Conventions

As announced last evening, CCI: San Diego's board, despite intense wooing from other cities, has decided to keep Comic-Con in San Diego. The announcement has been met with generally universal relief thus far. Yes, we moan, we complain, but exchanging the city of San Diego's mild temperatures and convenient layout for the bland boulevards of Anaheim or gang-infested alleys of Los Angeles wouldn't have really been much of an improvement. It isn't much of a surprise, really -- things had been going this way for a while and it was very clear that the board wanted to stay in San Diego.

It's official, via a press release. After long, complex negotiations that involved serious offers from Los Angeles and Anaheim, Comic-Con International: San Diego has just announced they will stay in the city they are named for. With the Con's contract with the convention center expiring in 2012, and the facilities MAXED out for space, everyone has been wondering if the con would move to a different city that offered more perks, The city of San Diego has been seen as indifferent to the biggest civilian convention of the year, although that has changed in the last couple of years.

Here it is!. A ton of comics, manga, anime and TV programming. UPDATE: We've been provided with a text file so you can see who and what is on each panel. Over 300 panels, and surely the most extensive anime/manga program ever in NYC...and the comics aren't bad either. A lot to look at but we've already marked this one down:

How many conventions can one comics-crazy town hold? We're about to find out as the dates for KING CON in Brooklyn have just been announced: November 4-7 at the Brooklyn Lyceum. That's three weeks after the New York Comic-Con, and four weeks before the next Brooklyn Comics Arts Festival. And the show is expanding to four days from two this year. X-MEn writer Chris Claremont has just been announced as the Guest of Honor.

The gang is all here, and it's awesome. Old skool comics as they are made and loved. Julia Wertz reading at SPXplosion at Atomic Books....

We've just posted the info on the upcoming Jet City Comic Show, which takes place September 25th in Seattle at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. It's a new one-day show with a nice guest lineup:

Portland's Stumptown Comics Fest, an increasingly popular stop on the indie comics festival circuit, is moving to the Oregon Convention Center, a bigger venue...

Wow, shit gets very, very personal in this installment.

Sounds like CCI: San Diego isn't the only comics show having some growing pains: There were HUGE lines and crowds at this weekend's FanExpo...

If you were following our live tweets of the Harveys last night, (and those from ComixMix and JahFurry) you saw portions of Mark Waid's keynote speech transcribed. While claiming it was a "vodka-fueled rant," Waid delivered a heartfelt, if off-the-cuff, talk on the importance of the idea and the supremacy of comics as a medium of ideas. He started off with remarks on the history of copyright, stating it was a means to allow ideas to go into the public domain where they could remain powerful. "No one would say we'd be better off if Shakespeare plays weren't allowed to be read and performed in high schools," he used as an example. While not advocating piracy, his main argument seemed to be that it's already done, the genie is out of the bottle, and struggling to keep ideas protected isn't as important as finding a way to profit from those ideas.

The rest of Harvey night was a little bit crazy. The night was set up for triumph -- after the taxing San Diego party...

In a world gone mad, there are still a few things you can count on, and comics at Baltimore Comic-Con is one of them. We got in last night for our annual dinner at the Rusty Scupper, this time with a bunch of Brooklyn compadres -- why do we have to drive four hours to see people who live a few miles away? Oh well, it's Con World.