The Line Goes Ever On

Disorganizational Deja Vu at the 2007 New York Comic-Con

By Margaret O'Connell
April 1, 2007

As everyone who read any of the press accounts of last year's New York Comic-Con undoubtedly remembers, Saturday, February 25, 2006 was a day that will live in infamy. That was the day when it became overwhelmingly obvious that the personnel in charge of the first New York Comic-Con had grossly underestimated both the number of people likely to turn up at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for such an event and the floor space needed as a result. According to the New York Sun, the organizers were expecting ten thousand attendees, but wound up with thirty-three thousand.

As a result, the overcrowding became so severe — one artist I spoke to said that the dealers' room was so packed you could barely move — that from sometime around twelve noon on, the fire marshals forced the NYCC staff to turn away would-be attendees by the hundreds, including many who had purchased three-day passes in advance. (See my article in the May 2006 issue of Sequential Tart for further details.) Luckily, this year NYCC organizers Reed Exhibitions had had the forethought to double the percentage of the Javits Center devoted to the comics convention. They also set a cap on the number of tickets sold, particularly for Saturday, the peak day of the convention. Although three-day passes were still available online, the con website was completely sold out of Saturday-only tickets by Monday, February 12th, a full eleven days before the con was to begin. By the time the con actually started, all sources of advance tickets for Saturday were sold out, and the organizers had announced that no tickets for that day would be sold at the door.

Despite these precautions, when I arrived at the Javits Center around 5 PM on Friday, February 23, I wound up having to wait on line for approximately fifteen minutes — the first ten or so of them on the downstairs plaza outdoors — before eventually being shuttled through a zigzag series of roped-off areas within the building into the main dealers' room. This was despite the fact that Friday was a primarily "trade only" day, in which the convention didn't open to the general public until 4 PM.

As it turned out, I was lucky. According to Heidi MacDonald's Publisher's Weekly blog The Beat, some members of the general public had started lining up outside the Javits Center on Friday at 7 AM, apparently in the hope of getting tickets to the Slayer Tales panel scheduled for first thing Saturday morning. This Diamond Select-sponsored panel featured Nicholas Brendon, Bianca Lawson, and Juliet Landau, the actors who played Xander, Kendra, and Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Even after the convention staff had somewhat alleviated the resulting crush by distributing the Slayer Tales tickets several hours earlier than originally planned, there was still a line that wrapped around the Javits Center by the time the doors opened to non-trade attendees at four. Large bins of badge holders and attachable lanyards stationed along the roped-off route inside the building speeded things up somewhat by enabling people who had pre-registered to have their badges already hanging around their necks long before reaching the actual entrance to the con. But the convention personnel were obviously counting heads very slowly and carefully as they processed the crowd of would-be con-goers into the building in order to avoid a repeat of last year's overcrowding fiasco.

The relatively minor delays I experienced on Friday afternoon were nothing compared to what awaited me when I reached the Javits Center at 10:20 Saturday morning, only to find a line occupying the main sidewalk outside the convention center complex which stretched from one end of the building at 34th Street and Eleventh Avenue all the way to the other end at 40th Street, then wound around the corner almost all the way back to Twelfth Avenue and the Hudson River. Evidently just about everyone who had heard anything about last year's notorious midday Saturday shutout had made strenuous efforts to get there by or before the moment the doors were supposed to officially open at 10 AM, not unreasonably fearing that if they arrived significantly later, they might never get in at all. The line was much shorter when I got there on Sunday at around 11:30, although this was probably at least partially attributable to the fact that fewer people usually come to weekend-long cons on Sunday anyway.

The temperature that Saturday morning was somewhere in the mid-twenties, although it was mercifully less windy in the immediate vicinity of the convention center than it had been hiking cross town from Eighth Avenue, where I had gotten off the subway from Queens. Still, the occasional lumps of snow left over from earlier — and even chillier — in the week were in no danger of melting anytime soon.

Under the circumstances, those of us who had been standing on line for twenty minutes in the cold already were not amused when the young couple immediately in front of me, who had previously been notable chiefly for the Winnie the Pooh decals on the young woman's mittens, were unexpectedly joined by a group of ten or twelve friends, all of whom obviously expected to jump the line. Increasingly heated protests from me and other people farther back in the line elicited nothing from the male half of the original couple but insincere claims that he didn't know he had to inform the others waiting that he was holding places for a throng of latecomers. According to him, his excessively numerous crowd of buddies, who looked to me as if they had just gotten off the subway like everybody else, were entitled to join him and his girlfriend ahead of the fifteen or twenty additional people who had accumulated on line before they got there because "They were traveling." (So was everyone else — did he think the rest of us spontaneously sprang out of the pavement around the convention center that morning?) Finally an older gentleman in a jacket and hooded sweatshirt who had already vainly yelled for security several times stalked off in disgust and returned several minutes later with a convention official. This functionary duly informed the late-arriving posse that they would, in fact, have to go to the end of the line, which they belatedly did.

Considering its ridiculous length, the line moved reasonably quickly, taking an average of about five minutes to inch each block closer to the inner courtyard/plaza of the Javits Center. However, by the time we had been processed through the additional lines in this more sheltered area and, finally, within the building itself, it had taken me an hour just to get off the line and into the convention, even armed with a pre-purchased three-day pass.

Since on several occasions on Saturday and Sunday I spotted gray-uniformed state troopers stationed at various vantage points around the convention center keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings, the NYCC staffers clearly had no choice but to keep a much tighter rein on how many people entered the con moment by moment than they had the year before. Still, as Bob Holt pointed out in his Comicsnob field report, the processing would have gone a lot faster if they had admitted the regular attendees through the multiple entrances at the front of the building — which NYCC for some reason had reserved exclusively for exhibitors and press — rather than shunting the main crowd through a single relatively small, bottlenecked entrance downstairs reportedly monitored by only two people.

It also didn't help that, with a reported forty thousand attendees, NYCC 2007 could have used four times the space it had been allotted the year before, instead of merely twice as much. According to a report on ComicMix, Reed Exhibitions had tried to get more space than it wound up being granted from the Javits Center management this year, but was unable to because the New York Times Travel Convention was also booked there for the same weekend. Under the circumstances, it would probably have been more sensible to simply change the date of the convention. In fact, next year's NYCC is now scheduled for April, rather than February, and will supposedly have twice as much space as it did this year. Hopefully, this further expansion, combined with less wintry weather, will somewhat alleviate the recurring crowd control problems even if the con's on-site organizational procedures continue to leave quite a bit to be desired. Unfortunately, the organizational deficiencies of this slightly less under planned second New York Comic-Con did not end once the determined attendee had finally reached the head of the initial line. For many, the crowd control-induced delays continued once inside.

Some people got caught in the erratically surging tides of foot traffic traversing the rather small and out of the way upstairs artists' alley, which inconveniently doubled as a passage leading to the gaming and autograph areas. Others were slowed down almost at once by the fact that throughout the weekend, there seemed to be no provision for the possibility that anyone might want to head for either the aforementioned artists' alley or the downstairs panel or screening rooms rather than the dealers' room, immediately upon being admitted to the convention. Once new arrivals were abruptly ejected from the entrance line onto the dealers' floor, there appeared to be no way to get to any of the other NYCC-related areas of the convention center without turning around and walking back out the main exit, at what appeared to be considerable risk of being ordered to go all the way back to the end of the line whenever one actually did want to re-enter the dealers' room.

In fact, on Saturday morning there was a sign posted instructing those waiting on line to obtain a wristband in order to re-enter the convention without being forced to start all over again at square one. Unfortunately, none of the convention staffers seemed to know where these wristbands could be obtained, even when they thought they did. The staffers at the edge of the dealers' floor told us we could get wristbands at the coat check downstairs. However, none of the coat check personnel knew anything about this, and there appeared to be no other NYCC staffers in the vicinity to clarify matters. When I went back upstairs to inquire further, I was told to go past the coat check and continue left until I came to the personnel distributing wristbands. Two separate attempts at doing this, the second time on the heels of another party who had just arrived and been issued the same instructions, failed to uncover anything in the direction indicated besides an arm of the convention center's sprawling food court. On my third return upstairs, I spotted a managerial-looking female convention official who, after some argument, finally issued me a wristband on the spot just to shut me up, then tried to make me rejoin the incredibly long line to get into the dealers' room anyway. I managed to slip past her and headed downstairs just in time to catch the last five minutes of the eleven o'clock "Future Shocks" science fiction and fantasy panel featuring China Mieville (author of Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, and the just-published young adult fantasy Un Lun Dun) and, allegedly, J. Michael Straczynski, who had failed to show up.

Due to the hour or so spent standing on line and the frustrating twenty-minute quest for a wristband, I had already missed the entirety of DC's Minx panel, which had started at 10:30 AM. Fortunately, the unnecessarily arduous ordeal of getting into NYCC each day ultimately proved to be worth it. I was somewhat disappointed to see that this year's scheduled programming did not include repeats of last year's yaoi or general manga panels featuring representatives from a variety of different companies, since I had considered these to be among the most worthwhile events of the 2006 New York Comic-Con.

However, this loss was balanced by the addition of several interesting panels involving women and/or gays in comics, including a spotlight on Alison Bechdel, creator of the long-running lesbian-themed comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and the acclaimed graphic novel-format memoir Fun Home. The first of these panels, entitled "Mothers and Daughters: Female Graphic Novelists and the Family," took place Friday at 6:30 and was moderated by Heidi MacDonald of PW Beat. The panelists were Bechdel; underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, author of Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir; and Miriam Katin, author of the Holocaust memoir We Are On Our Own (Drawn & Quarterly).

All three cartoonists reported having had less than enthusiastic responses from relatives to their comics-format accounts of family history. Ironically, despite the desperate measures, including an abortion, she was forced to resort to in order to keep herself and her small daughter alive and out of the clutches of the Nazis in World War II-era Hungary, Katin's mother appears to have been more accepting of the idea of these experiences being made public in book form than the mothers of the other two cartoonists. Her main request upon being shown the manuscript was that Katin not use the family's real name in print. Katin duly honored this request, although she reported, "The publisher wasn't happy, because it's stronger when it's you."

Similarly, Alison Bechdel's mother reacted to the prospect of a graphic memoir whose premise the author summed up at her spotlight later as "Lesbian Daughter Accidentally Outs Her Father, Who Kills Himself" by asking, "You're not going to publish this under your own name, are you?" Bechdel replied that that was sort of the point.

After being shown the manuscript in progress, Bechdel's family turned out to be reasonably okay with the book itself. It was the unexpectedly intense publicity and attention focussed on the real-life circumstances of the author and her family once Fun Home was published that was the problem — somewhat understandably, since it resulted in incidents such as someone asking Bechdel's seven-year-old niece why her grandfather jumped in front of a truck. Bechdel's mother was furious at this unwanted public scrutiny and reacted by forbidding her daughter to write about her further. However, as the cartoonist remarked to the audience, "I don't think you can do that."

Aline Kominsky-Crumb's mother, on the other hand, had managed to remain so oblivious to her daughter's artistic endeavors that until Terry Zwigoff's documentary film about Aline's husband Robert Crumb came out in 1994, her mother somehow failed to even realize that Aline herself was also a cartoonist. More recently, Kominsky-Crumb's mother was so willfully clueless about the nature of her daughter's memoir Need More Love, whose title apparently led her to expect something much more conventional and heartwarming, that for a while she was going around bragging about the book to all her friends. Kominsky-Crumb apprehensively discouraged her from doing so until she had at least read it first. When she finally did read the book, which portrayed her in a distinctly unflattering light, her mortified mother reproached Kominsky-Crumb by saying, "Once you write something down, it's there forever." Kominsky-Crumb replied, "Well, this is how I'm still able to talk to you, because I wrote about it."

When the subject of self-censorship came up, Kominsky-Crumb said that after finishing the first draft of the book she had gone back and taken out her stepfather's name after deciding that it was superfluous because "he didn't do anything." She added that she had probably also unwittingly engaged in subconscious self-censorship — "you leave things out without even realizing it." In connection with this, Katin remarked that "the things you want to leave out are the most important."

Bechdel commented that she always tried to be responsible in portraying others in her memoir, but "writing about other people is inherently hostile no matter how good you make them look — it's violating their subjectivity."

Cartooning as a method of coping with difficult family circumstances apparently runs in the Kominsky-Crumb family. Kominsky-Crumb related an anecdote about how she and her college-age daughter Sophie dealt with the inevitable stresses of visiting Kominsky-Crumb's mother in Florida by writing down various incidents that happened in order to preserve their own sanity. They then wrote and drew a story about the visit together in the airport while waiting for their respective flights back to France (Aline) and New York (Sophie).

Kominsky-Crumb remarked that while she herself had been an artist since she was eight, Sophie had been one since she was two. As the offspring of two cartoonists whose development had been chronicled in comics by both parents since birth, Kominsky-Crumb said, Sophie grew up thinking living in public was normal. She evidently also thought that possessing a certain level of artistic talent was normal. Kominsky-Crumb related an incident in which Sophie, who was then eight years old, asked her babysitter to draw a city complete with cars and people. When the woman couldn't do it, Sophie threw a fit, angrily demanding, "What kind of babysitter are you?"

On the topic of how they wound up doing comics memoirs, Bechdel and Katin both indicated that they had embarked upon specifically autobiographical works because each had a particular story crying out to be told. For Bechdel this was the events surrounding the discovery of both her own sexuality and her father's, followed not long afterward by his ambiguously accidental/suicidal death. In Katin's case, it was the story of how she and her mother survived World War II.

Katin said, "I never stopped drawing as long as I lived, since childhood. Since I was a little girl my dream was to illustrate books, since I loved them." However, she didn't read comics as a child and had never really looked at them before being asked to do comics for a youth magazine by an editor who had seen some of the animation work she did at a studio on a kibbutz in Israel, where she lived from 1980 to 1990.

Katin went out and bought some comics in order to do research for the assignment and wound up falling in love with the art form. After delving further into the field and encountering graphic novels such as Maus and the works of Lynda Barry, Katin realized, "I can do this. My English isn't the greatest, and I'm not a very good artist, but comics are sort of forgiving. I can do this with very little writing." She roughed out a four-page thumbnail version of the story which became We Are On Our Own ten years ago, but didn't complete the book-length version until much more recently. Meanwhile, she contributed several shorter, less personal stories to anthologies from Drawn & Quarterly, which eventually published We Are On Our Own in 2006.

Kominsky-Crumb, on the other hand, said that she had always drawn autobiographical material, because "I'm artless and incapable of doing anything else. I never even thought of making up anything — I wouldn't know how." She added that once she had drawn an animal comic and it just came out as her and people she knew with animal ears and tails.

Kominsky-Crumb went on to relate, "I draw myself [looking] less hideous now than when I was younger because my self-hatred is lower." One side benefit of drawing herself to look conspicuously ugly was that people meeting her in person after reading her comics exclaimed over how much better she looked in real life. One of Kominsky-Crumb's fellow members of the Wimmen's Comix collective back in the 1970's took the opposite approach, drawing the cartoon version of herself to look noticeably more beautiful than she actually was. As a result of this, one person who met Kominsky-Crumb and the other artist for the first time at the same comix-related event initially assumed that Kominsky-Crumb was the other woman and the other woman was Kominsky-Crumb, because each artist's cartoon self/projected self-image looked more like the other artist's physical self than her own.

Kominsky-Crumb commented that the people involved in the early days of Wimmen's Comix were "the nastiest group of women I ever met." Although Wimmen's Comix was a women's collective, she found it anything but a supportive group of people. "When I started dating my husband they shunned me for associating with the male chauvinist pig," Kominsky-Crumb said. At one point Wimmen's Comix rejected one of her stories on the grounds that "your feminist consciousness has not evolved sufficiently since your previous story." Kominsky-Crumb added that she had made one good friend, Diane Noomin, through her association with Wimmen's Comix, but otherwise it had not been a pleasant experience.

On the subject of artistic influences, Kominsky-Crumb cited the painters Alice Neel and Frida Kahlo. Her comics influences were primarily male — specifically, various male underground comics artists, whose work she considered very revolutionary, brave, and intense: "There was nothing else out there like it." Kominsky-Crumb said she was very influenced by Justin Green, creator of the 1972 tale of growing up neurotic Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. However, she didn't mention her husband Robert Crumb by name in this context except to discuss how she usually draws herself and he draws himself in the autobiographical collaborative comic strips they occasionally do for the New Yorker.

Alison Bechdel said that she had come of age during the underground comics explosion, referring specifically to titles such as Gay Comix, Wimmen's Comix, and Tits and Clits. She also described the comics produced by Harvey Pekar and his various artistic collaborators as "a huge influence." In terms of non-comics artistic influences, she cited Norman Rockwell.

In addition to works such as Maus and the Lynda Barry comics which first gave her the inspiration to draw comics herself, Miriam Katin said that she was influenced by Ben Katchor, creator of the alternative-newspaper comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. She described Katchor as "moving quietly about putting down what he sees — there's a romance in observation."

One characteristic all three cartoonists seemed to share was a feeling of being outsiders to the world of organized comics fandom. For Katin, this was partly a function of being "probably the first person to do their first graphic novel at age sixty-three," as she put it in her presentation at the MoCCA Art Festival in Manhattan last summer. Bechdel and Kominsky-Crumb, however, had both been doing comics for literally decades without receiving much attention from most aficionados of the art form until relatively recently.

Bechdel said that she had been doing her syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For for twenty-four years. However, although she had attended APE, the Alternative Press Expo, on one occasion, she had never been to a big comics convention until NYCC — at least, not in the United States. In her February 26th blog account of her impressions of NYCC, she mentioned having attended the Angouleme comics festival in France a month earlier.

As Bechdel explained, "I was doing lesbian cartoons in 1983, when the comics world was even more fourteen-year-old boys than now." Back then the Dykes to Watch Out For strip seemed to fit in better in gay and lesbian prose literary circles than it did with mainstream comics. "I spent so many years feeling bitter and underrated," Bechdel remarked.

"Me too," Kominsky-Crumb chimed in, adding that she earned her living as a Pilates instructor and had been "very unsuccessful" as a cartoonist. "One of my publishers told me they used my [unsold] books for insulation in the roof of their barn." Kominsky-Crumb went on to say that she had essentially stopped doing comics for about ten years because she was so unappreciated, instead switching to painting and other creative outlets which she found more satisfying. Having now completed Need More Love and had it well received had inspired her to go back and draw comics again, "which is my true love."

Although Kominsky-Crumb had attended more big comics conventions than Bechdel, this was largely because she was "invited as the wife." Kominsky-Crumb said that although "I feel like the great-grandmother of underground cartoonists .... My work was not accepted in the comics world — fourteen-year-old boys don't want to look at an old Jewish woman complaining."

Like Kominsky-Crumb, Bechdel was keenly aware of the generational differences between herself and many of the other people involved in the now more welcoming world of non-niche-marketed comics. She noted that thirtyish cartoonists, like younger lesbians, didn't have a lot of the baggage she did and didn't feel the need to prove themselves. Bechdel commented that for years she had felt like Casaubon, the elderly scholar in George Eliot's Middlemarch who spent his life fruitlessly compiling an abstruse volume intended to be the key to all mythologies. But with the success of Fun Home, she was now pleased to realize that she could keep on writing memoirs and, hopefully, continue to achieve the wider recognition she had been denied for so long.

End Part 1