Yes, WonderCon! Really.
I don't want to be misunderstood here—I am not usually enthusiastic about WonderCon. Just the opposite Of all the conventions I attend with SLG Publishing, WonderCon ranked as my least favorite, aside from 2003's now-legendary Extrosion in Las Vegas. In fact, if you Google my name, one of the top results is a 2007 post on my personal blog called "I sound so cynical" about the depression that overcame me at that year's WonderCon.
However, perhaps because everything between the last convention I went to, APE in November 2008, and now has been nearly so uniformly bleak, this year's WonderCon seemed like a bright slant of reality-defining sunshine. There was something... different. Such as the fact that people were buying—and not just our discount dollar bags (though they did buy those), and not just our perpetual bestsellers (though they did buy those, too). People bought graphic novels from across our catalogue; they bought $60 Milk and Cheese vinyl toys; they bought T-shirts; they even cleaned out our stock of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade. (The creative team, Landry Walker and Eric Jones, also do a comic called The Super-Scary Monster Show with us and were signing at the SLG booth.) They paid with cash; they paid with credit; they paid good money, that stuff that no one is supposedly spending right now. All in all, our sales were not at all phenomenal—in fact, they were down 15% from last year—but considering the state of the economy (particularly in California, where our employment rate is now 10.1%), I was seriously surprised.
So maybe it was a distorted sense of reality brought on by necessarily lowered expectations. WonderCon was an environment befitting the world of comics, an alternate realm where what we knew to be very real outside the convention hall doors somehow didn't matter too much to attendees. I would say it was like our very own bottled city of Kandor, but that would be going way too far. Still, the fact that the metaphor even occurred to me shows that something weird is going on. (Keeping me in the real world was Diamond Comics, the source of so much business-affecting policy change of late. They didn't seem touched by the magic; their booth featured an unattractive five-foot-tall stack of cardboard boxes, strewn with employees' water bottles and coats.) This sense of unreality extended to the year's big story and usual parade of regular folks interspersed with costumed fans—the graphic novel that was supposed to be unfilmable is the comics industry's anchor right now (there was a constant reminder in the form of Watchmen movie banners at the DC booth across the aisle from the SLG) and, for some reason, there were a lot of girls dressed up as Neil Gaiman's Death. That later detail gave things a decidedly 1995 feel.
Maybe it was that blast-from-my-comics-reading-past detail that made all the difference. Or maybe it's because I didn't spot anyone in a fursuit. Whatever the reason, though, I was happy about comics. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to be plunked back down into the mundanity of file formats and printer deadlines, but for a little while at WonderCon, I was the goofy person getting her copy of Groo: Hell on Earthy signed by Sergio Aragones. (There is a photo documenting this event, which my vanity will not allow me to share; I offer you the accompanying picture of me looking a little manic instead.) In that little space of time, for the first time in years, I felt like a fan at a convention again.
