ComicCon Report (finally)

August 3, 2006 5:40 pm by Neil Cohn

Huzzah! My computer has returned. While I was responding to (and purging) a few emails I was astounded to find 520 emails had accumulated across my various addresses. So, if you’ve emailed or expected more prompt communication from me over the last two weeks, I apologize and please be patient… I’ll get to it in no time I’m sure!

ComicCon was quite fun for the two days that I attended. Given that I’m from San Diego, with parents and friends making bids for time and the fact that I’ve been going in a professional capacity since I was 14, two days is plenty.

My first day was rather uneventful on the whole, though I did get to visit with various people, including T Campbell, who was the first person I ran into and always a pleasure to talk with.

Friday had far more fun highlights, opening the day with Brandon Peterson introducing me to Frank Cho and Howard Chaykin (who is hilarious, fascinating, and could be listened to all day). While there I ran into Merlin and we headed up to Scott McCloud’s panel. The whole family was great on stage. Scott’s talk was expectedly excellent, and his daughter Sky’s talk was awesome despite the technical problems (a theme of the day I’d find out).

I then skedadled over to my own panel with Zon Petilla (left) and Hal Shipman (middle). The talk as a whole went alright, though it had some issues. Running off a flash drive on an old and tired computer, the first segment suffered several mangled slides, causing my presentation to be a little lackluster, and ushering me into posing my fellow presenters and good friend Ian on stage as if they were panels.

Luckily, I was saved by fellow presenter Hal Shipman’s computer, after which it was smooth sailing. I sincerely hope people enjoyed the talk and that the distractions didn’t detract from it too much (and perhaps gave it some additional entertainment value?). I also thought that Hal’s talk, which followed mine, did a great job of exploring the differences between how Herge and Hal Foster used various graphic signs like speed lines. I’d love to see more papers like it.

At my talk I was also stoked to finally meet in person Neal VonFlue (who reminded me of a groovy Morgan Spurlock) along with Fabricari. It was great to talk to them and everyone else who came by at the booksigning afterwards.

So, all in all it was a fun, if short, ComicCon this year. Now on to my hundreds of emails, and Wizard World Chicago this weekend.