Comicsgirl

After tomorrow, no one will care.

I did make it home just fine — the TSA just asked a few questions and it wasn’t that big of a deal (my bags weren’t even searched, but I’ve read that’s the case sometimes). It sounded like I wasn’t the first person who’d lost his or her wallet (in fact, while I was waiting, a man came up and said he’d lost his ID, but he had other things with him). It seems like it’s a pretty common occurrence during Comic-Con.

While I was waiting for my plane, I overheard a conversation where one guy was complaining that it was “too crowded” this year and he didn’t go to any panels because the lines were too long. He didn’t specifically say what he wanted to go to, though. But I do kind of get the feeling that a lot of the “big” announcements that come out of Comic-Con don’t really need fans to be there to be announced. I do think the debate of “Is Comic-Con too big?” will be one that will never be solved.

(And just as a point of reference: Most people don’t care about Comic-Con. The TSA agents said they’ve never been and didn’t even know it went on until a couple of years ago. My hairstylist today asked me what it was.)

I do think it’s a problem that Comic-Con sells out months in advance, though, sure. It means people really have to plan ahead, even before knowing if there’s going to be anything they want to see there. I don’t know if there’s an answer to that, though, without radically changing the structure of the show.

As for me, next year, I will plan ahead a bit more, not lose my wallet and bring more than one pair of shoes. And not make ridiculous trip-home plans that involve late-night flights and then hanging out in O’Hare for three hours in the early morning. I have no clue as to why I picked that itinerary.

And just for fun, these are the celebrities I saw just hanging around:

• Kristin Schaal and Eugene Mirman
• Grant Imahara and Kari Byron
• Daniel Dae Kim (2/3 of the way down the page — in the Guy Fawkes mask. I saw him at the Giant Robot booth and I knew it was him. I knew this because I read the Internet and knew he’d done this before. So this is possibly my nerdiest celebrity sighting. And I do remember seeing Grace Park, too, but I didn’t know it was her at the time.)
• Mark Hamill

I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

No, my wallet is still gone. I hope it turns up, but it looks unlikely I’ll get it before I leave. My mom got some money to me and all in all, it’s not a big deal (I had no money anyway, you see) so really, it’s just an annoyance at this point. Cross your fingers they let me on the plane tonight, though (which they should).

I would like to thank everyone who showed sympathy and support about my missing wallet — everyone from good friends to people I barely know. I know most of you couldn’t do anything, but I feel like people are looking out for me and that’s great.

So I really haven’t done anything today and I probably won’t, since we’re basically in the last hour (I did wander the exhibition hall a bit). It’s funny because I feel like I’m just now getting used to the experience. I said to a friend that if I had another week here, I’d get all kinds of things done. But maybe next year (and yeah, I’m already thinking about next year).

Honestly, in a lot of ways, this wasn’t what I expected. That is actually a good thing. I knew it was big and loud and crowded (three things I typically don’t like) and yeah, at times, it was a bit much for me. But there’s enough going on that it’s the sort of show you want it to be. Like the TV/movies stuff? You can do that. Like waiting in really long lines to watch video clips that will almost instantly end up on the Internet? You can do that. Want to wear your lovingly-assembled Dazzler costume (although I didn’t actually see a Dazzler costume)? You can do that. Or if you’re like me, you can just spent a lot of your time bouncing from panel/presentation to panel/presentation (and luckily, my tastes aren’t popular so those are easy to get into).

You can just hang around the big publishers or check out the small press area. You can buy toys or original art or jewelry. Is the con too big? Maybe. But on the other hand, I think it’s size is actually its strength. It’s a cliché, but yeah, there’s something for everyone here (and everyone does seem to show up).

I know there was the stabbing and the typical “Free Hugs” kids (maybe I’m old, but I find them pretty sad) but I really didn’t see any bad or questionable behavior. I’m sure it went on, yeah, but I’m glad it didn’t seem like a big creep fest to me. I wouldn’t say the attendee split was 50/50 in terms of male/female, but I think it was pretty close (more men, obviously, though).

I know I have more to say and I’ll probably think of it, but my thoughts keep wandering and I keep spacing out a bit. My shoulders are sore (I packed light! But carrying around bags for four days will do that) and as much as I love my Macbeth shoes for their comfort, my blisters have developed blisters of their own. I would’ve loved to have done more today and tried to talk to a few people, but the wallet thing derailed that and left me a little out of it to function.

The con has an hour left and then I’ll head to the airport (my flight leaves at 10:45 p.m. — it’s an overnight one — so while I want to be there early to deal with my situation, there’s no point in being there too early). I’m actually sad it’s ending.

But yeah, the wallet thing still kind of sucks. But not enough to ruin the experience.

Today was fun until about 5 p.m. when I realized my wallet was missing. I started digging through my backpack. No wallet. I found a corner and pulled everything out methodically. No wallet. I went through everything again. That’s right, no wallet. As this point, I’d be wandering the very crowded exhibition hall for about an hour. Panicky crazed text messages sent to various people (mostly for information). I went to Lost & Found. No wallet.

I called my mom, mostly to let her know what was going on.

I periodically checked back in with Lost & Found and still, no wallet. I checked one last time at 7:15 and it wasn’t there yet, but I know they clean the exhibition hall floor each night. Or I think whoever picked it up just hadn’t had time to turn it in before I left.

None of my credit cards have been used so no one picked it up and went on a shopping spree (but the joke would be on them, right? Because I have no money). I just have my fingers crossed that it will be at Lost & Found tomorrow. (I know I lost it in the convention center so that’s better than if I lost it on the streets of San Diego.) Friends and family are rallying to my aid (I just hope I don’t need it).

But yeah, seriously. Other than that, it was a pretty good day. I didn’t hear about the “stabbing” until much later and I managed to do some shopping before my wallet disappeared. I did start getting a little braindead toward the end of the day (hence the wallet-losing).

OK, I know I didn’t put any photos up on Flickr. I’ll do that once I’m home. If I make it there.

My flight’s not until late tomorrow so I have all day to figure this out.

When I repacked my stuff today, I forgot to pack a pen. I have at least seven pens in my possession while I’m here, but did any of them make it into my backpack this morning? Nope. So I wasn’t able to take notes during this, so it’ll be from my memory (and I’ve seem to already forgotten a lot of it. Sigh.)

Comic book people probably are most familiar with Jillian Tamaki because of the graphic novel Skim that she did with her cousin Mariko Tamaki, but she’s an accomplished illustrator and comic creator on her own too. She has a recent collection out from Drawn and Quarterly called Inside Voice.

She started her talk with a slideshow of a lot of her illustrations. She talked about what she likes to do (more interpretive illustrations for science articles) and what she doesn’t (images of celebrities, mostly because she doesn’t think she’s great at likenesses). It was a fun glimpse into her process and I love people who are able to be creative for their job.

She then talked about comics and showed how she put together Skim. Mariko had given her a script but didn’t break it down panel by panel, so she had a lot of freedom to do what she wanted. She sketched it out in thumbnail form first and even put together a little book of her thumbnails to check on transitions and things like that. Since it was a pretty intense process and she didn’t have long to do it, she made jokes about being “unwashed” for a couple of weeks.

After her slideshow, Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot asked questions. She said it wasn’t bad collaborating with her cousin because they didn’t actually know each other very well at the point they started (they do now, however). She said Inside Voice was sort of born out of her sketch blog, which she started as a creative outlet. While she loves illustrating and feels like she can put a lot of herself in it, it’s to some art director’s whims. It allows her to do what she wants.

Both she and Nakamura discussed the process of getting started for young illustrators (basically, work for free. OK, that wasn’t so much the point, but they both agreed that sometimes it’s good to be out there even if you’re not getting paid). Tamaki also said she sees a disconnect between the illustration world and the comics world. When she goes to illustration cons, they know her for that and don’t know she does comics. At events like Comic-Con, it’s the other way around.

She was delightful and said many other things that have fallen out of my brain. So yes, I should go try to find a pen somewhere so this doesn’t happen again.

Moto Hagio is considered to be one of modern shōjo manga’s pioneers, but English-language audiences haven’t gotten much of her work. Fantagraphics‘ forthcoming A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (available now at Comic-Con) will help to remedy some of that. (I did buy it yesterday, as I reported.)

Moto Hagio is also a recipient this year of Comic-Con Inkpot Award and this was her first-ever visit to the U.S.

During her interview session yesterday with manga expert Matt Thorn, who translated her comments from Japanese, Hagio was utterly charming and fascinating.

She said she made her professional debut at the age of 20 and gained fame through her vampire story, The Poe Clan. Greatly influenced by American science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark (she specifically cited Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” as one of the stories that had a big impact on her), she tried her hand at sci-fi stories like They Were Eleven and Marginal.

Hagio incorporates a lot of darker ideas into her work. The short story, “Iguana Girl” is about a girl whose mother only sees her as being a lizard, although to everyone else she looks normal. Hagio said she created this story because she was trying to deal with her own issues with her mother, who believed that being a manga-ka was a “vulgar” profession.

Her longest-running story to date is A Cruel God Reigns about a young man seeking redemption after killing his stepfather who was molesting him.

During the audience question-and-answer session, someone asked if she had trouble getting published. She said when she first started out, she was doing comics for a magazine aimed at elementary school girls and her editors wanted energetic, happy stories. Instead, she was turning in depressing stories where people died. Another publisher approached her and it was glad to publish her dark stories. She said she kept right on killing people in her stories after that.

Someone else asked if she liked how shōjo manga now had a lot of strong female characters, and she said that it’s a good development. Japan has always been male-dominated, she said, and women are expected to get married, have kids and stay at home (she also remarked that she thinks that’s why her job was a source of conflict with her parents). She then went onto say that “The idea that men should do this and women should do this is ridiculous.” That got the most applause of anything she said.

At the end of her presentation, it was announced that she was donating the books of her works that she had brought with her to Comic-Con.