NY Comic Con: A Look Back & Forward

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Parent Category: Expos and Conventions

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 05 September 2013 15:53

Written by Renzo Adler

The 2012 New York Comic Con was one of the most content packed conventions I have ever been to... Maybe a little too packed. The NY Comic Con has never stopped growing since its humble premiere in 2006, back when it had to share the Javits Center with the NY Times Travel Show, but since then it had grown exponentially.

One of the complaints often voiced about these larger conventions is that they take the comics out of comic conventions, and become nothing more than one big coming attraction for Hollywood’s latest adaptations of beloved four-color heroes. While it’s true, NYCC ’12 had a considerable movie presence from Legendary Pictures and Marvel, their artist alley was more jam packed this year than I had ever seen it before. The artist alley alone was almost as big as a small convention, and featured a great range of talent, including Blacksad artist Juanjo Guarnido, writer of the webcomic Fox Sister, Christina Strain, and the duo behind Image’s revamped Glory, Joe Keatinge and Ross Campbell, among many, many others.

To promote their new CGI Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, Nickelodeon converted the hallways connecting areas of the convention center into a quasi-theme-park-attraction, replete with fake streets, fog machines, and lights, so you can ooh-and-ah about being on the same street as the Turtles, then bump into people because you’re not watching where you’re going.

At this point, the movie Pacific Rim was a mere twinkle in Legendary Picture’s eyes, and was only modestly hinted at by one of the costumes put on display and Guillermo Del Toro could only give out precious few details at his panel.  Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano gave a contemplative panel discussion and reflected on the nature of beauty. It struck a chord with me that when asked why he often draws his characters with androgynous features, he stated that he simply draws what he finds beautiful “…like with mountains, or the sky or anything else that is beautiful, there is not gender to it.” Manga author Moyoco Anno was on hand to promote the US premiere of her manga Sakuran from Vertical Inc.

One of the more prickly issues with the 2012 NYCC had to do with just how popular the convention was. Despite using nearly every crevice of the Javits Center, there were still so many guests and so many chokepoints that often times visitors were moving at a literal crawl as thousands of people trying to get from one end of the center to the other by a single hallway. Hopefully for the 2013 NYCC they will have devised a way to part large swaths of con-goers, like Moses in a sweatier and smellier Red Sea.

But what’s past is past, and a few hiccups with overcrowding aside, NYCC ’12 was still a great year, and the 2013 edition hopes to continue this trend. While in the past some more traditionalist con-goers protested the presence of authors like E.L. James and Stephanie Meyer at San Diego Comic Con as the pop-world encroaching on comic territory, I believe that anyone who grew up in the 90’s would be excited to hear that R.L. Stein, acclaimed author of the Goosebumps series, will be in attendance. Author of the Tek Wars novels (and I think he might have acted in something on TV or whatever), William Shatner will be making his first NYCC appearance this year. True Blood actresses, Kristin Bauer and Rutina Wesley will be present for fans to grieve with over the end of the series. Much to the delight of Anglophiles and Whovians, Torchwood's John Barrowman will be on hand, and the one and only Sylvester Stallone will be at the convention to delight folks with stories of muscles flexed and movies made in bygone eras.

NYCC ’12 had a great mix of guests from comics, animation, and film, and it looks like ’13 is aiming to bring the same great variety. Excelsior, and good NYCC to you all.

To learn more, go to: http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com

The 2013 New York Comic Con
October 10 – 13, 2013

The Javits Center
655 W 34th St
New York, NY 10001

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