Heavy on corporate, light on comic books
Some fear the ‘little guys’ are being squeezed out of Comic-Con by Hollywood
Calling all superheroes, LOS ANGELES sci-fi fans and genre lovers of all kinds: Comic-Con is here.
The annual pop-culture celebration kicked off Wednesday with a preview of the San Diego Convention Center’s showroom floor: 460,000 square feet of TV, film and video-game displays, along with toys, art and comic books for sale. Four days of panels, screenings and autograph signings begin Thursday.
What started as a comic-book convention with 300 participants in 1970 has grown into a corporateheavy media showcase that draws more than 130,000 attendees.
Netflix, Warner Bros., Fox, HBO and Marvel Studios are among the companies hosting large-scale presentations with top-name talent. But while Hollywood has raised Comic-Con’s profile, comic-book enthusiasts say it keeps edging out the book buyers and sellers.
“I think the biggest story about Comic-Con this year is that Chuck Rozanski and Mile High Comics isn’t attending. He is THE guy in terms of retail comics and he cannot afford to do the setup that he would usually do because he just doesn’t get the sales that he used to get at Comic-Con,” said Harry Knowles, founder of Ain’t It Cool News and a Comic-Con regular since 1971.
“The sadness that’s going on is the people that really made ComicCon worth going to from the very beginning are being squeezed out by the entire corporate structure of Hollywood, of the industry that is creating so much awesome stuff for us to obsess about.”
Among the fan obsessions on view this year: Stranger Things 2 and Marvel’s The Defenders from Netflix; HBO’s Game of Thrones and Westworld; Justice League and Blade Runner 2049 from Warner Bros., along with an anticipated appearance by Steven Spielberg.
Comic-book discoveries are no longer the main attraction at Comic-Con.
“Marvel and DC still use ComicCon to make announcements” about characters and storylines, said Adam Parker, book manager at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. “There’s still Artists Alley. There are still panels of writers and artists talking about the next plans for Batman or what Marvel is doing next. That all still exists, it’s just grown so much more beyond that.”
Jamie Newbold, who’s been attending Comic-Con since 1972 and selling comic books there for more than 20 years, said that as big entertainment companies have seized on the convention’s fan base, the cost of exhibit space on the showroom floor has become prohibitive for small vendors.
The owner of Southern California Comics in San Diego still plans to bring about 15,000 books, but he used to take triple that.
“I have a lot of friends who do what I do, and when they look around and see the booths on either side of them are corporate booths, they’re big businesses, and we’re just little guys from L.A. or Colorado or New Orleans,” Newbold said. “It would be nice for us to see some form of compensation to keep us there since we’re the seeds that sprouted this massive tree.”
His wish? That Comic-Con would make its 50th anniversary a celebration of rare comic books.