A couple of good reads:
The TOR blog has a transcript of Thursday’s talk with the Best American Comics crew including Neil Gaiman, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Gabrielle Bell:
Neil Gaiman: Things that didn’t get in were fascinating. One artist failed to get in because she was Swedish. I didn’t know she was Swedish! It was a silent comic and the line work looked thoroughly American, but unfortunately, it was Swedish! I still think that we should declare all cartoonists and writers honorary Americans. Nobody would know.
Matt Madden: Comics are considered a very all-American form of media and in that sense all comics are American, even though that’s been complicated by the discovery of much earlier European people making comics, but still…
Neil Gaiman: At that point you get into the way of Scott McCloud and madness and “Are hieroglyphics really comics?”
§ Tom Spurgeon talks to Reed Pop’s Lance Fensterman about many aspects of NYCC, including the late panels:
FENSTERMAN: Honestly, it’s one of the hardest aspects of creating the event. We have an exceptional team that pulls together the programming, but it is just three people. There is such massive amounts of content concepts that trying to create a balanced, enticing, inclusive roister of panels is a massive job. I’m proud of the content we’ve created for the fans and our team that created it, but for sure, there are challenges, some of which you highlight. We always do our best to reach out to the community at large for submission ideas and feedback on what we have created, but ultimately, its a big massive puzzle of ideas, logistics, schedule, etc that has be put together.
Programming went out a bit later this year because we had such a high demand for events and quality submissions. We tried to include as much as possible, which meant later night events. We try to include special guests in panels but as there are hundreds of guests, we can’t accommodate all of them within the time frame of the event. By the way, what guests are on there incorrectly? I am unaware of this and this concerns me.
