though, this just seems to be the inevitable progression of my life. I wanted to live in the world for a while, and because of that I am going to have a wide net of friends cast about the world. No one made me move to Aberystwyth, make friends with people, and then return home to Chicago where I have other awesome friends (including some new ones I made this summer).

What I need to do, both in my life and my virtual social media outlets, is learn how to manage both. I have to spend time with both Google+ and Facebook, getting to know the ins-and-outs of the new guy while returning to the appreciated familiarity of the old guy. Neither one is better than the other, and neither one is a replacement for the other. If I can fit two separate cultures and two separate circles of friends in my life, I should have room for two social networking sites.

Exposed Houses

In an effort to update the house my Mom moved into a few decades ago, the siding is being redone. This is not a complicated process: take off old siding, put on new siding. Of all the things that can be done to a house, this is probably one of the least complicated.

That said, it is really becoming quite an issue in my life.

My Mom smartly hired outside help to do the siding, Champion Windows and Siding (if you need a referral, please let me know). That is, after all, what champions would do: hire Champion to repair your house. The first thing that the contractors did was strip my house of it's siding and backer-board (the Styrofoam padding between the plywood of the house and the siding). At one point, I wandered outside to see how the work was progressing, and there was my house, exposed to the elements, it's siding strewn about the yard.

It was hard not to feel an tinge of embarrassment looking at my naked house. There were spots were the plywood had rotted from weather damage. Some mold damage blackening other spots, generally near where the rotted sections were. Insulating spewing from the vents that lead to the attic and washer/dryer. It was like accompanying my sister to a gynecological exam: I knew all of this stuff existed underneath the siding, but I would rather not have that theory quantified in front of me (and the neighborhood, for that matter). Thankfully, the workers were quick, and within a few hours, the rotted pieces were replaced, the vents were covered, and the whole house was wrapped in a moisture resistant layer of Tyvek.

Besides exposing my house and all it's physicality to the neighborhood, the contractors are required to sporadically bang on my house with hammers. Obviously, many hands make light work, so there are at least three hammers at any given time going to town on the house. For a fun experiment, put your head in a hamper and then pound on it with a shoe. That's sort of what it's like. The walls are rattling constantly, requiring my Mom and I to go around the house and take all the pictures off outside walls. In the hamper experiment, though, there is one important difference: you know when the blows are about to happen. There is no discernible pattern to the workers hammering (the they use actual hammers, so each individual hammer stroke is different). The lack of a pattern makes sense - what with all the up and down ladders.

This starts every morning around 7:30. Now, anyone who knows me (or most of the Lannon family for that matter) knows that the morning is not the best time to engage me in any manner. I tend to be one of two things: 1) really amiable just to get whatever is happening to stop so I can return to sleep (I lived with a girl who abused this horribly, getting me to take out the trash, move the car, and walk the dog); 2) really grouchy and testy. Because there is nothing I can half-assedly do to make the banging stop, I imagine I am leaning toward the second one.

But upsetting my sleeping patterns is not the only problem with having the siding people around the house. The main problem is that they are up on ladders near all the windows.

I woke up the other day and the house was unusually dark. My Mom likes to keep all the shades and curtains pulled tight when the weather turns hot so that the house stays cooler (ostensibly, this is to save on running the air conditioner, but because the house is so dark we have to run all the lights; in the end, I imagine it balances out). Recently, though, my Mom has taken to sitting in the corner of the living room where no one can easily see what she is doing.

I thought this was crazy until this morning when I was sitting in the family room, still in my pajamas at 11:30, watching The Colbert Report. Suddenly, I was really anxious wondering what the workers might think if they caught sight of me eating cookies and watching television in the middle of the weekday. I quickly turned off the TV and started reading.

Then, I started to worry that the workers would start to judge my taste in literature. At the moment, I am reading Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman. Catherine, a friend of mine from high school, and I have recently been talking about writing non-fiction, and it got me thinking that I hadn't read any for a little bit. Anyone familiar with Klosterman's work knows that it is basically the ramblings of a pop culture critic who has seen too many movies, read too many books and listens to too many CDs. He also has an ease with drugs, and writing about his use of said drugs. I was worried that the workers might notice this and assume I was some pretentious snob that would rather listen to The Postal Service and discuss the merits of PBR than do an honest day's work. I could have read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code but I don't want the workers to think that I am a slave to popular literature or that I found that type of writing engaging. I wanted something that said I was intelligent, but not pedantic, like Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Jennifer Egan's My Life with the Goon Squad. So I did what any rational person would do in this instance: work out.

I was really athletic in high school (another thing that talking with Catherine made me realize has dropped from my life almost entirely), and I used to be able to run long distances at better than average speeds. If pressed, though, I would pick track over cross-country as my favorite sport, and the one I was better at. Cross-country was nice, in that it kept me in shape and gave me a community to belong to, but I really don't have it in me to run miles and miles without complaining. The rational part of my brain realizes that I could drive the same distance much more efficiently. Or walk it, if a car weren't available, and still reach the same result. Running seems to be one of those things that needs to be done in emergency situations only.

Despite this recent change in demeanor, I found myself compelled to use the treadmill that collects dust in the family room. I returned to The Colbert Report, and undertook a thirty minute (or so) walk-run routine. Exercise, I thought to myself, ain't nothing strange about a man running on a treadmill in the middle of the afternoon. Or rather, running on a treadmill makes me less of a loser than sitting in my pajamas mid-day, watching TV and eating cookies.

Or did it? As I cooled down from my impromptu exercise program, I was suddenly worried that maybe it sent the wrong message. Who runs inside on treadmills? Am I the sort of person who is so distant from the working class that I have to run inside on expensive machinery when the world is free to run on? Was my workout suggesting that I was an elitist? I jumped off the treadmill and tried to both make use of the kettle bells and the Ab Circle (my Mom's house is something of a museum for exercise equipment), but neither I felt portrayed the "salt of the earth" sentiment that I wanted to suggest.

I decided the best thing to do was show these judgmental day laborers that I was contributing to society. I was going to take a shower and then get to work editing a document that I need to have submitted by tomorrow. See, I would say with my actions, I am TOTALLY like you.

Unfortunately, the workers by this point had scaled to the part of the house where the bathroom window is, and had, no doubt, begun making judgments about my choice of shampoo and body wash (Shampoo and conditioner in one, eh? Too lazy to use two bottles. Or, Suave Professionals? Is he too good for the regular Suave?). There was no way I could possibly take a shower with these people on the other side of the window, no matter how nontransparent the shower curtain is.

At the time of posting this, I am sitting in my room, away from the prying eyes of these contractors who, probably, have not noticed anything about my tastes in literature, movies or music, and who have more to worry about then what all of these choices say about me. In fact, unless I make my presence known, these workers are more interested in the outside of the house, rather than the two people knocking about inside of it.

That said, I have yet to shower.

Relearning and Redoing

Remember a while back, there were a series of ads that suggested a person could relearn how to perform certain activities without cigarettes that are associated with cigarettes, like driving and drinking coffee. Though these ads seemed to associate smoking with intelligence (that is, when you stop smoking, you forget how to do common every day things like driving or drinking a beverage; in fact, the effects of quitting are so crippling to one's mental capacity, that said quitter needs to relearn, like someone waking from a coma, how to do easy things), the point is worth examining: activities associated with other activities seem off when done solo.

Today was my sister's garage sale. I was not looking forward to it for a few reasons: 1) all forecasts suggested dangerous heat in and around the city. Some weather people suggested that it might get as high as 100, with humidity making it feeler even more uncomfortable than a temperature nearly high enough to slowly cook beans. In the end, it got to 72. As one of my friends said on Facebook, "I wish I had that margin of error at my job."

2) Garage sales are not really populated by awesome people. There are two agendas at odds here: I want to sell my crap; they want a good deal on things that are between gently and heavily used. For my sister, she fits into a nice little niche: little kids clothing. Anyone who has had kids knows the inherent problem with clothes other paraphernalia, like high chairs, bouncers, car seats, etc.: children grow out of things quickly so that shirts, pants, jackets, seat, and so forth are only good for a short period of time - a time much shorter than the life of the product. That is, a high chair is perfectly usable for many years after your kid can no longer sit in it. After a while, there is a pile of perfectly good clothing and kids gear that sits washed and folded in a bucket in the garage. Enter the garage sale. It gives my sister a chance to unload some of her goods while it gives new parents a chance to buy clothes and gear at discount prices.

Unfortunately, the value I put on goods is generally higher than the value the buyer places on the same goods. Thus, the negotiation. I hate haggling over prices, but I also hate taking home a TV that is taking up space in my Mom's basement. That said, I also like getting money for stuff I have lying around not making money. So I have to quickly balance the price I place on an item with the price offered and the potential price I could get. Generally, I tend to push the multiple item discount. Buy two things, and I'll cut the price on the two. This way we both win: I get money for my goods and said goods leave the sale; the buyer feels like he or she has gotten a deal. Win/win.

3) The third reason brings me back to the beginning of this entry: last year, Erika and I contributed some of her old belongings to help earn some walking around money for the summer. He manned the sale together, and it was a good time. I enjoyed myself. It felt weird manning this years garage sale, which like last year was overcast and sparsely attended, by myself.

Let me take a minute to describe a recent dream I had:

While waiting for an elevator in a large balcony decorated in a shiny, contemporary glass and chrome way, I struggled to arrange a large number of shopping bags. These bags were like those fancy bags you get at boutiques: odd shaped and strange colored with ribbons and braided strings for handles. I was really worried that when the elevator got there, I wouldn't be able to get on, and hoped that when it arrived it was empty. It arrived, and true to my concerns, I couldn't get all my bags onto the elevator easily. The doors opened and there was a really attractive woman on her way down. I wanted to get onto that elevator with the woman, but I was also worried about my bags. There was no way to take the elevator and get all my bags on at the same time. The woman, who had a British accent and looked not unlike Emily Blunt, keep urging me to leave the bags behind and get on the elevator.

That was when I woke up.

It's weird being in Chicago, or rather Bolingbrook, and doing things I did last year, but this time without a fiancee. I keep looking around and saying to myself, "Last year, Erika and I did this," or "I remember when Erika and I did this." And so on. Sometimes, it's not too big a problem; sometimes, it really sucks to be reminded of the really good times I remember from last summer. I haven't been able to bring myself to go into the city, though I'd really like visit some of my favorite comic stores.

But, in light of my dream, I realize I have to move on. If I want to get on elevator with the beautiful, accented woman I need to drop my baggage and just get on with my life. After all, there are only so many elevators, and not all of them will come with beautiful women.