The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: Shows And Events



By Tom Spurgeon

* the big one this weekend is Anime Expo. That's in a hotbed for manga/anime (LA) and with the holiday weekend has the ability to attract an old-school crowd of people on vacation/able to construct their vacation around the show. I'll be keeping an eye on Deb Aoki's feed over the weekend.

* HeroesCon has announced its dates for 2017; it will be their 35th year. I wish that all shows would take up the old tradition of announcing next year's show at the conclusion of this year's show. I know Comic-Con International still does this, and that SPX and CXC are blocked out through 2019 in the latter's case; 2020 the former's. It makes it easier to plan to attend, if you have that impulse -- maybe not a year in advance, but certainly not too long after that.

* Heidi MacDonald previews Comic-Con International as a comics show. The basic thesis of the show is fine, I think: that is a very good comics show with a ton of comics-related guests and a number of publishers on-hand that are happy to take meetings with some of us that are happy to have those meetings. You can spend an entire show bouncing back and forth between all the comics-related panels -- most of which are better attended than they were 20 years ago, type to type -- and have a really satisfying time. I also like shopping for original art and cheaper Silver Age comics there, and that can still be done. Some of the things MacDonald reports on seem like areas of weakness, just spun as positives, and it would seem to me okay to report on those things as potentially negative changes, too. I'm sad NBM is gone. DC doing an entertainment booth doesn't seem like an automatically great thing for their publishing arm, despite Dan DiDio's claim to the contrary. Drawn and Quarterly or Fantagraphics making any year their last year wouldn't surprise anyone. Heck, the comics part of the show still feels different in a not-great way since the days when Rory Root was an anchor as a new-books retailer. I guess we'll see who covers those huge pieces of real estate left to the show by Top Shelf (moving) and Slave Labor (leaving). It's the positives and the negatives that make San Diego the most interesting comics show year to year, and one I will continue to attend every year I'm able.

* major Derf exhibit at Oberlin in 2017.

* one story I was surprised wasn't in the PW round-up as a comics positive: New Bone.

* finally, here's a story at The Beat about expansions at the big Marriott property right up on the show proper. There's something very, very San Diego Con about that article, the idea of this facility as a kind of pleasure resource for potential attendees of that show. Along with the North Bethesda Marriott into which the near-entirety of SPX settles, and the dependable Charlotte Westin, and maybe that big Marriott in Toronto, San Diego's hotels dominate the list of top 20 hotel property that are also a part of a North American show festival's culture. Seriously, places like the Hilton Gaslamp and the Omni and the US Grant are like giant floor booths in a way.
 
posted 5:25 pm PST | Permalink
 

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