WonderCon 2006: Fantasy Pure and Simple
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 14, 2006 Sign up now!
by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/14/2006
WonderCon, the comics convention held at San Francisco's Moscone Center West February 10-12, is a show for people who love the escapist fantasy side of comics, pure and simple. There's very little in the way of manga or highbrow art comics, but plenty of toys and movie-industry tie-ins, and dozens of dealers selling books, T-shirts and back issues.
This year the star guests were filmmaker and sometime comics writer Kevin Smith; superstar artist and now director Frank Miller; and acclaimed writer Grant Morrison. And the show keeps getting bigger every year—there were lots of families with small children in attendance. David Glanzer, marketing director of the gigantic San Diego Comic-Con International, the organization that also manages WonderCon, said on Sunday that, while he didn't have final figures, WonderCon's attendance in 2006 was definitely up from 2005's record of 14,500. On Saturday afternoon, the crowds got so intense that fire marshals had to shut down the main floor for a while.
Marvel Comics' presence at this year's show was minimal—just a few of its creators (like comics writer and novelist Peter David, who announced that he'd signed an exclusive deal with Marvel), and a booth devoted to the Ultimate Avengers animated DVD. Given the show's superhero/fantasy focus, that meant that DC Comics ruled the roost. Its booth was the first one attendees saw when they arrived on the show floor, and retailers and fans were buzzing about DC's forthcoming weekly 52 series, which won't appear in trade book form until 200. Every day of the Con featured several major DC panels—although more than a few people noted that panels like "Modern Architecture: The Architects of the DC Universe," "DC Comics: Crisis Counseling: One Year Later" and several others were basically all the same discussion, with the same panelists.
DC seemed avoid making bigger announcements, perhaps saving a few things for the upcoming New York Comic-Con later this month, although DC did confirm rumors that Grant Morrison will be writing Batman, as well as Wildcats, The Authority, an anthology sequel to The Invisibles and a collaboration with artist J.H. Williams III. DC also announced release schedules for a few long-anticipated projects, like Rick Veitch's graphic novel Can't Get No (June); a Gilbert Hernandez graphic novel called Sloth (July); and the hardcover Fablesanthology 1001 Nights of Snowfall(Oct.), all from Vertigo.
The company also had a couple of movie-based surprises: a presentation about filmmaker Bryan Singer's much anticipated movie Superman Returns at which the film's star, Brandon Routh, made an unannounced appearance; and a Saturday-night screening of next month's V for Vendettamovie. On Sunday, a handful of fans could be seen wandering around wearing "V" masks—the show's second-coolest promotional item, after Dark Horse's Emily the Strange ski masks.
Dark Horse's booth (complete with "booth babes" promoting the forthcoming film Monarch of the Moon, disconcertingly enough) drew enormous lines for appearances by Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Frank Miller (Sin City)—although there weren't enough of Miller's fans to fill Moscone West's cavernous Room 2000 for a rescheduled interview by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's executive director Charles Brownstein. The major Dark Horse announcement of the show, though, was that Joss Whedon has signed on to write new Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Serenity comics projects.
WonderCon is the sort of environment where small publishers and individual cartoonists can connect with fans if their work has the appropriate coolness factor—some artists who'd set up tables in Artists' Alley to promote their own books, like Howard Shum with his Image title Gun Fu, drew significant interest. The fledgling Boom! Studios imprint was selling lots of individual comics on the strength of good word-of-mouth and a few big-name creators, especially writer/artist Keith Giffen. Boom! publisher Ross Richie noted that the reason the company hasn't yet published any trade paperbacks is that it's waiting to get book-trade distribution lined up.
There were numerous small to mid-sized indie publishers with booths—Top Shelf, Image, Slave Labor Graphics, Bongo and more—but the consensus was that their WonderCon sales this year were solid but unspectacular, perhaps because Bay Area readers already have plenty of first-rate comics stores. (Slave Labor did take the opportunity to plug its forthcoming series Tron: The Ghost in the Machine, though.)
Graphic novel booksellers, on the other hand, were raking it in—especially with titles a little bit outside the regular comics orbit. Rory Root's Berkeley store Comic Relief hosted a party on Saturday night and sold a pile of Peter Meresca's collectible $100 oversized edition of Little Nemo in Slumberland in addition to stacks of budget-priced Taschen hardcovers. Retailer Bud Plant did very well with European art books by the likes of Clare Wendling and Matheiu Lauffrey. Distributor/publishing house Last Gasp's booth featured Elizabeth McGrath's Everything That Creeps and design books from the Japanese publisher P.I.E. Books. Even San Francisco prose book dealer Borderlands Books opened the comics audience's wallets for titles like Kim Harrison's first novel, Dead Witch Walking.
