SDCC’s split personality

SDCC seems to be spiritually divided into two separate conventions. There’s the part of the convention that’s about comic books. I’m talking about artists exhibiting their work or trying to get their portfolios noticed, collectors buying and selling and getting stuff appraised. I imagine that this aspect of the convention operates in much the same way it did 40 years ago when the convention was first getting started. There’s a part of it that seems static and ageless in a weird way.

On the other hand, there’s the part of the convention that’s about “popular art”, which is pretty much a euphemism for “stuff nerds like”. This is the part of the convention with toys and games and movies and celebrity signings and Star Wars, so much Star Wars.

I think that both of these sub-conventions are important parts of what comic con has become. The “popular art” portion has become significantly larger than the comics portion, however, and that separation is getting more and more pronounced by the year. The only place I was ever able to freely move around on the show floor was Artists’ Alley (where individual artists can show off their portfolios), because it was pretty much deserted. Similarly with the vendors with endless boxes of bagged-and-boarded single issues; there just wasn’t anybody there. I don’t view that intrinsically as a bad thing, but I fail to see why some of these artists and vendors keep coming to the convention given how expensive it must be to get space on the floor. Maybe there’s an industrial interaction happening there (vendor-to-vendor, or artist-to-artist) that I’m just not seeing.

The thing that’s special for me about conventions like comic con is that it gives you, as a fan, the chance to interact with the people who make the things that you love. Whether that’s comic books, video games, TV shows or movies, you can actually meet and support (either directly through your cash, or indirectly through your public, vocal enthusiasm) the creators themselves.

There’s always going to be the marketing side of the con – after all, people are there so that you can buy their stuff, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered coming all this way. That said, there’s a big difference between marketing in support of the creatives and marketing in support of the faceless mega-corporations, and you can definitely see some of the latter sneaking their way in. For some reason I find it really hard to pin down exactly how I feel about this, but some (not many, but some) of the large vendors had this tangible feeling of insincerity to their entire presentation, like they were hyper-optimizing for comic-con’s stereotypical target demographic (socially-awkward men in their 20s and early 30s who like bacon, apparently?) and were hoping desperately that we’d fall for it.

My only real concern with SDCC’s growing popularity is that the cost of maintaining the convention will eventually price out everyone but the faceless mega-corporations. I think that day is a long way off, if it even happens at all, but it’s still a concern.