World’s Biggest Con? Part Two
Some of the positive things about this year’s Comic-Con:
1.) Cripples get a fair shake:
Minutes into tortuously navigating the dense human tide that slooshes down the aisles of Comic-Con, it becomes apparent that the electric scooter foot traffic is immense. Every few seconds one is obliged to join a respectful throng of people who part to make way for someone working the Con from a battery-powered perspective. Once one cart passes you by, you begin to notice just how many disabled people are here.
Gradually, the submerged disability aesthetic of mainstream superhero comic books begins to materialize like the sliding ruby red quartz visor of Scott Summers (to all intents and purposes, a blind man) unleashing his deadly optic vision. Daredevil is so blind he can only see the world in a sonic mesh. Tony Stark operates from the supercool equivalent of an iron lung; his heart regulated by a metal suit that is the only thing between nightly bouts with the Crimson Dynamo and Elle McPherson and a sure death. Captain Marvel withers of cancer brought on by an awful symbiotic relationship with his cosmic wristbands. Mutants are shunned by a society that feels ashamed and threatened by their difference. Comics are littered with examples of people who have to overcome terrible obstacles in order to assert themselves and restore some sense of ethical parity to the universe (and lets not even get started on the Blacks of Panther, Goliath and Brother Voodoo…).
My granite heart melts very slightly round its flinty surface meniscus at the thought that outsiders of every stripe can gather under the transformative hero banner.
2.) A tectonic temporary reversal of the California universe’s rules:
Journalist Jeremy Kay, in today’s Guardian article Geek Almighty on Comic-Con, observes:
In order to attain such rude health, the studios are once again courting one key demographic - the geeks. This knowledgeable and vocal sub-culture has returned to prominence since the 1990s, when fan hysteria greeted films such as Men in Black, Blade, and the Star Wars sequels and propelled them to box-office success. In the intervening years, Hollywood’s cyclical nature and the ascendancy of comic book aficionados such as Christopher Nolan, Zack “300″ Snyder, and Frank “Sin City” Miller has seen the nerd return as a highly influential factor in Hollywood. Studio chiefs know all too well that if upcoming projects such as Captain America, Wonder Woman and Wolverine are to prosper, first and foremost they have to be all right with the fans.
Now, as a wannabe scriptwriter currently spending the first part of his apprenticeship (five years in: no agent, no manager, a few miserable writing assignments, a wife near the end of her tether) on the lower slopes of the greasy pole, I can only - through vicarious means - take immense pleasure at the temporary Comic-Con reversal of the caste relationship between a typical comic book geek and the wannabe powerplayers. The latter are lower echelon gatekeepers who surf the whales of Hollywood like plankton with self-belief-powered outboard motors, flossing the mouths of studios whilst looking for exploitable plaque nuggets in the development department bowels.
The very idea of these hair-gelled, distressed-jean-wearing, imaginatively-inert jackanapes (and by this I mean the lower foot soldiers; not the directors, writers, comics publishers making the crossover or otherwise actually creative people. I am talking of all the sushi termites who would hail Whoopi Golberg’s snatch as the next big thing if it moved tickets, but are currently tacking, tails wiggling, into Robert Downey-land, swimming toward the light with Heath Ledger and muttering “awesome Joker” at Sunset Boulevard nightclubs) needing to spend one nanosecond relying on the circumspect judgment of geek outcasts, send shivers of unalloyed (non-Adamantium) joy up my spine.
I’m sat at the back of the massive Hall H where the studios pay Comic-Con to launch gobbets of raw superhero trailer (for products such as Watchmen which won’t even appear as actual films for almost another year), squinting to see jetted-in Keanus and Brendans, the size of pinheads, amped up on a massive battery of video relays and giant screens, glad handing the crowd like declamatory snake-oil salesmen. Nearby, as the trailer finishes, I can sense the control freak pre-destined movie types up front hanging in a state of suspended prayer, before the geek throng signals either their acclamation or derision.
For one tiny nanosecond (as opposed to a large nanosecond) these career robots who don’t even leave the feng-shui’d proportions of their washroom pot-pourri to chance are forced to rely on a disparate group of lamentable fuckwits jerking out of their seats or not to give a communal thumbs-up. Even if the suits are successful, and the trailer scores major kudos, they know - as they wend their way back up from San Diego to Los Angeles in their chartered Amtrak cabin, sucking distractedly on the Evian teat - that they’ve been owned like little bitches by people with Logan’s Run: The TV Series commemorative plates.
It won’t last. But: beautiful.
3.) Casting the runes: Comic-Con as media portrait:
Between the commercial giants such as Marvel and DC, and the indie presses working the audience from their tiny booths, the contemporary media landscape of American society is laid out before me in a stark Darwinian relief. Normally, I struggle to comprehend just exactly how the media and society is fracturing (I’ve read too many articles, browsed too many blogs, forgotten too many new phenomena phrases), but Comic-Con provides a gorgeous three-dimensional bread and circuses schematic.
For instance, if Marvel and DC are the equivalent of the networks - in a TV world - then Dark Horse, or DC’s Vertigo label, are the equivalent of HBO or Showtime, with less obviously commercial but grittier and edgier fare; and further down the food chain small presses pander to every stripe of human need and distraction like a rainbow array of cookery and hunting cable channels. Niche-mined mutant soldiers and vampire dandies vie with urban stick figure operas and gross-out comedic pastiches for consumer attention; and everyone seems to be making out just enough to keep going, like Wile E.Coyote before he realizes he’s stepped out over the abyss.
4.) The font of all future human knowledge:
From Goth to video game, ninja outcast to clubfoot mutant, figurine customizer to cybersteamgirly wet dream, Comic-Con has more sequestered information - literature, comics, books, printed texts, doodles, circomlutions, picture dreams, whatever - than was originally constituted in the Library of Alexandria. Seriously. Really. Think about it.
Like it or not, invest in it or not, the aisles of Comic-Con are packed with an incredibly vibrant series of iterations of wholecloth mythologies that make the few hundred pages of the Bible or the Koran look like the product of a coffee-klatch group written by superstitious artisanal drones. This will be the subject of a future, separate, blog, but basically: Comic-Con marks a shift from a peasant culture wherein a few nutters with long beards tell the rest of us monkey mass that god is vengeful, women need their clits cut off, and if we’re lucky at the end of our lives we’re going to get to submit to some fictional construct’s sense of grace and decorum; to one where vampires get boners, homos rule the earth, tubby boys can swap bodies with ripped dudes in the netherspehere, people can jump over buildings and feed oil company corporate heads to polar bears on the last remaining ice floe, the universe is essentially godless and waiting to be colonized by laser ships and planet eaters; and you’re talking a whole new ball game… with better special effects than the Torah.
Anyway, how big do you think the Library of Alexandria was in the first place? It was like your parent’s den/basement. Like where the cameraman had to face the wall at the end of The Blair Witch. Not even enough room for your overflow Star Wars figures.
Next year, walk into the exhibition hall… and marvel.
5.) Shitty karma for nice folk:
Fanboy director, writer, monologist and immensely gifted freeform individual Kevin Smith is going bald. As am I (although, to be fair, our connection pretty much stops there…). He has a saucer-sized tonsural abberation that even our military’s techno boys could guide a laser-bomb onto. Bad things happen to gifted people.
Which is only fair.