WonderCon 2013 - Anaheim

Attendee at WonderCon in Anaheim.

The photo above pretty much encapsulates the feeling of WonderCon in Anaheim. There were panels I liked and friends to check in with. We enjoyed hanging out with the Scooby Gang from the Comic Outpost. There's a big difference between having this convention at Moscone Center in the middle of downtown San Francisco and having it in Anaheim across the street from Disneyland.  The convention center itself is spacious and surrounded by supporting hotels. Every chain restaurant you can imagine is in the area. We had a quick visit to Disneyland one evening, and there's no denying how Disneyland completely dominates the "Anaheim Resort" area.  I don't think it helped that they scheduled the convention in direct competition with Spring Break/Easter weekend in Disneyland. Personally, spoiled by the SF Bay Area and the selection of urban delights (or not so delightful slices-of-life) nearby, Anaheim just felt really weird. I've read that the organizers are happy and considering doing WonderCon in both SF and Anaheim. As a Northern California person, we already come to So. Cal for San Diego ComicCon, and there's APE and other smaller conventions, I don't visualize making Anaheim a regular thing.

Anyway, enough ranting about Southern California and too many meals at Coco's... one of the good things about WonderCon is that the artists in Artist's Alley are generally less overwhelmed and more receptive than they are in San Diego. The organizers used a large space at the convention center called "the arena" this year, and aside from some initial confusion about how to get in there on the first day, it seemed to work out pretty well. In the arena I saw The Animation Show of Shows, 10 animated shorts curated by Ron Diamond of Acme Filmworks and AWN.com. There were many excellent films but the one that follows, The Centrifuge Brain Project, had me laughing out loud!

As usual, the Comic Arts Conference (the academic conference within the convention) had some informative panels. I found the first panel of the day about publishing, scholarship and teaching methods very useful. Since I am outside of the traditional academic path and writing/researching purely because I want to, sessions that discuss options related to publishing are very helpful. In the CAC session Comics in Higher Education, I very much appreciated Robert Weiner's (Texas Tech University) and Hannah Means-Shannon's (Georgian Court University) presentations on publishing, writing and blogging.  I also thought that Christina Angel's (Metropolitan State University of Denver) method of exposing her students to classic literature through comics was interesting, for example using V's speech in V for Vendetta as a way to into MacBeth. This strategy is probably common for people that are teaching in this area, but for me, as a non-academic, it was a good presentation.

The other CAC panel that really excited me was Comics and Form. I loved Karma Waltonen's (University of California, Davis) presentation on Asterios Polyp. I will re-read it soon, and will have her comments and visual analysis in mind. John Rodzvilla's (Emerson College) presentation on Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work was really thought provoking and I'm sure that I will be seeing Wood's layouts in every comic panel I look at from now on (as it should be). Rounding out this panel was Michael J. Muniz (Liberty University) talking about efforts by comics artist to break through the 4th wall, using film and film theory as a reference  (like this train sequence in the 1931 Joan Crawford film Possessed, below).

There were good panels on writing, notably Barbara Randall Kesel's "how to deal with writer's block" session Where Do Ideas Come From?, Michael Lovitz and Comic Book Law School (my husband Marc will be on one of these panels at SDCC), and all kinds of spotlights on upcoming films, including Guillermo del Toro talking about his new monster epic Pacific Rim (WonderCon trailer).

All this, plus an evening at Disneyland! We did Star Tours (below) and Pirates of the Caribbean, which I hadn't been on since sometime in the 1980's. Yay (and thanks Josh & Jessica)!

Saturday at WonderCon 2011

View of the exhibit floor above the DC Booth.

WonderCon has grown up. My husband Marc and I started going around 10 years ago when it was in the basement of the Downtown Oakland Marriott, now it truly looks like San Diego Comic Con junior. For the last two years I’ve had a conflict with other conference that I attend regularly and had only been in & out on Sunday afternoons, so the crowd on the exhibit floor Saturday really took me by surprise. Although I have no real statistics on the matter, I saw a lot of bodies around the booths and money changing hands, so I hope all the exhibitors did well this year. Here are some notes on sessions I attended on Saturday:

Over at the Aspen Comics spotlight session, I felt that the company as a whole recovered fairly well from the tragic loss of Michael Turner. Soulfire continues to be one of my favorite fantasy series. One thing I’ve always liked about their books, and hadn’t realized was an conscious company policy, is that they don’t do many crossover books. They feel, rightly I think, that each of their specific books is set in its own world, and there aren’t many ways to bring those worlds together that aren’t really contrived and illogical. Personally, I’ve been suffering from Brightest/Siege/Crisis burn-out, and I wish some other companies thought this way. They also said that they have finally got a solid team working on Fathom, another really interesting and unique title.

Following the Aspen panel was the spotlight session on the legendary writer Marv Wolfman. I thought it was interesting to hear his war stories about projects like Crisis on Infinite Earths, but I really liked hearing him speak about his writing process, how he maintained interest in a book focused on an unsympathetic villain for the long run of Tomb of Dracula, within all the limitations he faced on that series; how he built the “family” relationships between the characters of the New Teen Titans and of the Legion of Superheroes by thinking of them in complimentary and conflicting triangles; the complications of researching his latest non-comics work, Homeland: the Illustrated History of the State of Israel (with Mario Ruiz & William J. Rubin). I thought it was odd that he seemed to talk about everything but Blade, but then, maybe it’s a topic he feels has been discussed enough. It cracked me up when he told us that Marvel hired him because they thought it would be funny to have someone named Wolfman writing horror titles.

As a big animation fan, I really enjoyed the Marvel animation session. Geoff Johns started with a tease of the upcoming Ultimate Spiderman series, which looked really good and continued with a full episode of The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (trailer here), which featured the birth of Ultron. It rocked, the audience loved it. Next we saw clips from the anime series Marvel is rolling out starting this July on the G4 Network, starting with Iron Man and Wolverine (trailer here, in Japanese), with the X-Men and Blade in the works. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these. Iron Man and Wolverine seemed like a natural fit with the anime style of drawing and editing, especially Wolverine, who has had so many epic story arcs set in Japan.

Godzilla #1, WonderCon Exclusive

I’m really excited about IDW’s relaunch of Godzilla. I was always disappointed that the Godzilla series published by Dark Horse a few years ago never seemed to find an audience (I own several pieces of original art from that series). It sounds like IDW has established a good relationship with Toho, and has been able to license a dozen of the major monsters in the Godzilla universe (Mothra, Rodan, etc). The art, by Phil Hester, Victor Santos and others really captured the scale, mystery, and kookiness of Godzilla.

Otherwise, we bought lots of books. I was happy to find one of current favorite artists, Marko Djurdjevic, sketching completely unnoticed at the Marvel booth. Marc was happy to catch up with Darick Roberson at the Comic Outpost booth and get an original Witchblade cover drawing from him. I’m sorry to miss the Sunday panel organized by Trina Robbins and Jennifer K. Stuller, A Brief Herstory of Gum Shoe Gals, Spy-Fi Sheroes, and Private Dick Chicks, as it grew in response to the somewhat uneven Action Chicks panel at SDCC last year. I hope it went well, and they repeat it in SDCC this summer.

WonderCon 2009 Update

Marc & I both spoke at the annual WonderCon comics & pop culture convention on Sunday, which was held this year at Moscone Center in SF. Thanks to Peter Coogan of the Institute for Comics Studies for inviting us, and to Kate McClancy for her help. We really enjoyed doing it, and appreciated the opportunity to answer questions and interact with our fellow comic nuts. I spoke, as Pete wrote in a promo article, about "the importance of comics to contemporary visual culture and the central role of the 2005 Masters of American Comics exhibit in breaking comics out of the art world's high/low debate." Marc spoke about several cases defended by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and gave an in depth talk about the recent Superman copyright case. Bravo to Marc for explaining this complex case in a manner that non-lawyers could understand.

We’ve been going to WonderCon since it was a few booths crammed into a couple rooms in the basement of the Oakland Convention Center and are always amazed how much its grown. This year WonderCon featured panels and screenings about upcoming films like The Watchmen, the relaunch of Star Trek, Terminator Salvation and Pixar's UP, plus artist talks and sessions with comics publishers. The masquerade and anime festival are also popular attractions.

I missed most of it this year because I was in LA for CAA and just flew back to speak on Sunday, but Marc did surprise me with a 2 foot tall talking figure of Treebeard, one of my favorite Lord of the Rings characters, so I didn’t leave empty handed.

Marc & Kim speak about comics

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all enjoyed the season!

Husband Marc is on his way down to the AALS (Association of American Law Schools) conference in San Diego this week, to speak to the art law section on a panel concerning comics and the law. Marc is talking about some of his recent research on CBLDF (the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund). CBLDF is a non-profit that represents comics authors, artists, store owners and small publishers in a variety of cases related to censorship or unfair business practices.

Marc's talk will include the Georgia vs Lee case in which Lee, a comics shop owner in Georgia, was threatened with 21 years in prison for unknowingly giving a 9-year-old a comics complilation on free comics day that happened to include a couple pages from Nick Bozzeti 's graphic novel "The Salon," (a must see for arty types) a murder mystery set in 1907 Paris, which featured a few frames of Pablo Picasso painting (and answering the door) in the nude. After many convoluted twists and turns, the case was finally dismissed 10 years and $100,000. in legal fees later.

Marc will also talk about the Mavrides vs California Board of Equalization case. At one point, the California Board of Equalization decided that when comic artists finish their assigned pages and send them in to the publisher, the individual pages should be treated as works of art being sold, and should be taxed accordingly. Mavrides, a comic artist (a contributor to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) became the test case on this. CBLDF defended him, and the court agreed that submitting comics pages to the publisher was more like submiting a finished manuscript, and the state lost.

Marc also has a 90 minute slot speaking at WonderCon in San Francisco (end of February) on CBLDF, the Superman copyright case and other cases related to pop art/comic artist's copyrights. I will also be returning early from CAA to speak on a WonderCon panel about comic art in museums (this was the focus of my master's thesis). Peter Coogan of the Institute for Comic Studies tells me that the panel will include one other scholar writing in this area, and two artists whose work have been included in museum exhibitions. I'll post more specifics as they become available.