Oh, and here are some links to some of the nice and interesting people I met in San Diego:

Mike Barklage
Rob Beddard
Tim Bennett
E. Bess
Charlie Chu
Jason Cornett
Dan Evans
Andi Rosenberger

More updates from my vacation will follow. I’m not posting anything new until I get through last week. Hopefully I will be caught up by Sunday.

Today I met up with Jim, who came down to San Diego from Los Angeles to see what the con was all about. I caught up with him at a panel that was a tribute to Dan DeCarlo, the legendary Archie Comics artist who died not long ago.

Hearing his friends and loved ones speak kindly of him, and hearing his wife Josie describe how he used to check out girls on the street and then claim he was doing research, I started to feel just the littlest, tiniest bit guilty about the one page, in one of my sketchbooks somewhere, upon which I drew Betty going down on Veronica.

Oh, like YOU’VE never drawn it.

The San Diego Comic-Con is organized by Comic-Con International. From the program:

“Comic-Con International is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to creating awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular arts forms, primarily through the presentation of conventions and events that celebrate the historic and ongoing contribution of comics to art and culture.”

They’re skating around it, but really what they mean by “related popular arts forms” is films, video games, and, mostly, TOYS. Lots of toys. Toys dominate the convention floor. Many retailers have the toys more prominently displayed than their comics. And toys exist for almost any obscure property you could name; I’m sure Christopher Guest’s “My Dinner with Andre” action playset in “Waiting for Guffman” is not too far off the mark.

Habsro has a large booth here, with display cases featuring many products, both new and classic. One case contains a very large-scale GI JOE battle, with what looks like hundreds of figures and dozens of vehicles warring it out on a mountainside.

One of the Hasbro booth’s other features is a grown woman standing around dressed as the Baroness, the sexy, bespectacled female member of GI JOE’s terrorist rival, Cobra. While passing through the booth today I saw the Baroness commiserating with several people clad in stormtrooper outfits (from Star Wars, not from the Third Reich). It occurred to me that GI JOE would really have its hands full if Cobra and the Empire teamed up, especially if Luke Skywalker were the only Jedi around when it happened.

The whole set-up, for some reason, brought back a long-lost memory: that of one of my earliest semi-erotic dreams. I certainly couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, and I don’t remember any other details of the dream, aside from this indelible image: a stormtrooper removing the front plate of its armor, revealing a set of naked breasts. Naked girl breasts.

Episode II, of course, revealed that all stormtroopers are clones of Jango Fett, who is a male character. So it seems that my dream could not have taken place in the Star Wars universe. Perhaps, though, it was a vision of the future, in which the Baroness went back to her hotel room with a stormtrooper during a comic convention, and, after having a little fun with him, tried on his armor.

It could happen.

I find the subject of the comic book business endlessly fascinating. For those of you who know nothing about comics, here is a brief overview:

The American comics market is dominated by two companies: Marvel and DC. DC is currently owned by AOL TIme Warner and is responsible for such characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Green Lantern. Marvel, whose characters include Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Captain America, and the Fantastic Four, has had a series of owners over the last several years and has had a bit of financial trouble. Both companies have titles for mature readers (DC’s line of these has been around a lot longer; Marvel just revived theirs recently), but by and large the vast majority of titles these companies produce are superheroes.

In the early nineties, several prominent artists at Marvel decided to pack up and start their own company, and Image Comics was born. Image quickly became a strong competitor, due in no small part to the speculation boom of that period. Comics speculation involves buying up copies of comics which are considered to be rare or special or otherwise have some quality that might make them valuable in the future. In the early nineties, the companies were very actively encouraging this behavior, and some comics were selling in the millions. However, the speculators soon realized that the fifty copies of X-MEN #1 they bought were never going to appreciate in value just because there were so many of them, and so they gradually stopped buying comics. Many people who bought comics and actually read them also stopped buying them, disgusted at the way the companies pandered to the speculators with things like limited-edition foil covers and Wolverine guest appearances. Nowadays, X-MEN is lucky if it sells a hundred thousand, and it has consistently been one of the market’s top-selling books since the eighties. Sales have been dropping all over.

Other companies include Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Oni Press, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf Comix, Slave Labor Graphics, Bongo Comics, and dozens and dozens of others. All of whom have booths at San Diego, and their combined work covers a far greater spectrum of storytelling genres than the big companies, and also sells significantly fewer copies.

Hot-button issues in the comics biz right now include:

1. Comic book versus trade paperback format. People like trade paperback collections of comics. They look nice on a bookshelf and they don’t get torn up. Generally they are a better value for your money. But if nobody is buying monthly issues of a comic because they are “waiting for the trade”, the company will perceive that comic as a failure and cancel it, with no collection to follow. So why not simply release the books as trade paperbacks in the first place? Apparently the overhead is too expensive.

2. Creator ownership. The way things work at the major companies, for the most part, is that if Creator A invents a new series, and creates a cast of characters, that series and those characters are legally the property of Company B. (For the purposes of this exercise, let us assume the series is called BOOGIE-WOOGIE BUGLE BOY.) That means that once Creator A is done telling his story and leaves the book, Company B can hire Creator C to continue the book. Moreover, it means that Editor D can fire Creator A from the book he created at any time. Now, if Creator A owned his series and his characters, he could take it all over to Company E if he found that Company B was not the right place for him. And he would get a much, much larger percent of the profits should Movie Producer F ever option the rights to his characters.

3. Distribution. One company has a virtual monopoly on comics distribution, and lately any competition the company has had has been doomed to fail. Comics are no longer as widespread as they once were. They used to be common on newsstands, in grocery stores, and in bookstores. Now stapled comics are almost exclusively only available in specialty stores. It is becoming an increasingly niche business. (A major exception is Archie Comics, who always have comics in the supermarket checkout line. Why can’t DC get a SUPERMAN digest in there? Is the money not worth the effort?)

A panel I attended today dealt with the niche-squared concept of online comics non-news journalism, and why it is important. I would argue that commentary, interviews, and reviews are far more valuable than the regurgitated press-release style of much comics news today. Ninth Art is my favorite site for comics reviews and commentary, and it is very nicely designed, too.

Dinner and drinking tonight were again at the Gaslamp Strip Club. It’s a great place, but I don’t know if my system can handle another night of nearly-raw steak.

Because I was afraid that I would oversleep and miss my flight, and because really I was still kind of packing all night, I did not sleep last night at all. I managed to have everything nice and ready to go earlier than expected, but I still managed to get a little panic in there by not showering until after I called the cab to come get me in half an hour. We must do these things to keep our energy levels high.

My only notable nonstandard airport experience was that I was very scornfully ejected from a bar-type restaurant in the terminal into which I had brought my Sausage McMuffin from next door, in search of a place to sit down. But that one was really my fault.

The Chicago to Los Angeles flight had me drifting in and out of consciousness. Spider-Man was the movie of the day, and I missed how he got his powers, but I saw his Uncle Ben die, and then I missed the part with the Green Goblin attacking the balcony, but I saw the part after that, and then I missed the end. This is due in no small part to the fact that I drank a Red Bull earlier in the morning to keep myself awake, but took some dramamine almost immediately after takeoff when I realized how nervous I was about flying.

The Los Angeles to San Diego flight was notable in that I spent twice as long waiting for the flight than I did in the air. It was a nice view of the coastline, however. They still managed to get beverage service in. I barely had time to drink my soda.

I made it to San Diego at about 2:30 PM. I took a taxi to my motel and checked in, and decided to chill out for a little bit before I hit the Comic-Con. As I left for the convention center, I wandered through the motel lobby and asked the clerk on duty the easiest way to get there. He gave me simple instructions – oh, it’s easy, just go down this road, turn right, go straight until you hit this road, then turn right again, and then straight on until morning. I started on my merry way and it took me about half a mile before I realized he had given me driving directions. I was walking along a highway.

I looked for cabs but didn’t see any, so I decided to keep on walking. I looked at my watch and realized I was already way late for that X-Men panel I wanted to attend, so I decided to relax and enjoy the walk. After about an hour of wandering through scuzzy industrial and commercial districts, I finally ended up in what appeared to be downtown. Sure enough, I had made it to the con.

I wandered in, paid my admission, and started in on my number one con activity: drifting among the booths in a daze, with no particular goal in mind. Nothing to buy, really, no creators I was dying to meet.

After the con closed for the day, thousands of people scattered out of the convention center and settled into downtown San Diego’s various eateries. I managed to meet up with some regulars from Delphiforums. The five of us wandered into town, intending to go to somewhere called Dick’s, which is apparently famous for its obnoxious waitstaff who throw napkins on the floor, or something like that. Instead, we ended up next door at a restaurant called the Gaslamp Strip Club.

It’s not a strip club at all, though; the gimmick is you order your steak and they bring you the raw cut of meat, which you then take to a grill and cook yourself. In addition, there were drawings of naked women decorating the walls, and all the waitresses were extremely attractive in a bizarrely uniform way. We all agreed that the restaurant was in fact a very special place, and in fact we returned there later tonight with a larger group of people after drinking at the Marriott fell through in a way that I am legally obligated not to repeat.

Eventually, I caught a cab back to my motel, where I am writing this. I am tired. More tomorrow.

My trip to the West Coast is impending. I dropped off my cat with Vince and Sara. The separation trauma is palpable.

Over on my forum, I have gone to the trouble off preparing a jokey itinerary, which I am reproducing here for the forum impaired.

The itinerary of my entire trip:

Thursday morning: depart from O’Hare.
Thursday afternoon: arrive in San Diego. Check into hotel. Proceed to convention center.
Thursday evening: party. Find a nerdy girl and have nerd sex.

Friday morning: enjoy con.
Friday afternoon: enjoy con.
Friday evening: party. Find a nerdy girl and have nerd sex.

Saturday morning: enjoy con.
Saturday afternoon: enjoy con.
Saturday evening: party. Find nerdy girls from previous evenings and have nerd threesome.

Sunday morning: meet up with Jim at con.
Sunday afternoon: hang out with Jim at con. Run out of money.
Sunday evening: visit nerd STD clinic.

Monday morning: depart from San Diego.
Monday afternoon: arrive in Seattle.

Tuesday-Thursday: hang out with Darian and Nick. Entertain them with tales of nerd sex and consequences thereof.

Friday afternoon: depart from Seattle.
Friday night: arrive in Chicago.

Saturday: retrieve kitty from Vince and Sara. Weep with happiness.

How closely will my trip match this schedule? Who can say? Who would bother saying? Stay tuned.