Kim & Marc at SDCC

Marc & I both spoke at San Diego Comic Con this weekend. As usual, it was an amazing experience, and we have all kinds of stories. This year the Comic Arts Conference, hosted yearly at Comic Con since 1998, was very well attended and featured 16 panels on a wide range of topics.

I was on the Sunday afternoon panel, Comics in Museums, with Michael Dooley and Denis Kitchen. I presented my new research about The Comic Art Show (Whitney Museum, 1983). You can see the presentation in the slideviewer widget at the bottom of this page. My paper on this topic is in progress and I hope to finish it this fall. Co-presenter Michael talked about High & Low (MOMA, 1990) & Masters of American Comics (Hammer/MOCCA, 2005). Denis talked about some of the initial problems comics faced in the art world enviroment, and then about Underground Classics, a show he just co-curated in Madison WI.

A lively Q&A session followed, but we were pleasantly surprised that the artist selection in Masters wasn't the main topic of discussion as it often is after this sort of panel. Instead, many of the questions had a more businesslike slant. "Are artists able to get more money for their work because of the exposure they get from museum shows"? "Is it easier for a comic artist to crossover into gallery art, or a gallery artist to become accepted as a cartoonist"? "Why did museums seem to resist the narrative function of comics"? Conversation continued and spilled out to the hallway afterword. Thanks to Pete, Denis and Michael for their input and a great experience. If you are one of the people that came to me for more information after the panel, you can find my paper Beyond High & Low, which summarizes many of the events and issues we discussed, on my archive page.

Marc also had a good response to his presentation on the cases of CBLDF and the 70 year (and still not resolved) Superman copyright case. We were amazed to learn that Denis, my co-presenter, founded CBLDF! Small world...