COMIC-CON

We may now safely assume that the Comic-Con has arrived as a fixture of American popular culture. Both USA Today and Entertainment Weekly did articles about the event in the weeks leading up to it and covered it feverishly once it got going.

The Comic-Con has arrived, but comic books have not. In fact, they’ve been shoved quietly into remote niches. Only one of the USA Today stories was about comic books, a focus on small publishers (IDW, Top Shelf, etc.). And in its post-convention report — an extravagant 11 pages — Entertainment Weekly concentrated solely on movies: “For four days every summer,” the magazine gushed, “the geeks inherit the earth — or at least Hollywood. From July 22 to 25, the entertainment industry relocated to San Diego ... to stoke the buzz among the 150,000 fanboys and fangirls in attendance.”

Actually — or, at least, according to David Glanzer, the Comic-Con’s pr guy — attendance was 125,000-130,000, almost exactly the limit imposed by the city’s fire marshal.

Movies and tv shows previewed or excerpted included Green Lantern, Captain America, Tron: Legacy, Thor, Cowboys & Aliens, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Green Hornet, True Blood, Dexter, The Big Bang Theory, Hawaii Five-O, The Event, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, The Avengers, No Ordinary Family, Nikita, and The Cape among, I assume, a few dozen more that I missed references to, many, like Scott Pilgrim and The Walking Dead, based upon their comic book origins.

In the exhibition hall of the world’s biggest comics convention in the booths of the country’s two largest comic book publishers, DC Comics and Marvel, no comic books were on display. Not one. Every now and then, the proprietors of these gargantuan two-story, high-rise booths gave away copies of a title, but nothing was on display — no rack of comic book covers representing the dozens of titles each company publishes every month. Instead — action figures galore. Life-sized and small. Giant-sized renderings of superheroes on billboard walls. Movie sets for superhero movies. But no comic books.

Golden Age funnybooks have all but disappeared. The good stuff has long gone; what’s left are the comic books of Charleton and other small bore publishers, all priced too high for me.

Movies, tv shows, action figures, toys, islands of illustrators selling their wares (pricey prints as well as original art), webcomics. And costumes. Everywhere you look, fans playing dress-up. And on every side, as they strut their stuff through the hallways and byways of the Convention Center, are lines of amateur photographers peering into cell-phones as they focus on the colorfully attired objects of their temporary affections.

Despite all this carping, the Comic-Con, even with a mere dearth of comic books visible, has enough that appeals to the same sensibilities as dote on comics. Withal, it’s the only giant comics mall in America, a massive opportunity to buy comics stuff or to get comics stuff free.

Yes, I’ll be back next year. You can’t find comic books at DC Comics or Marvel, but you can find graphic novels at IDW, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, and Image and in the small publishers’ section, and reprints of masterpieces in the medium, and original art in Artists Alley and elsewhere in the hall where cartoonists and illustrators sit behind display tables, showing their wares. And I’m not the only one who’ll be back: you could buy a ticket for next year’s Con this year during the festivities. Reportedly, 15,000 tickets for next year have already been sold.