Gabba gabba hey,
or, Vootie!
The climax of the First American Transcendental Exhibition comes early—it’s the eighth of eleven stages: “God’s Universal Form.” When “Krishna’s Transcendental Manifestations” winds down, your dhoti’d guide will appear, flashlight in hand, to lead you into the largest room in the tiny museum. There’s three folding theater seats (for Jenn, Lori, and Lori’s friend Sara, though I might be misremembering the name), and he’ll close the door, revealing a padded bench that unfolds from the wall and hooks onto the last theater seat. —On a little stage in front of you is a miniature of the statue you’ve seen once already, of Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot, talking theology and philosophy while the two greatest armies ever assembled await the trumpet blast. Those bedevilled by that hobgoblin of subcreation—continuity—can see if Krishna’s wearing the same necklaces of flowers and if Arjuna’s crown matches the one he wore in “Setting the Stage”; me, I’m looking at the big black curtain behind them. Something is about to be Revealed.
And sure enough, as the synthy Hindipop remix of the Firebird Suite’s finale gets up a head of steam, the curtain is drawn back, revealing the godhead in all its multitudinous forms: “I see Brahma,” cries Arjuna, “sitting on the divine lotus!” (In English, or Spanish, French, Hindi, or Japanese, depending.)
That’s what Comic-Con is like. Except bigger.
You’ve got to understand: I was always a New York City kind of guy. LA? Please. —It wasn’t just the Woody Allen movies, though those didn’t help: New York City is a goddamn city, with skyscrapers and subways and yellow cabs and Central Park and all the other signs that say you aren’t on the farm anymore. LA is hellish, sunsoaked, shallow sprawl. Wake me when there’s a there there.
It also doesn’t hurt that when we visit Lori and John in LA, we see things like Soapy Smith’s only honest roulette table and the First American Transcendental Exhibition. We go shopping for inflatable furniture in an art gallery full of Taschen books and pieces by Kaz and Baseman and some creepy Struwwelpeter pen-and-inks (pause for a lengthy confab via cell phone with Scott, and Jenn isn’t kidding when she says she can give him the Pantone color of the chair we’re looking at, to match the ones he’s bought). We eat bubbling hot soon tofu and some incredible conveyor-belt sushi.
So LA is very much a city, after all.
I mean, it’s the sort of city where you go into a bar (the door is too hot to touch outside and the inside is conditioned to an admirably arctic degree) and as you’re drinking the Mai Tais that the bartender agreed to make despite not having the the recipe, Lori asks you who does the voice of Spongebob Squarepants, because maybe it’s that guy there at the bar, the one from Mr. Show.
But still.
(Also: lychee martinis.)
The less said about driving from LA to San Diego, though, the better.
(Lori: here’s a song by Regina Spektor, and here’s a song by the Dresden Dolls. Sorry we couldn’t arrange an iTunes party en route.)
I think it was Scott who said they were competing for “least desperate booth in the Con.” Or maybe it was Patrick. Whatever—a cool blue cloudy backdrop, lots of computers, nothing to sell, plenty of room to hide out behind the table, splayed out on inflatable chairs, a small plot of grass: they didn’t call it Tranquility Base for nothing.
It is highly recommended that you secure one of these as a base camp on the floor. Makes walking a third of a mile up and back again conceivable. Heck, I must have done it three or four times, myself! (I saw Dylan, crouched at the back of the Flight booth, mouth downturned, eyes raccooned. “Dylan!” I cried. “Why aren’t you out on the floor? Seeing what’s to be seen?” —This was on Saturday. Saturday was among other things Star Wars Day. 45,000 people were in the room on Saturday. That’s as many people as came to the con all four days total back in ’98. They had contingency plans in place in case the fire marshal showed up. They dimmed the lights on Saturday because it was getting too hot. So Dylan rolled her eyes, her mouth souring around a grin too wry to bother showing up. “Kip,” she said, “I was out there. Pushing through the crowds. Trying to make it across the hall. Kip—I’m armpit height.”)
Anyway: you’ll have to find your own base camp. Ours was pretty full.
Here’s what I know, economically speaking: I went to buy a copy of the single-volume Bone collection on Sunday morning, and they’d sold out. We wanted to buy some Scary Go Round collections. John Allison had blown through his inventory. Kazu Kibuishi had to keep going over to the Viper booth to steal more copies of Daisy Kutter #1 because he couldn’t keep them from flying away. Whoever was taking money for Flight had a hell of a job, wadding all those twenties and finding a pocket somewhere to stash them (Vera did the money dance, her cargo pants swaying like bells); they’re saying it came in second in the bestseller sweeps, after that Bone volume, and even with the hype that’s something. —Artists’ Alley was smaller this year (“This is the year Artists’ Alley truly became an alley,” said Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald), but it wasn’t sealed away behind a giant screen, and it wasn’t a deserted wasteland: Rebecca could barely stop sketching and chatting to laugh, and Parker’s audio posts (“This is me, trying again”) capture something of the progressive degradation the Con will work on you no matter where you are, and if Steve was as resigned as ever, well, it’s part of his shtick, and anyway, Comic-Con lost his table application, the bums, and besides, it was only Saturday morning, and the storm had not yet achieved perfection. (I never saw them again, but hey: check in with him and Parker in a bit for the traditional Only Report You’ll Need.)
A lot of people are talking about how this is the con where the movies finally stopped being ashamed of the comics and embraced the geekiness of it all, which is strange: the movies don’t give a damn about comics. The movies give a damn about 100,000 people showing up to buy stuff and get jazzed with that all-important viral buzz marketing stuff. The 100,000 people were showing up for the Star Wars pavilion and the video games and the trading cards and the Sky Captain robots and Jude Law and Eliza Dushku and The Incredibles and Smallville and, yes, the comics: the comics were there, too. But you could have cut the comics away and it would have hurt, but half of that 100,000 wouldn’t have noticed a thing, except maybe that the manga was missing. —This was the year Comic-Con became Pop-Culture–Con, or at least this is the year I’m saying it finally happened. Comics rolled over and stopped pretending it was all about them: this is escapism and empowerment and the promise of hundreds of worlds built just for you, and comics is just one of a dozen ways to make good on that promise. (Happy trivia fun-time: when Diamond muscled Capital out of the comics distribution biz, and reigned supreme [and pretty much still does] as the only mainstream comics distributor to the direct market, they came up with a unique defense against accusations of monopoly: they aren’t a comics distributor. They distributed collectibles, you see, such as statues, dolls, special DVD editions, sports and non-sports trading cards, and games and books; comics were just another item in that broader category, and there’s lots of distributors of collectibles. —This was back in 1997. Comic-Con has just now finished catching up, in a weird sort of way. —Then again, they’ve been subtitling it as “a celebration of the popular arts” for how long now? Maybe it’s just us that’re catching up. Except with the stuff I’ve seen some folks saying, maybe we aren’t. Of course, the Beat’s all over “Hollywood’s Summer Sundance.” So she is, at least.)
But: this is not necessarily a bad thing for comics.
For one thing, there’s always going to be a place for comics at San Diego, and not just in the name. (The Eisners, for one.) —The pop culture (or popular art) being celebrated is a very specific one: highly visual, escapist adventure stories with the sort of whacked-out goshwow eyekicks that comics pioneered—had to pioneer, because for years film couldn’t do it and video games didn’t exist. Now they do, and film and television and video games can do it better, faster, cleaner, purer, and 100,000 people will mill back and forth over a third of a mile for a taste. Comics will always have a place at that table, with the superheroes and the crime comics and the supernatural adventure yarns and the farm teams testing properties and the tie-ins and marketing opportunities before the big bucks go all-in, as well as whatever mad experiments are swirling around Grant Morrison’s fevered brain.
But these other things have their festivals, too, and we shouldn’t let the ginormity of San Diego eclipse them: APE, MoCCA, SPX, and can I be cheeky and mention Stumptown in the same breath? Not yet? Ah, give us a bit. —The immediacy of comics is lauded in the New York Times; formal techniques pioneered in comics are taught to web designers and usability mavens every day; Chris Ware just curated an edition of McSweeney’s, you might have heard of it. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep on saying it: for all the shakiness of comics-the-industry (as we know it: watch those bookstore numbers!), comics-the-art has never been better.
And that includes the art of goshwow eyekicks. —Do I need to point out that the eyekicks in comics have an intimacy and immediacy, depend on and have created and honed fantastic formal conventions, can become beautiful, lasting works of art and design? That intimacy and experimentation and craft have eyekicks of their own?
Probably. Anyway. That’s what it all looks like from where I am, but I’m not that much taller than armpit height, myself. (You’ll notice how I’ve left out the bit about how all this affects webcomics, and how Flight is cleverly—savvily? inevitably?—reaching out to all the various factions that don’t really exist when you stop and look at them closely enough. This has gone on too long already. Maybe next time. —Tranquility Base didn’t sell much of anything, though. Then, they didn’t set out to.)
Jenn Manley Lee; Tracy White; Patrick Farley; Daniel Merlin Goodbrey; Scott McCloud.
Terry Rossio wants to know what the Next Big Thing will be.
“Entertainment used to be appointment-based,” he says. We just had dinner for 20 or 30 or so at Bucca di Beppo’s. It’s Friday night. We skipped dessert. I should maybe have had some coffee but I didn’t and it’s not like I need coffee. “You’d wait for opening night or the next episode or the next issue. You’d make an appointment to see it. Now, with DVDs and the internet and trade paperbacks, you can see it whenever you want, the whole thing, or just a piece here and there.” He didn’t make the point about trade paperbacks, but it fits, so I’ll make it for him. But maybe I should stop putting words in his mouth, since I’m bound to get his argument wrong. I didn’t take any notes. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have gotten some coffee anyway. —The point is this: appointment-based entertainment builds buzz because it builds community. You’re all waiting for everybody else for the same damn thing, and then you’ll talk about it after, and not a little of the drive to see it in the first place is that hankering to talk about it after. (Half the appeal—a third?—of preordering the next Harry Potter is knowing you’re reading it at the same time as how many millions of people? Hundreds of thousands? It’s shivery cool, if ultimately evanescent.)
But the advent of 500 channels and niche publishing and the death of radio—the turgid stop-and-start media revolution, the guerilla war of many-to-many against all manner and model of broadcast, to draw a megalomaniacal analogy—has caused appointment-based entertainment to wither away, if not yet die. There’s so much out there, and the barriers to get it out there are lower than ever, are falling away to nothing, and this is good, this is fantastic, phenomenal—but there’s so much out there. How are you going to get noticed? Get everyone picking your signal out of the glorious noise? How are you going to line ’em all up for the Next Big Thing?
Momus says Warhol got it wrong: we’re all going to be famous for fifteen people. And that’s great, that’s fantastic, that’s phenomenal—but fifteen people can’t feed a family of four. Much less draw up the standard rich-and-famous contract. Fifteen people can’t even keep you in beer money.
Terry notes the fervor hardcore fans bring to things like fanfiction; he talks about how people will follow sports teams, even though there’s no set story: any given Sunday, and all that. So I pick up on the threads he’s dangling and suggest a soap opera following the members of various teams in a, say, quidditch league. Thinking sports because you could stage the games on a regular basis (rotisserie-baseball–style), which supplies the (I’m thinking) necessary appointment basis, but also limits the wild cards: there’s no set story in sporting events, but that doesn’t mean anything goes—rather, a pre-set number of possible outcomes have a greater or lesser chance of occurring. (Storytelling is always about rules: horses and harnesses, tennis and nets. You abstract a set of rules from the larger storytelling set and dance with them, and adhering too them too slavishly is as bad and dull as ignoring them utterly.)
But he’s smiling at me. “You’re taking the sports thing too literally. Imagine a castle. When you first see it, it’s full of people. You don’t know any of the relationships, any of the alliances, how anything works. And you don’t get told who to watch or follow. You can go anywhere, see anything that happens, but as you’re doing that, something else is happening somewhere else. You can go back and catch up, but you can only watch one thing at a time. That way, you can come home, pop it in, follow a little bit here or a little bit there, you don’t have to live in it eight hours a day to pick it up. But it’s big enough to have that draw.”
So not anything goes— there’s a set storyline, but it’s multilayered, multivalent, and the uncertainty comes from the happy accidents each reader makes as they see this scene or that scene first, followed by something else; each reader writes their own path through. And appointments can be made with story and setting updates. “Did you get part three? Oh, man, you know that bit with the princess—you’ll never guess what happens—” It’s a video game with a narrative flow, it’s interactive fiction with a budget: call it a MMOTE. (Massively Multi-audienced Online Theatrical Event. Okay, maybe not. For the record, here’s a primitive something of what it is he’s on about.)
But whatever: the deeper thing we’re talking around is worldbuilding. It’s no longer enough to sit around a campfire and just tell a story. People want us to give them worlds to escape to and the tools they need to climb into or even make up their own stories there. They write fanfiction about their favorite characters. They build levels for their favorite video games based on scenes from their favorite movies. They mashup pop songs and remix them and make playlists for their own personal soundtracks. They roleplay in the settings of their favorite TV shows, and they dress up as their favorite superheroes for a day. (Or they want to, but don’t have the time. Or the energy. They want to make a gesture in this direction. They want something close to it, closer than they can get now.)
—New pop culture technologies. Fiction suits. Worldbuilding. This is what the Next Big Thing looks like.
So I mutter something (once again) about Dylan Horrocks’ essay, and look over at Scott, at the other end of the table, who’s waxing theoretical about Classicists and Iconoclasts, Formalists and Animists.
It’s a good dinner.
It’s on Saturday, I think, that I nearly trip over one of the Haradrim. And you have to ask yourself: what is it, exactly, that you desire, when you dress up as a spear-carrying bad guy seen in medium shots for less than a minute’s worth of footage, total?
I did try to warn you: “one thin layer of parody or pastiche,” I said, “and this whole house of cards of mine collapses into a merry war.” And fans are parodists and pasticheurs: they can’t help it. Those are the iron-clad forms of sub-subcreation.
Trouble and desire: it’s a refrain from a Hal Hartley film, which is why it sticks in my head, and I think I did a better job of laying out what I’m on about with it last year, though that fit’s not much more coherent than this year’s, which went on about desire at the expense of trouble, which is to slight one half of the engine’s kick: you have to have trouble, so you can unleash your power; you have to have desire, or you’re not going to give a good God damn about the trouble. (And I should warn you that I get lost in the nuances of that peculiar, Lacanian sense of desire: “When all the elements of need are satisfied in the situation of want, the remainder is desire.” Seems straightforward enough? Well, watch it: it gets slippery fast. —So I don’t even know what the hell I’m on about, myself. I just take comfort in the way Barbara Johnson bitch-slapped Lacan and Derrida with a purloined letter.
(Um. As described by John Irwin. God, you think I’ve done any of the actual reading myself? I cribbed the Lacan quote above from Delany. Oh, hell, let’s climb out of this pit and get back on the con floor.)
But don’t think we’ve banished sex and the appetite for sex from our equation. Just because you’re lost in the trees doesn’t mean there isn’t any forest. —There was not only the Elvis stormtrooper this year, there was also an Elvis Ghostbuster.
See?
(I’m reading House of Leaves again, and just thought I’d mention how cascadingly funny it is that just about everything is cited to articles written in hundreds, thousands of magazines and books, as if the central events of the book were covered in one facet or another by everybody from Newsweek to Outdoor Life to Ladies’ Home Journal, and all those Tweely Clever Title: Wretchedly Explicatory Subtitle books from all those academic presses. Worldbuilding again: the story, and the space around the story, its echo, the wider world, and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore: it’s creepy, it’s obsessive, it’s weirdly claustrophobic, it’s frightening. —Good book, that.)
Comics?
Well, sure: Flight, of course, which sold more copies than anything else on the floor except the giant all-in-one Bone. It remains to be seen, time will tell, but in this reporter’s opinion, here and now, I think it can be said the promise is being fulfilled. (Volumes 2 and 3 are underway.) Picked up a copy of Kwaïdan because, ooh, pretty; it ended up as just about the most European Japanese comic I’ve ever read, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But I also picked it up because the size and format—slightly smaller than a regular comics TPB, but not manga-tiny; good thick matte paper; the spine was a little stiff, but the price—$14.95—was just about perfect: it’d be ideal for (say) print runs of Dicebox. (Know anybody who wants to publish a 90-some-odd–page comic? Second most popular strip at Girlamatic…) —Finally dropped some money for the Darwyn Cooke Catwoman trades, because cons are where you finally break down and buy the stuff you’ve been dickering over for a while. The cartooning—like Matt Wagner in his prime, and that’s a very good thing—was almost enough to make me overlook the mawkish noir. (I was surprised to find Cooke’s solo effort a much more appealing story than the regular Ed Brubaker-written stuff: I haven’t kept up with Brubaker’s capecapades, but back when the Comics Journal accused him of drawing like Chester Brown he could, you know, write. But this, this was warmed-over treacle: hookers in danger, a cheap Clayface knock-off, some awkward hand-waving about what sounds like a ridiculous bit of retrocruft [Selina Kyle ran for mayor of New York? When Gotham City was going through that we’ve-been-destroyed-by-an-earthquake crossover? What?]—I realize that when you’re working on something like a Batbook, you’re largely rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic that will not sink, and there’s some deep fucking grooves in the deck that it’s hard to yank the chairs out of at this point, but still. Better was expected. Thank God for the kinetic jam-kicking cartooning.)
What else? Daisy Kutter #1, because what Kazu Kibuishi’s doing with Bolt City is a thing of wonder and delight. But it’s a number one. A nice-enough opening; we’ll see what happens next. Jenn ended up with a Wigu collection, and what little I’ve seen is inspired sophomorosity. Clio dropped her sketch ’zine in our hands at the last possible moment, and Lord, but the girl can draw. (Those fish!) —I’d say something about all the other Pants Pressers, but they’re all in Flight, so go look at that, and anyway, Clio was the only one who gave us freebies. Street Angel? No, wait, we picked that up at APE…
Oh! Right. Isaac the Pirate, vol. 1, because Dylan made us. (And Chris.) Which I still somehow haven’t really sat down with yet. Hmph. Oh! And we saw the Incredibles preview and the Farscape preview and I won’t tell you what I was thinking during the Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean panel on Mirrormask because Ivy would glare at me and we leaped to our feet when Joss Whedon came out and said, “I’ve got something to show you,” and then when he said, “I’ve got something else—well, actually, nine somethings,” we leaped to our feet again and whistled and I think Jenn even stomped, because nothing says that indiepop cartoonists and British invasion formalists and bootstrap bricolagistes can’t let themselves get swept away by the razzle and the dazzle of the Cannes for Fans, the Summer Sundance.
There was going to be more, because there was more. More about the dinners (the second one, which had less theory and more sketching, and had more laughter but only because there were three times as many people), and the people I’ve slighted horribly, like Ivy, and Winter and Sky, who’s taller than you remember; Merlin, who was there to assure us that Spaced lived up to its hilarious promo; Steve, whose head is bumpier than mine; Tracy and Lakshman and Lauren and Tammy and Heidi and Anne and Jen and Bill and, um, and— I don’t even think I mentioned the grass! (Oh. I did. Briefly.)
Me, Ivy, and my hat.
There was going to be more, but the music’s falling away. The lights dim, the halogens fade, leaving red and green light-smears to chase the edges of all those dancing arms, those beatific faces. There’s a rattle of rings as the curtain jerks its way back across the stage, and all that’s left is the little statue of Arjuna and Krishna on the chariot, talking theology, there between the two largest armies ever assembled, waiting to crash together in the greatest battle for righteousness and against tyranny that the world has ever known. Sandals slap, and the flashlight comes bobbing. It’s our guide. “I’m sorry,” he says, as he asks you to stand. He fusses with the bench you’ve been sitting on, lifting it up and hooking it back against the wall, opening the door it had blocked. “I have to put this back now,” he says, “or I’ll forget, and I’ll run through here in the dark and bang my shins and end up with my dhoti over my head.”
We can’t have that.
There’s more—three additional stages, in fact: “Ocean of Birth and Death,” “Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Festival,” and “Goloka—The Spiritual Realm.” But don’t follow him out into the next cramped hall just yet: stop a moment in the doorway, turn, look back. There’s a gap between wall and curtain, and you can just see the forms of all those gods: clay statues, brightly painted, carefully dressed, standing perfectly still under all those mirrors in the dim light.
And then even that’s gone. —Our guide’s about to start the next display. Go on. We can’t keep him waiting.
And right there, under the Campfire Diagram, the footnote: "Everything Available for Take Out."
So there you have it.
Abashed and appalled to report a couple of corrections, emendations, errata, etc: I must add the great mini drawn by Steve Lieber and written by Sean Stewart to the brief and paltry list o' swag: "Family Reunion," it's called, and you can buy it for a buck. (I also got a couple of volumes of Arthur Machen stories from those gaming guys who are there every year with the exact change bellow and the black cup o' dice offer; they always have the best Lovecraftiana.) —Also, any photos above not obviously taken by me were probably taken by Jenn. Except one, which I stole.
When your seersucker jacket
Gives my eyeballs such flack, it's
A Moire!
Onest: Proposal sample art of DiceBox to NBM, perhaps?
Twoest: that was the prettiesst, most literate con report ever.
Threeest: Tranquility Base attracted a lot for being tranquil. I tried to say hi and couldn't get near the table. sob.