For me this year’s Comicon is an improvement, I got in. That is not to say I was very happy how they handled it. There was only one small entrance into the show. This meant that even with tickets (the show was sold out so you had to have tickets) it took an hour to get in. For some special events (like Stan Lee’s signings) you had to go outside the show to get tickets. Having spent over an hour on line I was not about to go out again and have to wait on line once more.

Once in the show the crowds were generally manageable. They did have wider aisles so generally it was not too hard to walk around. That is except for Artist Alley. That was a disaster. Narrow walkways made passage painfully slow and difficult.

It’s not the San Diego show but I think it could be. However San Diego was a show that grew into what it is today. New York has had to start up running. The show’s management has made improvements but they have to make a whole lot more. If they don’t do so quick enough I am afraid the Comicon will never go much beyond what it is today.

I went to a couple of interesting panels. One on a movie that is being made of Will Eisner’s Spirit. Frank Miller was not there, but he will be directing it. Boy talk about mixed feelings. Frank is great and Sin City, both the graphic novels and the movie, were masterpieces. I look forward to the movie 300. The panel made it sound that the Spirit movie was going to be on the dark side. But the Spirit resides in Central City not Sin City. We shall see.

Also a panel on the Marvel Bullpen. Ralph Macchio, Gene Colan, Joe Sinnott, Fabulous Flo (sorry I do not remember her last name) and of course Stan Lee. Very entertaining and off course Stan stole the show. Not that he did this in a mean spirited way. Often Stan would redirect questions aimed at him to one of the other panelists. During questioning from the audience many of the speakers prefaced their questions with gratitude to Stan for all that he did. At one point Lee said that he did not deserve all the credit. That there were other artists that were important to Marvel’s success such as Jack Kirby, etc. He then added something to the effect of “but of course I was the most important”. Now if you read this it may make Stan sound bad. But to hear and see it delivered it was something else entirely. Nothing in the original questions required him to say anything about Jack or the other artists. His remarks about the importance of these artists sounded absolutely sincere. In his statement about his own importance Stan was obviously hamming it up and it was clearly meant to be a joke.

As for Simon and Kirby I did not see much original art. There was the cover art for the Harvey Fighting American. That is a bit of a puzzle for me because Joe still has “original art” for this cover made from stats. Why would he have done that if he still had the original art? My guess is that the art had already passed from his hands. Maybe Kirby had it or maybe it was already belonged to a collector. I did see once piece that was an important clue as to the identity of an artist that worked for S&K or perhaps Simon alone. I will post more on that if clue turns out to be valid.

The Comicon has thrown my scanning schedule out of whack. But I do have some more Foxhole ready that I can post on next week. Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll be able to wrap Foxhole up.