Conventions

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.

We've said it a zillion times, but we'll say it again, with the picturesque setting, great seafood, and top-notch lineup of comics creators, this is a totally relaxing and informative way to spend the weekend. The Beat will be walking around, listening to all who would speak, and giving a piece of her mind to all who would listen. Please stop and say hi! It's been a long year of travel, but Baltimore remains one of our favorite stops.

Shamus has a lot of answers for everything, but doesn't even seem to be saying that comics are a focus of the Wizard shows any more: “When you look at how comicbooks or the characters pervaded the media, they’ve become celebrities themselves. ... So when you look at people, and how they’ve come to know Spider-Man, or Batman, or Star Wars, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, they may have only known Spider-Man through a comicbook or maybe an animated show or something like that. ... They are going on their own way, creating a large national chain of comic conventions that’s servicing a local population that can’t make it to the bigger shows – but also injecting them with stars of stage and screen to bring in a new audience. ... It took the MCM London Expos to knock that out of me, and I’m starting to realise that my expectations and experiences are not shared by the vast majority of the population and that an increased numbers of Wizard World style conventions will increase the acceptability and appeal of comics to a population, even if that population is only on hand to see Xander and Spike. ... I'd argue that the focus on celebrities past and present at Wizard/Creation shows is not driving attention to the comics publishers who do exhibit at these shows, so without some kind of support -- even Shamus says that the reason there was such minimal comics programming is because attendees weren't interested in it -- it might not be a cost effective marketing push.

It's hard to find much coverage about this weekend's Chicago Comic-Con/Wizard World Chicago that didn't involve disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. That was definitely THE big story, from his meeting with Ethan van Sciver to his encounter with Adam West and an attempt to steal the Batmobile.