The Future Doesn't Care
I have seen the future.
And it is filled with content. A lot of content. So much content that you're going to be hard pressed to keep up with much of it, much less all of it. So much art, so much design, so many characters familiar and yet different, so many situations that you've seen before but just not quite. Toys made for two hundred lucky purchasers. Entire mythologies undreamed of, unimagined, existing alongside one another. It's Timewave Zero out there. So many fictions overlapping, coexisting (not peacefully, mind you.) So damn much information, signal, that it's useless without filters wrangling meaning and desire.
And that's just Thursday. The quiet day. The day before Friday (which is apparently gonna be just like Saturday now that there's been two consecutive days of sellouts.) If you didn't have a badge already, well then Cthulhu help you, because you're going into the grinder, the grinder of souls clutching their filled-out information sheets. And the grinder's gonna take its time getting to you.
Luckily, I got to bypass a lot of that. And I was prepared. I'd spent the morning going through the programming schedule, trying to make the hard decisions (Storytelling clinics with Cameron Stewart/Darwyn Cooke/Carla Speed McNeil/Colleen Coover or BLADE RUNNER?) Of course, preparations go out the window once you hit the hall and start to take it in. I went rummaging through the retailer end of the hall, trying to find STAR WARS toys for my son, but being distracted by the kiosks of Dodgy Purveyors of Asian Cinema. And oh yes, the project that was a cross between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and COPS. That looked promising (even if I can't remember the name right at the moment.)
And I have to say, that if you sought peace and quiet at the show, you were more likely to find it on the comics half of things than on the media side of things. As obnoxious as some of the large comic publisher booth setups were, they had nothing on the FULL SIZE PROPS that dominated a lot of the large media offerings. And man, they're agressive marketers, those media types. But then they've got audiences to build, and this is a big shot at the general public. Those stunned eyeballs of July may become the glazed Nielsen eyeballs of Autumn. But you gotta catch 'em early.
Ah, that's my wife on the phone. I'll continue this later.
More to follow. Darwyn Cooke, George Romero (with special guests), Cameron Stewart and the APOCALYPSTIX and Jim Ottovani follow.