parakkum

Today was the first full day of Comic-Con International: San Diego. I rushed through breakfast and then hit the DC Talent Search Orientation. DC holds one each day to prep people for their review process. It's changed since the last time I attended one, for the better I think.

Old method: Attend orientation, receive ticket (maybe) to go have your work reviewed by one editor.

New method: Fill out form, attach to photocopied leave-behind of your best work, drop leave-behind in curious little slot in DC booth. Editors representing all of DC's lines (e.g. Vertigo, Universe, kids) look at all the work, then if any are interested, your name will appear on the meeting schedule the next day, posted at the DC booth.

The upshot of the new method is that you don't have to come back repeatedly, they get to quickly prescreen people who obviously don't make the cut, and your work will be seen by an editor from each branch, so there's a greater chance that someone in a position to like your style will see your work.

Notes from the Orientation are below.

My collaborator James Nguyen showed up around 12:30. He dropped his portfolio leave-behind at the DC talent slot then we hit the Portfolio Review Area.

How to get a portfolio review

Show up early, then wait. The signup sheets for portfolio reviews are put out half an hour before the start time for a given review, and they fill very quickly. Thus, you need to be lurking around before the sheets go out to have any chance of obtaining a reasonable slot and being reviewed. We came at an odd time, so we basically waited until 1:30 and James signed up for Sony, then we lurked for a while.

While we were waiting, we were interviewed by a reporter from San Diego CityBeat. She was interested in the portfolio review process, what it felt like, etc. We were sitting next to another writer-artist team who, like us, had just met in person for the first time at the con. She said that was definitely going in the article. She asked a lot of good, intelligent questions -- I like her "What's your best-case scenario?" question. Hearing that James was putting stuff into consideration for DC, she asked us to email her if he was accepted for the next-stage interview (or if he heard positively from anyone, really).

We'll see.

Sony turned him down, indicating that they're looking more for animators right now, though everyone from Sony loved his work. The reviewer thought that James would be a good cleanup artist for animation, once he learned more about animation.

Before James arrived, I also signed him up for a portfolio review tomorrow (Friday) with Disney's publication wing, as their signup is done at their booth and is first come, first serve. They're interested in original concepts, so I figured we could put Inhabit in front of them and see what they think of it.

We were also able to check on someone we've had email correspondence with, which was handy. As our last event of the day, we attended the Adult Swim "How to pitch to us" section. I'll just dump my notes here. The DC Orientation notes follow.

Various notes in the extended.

Today was the major portfolio review day for James, and I hung around for a fair amount of that.

We started with the usual semi-Irish breakfast (the real one having to wait for Saturday morning), then hit the convention center. The con ATM gave me fifties, which surprised me a little, then I met up with Dave and Yoko and went over to DC to see if James had received the editorial nod from his packet the day before (he was off directly to the portfolio review area to sign up for reviews). He was not on the DC list.

After this, I walked around with Dave and Yoko for a bit, pausing every so often for Yoko to take a picture of one of the walking oddities (first picture -- girl dressed as Kagome from Inu-Yasha).

At about 12:15 I went up to the portfolio review area to try and help James sign up, as both Marvel and Dark Horse began their portfolio review at one. A huge Marvel line had already formed, so he ended up fifty-second on the list, and thirty-second on the Dark Horse list.

The Dark Horse list eventually broke down a bit, but James did get to see them today, which did not happen with Marvel. The Dark Horse experience typified his day: "Your work is good, your storytelling is good." Then usually a "but this isn't quite what we're looking for" -- though in the case of Dark Horse, it was rather more vague than that, with no specific stylistic issues. Fior from CityBeat happened to be in the Dark Horse review area when James had his review, so I imagine she has an even more interesting story now.

The Marvel list ostensibly rolls over, so James should be seen by them on Friday.

As I mentioned earlier, I signed James up to talk with Disney on Thursday, grabbing the first time slot. Thus, we sat down with two guys from Disney's publications wing and pitched Inhabit. It went pretty well, and they seemed interested. One of them mentioned that they want to increase their audience among boys -- mostly girls read their comics at the moment. They also appreciated that we had worked the characters up with descriptions and motivations. I said something like, "Well, yeah -- otherwise how else will I know how they're supposed to act?" to which one of them replied, "You'd think so, but..." and made a funny comment about how they get a lot of "I have an idea where robots fight. It's robots, and they fight!" One of them gave us his card and they took the leave-behinds, so hopefully this will go somewhere interesting.

That was the end of the portfolio review day for us, so it was down to the exhibit floor again, then off to meet up with honeyfields. I followed her around as she scoured the small press area for sketchbooks. Her acquisition list is too long for me to want to list here right now, but she made some great finds. Some notables for humor:

Counter Attack by Alisa Harris, a short book of cute and astute cartoons about cats.

How to Draw Boobs and Attract Other Morons by Adam Hughes, who is very aware of the silliness of the out-of-proportion women he draws for comics covers (and who is a very good artist, too).

I also picked up two GURPS books for five bucks each, to add to my reference pool for writing.

Once the convention floor closed, we went back to the hotel to dump things and relax for a bit, then had dinner at Ole' Madrid in the Gaslamp. The paella was good, as were the bread and sauces. Then it was back home and slipping into comas in preparation for the day of maximum chaos, Saturday.

Posting rather after the fact, now that I've recovered and have some sleep back in me.

Saturday began at The Field, our preferred breakfast spot on the weekend. I had an Ulster Fry, which comprises eggs, a rasher of bacon, sausage, black pudding, white pudding and a lone slice of tomato. kwc and m added to this with Guinness and coffee.

Suitably fueled, we headed off to the convention center. James left a little early to check the DC portfolio review out for himself, while the rest of us hit the convention floor. I'm a little rusty on the details at this point, as things are already starting to haze together.

I met up with James in the middle of the day to see how he was doing in portfolio-review land. As it happened, Marvel's pair of editors were proceeding remarkably slowly through their reviews, so James never managed to see them. Saturday was thus a bit of a bust for him.

Highlights from my Saturday included Jeff Smith talking about the origins of Bone, the Quick Draw and the Masquerade. I'll put up my notes on the first and third after this, but kwc will have to handle the Quick Draw, as he took the pictures while I took the notes.

Saturday was good, long, chaotic and full of people, as we've come to expect from a Saturday at the Comic Con.

Jeff Smith's talk was on the origins of his comic Bone.

Though he's a great cartoonist and storyteller, Jeff Smith is a surprisingly flat speaker. His talk was very much like an academic lecture given by someone who is very interested in their topic but without much energy or ability to impart that enthusiasm. It was one of those talks that would engage you if you already knew you were interested in the topic, but might not be able to convince you it's an interesting topic.

He also spoke about his upcoming Captain Marvel project for DC at the end of the talk.

Notes in the extended.

Since we like to talk about attendance totals for the San Diego Comic Con (or, more properly, Comic Con International San Diego), here's the number pulled from the blerb for Wonder-Con, the much smaller Bay Area convention run by the same folks.

There were 104,000 attendees at last year's San Diego Comic Con.

Woop. That's more than the population of my current city of residence. :)

Continuity is both a threat and promise in continuing media. It promises you an engaging story that you can keep track of for episodes, or issues, or months, or years, and that will pay you off over and over again for sticking with it. Conversely, it threatens you with being unable to get into the story half way through its run, or worse, with a story that collapses under the weight of too much continuity -- especially if that continuity is in conflict with a desire for the characters to remain comfortably static.

When your favorite story jumps the shark, it's often because it should simply have ended already, or at the very least changed to become unrecognizable. It's that moment when you're watching Star Trek: Nemesis and you realize the Enterprise is top-heavy with senior officers who in any kind of real system would have been moved on to other commands many times over already. It's when you watch the Marvel universe fumble with the idea that the Fantastic Four always gained their powers "ten years ago," while trying to shoehorn decades of continuity into that space.

Comics, in particular American superhero comics, really labor under the weight of continuity. I grew up reading X-Men, but these days I couldn't possibly explain, without significant research, what's going on in any modern X-title (and there are rather a few more of them than there were when I read them). Similarly, I have no idea what's supposed to be happening right now in Batman's universe, either. The last two Bat-related comics I read? A recent all-ages Batman Adventures mini-trade and the most recent Gotham Central collection.

Recently, the big talk of continuity down has been the massive retconning of Spider-Man. To summarize very, very briefly:

Spider-Man has been married for about two decades now. Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada has always believed this is a bad idea and limits storytelling, and wanted to get rid of that whole "wife" deal.

In recent years, Spider-Man has had his identify revealed to his Aunt May (who took it better than he expected, thank you), and, more critically, revealed his identity to the whole world. Oops. This led to the nigh-inevitable shooting of Aunt May, and then Peter and Mary Jane made a deal with the devil to get her back, in exchange for their marriage.

Say what?

Yeah. Here's a bit of what Tales from the Longbox has to say about it:

They took a mature and growing character twenty years backwards because Joe Quesada didn't think he was "relatable" to his readers (who at this point are mostly adults) anymore. They've done everything short of having him back in diapers in their effort to make him seem younger again. But it's actually just pathetic that he's now a thirty-something guy who's never moved out of his aunt's house (although maybe that does make him relatable to many readers).

Quesada also didn't want Peter to get a divorce because that wouldn't be a good example for the children. IN WHAT FUCKING WAY IS MAKING A DEAL WITH THE GODDAMNED DEVIL MORE ACCEPTABLE?? Not only that, but pretty much every character along the way told Peter that altering reality was a bad move and pointed out the precious nature of true love. So now our "hero" Peter comes off as not only immoral, but a complete fucking moron for making what everyone else could plainly see was a horrible decision.

Good stuff. It also leads us to an important point:

This is not how you fix your continuity.

I was totally pleased when I saw the unfortunately named "Ultimate" line, as it allowed classic characters to be walked through the paces again without the weight of continuity, much like Batman: the Animated Series allowed for the Batman mythos. Similarly, the shoujo-market-targeted Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane lets us toss forty years of continuity and just enjoy the basic idea of Mary Jane and Peter Parker in their classic, teen form.

So given that, why try to collapse the "core" books, when these offspring are healthy and let you tell the classic, Parker-as-downtrodden-single-guy stories?

Well, because you make poor decisions.

Since I'm second-guessing Marvel editorial here, what would I do in their place?

I'd take my cue from how Japanese media companies treat many of their properties. Take Gundam, for example. Mobile Suit Gundam aired in 1979 and is, I'm told, a gripping tale of people in a war-torn world, carrying with it a constant message that war is, fundamentally, tragic. Mobile Suit Gundam was incredibly popular, and naturally there was a desire to revisit the ideas, the visuals, and other elements of the property in a sequel of some kind.

And there were sequels, but there were also other things. Offshoots, basically. Stories that used the best elements of Gundam, but did not attempt to fit in with those other stories, or try to shoehorn in years of continuity. Instead, these were "alternate universe" stories that had the same giant robots of Gundam, and perhaps elements of the setting, but that fundamentally didn't happen in the same world.

Consider also the Final Fantasy series of games. I'll borrow a sentence from the Wikipedia entry here:

Most Final Fantasy installments are independent stories; however, they feature common elements that define the franchise.

That is to say that if you look at one of the games, you know it's a Final Fantasy story on sight, but almost none of them have anything to do with each other, or are meant to happen in the same world or continuity. Just like you know that Ultimate Spider-Man is a Spider-Man story even without seeing the title (or even without seeing Peter in his costume), but it doesn't have to live in the same world as The Amazing Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, or any of the other "core" titles.

So what would I do? I'd keep moving the core title forward until it hit a natural conclusion (Peter marries and settles down, perhaps). Then I'd reboot the concept and give it another try. And so on, over and over again. Perhaps even in parallel. Rather than having four Spider-Man (or Superman, or Batman) titles that live uncomfortably side-by-side, ostensibly happening to the same character in the same world yet written by different people and only loosely connected, you could have four different takes on Batman in different worlds happening at the same time. m suggested the very neat idea of having era-oriented Batman titles, such that you'd have a 30s Batman, a 60s Batman, an 80s Batman, and a contemporary Batman all in their own titles.

Of course, this all wrecks the heck out of continuity. It requires an audience that, like many manga readers, can accept a story that actually ends after four, or six, or twelve volumes. I'll gladly be a part of that audience, though. I'm hoping that the continued presence, pressure, and influence of manga leads to more of a move in that direction. Rather than being put off by four X-Men titles that interact uncertainly and stagger under the weight of decades of continuity, I'd love to have one "full continuity" title shelved next to three exciting variant takes on the fundamentally sound X-Men concept.

Do that, and you'll have me spending a lot more money on comics again.