The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: News On Cons, Shows, Events

By Tom Spurgeon

* today is the start of the second Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art Of Illness conference, on Northwestern's campus -- a beautiful place to go to school and a fun place to visit. Phoebe Gloeckner, David Small, Paul Gravett and Scott McCloud are speakers, which is the kind of line-up that most comics shows can only dream about. Say hi to that show's passionate advocate Brian Fies is you make it up to Evanston.

* we're in a typically strange part of the calendar year with traditional comics shows. There's a bunch of shows like Wizard World Philadelphia coming up (that's the weekend after this one), and I think a show in Munich the weekend after that, but even collectively this run of events tends to not make a huge impression on the overall convention landscape and for a certain core comics professional community the next big, big, big show is perceived to be Comic-Con International. I know people will disagree with me and say X, Y, Z show shouldn't be dismissed and I agree, they shouldn't: it's that I think seeing this as a mostly fallow period is a fair appraisal of a certain collective feeling one encounters in comics. Heck, I'd love to go to this show in Fort Wayne the weekend after this one if only to see if my memories of Northern Indiana back-issues boxes holds true.

* Heroes Con was last weekend. Its collective memory can be found down the page and will be archived this weekend in the columns on the right hand side of this site. While I've never believed that the value of comics conventions lies solely or even primarily in the after-hours schmoozefests that pros and certain fans enjoy, given the DC re-launch news and the general rough winter for the industry sales-wise I imagine that a weekend of sharing ideas and encouragement and alcohol was more welcome this year than most.

* hey, Gerry Alanguilan of Elmer is going to be at CCI this year. I've always wanted to meet that guy.

* speaking of CCI, did you know that Comic-Con International in 2012 was scheduled for half-way through July rather than in its second half? I did not. This may actually provide more balance to the summer; it used to be that the other big show of the summer was Chicago, which squatted on the July 4 weekend or somewhere close -- now that show and Baltimore are in August.
 
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