From: [a--er--d] at [slip.net] (David Goldfarb)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
Subject: CON: David Goldfarb's Con Report -- part 2
Date: 20 Jul 1996 09:26:25 GMT

        Well, Friday took rather longer than I thought.  (What are you
talking about, Goldfarb?  It took 24 hours.)  Anyway, here it is.
Saturday and Sunday should be coming soon.

Friday:

        Katie and I got up earlier in order to make the Kurt Busiek discussion
group.  (Here again the program guide fell down: the group was not listed
in the regular listings.  It did make the grid in the back.)  Kurt is smart
and interesting, and the group was easily the best panel I attended all con.
Lots of stuff was discussed there; I'll try to recall the highlights.

        Someone asked where Astro City was located.  Kurt refused to answer
directly, but said that there were clues, especially Samaritan's travel times
in issue #1.  (This is old news to people on racm, of course.)  Are there
other heroes in the world of _Astro City_, besides the ones we've seen in
Astro City proper?  Yes -- in fact, MPH of the Honor Guard is based in Detroit.
Someone brought up the issue of other countries' heroes in general and Asian
heroes in particular.  Kurt said that they do exist but he wasn't going to
go out of his way to show them; they'd show up if it added to a story.  The
book is _Astro City_, and he's going to put the most interesting characters 
and stories in that location.

        _Untold Tales of Spider-Man_ is going to get a new logo.  Or rather, 
an old one -- when the Marvel PTB decided to allow diverse logos on the
Spider-Books again, _Untold_ managed to get dibs on the original _Amazing
Spider-Man_ logo.  So the spiky cartoon one will be disappearing soon.
Kurt's original name for the book was _Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man_ 
but that got overruled.  He doesn't like the name _Untold Tales_, because 
it gives him the impression of leftovers.  "Once you've used up all those 
other Spider-Man tales, if you're still interested in more, get these *untold*
tales!"  He's considering trying to get the name changed.  Pros: he'd like
the name better, and if it were renumbered as well there might be a sales
boost from the new #1.  Cons: fans might have trouble finding the series,
since Marvel is afraid to put creator names on their covers.  People might
mistake it for just another one of those limited series that Marvel keeps
doing.  Also, while a new #1 might get a boost, the post-#1 order drop might
reduce sales below what they are now.  A quick show of hands showed people 
split about 50-50 on renaming, and almost all opposed to renumbering.

        Somewhere around here Kurt described the upcoming UToS annual.  It 
will feature art by Mike Allred.  It guest stars the Fantastic Four and
the Sub-Mariner.  (Kurt summarized the story, at least the premise, but
it occurs to me that some might not want spoilers.  Interested parties
can email me.)  Apparently Allred doesn't want to work much for Marvel,
but still has some fondness for some of the characters and a desire to draw
them.  He's pleased because this annual has almost all the characters he 
feels that way about; he can do this, get it out of his system, and then 
never work for Marvel again. :-)  Kurt wants to return to the concept of
an Annual as something big and special, with extra features to give the 
reader value for money.

        This prompted some discussion of themed Annuals.  The consensus was
that they didn't work too well.  Kurt said that it could work if you had, say,
six books in your line; you could do that many variations on a theme without
boring people unduly.  But DC and Marvel's 3 dozen or so just drove things
into the ground.  He'd come up with a couple of concepts he thought could
work: "Good Stories by the Regular Creative Team!"; and, more seriously,
"Big Finishes" -- doing a story arc in the main book and doing a large-scale
wrapup in the annual, as Marv Wolfman did a couple of times in _New Teen
Titans_.  The problem with that, though, is the Superman books; with four
of them doing an intertwined story, how do you do four big finishes?  So
that might not work.

        Someone asked why _Untold Tales of Spider-Man_ was packaged as a flip
book on newsstands.  The reason is that newsstands won't take a 99-cent
package; it doesn't make them enough profit to be worth the bother of stocking
it.  So Marvel put two 99-cent books together for $1.99.  This led Kurt into
an explication of "How the comic industry has driven itself into the ground".
To summarize quickly: as costs rose, where adult magazines raised their cover
prices, comics chose to keep their cover prices as low as possible to stay 
affordable to kids, instead cutting page counts.  Unfortunately, that meant
making themselves relatively less profitable to newsstand retailers, to the
point where by the mid-'70s newsstands and convenience stores pretty much
didn't stock comics at all.  The direct market kept things afloat for a while,
but doesn't attract new readers.  And now it's a generation later, and there
are no readers.  The solution is to come up with some kind of new package
with a high price but that offers better value for the money than what we 
have now.  (This also shows up in Busiek's interview in the latest _Comics 
Journal_, so if you want more details you can find that.)

        And at some point, Kurt told the story of how Mark Waid once called 
him a Nazi.

        It happened when he was an assistant editor at _Marvel Age_.  He did 
an interview with Stan Lee -- not the Q&A type, but an article.  He wrote
something like, "The main co-architect of the Marvel Universe was Jack Kirby.
Other artists involved were Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, Don Heck...[etc.])"
Now, Mark Waid, who was writing reviews for _Amazing Heroes_ at the time,
somehow managed to miss Kirby's name in there.  He wrote a scathing article
along the lines of, "Marvel's official policy is to deny Kirby's existence, 
and Jim Salicrup and Kurt Busiek are going along with it like good little
Nazis."

        Kurt telephoned the AH offices and pointed out that he was a German,
"Nazi" was not just some generic insult but an actual political party, and 
that he felt this was getting into territory that was legally actionable.  
They connected him with Waid, who had realized his mistake, and who apologized 
profusely.  Ultimately AH ran a retraction, albeit a really weasel-worded 
one -- "Jim Salicrup and Kurt Busiek are not actually members of the Nazi 
Party, but...."

        Anyway, a while later Kurt was in New York and planning to have dinner
with Gerard Jones to discuss a project.  It turned out that some DC staff 
wanted to discuss stuff with Jones on the same day, so Kurt wound up going
along to that dinner.  He arrived outside of DC's offices, and Jones introduced
him.  One of the people there was a heavyset, round-faced, strawberry blond
man; he shook hands with Kurt, and said, "Hi.  I'm Mark Waid.  You don't
like me very much."  "Well, sieg heil, Mark," said Kurt.  And there, in the
middle of the sidewalk, in rush hour traffic, Waid sank to his knees and
began apologizing until Kurt finally forgave him.

        (I must admit to a mild curiosity about how Waid recalls all this.)

        Also at some point in there we plugged the trivia challenge, which had
not made it into any of the official listings previously, and was finally
given a published time and room in that morning's newszine.

        Whew.  Anyway, right after that discussion group was the DC Universe
panel (number 1 of 2), of which I don't recall much except that Mark Waid
promised not to kill off any more characters for a while.

        After that there wasn't much in the way of panels; I'd've gone to the
spotlight on Alex Ross, only it was cancelled. I wandered the dealer's room
for a while (something which could take up a weekend in itself) and picked
up more Legion issues at prices ranging from 25 cents to $1.  You could really
tell that the speculator craze was over; booths with Golden Age and Silver 
Age comics far outnumbered any with recent Image-type stuff.  The downside of
this was that I was completely unable to find any issues of _Nexus_ that
I was looking for.

        Round about 4:00 I met up with Katie again.  (She'd had other things 
she wanted to see, so we'd split up before the Busiek group.)  We did the 
dealer's room some more before going to get dinner in time to make the GEnie 
meeting.  Neither of us is on GEnie, but last year that meeting featured 
J. Michael Straczynski, and we were hoping that he'd be there again this 
year, allowing us to see him in a more intimate setting than the big Saturday 
_Babylon 5_ presentation.  We ate at The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was 
higher-priced than the Horton Plaza restaurants but gave a *lot* more food 
for the money.

        We had to rush to make the GEnie meeting, but it turned out that JMS
wasn't there after all.  We did meet Tim Lynch and his wife whose name is
escaping me.  So after a couple of minutes we made a quiet exit.

        Walking through the dealer's room, we saw Scott McCloud and his family
near the DC display.  I stopped to ask Ivy if she'd met up with Kathy Li.
(It's a tradition for the two of them that their San Diego really starts
when they meet and say hello.)  She assured me that they had; in fact, they'd
had dinner together on Thursday night.  With that to break the ice, I was
able to ask McCloud something that I'd been wondering for years: Zot's
middle name.  He said that he couldn't recall for certain -- his first impulse
was "Thaddeus", but he felt that "Zachary Thaddeus Paleozogt" didn't scan
quite right.  We noticed that Winter kept chewing on her arm; McCloud told
us that pediatricians had certified that as normal, and just a phase.  Katie
commented on how much hair Winter had at the tender age of 11 months.

        Tom had told us at the GEnie meeting that Peter David and Kathy Li 
were going to be meeting at the Claypool booth for dinner at the Galaxy Grill
(aka "The Nine Planets Ice Cream Parlor") in Horton Plaza.  We'd already eaten,
but had some time to kill before the trivia contest, so decided to see if we
could meet them.  We got there just in time to see Kathy depart.  Meanwhile,
Peter was getting Rich Johnston to say, "Sorry, Brain", which was really quite
eerie.  Shortly afterwards, Tom showed up, the GEnie meeting evidently having
broken up after only a short time.  So did a few other people whom I don't
know -- what was going to be a small dinner was mushrooming into a party.
There wasn't car space for everybody, so Katie and I simply walked to the
Plaza.  As luck would have it, a shuttle bus arrived just as we were passing,
so we ended up getting there first.  Along the way we ran into Michael Grabois,
whom I have slighted in previous parts of this con report -- sorry, Mike.  (He
was going to Horton Plaza, too.  I think it was a Compuserve dinner.)

        By the time everyone got to the Galaxy Grill, we'd somehow managed to
lose Rich Johnston and his friend, but we'd picked up another four DC staffers.
The final total was 14 people.  Peter announced that he'd been planning to
pick up the tab when it was just going to be 3-5 people, but since he wasn't
on an expense account, he wasn't about to pay for fourteen.  Katie and I had
already eaten, of course, so we just had ice cream.  Peter was nice enough
to pay for that (although it was partly also just the luck of the draw on
the seating arrangement).  I told Kurt Busiek's Mark Waid Nazi story; Peter
told the story of Peter Jurasik at the German B5 convention.  (Too long to
go into here -- it was in a recent "But I Digress".)  Tom let Peter know about
the time and place of the trivia competition.

        On the way out we noticed the giant concrete teddy bear holding the
FAO Schwarz sign.  Tom speculated on the possibility of transporting it to
the next day's B5 panel for JMS's benefit.

        After that we returned to the Clarion to drop off the day's loot.  We
walked, Tom rode in Peter's rented convertible.  Tom later considered this
a mistake.

        Next on the agenda was the long-awaited trivia match between Len Wein's
"Purple Pros" team and our "Black Ink Irregulars".  It's been detailed
elsewhere, and I'm running really long here already, so I'll just record 
the final result: Pros 190, Tom Galloway 170.  (Tom answered every question
for our side.  We had three people rotating: Elmo, Jim Murdoch, and
Stephen Brumbaugh.  Towards the end, I tried to simply rotate *all* of us
offstage, including myself, since we'd be just as effective off as on. :-)

        After that was over we all trooped over to the Hyatt to try to find
a place to sit.  Mark Waid went along with us; just before we entered the
lobby, he loudly announced that he was about to "turn into a normal person
who doesn't know any of you."  And sure enough, he immediately cut out on
us.  I thought it was pretty rude of him.

        The post-Eisners dance party was going on.  I was a bit disappointed
to miss it, even if they did have the same lousy DJ as last year, but 
everyone else seemed to want to go to the bar on the top floor.  We got
a table, and sat and talked and watched the fog roll in from the ocean.
Johanna had a book on the sociology of SF fandom, and we all looked at
the chapter on K/S fiction.  Eventually Elayne got tired, and she didn't 
want to try to get back to the hotel alone, so the three of us caught a cab.

   David Goldfarb       <*>|"The Carson/Johnson Law of Human Behavior:
[g--df--b] at [ocf.berkeley.edu]  |  80% of all questions that begin with the word
[a--er--d] at [slip.net]          |  'why' can be answered with the phrase
[g--df--b] at [csua.berkeley.edu] |  'People are stupid.'"   -- Ted Faber