San Jose’s Comic Con — brought by a geek icon
Apple co- founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak is organizing Silicon Valley Comic Con, which he hopes will become an annual pop culture and technology show just as popular as Comic- Con International: San Diego.
The event, scheduled for March 18- 20 at the San Jose Convention Center, fills a void left in the Bay Area since Comic- Con’s WonderCon ditched San Francisco after 2011 and moved to Southern California.
Wozniak and Marvel Comics founder Stan Lee first talked about a Silicon Valley event about four years ago. They expect nearly 30,000 people with a lineup that includes William Shatner of “Star Trek,” “The Martian” author Andy Weir and a reunion of Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson from “Back to the Future.”
Wozniak talked with The Chronicle about Comic Con, the truths and fiction of the latest Steve Jobs movie, and Silicon Valley geek culture.
Here are excerpts, edited for clarity and space: Q: There are a number of comic cons like the one in New York and the granddaddy in San Diego. What can a Silicon Valley Comic Con offer that the others can’t?
A: If they’re in all these other places, why isn’t there one in Silicon Valley, where there are so many comic con- type fans who are into science fiction and trying to make things into reality? There was a vacuum.
So we’re going to have a wing that also has some technology presentations because new products and new ideas can be just as exciting as science fiction.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish?
A: First of all, bringing a desirable entertainment event to Silicon Valley. I was born in San Jose. Bringing it there makes me feel like bringing a huge concert or festival there. Q. Growing up, did you attend an event that fired up your imagination?
A: Not one event, it’s all the books I read. Me and my techie friends, we would buy “Tom Swift Jr.” books ( about) a young kid who owned a company with his father. And he was an engineer and he’d go into a laboratory to build things to
solve the problems of the world. Totally influenced me so much. Q: When you and Steve Jobs were starting Apple, this is the kind of geek fest that seemed nichey. But now it’s mainstream, and the people in Silicon Valley want to be you. How do you feel about that? A: To take a big entertainment show and try to blend in either geeks or technology back then would have been very hard. Nowadays, the geeks are more celebrated because so many of us have started companies, had big successes and built products that changed people’s lives for the positive.
Even the idea of a geek, it used to be someone you can’t communicate with; they’d only talk science. Today, a geek is anybody who loves the latest smartphone that they’ve got and an app they got to show off to their friends. So “geek” has broadened out so much. In a sense, everyone’s a geek. Q. What one guest or panel are you really looking forward to? A: William Shatner. He’s inspirational, he’s artistic, he’s a poet. And maybe we’ll hear some stories about “Star Trek.” Also, (“MythBusters” co- host) Adam Savage. Every time I hear him, every bit of it is entertaining.
I ( also) want to see the reaction other people have to virtual reality. VR is so emotional, it’s going to have a huge impact. It’s technology and it’s pop culture. Q: What you did think of the latest Steve Jobs movie ( starring Michael Fassbender)? Were you and Jobs portrayed accurately? A: None of the scenes where I spoke to Steve actually happened. I didn’t talk to him at those events backstage when he’s introducing products. The things ( the Woz character) said, I never said to Steve Jobs ever, “Oh, you should recognize the Apple II engineers.”
I did say it once to ( former Apple CEO) John Sculley after a meeting. They expanded a real concept into an important part of the movie, but Steve was ignoring the Apple II group that had paid for all of his endeavors and really didn’t respect them well.
Steve’s negativism, which mainly came out toward his daughter that he didn’t recognize, there are a hundred stories like that that you’ve never heard, the kind of negative things that you’d say, “I can’t believe that a person would do that.”
A lot of people at Apple say this is not the Steve Jobs they knew, that it’s not an accurate portrayal. But they didn’t know him before he returned. In real life, to real people, that’s the way he could be, very sharp, ( although) never quite as much as in the movie. Q: You’re still involved in the company, aren’t you? A: No, not officially. I get a small paycheck. I want to be the only person who’s been on the payroll since the start. Q: When Steve Jobs was at Apple, he would make final decisions, but now it’s sort of a bureaucracy. What do you think about the state of innovation at Apple now? A: I can’t see any lapse in innovation.
Look at the incredible Apple Pay. I had Google phones for years before that, trying to pay with a phone.
It was complicated, messy, you never wanted to do it. And Apple comes along and it’s beautiful. Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E- mail: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny