The Big Con

Tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Diego to attend Comic Con International. This will be my 25th straight year there.

      The first time I was in my mid-20s, my first book had just come out, and I was researching my second, a history of '60s comics. I was also a rabid young comics fan, thrilled at the new directions the medium was taking in the '80s. Over the subsequent years I went back as an upstart comics writer networking like crazy, as one of the most prominent writers in the business locked into one signing or panel after another, as a burned-out comics writer bitching and moaning about the business, as a former comics writer skirting along the edges, and most recently as a comics historian honored by a small core of long-time fans but unknown to all the new fans in the field. And in the last couple of years I've started to meet young writers and artists who wanted to shake my hand because they'd "grown up on your comics, Mr. Jones."

      I've gone there umarried, married but no kid, with a baby, with a little kid who wanted to look at toys, in various states of marital break-up and reconciliation; this year I'll be there with a 15-year-old son. I've been there too broke to buy the comics I wanted, able to buy huge stacks of the things, loaded with cash but not wanting anything, and broke again.

     I've seen the convention change too, from a few thousand fans—mostly actual comics fans, and of the old nerdy school of hard-core collectors before comics got cool—in the dumpy old downtown convention to 120,000 people filling and overfilling the jet-hangar-sized center on the harbor. I've seen comics fans and creators become hipper, slimmer, more attractive, more ethnically varied, and more likely to be female, as I've seen the comics themselves pushed to the edges of the convention by the movies, TV shows, cartoons, video games, and collectible toys that have become the heart of the convention. I've seen the Klingons, Imperial Storm Troopers, superheroes, and other costumed oddballs come back every year but every year vanish deeper into the crowds of families in t-shirts and shorts. I've seen my generation of young turks become middle-aged veterans, seen the middle-aged veterans I admired become old-timers, seen the old-timers of another day become fewer and fewer.

      I can chart the course of half my life by just recalling each of those 25 sets of four days in the summer in San Diego. And this year, as most years, I go there in an interesting place, my career unfixed, opportunities open and closing like Venus fly-trap lips. I'm pushing these on-line humor books, wrestling with the nonfiction book that's given me the most trouble of any project in my life, and talking up the screenplay I've written about the early days of the comics business, which I know is a good piece of work—but which I'll also have to admit is trapped in a legal and financial dispute of the producer's.

      I never know how I'll feel about any of this as I talk to other writers there or as I think about it on the way home. I never know who I'll meet, either, because as the Con grows amoeba-like it slurps up more and more chunks of the culture outside it. I've just learned that several of my "real novelist" acquaintances will be there this year.

      So I'm going to let my Sisyphean obligation roll to the bottom of the hill and sit there for a week. This is no time to let my view of life be blocked by a big rock. I'm going to let my head empty out in the liminal state of the long I-5 drive. Then I'll plunge in, eyes and ears open, and find out who I am this year.