I have just returned from a trip to the San Diego Comic Con and thought I would jot down some thoughts on the whole awesome shebang.

I had planned on going last year but for various commercial printing related reasons had to abandon the trip at the last minute.

The main reason for the trip was to get a feel for how the market works in the US and how we should approach it. Many of you would know that while our books are available on line and in newsagents, we have not as yet approached Diamond. Our plan right from the start was not to go to them until we had a large enough number of titles with back issues in hand to allow for production problems. We have that now and are in the process of getting our books listed.

I had spoken to others about SDCC and was aware that getting a booth there was difficult. I was widely advised to do a scouting visit prior to going to the expense of setting up tables. Having been now I realise that the con is close enough in format to the local Supanova/Armageddon style happenings that we could have gone and would have coped, but I am glad I had this year to go as a fan. I also got to take my eight year old son along to enjoy the spectacle of it, something I couldn’t have done if I had gone with a stall.

We arrived late Wednesday and went down to collect our badges. I was aware that Preview Night was on but thought it was just for exhibitors and press. It was like Christmas when we realised we could get in early and we went nuts buying stuff, starting with Diary of a Zombie Kid for my son. We only had about an hour to take in as much as possible and it was not enough, even with the barely full hall.

My first piece of advice is to try your hardest to get admission to the Preview Night as there were heaps less people and there were things happening that just didn’t happen again. The one that springs to mind is that one of the stalls had around ten Slave Leias being available for photos – a pretty essential part of the con experience I would suggest. The next day they were down to two though and by the Friday they had none. If you wanted to pick up any of the items for sale the lines were a lot smaller as well. It was definitely worth going through the professional admission process for this night alone.

Thursday was the official opening and the crowd was a lot larger but still nothing on the weekend to come. We decided to try and walk the whole thing and take it all in. We started off about ten in the morning and left at seven at night and had not made it into artist’s alley – the hall was that big. The sheer amount of toys and books for sale was astonishing and as much as the “cool toys” could distract you for hours, equally distracting was the number of stars gathered around the place, both human and corporate.

We wandered past Lou Ferrigno and Gil Gerard sitting at a small booth similar to the ones used for temporary tattoos at Supanova. Cast members from Buffy, Star Trek and Back to the Future were around the place doing signings  for anyone who ambled up for a chat. Wandering through the small press section, Sergio Aragones was sitting at table the same size as a Supanova AA table happy to sign his new book and chat away. Ditto Jerry Robinson. Matt Emery asked me to get Gilbert Hernandez to sign a sketch of Fritz from Love and Rockets – the entire Fernandez clan were sitting at an AA size table happy to chat to anyone at the Fantagraphics booth and for $10 I got an original sketch signed to Matt.

I guess the point of what I am saying is that before going I imagined all these people would be kept a certain distance away from the public, with contact limited. And while that was true of say the cast of True Blood (who caused the biggest crush I saw at the con) for most of the people involved in comics it was pretty easy to make contact.

Another surprise was the way some of the companies presented themselves. Marvel and DC had the awesomely massive booths you would expect but they still had comic-craft based attractions. Jim Lee did a drawing class at the booth and there were plenty of other similar things happening.

It was the mid size publishers like Fantagraphics, IDW and Image that had really interesting booths, basically little more than a few tables selling books and with a roster of artists coming along to sign. The Kings Comics stall at Supanova was bigger and sleeker than any of the above publisher’s booths. It really threw me a bit as I would have expected them to be trying to emulate the big two but instead they seemed to be going to great efforts to emphasise how small they were.

And then we get to the smaller publishers like Asylum or Slave Labor Graphics. I had always pictured them as being medium size, full time operations – actual companies with corporate suites and full on editorial operations. But talking to Frank Forte I realised that they were closer to a Gestalt style operation – one person running a publishing operation outside of the hours of their day job. Nothing wrong with that at all - it just goes to show the skew of my perceptions that companies that had promoted themselves in a very professional, corporate way in the comics media were actually more like a creator/publisher model.

Why is this important? I have spent a lot of time being afraid of the US market because of the shadow cast by a lot of these companies. There seem to be so many and they seem to have such a high profile that the idea of trying to compete with them on their own soil was really daunting. But now, having seen them in the flesh and put their operations into context I realise that Black House, for all its isolation in Australia and diminutive size still compares very well to many of the big names in terms of commercial, creative and administrative muscle. The US seems a lot less frightening now.

And here we get to another major point I want to make for all of our local creators – Artist Alley.

I reserved pretty much a whole afternoon to wander around there. I wanted buy as many self published books as possible – see who had talent and drive but hadn’t been picked up and see if I could get a few US based creators working for us. And Artist Alley is huge – I don’t know how many people exactly but every artist was restricted to what we would consider half a table and if I had to guess a figure I would say there were between 100-200 people with their wares on display. Sounds pretty intimidating, doesn’t it Aussie boy/girl?

Wrong.

Of all the artists sitting there at the biggest comic trade show in the world, I would guesstimate that ninety percent of them only had sketches for sale. No self published books – just sketches and mostly sketches of other peoples’ characters like Wonder Woman etc. Of the ten percent who had books on their tables, I would guess half to two thirds of them were simply sketch books. Only a very small few had work that they felt so strongly about that they had paid a printer to print it. I asked one of the artists, thinking maybe I had missed something but he said that only a few of his friends had been lucky enough to have been published - the idea of self publishing seemed alien to him.

Astounding. Where was the drive – where was the hunger to do the work, whether you had a publisher paying the bills or not? Compare that to Artist’s Alley at any of the local cons where you find a heap of creators backing their own creativity. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone turn up at a con without actual books to sell. And sitting back waiting to be lucky enough to be published seems just plain lazy – you will spend a long time waiting to be published in Australia – you need to force your way into print one way or another.

Having said all that, every market finds its own way to work and I suppose this system must work for the Americans. I guess if you were a Marvel or DC talent scout you could wander over to AA, peruse the sketches and use them to assess the artist. But how much more impressive would it be to find someone so driven to succeed they did it all themselves?

I think this is a real opportunity for the local creators. Get over there and show them what you can do because I am sure they won’t know what hit them. All I could think as I was wandering AA looking for original works was that people with the get up and go attitudes of a Jason Franks or Paul Bedford would eat this lot for breakfast.

Anyway, to sum it up as a pop culture spectacle it is incredibly cool. As a party zone it is a great place to go if you are involved or interested in comics or pop culture even peripherally. As a comics trade show it is pretty damn good, but I suspect the New York Comic Con may be better for its reputedly tighter focus on comics.

I will be back for sure and I will be bringing tables.