On the whole, things hummed along nicely at C2E2. The crowd felt a bit lighter than it could have been, but for a first year con, Reed pulled in a generally sizable crowd and, most importantly, pleased that crowd. It didn’t even take a leading question to hear quotes like “I’m definitely coming back next year” or “This is so much better than Rosemont” from pretty much anybody at the convention. Reed may not be winning the attendance war yet, but they seem to be winning the war on hearts and minds already. The 2011 faceoff will, I think, be the true test. Turning all the people who gave the con a Saturday test run into full weekend attendees will be the next big step.

 

Seeing as how I’m putting the finishing touches on this report over a month after the convention took place, it seems silly to do a rundown of publishing news at this point, but if you’re interested in such things, I’d like to direct you to Robot 6’s thorough collection of news tidbits here, here, and here.

 

When I originally made my plans to attend C2E2, I had every intention of covering the various newsworthy panels of the weekend, but scheduling conflicts made that completely impossible. If you’re a fan of mainstream comics, odds are the two panels you want to be sure to catch are Marvel’s “Mondo Marvel” panel and DC’s “DC Nation,” but those two panels both took place on the same day (Friday) and overlapped by a half hour (Marvel’s ran 4-5PM, DC’s 4:30-5:30), so there was literally no way you could attend both. (To make matters worse, #3 publisher Image Comics’ panel ran at the exact same time as Marvel’s.) As a fan of works from both companies, it made me so annoyed that, not wanting to pick favorites, I just skipped both panels.

 

The next day, I did decide I should hit up at least one major panel to see how well they worked, and the lucky winner was DC’s Brightest Day panel, centering around DC’s yearlong biweekly event miniseries. Brightest Day follows a dozen heroes (including such DC stalwarts as Aquaman and Deadman) who were revived at the end of the Blackest Night event miniseries. The panel was run by editor Ian Sattler, and featured writers Peter Tomasi, Geoff Johns, Gail Simone, James Robinson, and JT Krul, as well as Brightest Day cover artist David Finch. While I won’t bore you with the details of month-old news (if you’re interested, you can find more here), I will say I was impressed with the way it was run. The room was large enough to handle the crowd (it was at probably 90% capacity when the panel started), the sound was good, and they managed the flow of questioners to the microphone to keep things running smoothly.

 

The panel itself was mostly Q&A, and thus was mostly made up of the standard awful questions that are begging for spoilers but instead elicit one-word or “we can’t tell you yet”-type answers. (That, or jokey questions like “Will we find out why Martian Manhunter has pants now?") But as they got deeper into the panel, the questions delved deeper (as Sattler joked, “This is not a 100-level class.”), peaking with a thoughtfully reasoned explanation from one fan on how disappointed he was with the death of Roy Harper’s daughter during the Robinson-penned Justice League of America: Cry for Justice miniseries. It was a heartfelt question that got right to the core of why it is people care about these characters and Robinson, obviously touched, told the fan “Because of the eloquence of your statement, in the next two years, you will see another hero or heroine have a child and have a normal relationship with that child.” It was amazing to see the spin melt away and hear a creator address a criticism from a fan so directly and so personally.

 

The only other panel I managed to attend in full that weekend was the “Visual Analysis” panel, the final presentation of the academic Comics Studies Conference. While I was interested in many of the topics in the conference, I ended up attending that one for purely personal reasons, as PLAYBACK:stl’s own Steve Higgins was a presenter on the panel. It ended up being a rather weird hodge-podge: the first half of the panel had nothing to do with visual analysis at all, and instead was a hard-sell presentation on Gotham City 14 Miles, an anthology of essays on “why the 1960s Batman TV series matters,” helmed by the book’s editor, Jim Beard. The panel featured comics writer Mark Waid, an Adam West-style Batman cosplayer, and generally had nothing to do with visual analysis at all. It was a weird transition, then, to move into Higgins’ presentation on visual imagery in Jason Lutes’ Jar of Fools, or his fellow panelist’s essay on decadence and aestheticism in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Promethea, and Lost Girls. All of the presentations were interesting, they just didn’t gel together all that well.

 

 

Here’s a photo parade of some of the other sights to see on the convention floor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An excited youngster prepares to get his picture taken with his pal Brobee from Yo Gabba Gabba! in front of the Oni Press booth. One of the bigger publishing announcements of the convention was that Oni had scored the license to publish comics based on the hit kids TV show. Photo by Jason Green.