LORDS OF THE BLING

I blame Hugh Jackman, personally. It wasn’t until
X-Men broke box office records that
Hollywood took any serious note of comic book fans and the sub-cultures they
spawned; sure, there’s been the odd Superman or Batman movie, but those were
considered summer flings rather than the extended love affair superheroes have
enjoyed with the big screen of late. Tinseltown has invaded San Diego
Comic Con, the arch granddaddy of the modern pop culture convention, and she is taking no prisoners. Now the
ersatz fan nation is sporting a population in excess of Salt Lake City for the
four days it operates, and a curious question hovers over it like a threatening
CGI mist: what, exactly, is the purpose of this con?

This isn’t just a question of why we need to go to conventions in an Internet
age, though that question is certainly relevant. Affinity groups can
self-organize via social networking sites; rare trinkets and signed photos can
be obtained via eBay; bootleg recordings of oddities not available commercially
can be schlurped from BitTorrent; informative panels can be conducted via any of
a wide menagerie of chat interfaces, with or without audio and video; and let’s
face it, the vast majority of any con is only going to get to watch the costume
contest via the closed circuit broadcast anyway. But “why am I here” gets kicked
to another level at SDCC because the con tries to cover the entire breadth of
geek culture at the expense of depth in any aspect of it.

Whatever it has become, it ain’t just about the comics. A quick glance at the
map shows that probably, at most, 35% of the floor is given over to dead trees.
The largest booths are set up not by Marvel or DC but by movie studios like
Paramount, Warner Bros., and Fox; video game companies like Sony, Microsoft, and
Square-Enix;
game and toy companies like Hasbro and
Wiz Kids; even those
responsible for publishing the ravings of L. Ron Hubbard had significant floor
space. Lost alone was responsible for half
a dozen different programming panels, and televisual media in general probably
beat comic books 2:1 in that regard, even if one ignores the anime room.
Vampires lurk about, rolling dice to determine who bites who for how much blood,
knights in cardboard armor cross plastic swords with Jedi light sabers, and young
children cockfight with cards at various gaming tables.

Calling it Nerdvana, in other words, is cliché but appropriate. But San Diego is
running out of room, and it’s unlikely that the resulting turf war is going to
come down in the fans’ favor.

If SDCC is the ultimate expression of geekgasm, similarly it is the perfect
metaphor for the struggle between art and corporate culture. The creators need
the industry to get paid; the creators would not be able to survive without
charging fans $20 a pop for autographs. The con needs the creators to survive;
the con would not be able to thrive without charging NBC Universal ten times
what it charges
Kingdom of
Loathing. So the “Independent Pavilion” full of self-publishers shrinks
every year and the center of the hall is dominated by 24/7 ads for Cool Shit You
Can Buy™. Panels on how to draw small pictures for a living get shelved so that
Fox can air yet another preview for The Simpsons
Movie and open the floor to obvious questions and fawning praise. Neil
Gaiman is driven like a soldier on D-Day at Paramount’s behest. And so it goes. The net result: You’re spending
$30 a day for entrance, $75 a day for food, $200 a night for a hotel, and
Heinlein knows what else for all the stuff you came to purchase in the first
place, so that you can absorb the same ads you are exposed to several hundred
times a day for free. Which isn’t to say it’s not seductive. It may be the
liminality of the experience, the altered state induced by travel, or just the
bison-like stench of 200,000 geeks who haven’t bathed in 2 days, but somehow seeing the same
ads in this setting always somehow feels more significant.

Okay, maybe that’s overly cynical. It’s certainly not as if there are no
intangible benefits to attending a con, but as SDCC grows more
corporate, the questions surrounding these intangibles become somewhat more
charged: is it worth $500 a head, plus goodies and travel, to shake someone’s
hand?

Ah, but this is America, is it not? The land of a thousand languages, the
melting pot that has become a patchwork quilt of ideology and interest, all
watched over by an Internet that never sleeps. So maybe they’ve edged ever
closer to taking the comics out of Comic Con; where else can you go from a
screening of Ghost Rider straight to Lloyd
“Mayor
of Tromaville” Kaufman illuminating how Mark Steven Johnson got his start
writing things that were slightly less prestigious, all the while going through
some of the secrets of making a movie on the cheap? Where else does George
Romero sit at a table, happy to discuss his new
Night
of the Living Dead comic if the autograph line slows down?

If nothing else, this is the legacy of the con as phenom: the true origin of
remix culture. Sure, technology has made it more widely accessible, but it
didn’t start with renegade remixers running amok on Napster. Neil Gaiman, during
his
spotlight panel, notes that randomly walking the con floor in 1989 lead to
what became a much-beloved Sandman collaboration. Fan fiction, too, got it’s
start well before web, being traded at shows like this one on typed or
handwritten pages, lovingly photocopied and stapled together and offered amongst
devotees of the sub-sub-subgenre. And so mediums blend and the only constant,
the ability to tell a relevant and worthwhile story, determines which franchises
live or die.

This is really the equalizing force of the con – it’s one of the few venues
where money can buy you attention, but not respect. Once the amputee model is
done dancing at the Warner Bros booth I’m back on the floor, and in a literal
example of the marketplace of ideas, an artist asks me to stop so that he can
show me his new comic, so new it isn’t even up on
the
publisher’s website (it’s called Helen Killer – look for it, it seems
bizarrely awesome). All the while, people roam the floors wearing unauthorized
costumes of their favorite characters, innocently or intentionally living the
dichotomy between those who own our culture and those who claim it for their
own.

Is this, then, what the con is for? In this era of digitally managed media
rights, conventions represent one of the few truly unregulated spaces where this
sort of appropriation can happen. That they almost can’t exist without
sponsorship of the very corporations being appropriated simply brings it full
circle, an illustration of the symbiotic relationship between creator and
consumer that neither side entirely wants to admit to.

The first conventions as we know them today were held in the late 1930s in the
UK, arriving in the US just prior to that country’s entry into WWII. These early
gatherings were held alongside celebrations of scientific achievement to honor
those who were thinking creatively about how this stuff was going to impact us
in the future. (Okay, we don’t have flying cars yet, but it’s a noble goal and
one that deserves some recognition) It’s an easy thing to forget if you aren’t
conversant in the history of comics, but for most of the 1950s and 60s, comics
were science fiction…or science fantasy, at any rate. This is the era
that saw Batman become a time traveler, the Green Lantern become an
intergalactic force to be reckoned with, and upstart Marvel Comics introduce any
number of normal folks who became freaks due to scientific accidents
(radioactive spider bites, gamma ray exposure, cosmic storm encounters, unusual
genetic structures, etc). It only makes sense that the culture of sci-fi
conventions would expand to include these red-headed cousins of thinkers like
Asimov.

Through that filter, the sweeping reach of SDCC makes more sense. As
communication technology improved and traveling was no longer necessary to get
your fill of news outside of the mainstream, cons had to become something more
than just an intellectual party to survive. To that extent, the
commercialization of the con was basically inevitable, but without even meaning
to it reveals some of the truths about the shifting media landscape we now
inhabit. The line between creator and consumer is already starting to blur; a
future without it’s clear, bright demarcation seems unavoidable, no matter what
Hollywood would like (or would like us) to believe.

Look for video footage of Warren Ellis‘ hilarious spotlight panel and a review of his recent novel, Crooked Little Vein shortly.