Once and Future Comic Con Transcript

1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, I’m Eric Molinsky. I love Comic Con in all its varieties. When I lived in L.A., I used to take the train down to San Diego Comic Con almost every year. Once I moved to New York, I always go to New York Comic Con. I even go to Winter Con, which is a quirky little fan convention that’s always held at a casino in Queens. But I still miss San Diego – that is the mothership of comic cons. When it happens every summer, I spend three days glued to social media looking for announcements, trailers, pictures of cosplayers or collectables that were sold exclusively at Comic Con. Even if I can’t order them online, I like seeing them. There’s a reason why it’s called Nerd Christmas. This year would’ve been the 50th anniversary of San Diego Comic Con. But it was cancelled because of COVID-19. Then it was announced Comic Con was back on, but it’s going to be virtual and free to everyone. I’ll be watching but it’s just not the same. Before the virus hit, Comic Con was already at an interesting point in his history, so this is a perfect opportunity to look back at the history of fan conventions to learn how San Diego Comic Con became the high holiday of geekiness, and why the future might look very different. The first sci-fi fantasy convention was World Con – which still exists today as an alternative to Comic Con. World Con is held in a different city every year. And first World Con in 1939 was held in conjunction with the World’s Fair in New York. ERIC: They had a place where you could buy paraphernalia, whether that be comic books or pulp magazines that evolved in what was known as the huckster room, it's no longer called up, but it's, it was one of the centerpieces of these big conventions. Eric Brammer is working on a documentary about the history of fan conventions. He’s also a multi-generational fan. When he was a baby, his Dad brought him to World Con when it came to their hometown of Cleveland. Eric says we have to remember, when World Con began, it was a strange and radical idea because comic books and sci-fi pulp magazines were not the type of media people were used to celebrating. 2 ERIC: I mean, it was practically like being seen reading pornography. I mean, you practically had to have a Brown wrapper around this material, and there's a great story of Isaac Asimov, who, whose father had a candy store and they, he would string up these pulp magazines in the front and he was forbidden from even reading them by his father. And so young Isaac, what would pull them off of the string after hours and do the classic like flashlight and under the covers and then very gingerly place them back In fact, Asimov was at the first World Con in 1939. So was Ray Bradbury. ERIC: Bradbury was 19. He and, um, Forrest J Ackerman came from L.A. all the way across the country How old was Asimov? ERIC: Also 19. Oh my God. ERIC: Yeah. I just, I don't think they had any sense of the shadow of all of this would be. That second name he mentioned, Forest J. Ackerman, eventually became a huge literary agent for authors like Asimov and Bradbury. At the time, Ackerman ran a fanzine with his girlfriend Myrtle Douglas. They arrived at World Con wearing hand-made costumes based on the science fiction film, Things to Come. ERIC: Imagining 1939. This guy is walking around in his silver space suit with his girlfriend who is wearing something similar to that. And that literally was the first what most people consider the first cosplay. And in fact, that became a very big part of the convention is the, the kind of closing denouement of every convention was a Saturday night masquerade ball. And it became very involved with even skits and just fantastically intricate costumes. World Con slowly got bigger over the years. But it was all things to all fans. In 1961, Marvel launched, and it revitalized the comic book industry. And in 1964 the first Comic Con was held in New York. San Diego Comic Con was created six years later so the artists on the West Coast, like Jack Kirby, didn’t have to travel 3,000 miles. Rob Salkowitz wrote the book “Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture.” ROB: I mean, especially for the comic artists, like Kirby, you know, worked alone, he was drawing his pages and stuff like that. And he was very gregarious, and he liked to get out and people would come to his house and his wife would serve them milk and cookies and stuff, and Jack would come out and talk to them and everything. But I think 3 he liked to be around people. And here are these guys that were being chewed out by editors and underpaid and leading these solitary existences and working six, seven days a week could come out and suddenly all these people were like, man, I love your work. Like you changed my life and these creators, like this is a place that they could get respect. There’s a misconception among the fans that Comic Con started out with a pure focus on comics, but Hollywood took over. That’s not quite true. In fact, Eric Brammer says filmmakers have been using fan conventions to spread the word for a long time. ERIC: Going all the way back to ‘56, there was a regional convention in Charlotte in which Forbidden Planet was premiered in spring of ‘56. So even then there was this awareness that if you appeal to these very ardent fans, that it's likely to have broader appeal and effects, so, well talk about appealing to Hollywood. And in ‘66, Gene Roddenberry with the reels, literally under his arm of the pilot episode of Star Trek showed it to the conventioneers of Cleveland. Erin Hanna is the author of “Only at Comic-Con: Hollywood, Fans, and the Limits of Exclusivity.” ERIN: From the very beginning, there was a really vested interest in other media besides comic books. So, like in the seventies, there were panels and blocks of programming dedicated to Star Trek, but also Star Wars was promoted there in 1976. How much Star Wars do they have to show in 1976? ERIN: They just, so they did a little panel, they showed some slides and then they had a table in the dealer's room. This also really anticipates what happens now, but just on a much smaller, smaller scale, they used that table in the exhibit hall to do kind of informal market research. Like they asked fans about like, oh, what's your favorite like manufacturer for toys and collectibles. Now whatever stereotype you have in your mind about the kind of fans who showed up at those conventions, Rob says, you’re probably right. And he was one of them. ROB: I was a kid in the ‘70s, I was adolescent in the ‘80s and that's when comic culture was at its most niche, right? Comic Con banished from the newsstand. They were at comic shops. They were no longer like a mass medium. They were just, they were a cult and most of the cultists were guys and they're very nostalgic and very sort of backward 4 looking. So the community of people that bought comics and talk comics and, and was into, and of course went to the conventions was 80, 90% male. And the also the popular perception of the fandom reflected that if you remember, like the, the Saturday Night Live sketch with William Shatner and you know, like get a life and all of that stuff. He's referring to a famous SNL Sketch from 1986. Shatner is supposed to be at a convention of fans. And after taking all these detailed questions about Star Trek, he just snaps. SHATNER: Get a life, will you people! I mean, for crying out loud! It’s just a TV show. Look at you, look at the way you’re dressed, you turned an enjoyable little job I did as a lark for a few years into a colossal waste of time, I mean how old are you people?! What have you done with yourselves? You! You must be almost 30. Have you ever kissed a girl? Fans may have been a target of mockery back then, but only because fan culture was growing very fast. And it was around this time that San Diego Comic Con started overtaking New York Comic Con because New York was falling on hard times. And when Batman came out in 1989, comic book movies became hot, and the studios started to realize: ROB: If anybody in the world is going to go see a movie like this, it'll be the people that go to San Diego Comic Con. So let's start our marketing efforts with the core hardcore audience in the hopes that if these folks like what they see at these panels, they'll go back and tell all of their friends and then we'll win our opening weekend and then we'll be off to the races, you know? So, the studios would go and then the studios would create the story.

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