The Four Color Media Monitor

One of the UK Guardian's writers is puzzled why today's comic conventions, even in Britain, deal very little with the actual medium today:

On the website of a recent comic con in Lancashire, the big draws were: a puppeteer who worked on Star Wars and The Dark Crystal; an actor who was in Space: 1999 and played the Stormtrooper in Star Wars who said: “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for”; a child actor who appeared in Game of Thrones. Oh, and Knight Rider’s car was there, as was The Simpsons school bus and Luke Skywalker’s Land Speeder. There was a gaming area. All of which, I hasten to add, sounds absolutely brilliant to a geek like me. And yet … this was a comic con, right? What became of the comics?

I find myself annoyed by the ever-growing number of comic cons that don’t seem to be about comics at all. The five comic creators named on the aforementioned con’s website were tucked away at the bottom: two from the Beano, one at Marvel, a Jack Kirby expert and the fifth who was more a fantasy illustrator than a comics artist. Again, all great – but isn’t it a bit disingenuous to continue to call these events comic cons?

We can probably blame San Diego for all this. The godfather of comic cons began life in 1970 and was then entirely devoted to comics, thus earning its name. Actually, it was called the Golden State Comic Minicon back then. But over the years it has morphed into a glossy, media-led event where we get first looks at huge movies and TV companies announce new series. It’s very possible now to spend a day at San Diego Comic Con without getting so much as a sniff of an actual comic.

Well if they took a closer look under a magnifying glass at the dire state of the original medium, they'd see there's not only little reason to cherish some mainstream comics, they'd also notice the publishers sold out to Hollywood, which is in dire straits of their own now as well. If you can blame the SDCC for dumbing down comics conventions, then it's only fair to figure Hollywood has some blame to shoulder for dumbing down comic books to boot.

They bring up a convention in Leeds called Thought Bubble, which is dedicated far more to the medium than some other conventions are these days:

Thought Bubble is the brainchild of Lisa Wood, an artist of some renown under the pen name Tula Lotay, who decided a decade ago to create the kind of event she’d like to attend – one focused on artists, writers and readers.

“I always think it’s really bizarre that you have all these events around the country called comic cons when they really don’t have much to do with comics,” says Wood. “People do enjoy them, and that’s great. But … I want to see writers and artists, I want to see the creators that help the medium flourish. We’ve always wanted to celebrate comics in their purest form.”

Which is surely easier in Europe with events like Angouleme's over in France, because in some parts of Europe, they embrace the art form far more enthusiastically than some in the USA do now. The lady's correct - it is ridiculous to call a comicon just that if comic books make up so little of the festival in question, if at all. If they're so much more interested in movies and music, then they should call them entertainment conventions, where anything could be put on display, but they shouldn't make fools of themselves by calling them comics conventions. I think the managers of the SDCC would do well to consider that in coming years.

And maybe the newspaper could do better by asking why the medium as a whole in the USA, if not overseas, is doing so much to alienate their audiences with awful leftist politics that, as a result, it's no wonder quite a few comicons have surely lost audience. Not to mention why superhero comics are being dumbed down so terribly. If they don't, then there's not much point complaining about comicons in name only.

Labels: conventions, Europe and Asia, msm propaganda