| SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL 2002 August 6, 2002 Every year I go to the San Diego Comic-Con, I get something totally different out of it. It's hard to pin down, but I will say that every year it becomes less about the comics and more about the people. That's not to say I don't buy comics there, or catch up on what all the latest on comics as an entertainment medium. Every year, I just meet more and more great people there. This year I met pretty much everyone I've been wanting to shake hands with since I started following and creating comics online. Sure, I would love to meet the creator of Pokey, or Phil Cho from Skinny Panda, and John Allison has managed to dodge me so often now and with such success that I think it's some sort of sinister conspiracy. All in all though, the number of people I did manage to meet this year is a happy thing. My wife went with me on the journey, as did Sam Neill. On the way there, Sam suggested that since my wife and I wanted to spend a lot of time alone together on the trip, taking in the shopping, restaurants, the harbor, and of course, the convention, he'd be happy to go around and take some photos for my online journal of events, so everyone who wants to can see a bit of what happened at the convention this year. Despite knowing he must have had some ulterior motive (he is very very naughty at times), I agreed to loan him my camera and off he went. I didn't get to a whole lot of panels this year, but that was mostly because there weren't a great number of them that interested me. I attended the Modern Tales and Keenspot panels though, and I have some fairly strong opinions about how the two of them compared. Modern Tales came off as a group of professionals interested in making a legitimate business out of online comics. They gave kudos to Keenspot and mentioned them several times, and handled every question, even the tough ones (like "Has the loss of Kurtz hurt you"), very well and, again, the word I want to emphasize is professional. I hate to dig at Keenspot, because as a group of online comics artists I really want to like what they are doing. However, with the exception of Maritza they all came off to me as only interested in Keen-related stuff, making money, and bathing in their glory. Maritza Campos seemed genuinely passionate about not just her work but online comics in general, and I enjoyed everything that came out of her mouth. I didn't really get a lot of what Darren was talking about with his rants about advertisers, but that may have been a fault of mine. In any case, as a person who wasn't a fan of Keenspot to begin with hoping to be sold on the project by attending the panel, I'm now even more disinterested and just frustrated with the whole experience. I'm not saying there isn't quality work being done at Keenspot, I'm saying I'm just not having very good experiences with them overall. I will say that my discussions with Chris Crosby have been very enjoyable, and I appreciate his taking the time to discuss my grievances with him. But I digress. On with the show! NEXT |