If there are diamonds in the sidewalk, this must be San Francisco.
Being a Wonder-Con 2008 retroperspective.
Things started about as badly as they could start. At least I had a hotel. And boy, did I ever. It was the con hotel, the big juke-box looking thing that towered over fourth street like a green-mirrored Wurlitzer, only without the stream of oldies (but you could get a reasonable approximation of that at Mel’s Diner on Mission, where I paid fifty cents to hear some Etta James and Junior Walker.)
Of course, it being downtown San Francisco, there was only one way to get into the hotel, and it wasn’t on Fourth Street, even though the street address clearly said Fourth Street. Go figure. So I got to make two passes, cursing my inability to turn left on Market while driving through the broken sunlight.
Check in, get my room, go fetch my badge. Relatively painless, as opposed to the overnight parking charge for the room. Which was basically a third of the room price. Yeah. Right. I wasn’t going to stay there a second night. Don’t get me wrong, the Wurlitzer is a nice hotel and all, but come on.
Friday at the show? Dead. Pretty dead. Deader than last year dead. And when I got there, Image was indeed parked and ready to go, contrary to reports to the contrary. That SILVER STAR book looks pretty tempting, now that I’ve actually seen it and all, but the 35.00 pricetag puts me off just a bit. I’ve waited this long; I can wait for the paperback.
Speaking of waiting. I saw that Comic Relief had copies of the new Jack Kirby book, KIRBY: KING OF COMICS by Mark Evanier. They had stacks. 80 copies to be precise, that they themselves paid to have air-freighted out to the show. That’s proactive. I glanced at the stacks and figured, “Okay, they’re set for the show. I’ll grab one on Saturday on the way out or on Sunday. Easy.” Only it wasn’t. They were gone by Saturday morning when I checked back. But more on that later.
Oh, did I mention that I’d been in a foul mood since pretty much Thursday? Draw a little stormcloud over my head. As I’d joked, my bad Friday had started the afternoon before and didn’t show many signs of letting up, since I’d really come in about two hours after I wanted to, being tied up in stuff that was out of my control, and did nothing but intensify my pissed-offed-ness at the universe in general. Enough so that I was wondering what the hell I was even doing at Wonder-Con. I didn’t have any books to sell, no table to sell them from (mostly because I wasn’t going to have the books to sell in the first place.) I was suffused with malaise and really ready to pack it up after I’d seen one aisle of Japanese import toys and custom vinyl figures that cost more money than I’d been able to save up before I was age thirteen. It was a moment of profound dis-connect from pretty much everything in the room, like the one decent scene in BEING JOHN MALKOVITCH where Malkovitch enters himself and sees the entire world as Malkovitches murmuring “Malkovitch” and being all the more alien for it. I was of this world, I knew it, but at the same time, I wanted nothing more than to go to my room, pull the blackout curtains and just stare at a corner.
Yeah, a Cyclops-esque funk. Oh, please, like you didn’t see that coming. He has always been the X-Man that I identified with. Some things never change; some people never grow up, encased in Lucite and unchanging, foil stamp declaring value right on the front there.
So instead of actually grappling with the Otherness of the show, I instead sought some sanity in the Art Noveau/Deco prints and Gustav Klimt pencil sketches at the Art Booth Of Utter Doom. Seriously, that’s like heroin to me. I know I’m supposed to stay away or my probation officer is gonna chuck me back in the joint. But I can’t. I’m not strong enough. Surrounded by plastic artifice, I sought some solace in capital A Art, though to be fair, much of it was art in the pursuit of commerce a century or more ago.
And just across the hall was one Steve Lieber, who’s still the most consistent operator in artist’s alley, as well as being a talented and hardworking artist to boot (and those two don’t always come in conjunction now, do they?) Sadly, he didn’t have any copies of his Alcatraz project, which I’d been hearing about for years and is now supposed to be out. I guess I have to go to the state park there myself and pick up a copy. Yes, he’s hard at work at WHITEOUT 3, which probably isn’t going to be called that. Ended up having dinner with Steve, Sarah (Periscope’s talented intern from Cologne, Germany, who’s going places once folks see how talented she is) and Thomas Galloway (he of rec.arts.comics from waaaay back in the day, and DC trivia master extraordinaire, as well as an all-around good talker.) Vietnamese food was on the menu. Spring rolls and a peanut sauce, too-strong green tea (stupid me for putting the basket back in the kettle) and lovely beef stir fry with scallions (not unlike a chewier Mongolian beef).
A brief adjournment to the Cartoon Art Museum party followed, though I pretty much ignored the room and just stared at the art on the walls. Milton Caniff originals? Right next to a Will Eisner SPIRIT page? E.C. Segar THIMBLE THEATRE and a Harriman? I just wish the light had been a little better.
I still had my little raincloud following me when I trudged back to the hotel, trying to figure out if I was even going to stick around past noon tomorrow. Fun is fun, but when you’re not having any, and you can’t even conduct some business, well…meh.
Saturday follows. Need to get some other stuff together first.