I think that a general rule of thumb I need to follow in the future is not to promise anything. I got started typing up that account of my trip to Wizard World, and it just got longer and longer as I worked on it. At some point, I stopped and closed the Word document, and every time I thought about blogging, I remembered, "Oh, yeah - the Wizard World post. It's not done yet. *sigh*" Then I wouldn't blog, because I had other stuff to do and I'd figure I could set aside time later to post it.

So that's why you're only getting half an account. I'll post what I have, and if you have any questions, fire away.

The real reason I wanted to post today is that I just got word through Infuze Magazine:

MGM announced yesterday a new plan for several "tentpole" (blockbuster franchise) films over the coming years that will support the reinvigorated studio. Among them: Terminator 4, the 22nd James Bond film... and a little something called The Hobbit. MGM owns the rights to distribute The Hobbit, but New Line (which produced the Lord of the Rings trilogy) owns the production rights. Apparently, the two studios have worked out a deal to co-produce The Hobbit. MGM and New Line have not yet approached Peter Jackson to direct, but reportedly have intentions to. Variety reports that MGM/New Line might even consider making two films out of The Hobbit instead of just one (overkill or milking a cash cow? you decide). But announcing the film before even approaching Jackson? I think that's what Hollywood bigwigs refer to as "applying the pressure."

I know that not all of you were crazy about the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, and I respect the reasons that you've given. But I still love 'em, and I'm hoping that "The Hobbit" will happen and be at least as good as the Trilogy.

Okay, without further ado, here's what I managed to type up about Wizard World:

Wisconsin is a bit nicer than I was expecting. Not that I want to move there, but what I saw of it from the highway was more attractive to me than southern Minnesota. They have hills, for one, especially near the St. Croix River (which is also much wider and more beautiful at the I-94 crossing than the Mississippi is between Minneapolis and St. Paul). They also have a wider variety of trees, including a type of coniferous tree that reminded me much of the mountains in California. Having said that, Wisconsin is not free of cheese. Certainly, there’s the cheese that the state is known for (and advertises enthusiastically along with gifts and fireworks along the highway), but there’s also the cheesiness of their tourist traps. The Wisconsin Dells are a place that I knew previously only from verbal references on “Mystery Science Theater 3000”, but now that I’ve driven through them…well, I’m at a bit of a loss. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting; perhaps some dramatic, sweeping valleys, or larger versions of the rocky hillocks that we saw near the St. Croix. I don’t know, but I can say that I was expecting to see some sort of geographic variation that made The Dells something which stood out. If there is some such distinction, I wasn’t able to see it. I was able to see quite a few water parks and urban developments and plasticky tourist-trappy lineups of fast-food restaurants and hotels. Out in the middle of hilly farmland. Marilyn and I spoke briefly of the idea that this was where people looked forward to taking their children every summer, and it made me depressed.

Illinois made me irritable with occasional bursts of angry. First of all, it’s flat and smells like burnt dust, if that evokes any ideas of possible odors. The I-90 is a long, relatively straight line to Chicago, which would be duller than it is, but the State of Illinois has helpfully added to the variety in your drive by adding tollbooths with which to extract your change. I’m not native to the East, so the idea of toll roads is something akin to checking people’s papers at border crossings in communist Eastern Europe in my mind (yes, I have been spoiled, thank you). Likewise, we weren’t really prepared for it, so we had to hunt and scramble for change for the first tollbooth, relieved when we found exactly one dollar in change…until we hit the next one, and had to ask the guy to break a twenty (which, fortunately, he could). In total, we hit four tollbooths before we finally reached our destination in the suburbs of Chicago.

We stayed at the Renaissance Chicago O’Hare Hotel, which was quite nice. We got up to our room, which was pretty neat. The room was divided up into little rooms: a sitting area with a couple of comfy chairs around a coffee table, a business desk and office chair, television, window out on the suburbs, and a cabinet; the bedroom had another television, closet, bedstands, and another window view, and finally a bathroom with a very large shower. Unfortunately, by the time we had unpacked, we noticed the ashtray on the coffee table and the faint odor of stale cigarette smoke that was already making Marilyn’s head buzz. She called down to the front office, telling them that we had originally asked for a non-smoking room, and they offered to relocate us to a new room. We went up a few floors to #630 - which turned out to be some kind of conference suite, with all of the features of the first room but also with a large conference table and what looked like a surround-sound setup for the ‘living room’ television. It was on the corner of the building, so we had windows all the way around the room. It was twice the size of our apartment in Minneapolis. We danced around the humungous room, wondering when they were going to get wise to what they had done and make us move again.

Friday morning, as we were starting to get up and ready to go to the convention, there came a knock at the door. I answered in t-shirt and shorts, bleary-eyed and bed-headed. There was a smartly dressed young woman there with a portfolio-tube slung over her shoulder; she looked at me warily and said, “Ah…I’m guessing that this isn’t the room for interviews?” I told her apologetically that I had no idea what she was talking about, and she headed back downstairs to the lobby. I warned Marilyn that this was probably where the hotel was going to realize what they’d done…and sure enough, they called up, asking us if we were something like ‘Source Enterprises’ or something similar. We answered in the negative, explaining that we’d been moved the previous night. To our delight, they never called back on the matter, but we worried that perhaps the girl had been led to meet with some fly-by-night organization… Anyway, the sweet suite remained ours for the weekend.

We had to be at the convention by 10 AM for the DC Nation Tour Orientation. This would be Marilyn’s first major comics convention; she’d been to dinky cons like the local MicroCon and FallCon. Wizard World turned out to be about half as large as the San Diego Comic Con International, which is still saying something. It was, of course, noisy (with booming bass music coming from the Spike TV booth and the pro wrestling ring behind it, played above the 80s radio hits that the convention center piped into the dealer’s floor), filled with geeks and nerds running the gamut from the stereotypical obese bearded guys in too-tight Superman t-shirts to the sexy cosplay girls (top three most popular costumes for girls at this convention: 1) Sexy Schoolgirl, 2) Platform-booted Goth Girl, 3) Blue-Skinned Twi’lek Jedi Girl…and no matter how often I asked, Marilyn refused to wear any of them for me when we got home).

It’s funny; it’s an atmosphere that one part of me is really at home at, because I know most of the references, I grew up with and appreciate, even enjoy, many of the comics and shows and games that everyone is talking about. I grew up in the company and proximity of geeks and nerds, and normally consider myself one of them. On the other hand, I’ve never really been able to carry on much of a conversation with most of them, and no matter how much I might feel a glimmer of kinship with them, personal hygiene is important to me, and that alone sets me apart. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a snob. Really. It’s just that there’s a certain rabidity amongst some fans that I just can’t muster within myself without feeling a lot of self-consciousness and guilt. There’s a point at which one begins to tread upon other people’s toes, when one’s interests become a sort of social offense that defeats healthy interaction, and at that point it just becomes inconsiderate of others, I think. Ask Slusser about the guy we met who started quoting Monty Python to us and just wouldn’t stop.

Anyway, the good news is that there are less of these ubergeeks at conventions and a much larger cross-section of society. I find that somewhat encouraging, even though many of these other people are probably showing up just for the manga and anime. The bad news, as Marilyn has pointed out in the past, is that comics conventions are no longer about comics, necessarily. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re still the primary iconography that gets used for convention-related advertising, but now it’s about the entirety of the entertainment industry - movies, television shows, video games, RPGs and board games, pro wrestling… It’s about Fandom. Make of that what you will; I haven’t yet decided whether that’s as bad a thing as it seems to me as an aspiring comics artist. Time will tell, I suppose, but I fear the day may come when they’re called ‘Entertainment conventions’ or something similarly broad, and comics will be relegated to the tiny booths next to Artists’ Alley.

Back to the story. The reason I first mentioned the unhealthy ubergeek archetype is because he was one of the first that I spoke to at the convention. As we found our way back to the ballrooms where the panel discussions were held, we asked one such fellow in the back row if this was indeed the DC Nation Tour Orientation. He stopped his discussion with his buddy, giving him an exasperated look and a sigh as though he had just discovered chewing gum stuck between the pages of his autographed mint issue of “House of M” #1. Finally he looked up at me and said, “Yeah, that’s what I’m told,” or something like that. It was a small thing, but it was that particular attitude of condescending annoyance that reminded me of why I instinctively avoid geek-types. Thinking back on it now, one couldn’t have asked for a more exact representation of the Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons.”

I keep getting off track - we’re still only at 10 AM on Friday. The panel was basic, and they didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know about the format of our submissions; Marilyn had already researched the stuff online. But Dan DiDio, DC’s Senior Editor, was there, and a couple of other guys that I probably should have recognized as comics bigwigs but didn’t because I’m still relatively ignorant in the ways of mainstream comics. They were upbeat, but they made it clear that drawing comics is definitely a job, not a hobby, and a competitive one at that. In order to get a job with DC, I’d have to take someone else’s job - I’d have to prove to them that I was better than someone who’s already working for them. Getting my foot in the door by being artistically skilled is only the first part of it, though - what will really impress them, as DiDio said, is consistently meeting deadlines and being reachable. Great. That’s three things I have to do.

They said they’d have editors from all of their imprints (DCU, Vertigo, and WildStorm) as well as people from marketing looking at the submissions, so they‘d consider a wide variety of styles. If all you had was talking heads, they said that it was even better than doing the standard combat stuff or splash pages (which was good news for me, since I didn‘t really have any combat stuff in my submission package, aside from a scene where a guy threatens to beat up a girl and a scene where Roman soldiers tackle a guy). If the first page of the submission caught their eye, they’d go on to the next, and so on. If they liked what they saw, they’d list the artist’s name for an interview. If they didn’t, it would go in the trash. They’d review the packages and then post the list of interviewees between 3 and 4 PM on Saturday.

We attended a couple of other panel discussions on Friday. There was one on “The Philosophy of Making Comics,” taught by Angel Medina. I didn’t recognize him (again, I’m Mr. Mainstream-Illiterate), but he said that he’d been working on “Spectacular Spider-Man” for a long time, and many people in the audience knew him from his work on “Spawn.” He was very upbeat and encouraging about drawing comics as a profession, though he was also quite honest about the sort of commitment it required. He talked about the fact that he grew up loving to draw, and getting a job doing that was about the best thing he could have wanted. When someone asked him how much free time he had, he held his fingers up to form a ‘zero.’ He explained that the word “vacation” is based on the verb “to vacate”, meaning “to leave behind”, and that was something he simply never did; drawing was the activity he enjoyed doing, and he was always doing it, even if he was just scribbling while watching television. He did qualify the statement by saying that he set time apart to spend with family and friends occasionally, but he also said that he didn’t really go to movies, watch much television, or other such things. I’ll admit openly that this was the part of the weekend that made me feel the most uncomfortable, because a) I am a man of many time-consuming hobbies, such as roleplaying and computer games. It will take some training to get to the point that Angel was talking about. Having said that, I know that I can combine some of these things; if I am to always be drawing, every spare moment, at least I can draw roleplaying characters and other such things. Practice is practice, so why shouldn’t I draw something I can also use for the occasional gaming session?

These are habits I’m going to need to concentrate on developing, though. As I thought about the possibility of interviewing with DC, I considered this fact. The conclusion I came to is this: This is the career I’ve chosen; it’s the job that I believe I’m best suited to, as far as the gifts and desires that God has given me. I’ve never really given my all for a job before, so why shouldn’t I give what I have for this?

We also attended a discussion called “Marketing 101”. It was taught by a guy whose name I don’t recall at the moment, but I believe he was the head of marketing at Top Cow. His seminar was blunt, pulling no punches, and filled with useable information (I jotted down three pages of notes to Angel’s one page). The details he gave me reinforced my conviction that self-publishing is not the way I want to go: too much money required for too little payoff in the vast majority of cases. It was depressing to hear how small the comics market is, especially in comparison to the comics markets of Europe and Japan...

[End result - I didn't get an interview. Now that I've had time to think it over, I can think of a number of flaws in my sample; next time - if there is a next time, because this was the most expensive job interview I've ever applied for - I think I have a better idea of how to put my sample together (only pencil work, a wider variety of subject material). I'm also reconsidering storyboarding work. Look, just as long as I can get a job DRAWING cool stuff, I'll be quite pleased.]