Photos for Friday Here!
To get to the show, I took the subway to Penn Station and walked down 34th St, heading for the Jacob K Javits Center. As I got closer to the Center, and further away from the main Midtown area, the crowds on the sidewalk started to thin out, and eventually, once I was a block or so away, I noticed that aside from one solitary woman, everyone walking the way I was were guys, in ones and twos, and all of them carrying backpacks or messenger bags. Clearly, the geeks were converging on their Mecca.
Once I got around the corner and saw the Center, I was pretty immediately impressed: The place is huge. I got inside, and found my way down to the main Attendee lineup, at around 11:20. The lineup was enormous, and it snaked around the room. I saw a few interesting costumes in the lines, including one rather well-done Kid Flash costume. Nice.
At one point, the crowd went nuts, and I looked around and saw that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were up at a window overlooking the queuing area. They came down later and did some sort of acrobatic fight demo in between a couple of the loops of lines, but I couldn't really see them...
Once the line had finally started to move slowly toward the door leading up the convention floor, a group of faux-leather-and-chainmail-dressed ladies swooped in on the geeks to hand out cards promoting some odd-looking Comedy Central show that seemed to revolve around some sort of generic fantasy setting. Hmm.
Finally getting in to look at the show floor was pretty cool. It's huge, colorful, and pretty overwhelming to the senses. I spent a good while just sort of wandering around, looking at various company booths, before finding my way to the booth shared by PvP and Penny Arcade. I stood by the PvP side of the booth and watched Scott Kurtz do a sketch in a guy's book, and then bought a Skull plushie and snapped a pic of Kurtz with it. I moved around to the other side of the booth to check out the Penny Arcade goodies, and ended up buying a "I Roll 20s" shirt. I then asked Gabe for a sktech, and totally failed to talk to Tycho.
Which brings me to an aside: I had a terrible tongue-tied shyness problem all day. I could barely stammer out "I like your work" to Kurtz and Gabe, and didn't even manage to say anything to Tycho. I had similar problems in the Marvel and DC booths, where I completely didn't talk to anyone, except when I got a sketch from Jim Starlin (a Darkseid face!), when I managed a quick "Love your work. Can I have a little Darkseid sketch? Thank you!" Sigh. It was like being a teenager again. I'll try to be more forward for the rest of the con.
Anyway, I did another sweep of the main "big company" area of the hall, and stopped at Rockstar's display to try GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS. It was pretty cool! Very much like an old top-down GTA game, but with slightly nicer graphics, and a gameplay sensibility more like the modern ones. I could see getting it, if I still had a DS.
Next up, I headed downstairs for my first panel of the weekend, which was about the business side of Webcomics, and featured Scott Kurtz, of PvP, and Robery Khoo, the business manager for Penny Arcade. It was quite interesting, though admittedly pretty far outside my area of knowledge. I just read webcomics, and don't really have any great desire to make one. Still, Kurtz and Khoo were both good at speaking on the subject, and Kurtz especially is a funny and charming speaker as well, so it was just fun to listen to him. I did enjoy it especially when the subject turned to webcomics vs print comics, and the idea that some "old media" artists have the opinion that making money from advertising or merchandising is somehow "cheap": Kurtz made the point that whether you're making your money by getting a pay cheque from a publisher or a comic syndicate, or from ads and merchandising directly, ads and merchandising are coming into play at some point. As Kurtz put it: "There's only one way to make money directly from your art. It's called counterfeiting."
After that panel, I got a tiny, expensive, but luckily pretty good, pizza, and then wandered the show for a little while again before the next panel I wanted to go to. During this short wander, I saw a lot of the dealers. They were selling a mind-numbing amount of comics and toys, and some of them had some crazy deals on trades and back issues. I might have to pick some stuff up; I think I'll wait until Sunday though. The other thing I saw at this point was the EA booth, where I found a playable demo for Dragon Age! I didn't have too long to park myself there, but I did fiddle with it for a few minutes, and it was pretty cool. Very Baldur's Gate with nice graphics, which is not a bad thing at all.
I got down to the Comic Writers on Comic Writing panel in time to get a seat near the front, and then we had to wait a bit for the writers to assemble, as some had to escape other panels and signings to get there. It was moderated by Peter Sanderson, a comics scholar, who works with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Present at the panel were Tom DeFalco, Jimmy Palmiotti, Colleen Doran, Christos Gage, and Louise and Walter Simonson . It was a great panel, though I would have liked to have seen more time given to questions -- Sanderson had several questions that he asked each panel member to weigh in on, and with six of them, most of the hours went to answering 4 or 5 questions. Still, it was cool and I jotted down some notes about different comic writing styles, and a few helpful hints about dialogue writing.
By the time the writing panel was over, it was nearly 7:00, which was closing time for the main hall that evening. I was tempted to hang around for a DC Universe panel, and maybe even for the screening of the new Wonder Woman animated feature, but I quickly decided that it had been a long day, and it was time to head home. After all, the show runs from 10 AM until 8 PM on Saturday!
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