Imaginary Worlds - Once and Future Comic Con

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

San Diego Comic Con is the high holiday of geekiness where fans converge to cosplay, buy collectables, show their appreciation to creators, and be the first to hear big announcements and see upcoming trailers. But the road from obscurity to cultural domination hasn’t always been smooth. In a year where the future of fan conventions is in doubt, we look back at the history of Comic Con and what it might look like in a COVID-19 world. Featuring filmmaker Eric Brammer, journalist Rob Salkowitz, and University of Oregon professor and author Erin Hanna. “Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture: What the World’s Wildest Trade Show Can Tell Us About the Future of Entertainment” by Rob Salkowitz “Only at Comic-Con: Hollywood, Fans, and the Limits of Exclusivity” by Erin Hanna Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. I love Comic-Con in all of its varieties. When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to take the train down to San Diego Comic-Con almost every year. And since moving to New York, I go to New York Comic-Con every October. And every December, I go to WinterCon, which is a quirky little convention that's held at a casino in Queens. But I still miss San Diego. I mean, that is the mothership of Comic-Cons. And when it happens every summer, I spend three days glued to social media, looking for announcements, trailers, pictures of cosplayers, or collectibles that are sold exclusively at Comic-Con,

even if I can't order them online. I like seeing them. There's a reason why they call it Nerd Christmas. This year is the 50th anniversary of San Diego Comic-Con, but it was canceled because of COVID-19. And then it was announced that Comic-Con was back on, but it was going to be virtual and free to everyone. I'll be watching, but it's definitely not going to feel the same. Even before the pandemic, San Diego Comic-Con had already reached an interesting point in its history, so this is a perfect opportunity to look back, to learn how San Diego Comic-Con became the high holiday of fandom,

and what the future might look like. Now, the first sci-fi fantasy convention was Worldcon, which still exists today as an alternative to Comic-Con. Worldcon is held every year in a different city, and the first one was held in 1939, in conjunction with the World's Fair in New York. They had a place where you could buy paraphernalia, whether that be comic books or pulp magazines.

That evolved in what was known as the Huckster Room. It's no longer called that, but it was one of the centerpieces of these big conventions. Eric Brammer is working on a documentary about the history of fan conventions. He is also a multi-generational fan. When he was a toddler, his father brought him to Worldcon when the convention came to Cleveland. And Eric says, we have to remember in 1939, when Worldcon began, it was a strange and radical idea because comic books and sci-fi fantasy pulp magazines were not the type of media that people would typically celebrate back then. I mean, it was practically like being seen reading pornography. I mean, you practically had to have a brown wrapper around this material. And there's a great story of Isaac Asimov, whose father had a candy store and he would string up these pulp magazines in the front and he was forbidden from even reading them by his father.

And so young Isaac would pull them off of the string after hours and do the classic like flashlight under the covers and then very gingerly place them back. In fact, Isaac Asimov was at the first Worldcon in 1939. And so was Ray Bradbury. Bradbury was 19. He and Forrest J. Ackerman came from L.A. all the way across the country. Wow. And Asimov, how old was Asimov? Also 19. Oh, my God.

Yeah, I just I don't think they had any sense of the shadow of all of this would be. I don't think they had any sense of the shadow of all of this would be. The second name that he mentioned, Forrest J. Ackerman, eventually became a huge literary agent for authors like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. At the time, Ackerman was a young man and he ran a fanzine in Los Angeles with his girlfriend Myrtle Douglas. Douglas. They traveled all the way to New York and showed up at Worldcon wearing handmade costumes based on the science fiction film Things to Come. Imagining 1939, this guy is walking around in his silver space suit with his girlfriend who's wearing something similar to that. And that literally was the first, what most people consider the first, cosplay. And in fact, that became a very big part of the convention, is the kind of closing denouement of every convention was a Saturday night masquerade ball. And it became very involved with even skits and just fantastically intricate costumes.

Worldcon grew slowly and gradually over the years, and it was all things to all fans. But in 1961, Marvel Comics launched, and it revitalized the comic book industry. So in 1964, the first Comic Con was held in New York City. San Diego Comic Con was created in 1970, so artists on the West Coast, like Jack Kirby, didn't have to travel 3,000 miles. Rob Salkowitz wrote the book Comic Con in the Business of Pop Culture. I mean, especially for the comic artists, like Kirby, you know, worked alone. He was drawing his pages and stuff like that. And he was very gregarious, and he liked to get out and people would come to his house and his wife would, you know, serve them milk and cookies and stuff while, and Jack would come out and talk to them and everything.

But I think he liked to be around people. Here are these guys that were being chewed out by editors and underpaid and leading these solitary existences and working six, seven days a week could come out. Suddenly all these people were like, man, I love your work. Like you changed my life. And, and these creators, like this is week could come out and suddenly all these people are like, man, I love your work. Like you changed my life. And these creators, like this is a place that they could get respect. And I think anybody that's any kind of a creator and artist, you know, really does want that and values that.

There's a common misconception that Comic-Con started out with a pure focus on comics, but then Hollywood took over. That's not exactly true. In fact, Eric Brammer says filmmakers have been using fan conventions to spread the word for a long time. Going all the way back to 56, there was a regional convention in Charlotte in which Forbidden Planet was premiered in spring of 56. So even then, there was this awareness that if you appeal to these very ardent fans, that it's likely to have broader appeal and effects. So, well, talk about appealing to Hollywood. In 66, this first convention I went to in diapers,

Gene Roddenberry with the reels literally under his arm of the pilot episode of Star Trek showed it to the conventioneers of Cleveland. From the very beginning, there was a really vested interest in other media besides comic books. Erin Hanna is the author of Only at Comic-Con, Hollywood Fans in the Limits of Exclusivity. In the 70s, there were panels and blocks of programming dedicated to Star Trek, but also Star Wars was promoted there in 1976. How much Star Wars did they have to show in 1976? So they did a little panel, they showed some slides,

and then they had a table in the dealer's room. This also really anticipates what happens now, but just on a much smaller scale. They used that table in the exhibit hall to do kind of informal market research. Like they asked fans about like, oh, what's your favorite like manufacturer for toys and collectibles? Now, whatever stereotype you have in your mind about the kind of fans that would show up at these conventions, Rob says you're probably right. And he should know because he was one of them. I was a kid in the 70s. I was adolescent in the 80s. And that's when comic culture was at its most niche, right? Comics had vanished from the newsstand. They were at comic shops. They were no longer like a mass medium. They were just, they were a cult. And

most of the cultists were guys. And they're very nostalgic and very sort of backward looking. So the community of people that bought comics and talked comics and was into, and of course, went to the conventions was 80, 90% male. And also the popular perception of the fandom reflected that. If you remember the Saturday Night Live sketch with William Shatner and Get a Life and all of that stuff. He is referring to a famous Saturday Night Live sketch from 1986. William Shatner is supposedly at a fan convention

and after taking all these super detailed questions about Star Trek, he snaps. Get a life, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show. I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed. It's just a TV show. I mean, look at you. Look at the way you're dressed.

You've turned an enjoyable little job that I did as a lark for a few years into a colossal waste of time. I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? You, you must be almost 30. Have you ever kissed a girl? Fans may have been a target of mockery back then, but it was only because fan culture was growing so fast. And it was around this time that San Diego Comic-Con started to overtake New York Comic-Con

because New York City was falling on hard times. And when Batman came out in 1989, comic book movies became hot and the studios started to realize. If anybody in the world is going to go see a movie like this, it'll be the people that go to San Diego Comic-Con. So let's start our marketing efforts with the core, hardcore audience in the hopes that if these folks like what they see at these panels, they'll go back and tell all of their friends, and then we'll our opening weekend and then we'll be off to the races you know so the studios would go and then the studios would create the story it's like yeah brian singer's coming to comic-con or you know steven spielberger

you know like big a-list people and you'd be like comic-con really so then the entertainment press had to go to san diego to cover this, then all of these people started seeing that this was a star-studded spectacular. And so you got more people coming, which made it more attractive for studio marketing, which made it more attractive for media, which brought in more people. And before long, you've got 150,000 people in the San Diego Convention Center and maybe a quarter of a million people on the streets of San Diego that don't even have badges that are just there for the vibe.

Aaron says the next major turning point came in 2004, when the convention center expanded to include the gigantic Hall H. Hall H now is kind of really well known as the place where the huge Hollywood panels happen. the huge Hollywood panels happen. Increasingly, you have a lot of TV panels happening there, but that's like the really high profile space for Hollywood studio promotion. You can also fit the entire cast of the Avengers in Hall H. Right. Yes. And they have several times. It seats about 6,500 people. So really just a small percentage of the people that actually attend Comic-Con. It's also kind of like a very exclusive space in that way. Like even though it fits a lot of people, it's still really hard to get into. And I really feel like that more than a specific film

for me is a moment where you see that shift really happening because it's happening in a physical space. Even the exhibits were changing. It started off as kind of the dealer's room, which is like the quintessential kind of Comic-Con, you know, where people are like, you know, dealers and are selling stuff, people are trading books and things like that. And watching it sort of gradually evolve over the years into what looks to me more like almost like a trade show, like an industry trade show now. In fact, the relationship between San Diego Comic-Con and

Hollywood was becoming so cozy, a lot of people in the entertainment industry were arguing they should just move the convention to LA. In the meantime, other cities wanted in on the action. They wanted to create their own Comic-Cons. And Rob says the problem was not finding fans in those cities. The problem was that once you rent out a huge space in Denver or Boston or Miami, the studios are not going to go there. Like at San Diego, you're going to see the Lucasfilm booth. There's this gigantic, like, you know, 50,000 square foot thing with X-Wing fighters and all of that stuff,

that does not travel. That goes to San Diego, period. Even the vendors making collectibles or selling indie comics tend to focus on San Diego or maybe New York because they can't afford to travel the country going from con to con. So what these regional cons focus on is paying talent to come there. Fans will line up all day long to have pictures or an autograph with a celebrity, and they pay hundreds of dollars to do it. There's an interesting scene in the HBO documentary Bright Lights where Carrie Fisher describes going to a fan convention as a, quote, celebrity lap dance. A celebrity lap dance, which is where celebrities of all shapes and ages

sign autographs for, cash prizes. It's sort of like going to a strip club, except they don't stuff cash in your underwear. But that's kind of it. But despite her cynicism, we then see her, in very good spirits, taking in all the love from the fans. All right, thank you. Thanks so much.

And that's my gold signature. There you go. Thank you. I like your outfit. Thank you. No bra, though. But with Comic-Cons taking off so fast, there were bound to be growing pains for the organizers, the fans, and the studios. The first problem was with the old guard, the aging white guys.

I mean, they were so proud that the world was finally taking them and the stuff that they loved seriously. But they were starting to see fandom itself change. Aaron says the turning point was the Twilight panel at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, which brought in a record number of female fans. The backlash to that is really strong. People had little mini protests and signs and anti kind of twilight statements happening all around the time that that franchise starts to show up at Comic-Con. Most of that was more like it's couched in an argument about quality or what kinds of content is welcome and accepted at Comic-Con. But ultimately, it was just like a sexist backlash. I think that it's pretty evident and clear. I've seen it happen. I also saw, watched a panel. They have a panel every year called Women Who Kick Ass. And I watched it one year in Hall H. It happened right in the middle of the day

between a morning panel, which was like a DC Warner Brothers panel, I think they announced Batman versus Superman, and then an evening panel of Marvel movies. And so when that panel started, people got up and went and got snacks. They went to the bathroom. And then at the end of the panel, some guy in the audience yelled, women who talk too much.

And as more women started showing up at Comic-Con wearing costumes, to give you a sense of what happened next, organizers had to put up signs everywhere that read, cosplay is not consent. But the younger fan base is much more diverse in terms of race and gender. And when the reactionary members of the old guard leave their social media echo chambers and go to a comic-con, they're outnumbered. They can't deny the obvious fact that the future is looking very different than the past. Also, the relationship between the studios and the fans was starting to become strained. And that gets to a question I've often thought about when covering fan culture. Who has the power here? And of course, the studios, the directors, the stars

have a lot of money. They make the content that is officially declared in canon. But fans can make or break a movie to the point where the studios started to fear them. In fact, Rob Salkowitz remembers sitting in a panel in 2003 when DC announced that they were going to make a movie based on the character John Constantine. So the character John Constantine was based on Sting, the rock star, who's very British. And the character is very British, and he's like this sort of dark, cynical guy.

And so they announced, and there's going to be a John Constantine movie and everybody was like yeah and then they said and it's going to star Keanu Reeves it was like silence and you could feel the temperature in the room go down like like 10 degrees like the people on stage were like looking at each other they were expecting this would be this a big applause moment like don't we love Keanu Reeves he was in the Matrix like that guy it's like totally not right for that part. Everybody in the room knew it. You know, like, those moments where it's like,

where it doesn't work can be awful. Needless to say, that Constantine movie did not do well at the box office, at least in the U.S., and they scrapped any plans for a sequel. And around this time, the studios started to become interested in fan service.

Not just making movies they hoped the fans would like, but making movies with the Comic-Con audience in mind. Again, Eric Brammer. At a certain point, if you are trying to cater to something that you don't really know,

and thinking that that is what is going to dictate success and not appeal to the best and the brightest in what their tastes are, then it gets watered down. And it is something I think where the tail is wagging the dog. Rob says a perfect example was Zack Snyder's 2010 Watchmen film. Watchmen is like a revered property within the comic fold. The graphic novel is a literary masterpiece, and it really works as comics. And they've been trying to adapt it for like 25 years. So Zack Snyder comes and he says, we're going to be completely faithful to the source material. We're going to adapt it exactly like panel per panel. They kind of missed the forest for the trees there. They got all of the details right. In my opinion, and I don't think I'm the only one here, it was not really successful as cinema. And it certainly wasn't the kind of mega hit that they thought they were going to get.

So I think they did that because they were afraid that they would get booed off the stage if they had done it any other way. But then there is an example of an effort at fan service that didn't translate to the wider world. 2010 may have been a breaking point because the same year, the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World totally killed at San Diego Comic-Con. The studios thought they had a hit on their hands, but the movie fizzled at the box office. And Aaron says that led to a lot of second-guessing among executives. That's like one of those moments where it's really interesting to look at because all the sort of the narrative and the mythology about Hollywood's relationship to fans at Comic-Con

kind of like starts to rupture a bit. What came out of that, which is kind of like this idea that if a film isn't successful after Comic-Con, that the studios might start to like question if it's worth going there at all. And that's where you see like the industry kind of start to try to exert their power and control a little bit more by being like, you got to go see the film, you got to try to exert their power and control a little bit more by being like you got to go see the film you got to tell your friends to see it if you don't see it or you don't support our films we won't come back now that attitude did not go over well with the fans who were feeling empowered and some of them were feeling entitled a lot of the promotional

discourses and the way that the industry talks to fans at Comic-Con is, like, is reinforcing that sense. Like, you're part of this production. Like, so it makes sense why then in moments where fans feel like they're not part of that team or they're not being listened to, there are those moments of pushback and they're like well they need us right so the so people the logic and it makes sense because that's what all the discourses in the media are suggesting is that Hollywood needs us they need the fans we're important now and we're important to the success of a film so just make them do what we want them to and that's the moment where it's like you start to realize well there's still like a vast power differential happening. In the last few years, San Diego Comic-Con has hit a plateau in terms of how many people they can fit into the convention center and how involved the studios want to be. Eric Brammer says some of the longtime convention goers were starting to do a little soul-searching about what is the purpose of Comic-Con. You know, now Sao Paulo set a record

for, you know, breaking the attendance record of the ones here. There's half a million people go to the one in Japan every year. So I think there was some feeling within the community. Have we gone too far? Or, I mean, is it just strictly like a publicity play now, as opposed to the beginnings, which were the love of these characters and these stories? And, you know, is it strictly just a PR grab? And now San Diego Comic-Con has gone virtual. We still don't know what's going to happen with New York Comic-Con in the fall, but I would not be surprised if they go virtual as well. So what does the future look like for fan conventions? We will try to figure that out after the break.

It is definitely possible that by next summer, there could be an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19 and everything goes back to normal. But let's imagine there's not. They could severely limit the number of people at the San Diego Convention Center. They could keep re-sanitizing every surface. They could also enforce social distancing and wearing of masks, not just cosplay masks. And I'm sure they'd find enough fans who would want to go, but I can't imagine Marvel or DC doing a presentation in Hall H if more than half the seats are empty. Now, in terms of finances, the organization behind San Diego Comic-Con is in good shape, at least for now. They're actually a nonprofit

and they have a multimillion dollar rainy day fund. They also never pay talent to show up. The studios have been doing that on their own dime. But Rob says all the regional Comic-Cons, which are for profit and need to pack in as many paying customers as possible have been doing that on their own dime. But Rob says all the regional Comic-Cons, which are for profit and need to pack in as many paying customers as possible, are in trouble. Like the entire economy of it has collapsed

and a lot of the companies that invested in it, you know, not just in the fan convention space, but like across the board, are losing their shirts. You know, if they go bankrupt, they, you know, then they're out of business. And it's hard to, it's hard to restart after a disruption like this. You know, I think that the era of big conventions is, if not over, certainly like phase one is over and whatever comes next comes next. But it's a real discontinuity

from what happened before. Aaron Hanna has been thinking a lot about how San Diego Comic-Con changes when it goes virtual and it's free for everyone. Because part of the appeal of Comic-Con was that sense of exclusivity. The core meaning of exclusivity is exclusion, right? Like it means that someone can't participate. It's only exclusive because not everyone is included. That tension of exclusivity being rooted in exclusion is a way to sort of think about just how much control and

power is exerted in order to construct this aura of exclusivity. And I mean, it goes right down to even just the idea of waiting in line, right? That people waiting in line for Hall H are waiting because there's kind of a sense that there's going to be something valuable waiting for them at the end of that process. So just even the power to make people wait for you, you know, it says a lot, I think. Yeah, it's funny because like when I think about

San Diego Comic-Con, I mean, you know, it's like I'm weirdly living vicariously through the people there, like over social media. And I actually feel happy for them, like the people who are in the in Hall H at the moment where they get to see that trailer first. Even though that trailer is posted to the Internet five minutes later, I love hearing their reaction. And it's like I'm almost so I'm so happy for them that they have they get to be there. And it's so weird how that sense of magic is gone when ironically I'll be able to view everything in real time this year I know it's so true I mean I've

been thinking a lot about this too because how much we forget about how important physical spaces are in our lives or like experiences we have out in the real world what does that it mean when we just can't have that experience right now at all? DC has decided that a virtual San Diego Comic-Con is useless to them. In fact, DC has created a rival virtual convention called Fandom, where they're going to debut all their latest stuff. Erin is not surprised, but she is disappointed. It seems like after years of kind of benefiting from not even so much the Comic-Con fans that are in the crowd, but even the organizers, like working with studios to kind of bring them in and keep them happy, that they

would so quickly just be like, we're going to do our own thing over here now at a moment where Comic-Con is like seriously threatened. Its future is somewhat shaky. In the future, other studios might do the same thing. They didn't love sharing the spotlight to begin with. In fact, last summer, Disney saved one of their biggest announcements, the Rise of Skywalker trailer, for the Disney-focused D23 Expo, which happened only a month after Comic-Con. But Rob thinks in the era of COVID-19, the convention scene might become even more fragmented.

Instead of it being these huge pop culture conventions that are all things to all people, you're going to have stuff that is just for, you know, fans of the Transformers or toys or tabletop games of a very particular kind, you know, things that don't scale because you can't get that big. So let's say that's the future. The era of the ginormous cons is over. What gets lost? For the exhibitors, they're going to miss, I mean, you know, if you're going to drive to a convention and set up a table and do your thing for a weekend, you'd rather do it in front of 50, 60, 70,000 people than 5, 6, or 7,000 people just because you're

putting in the time regardless. And so for exhibitors, it's a changed picture. But the biggest loss, I think, just the um ephemeral nature of when you walk in there the minute the doors open a comic convention everybody goes flying in there there's this great sense of you know a hundred thousand people that share your interests all simultaneously having the time of their lives like there's so much good energy that comes out of that. That was one of the great things. And everybody that went to San Diego

or to a big comic convention that was bigger than anything they had ever seen before has experienced that the first time they go. And sometimes you never lose it. You just like every time you're just into that feeling. Yeah. You know, for people like me, I like so much different stuff. And I can't imagine myself just going to a Star Wars or just going to a Buffy or just going

to a Marvel convention. I feel like there's not one of them I love more than all the others, but I love having them all together in the same, you know, and seeing cosplayers show up, you know, from, you know, picking and choosing from all these different franchises. Absolutely. And again, all of these brands are now very territorial about this stuff. And if like Hasbro had their way or Marvel had their way or, you know, Disney, you know, they would want cons. That's only their stuff. It's a completely walled garden branded experience. And you're right. The fans don't really want that. So when you have a big convention, it feels like Switzerland. It's like

the giants are there sort of looming around you, but they're all on good behavior because nobody's in control of that experience. They're all fighting for your attention. Personally, I cannot wait for the day when I feel safe walking into a Comic-Con again, because I never get tired of that feeling when I walk through the doors and I see all the fans, all the cosplayers, totally embracing their nerdy geekiness. Every time that happens, I literally sigh with relief and think to myself, my people. Eric Brammer has been feeling that way ever since his dad used to take him to conventions when he was a little kid. As a young child, I remember seeing wondrous characters, but very sort of outside of the mainstream.

And they're very endearing to me, that they're very smart, sensitive people to the world and very important in really what drives the world. And really, I think the sense of wonder that is what brings people in at a young age, that is something that is consistent. Whatever happens, there will always be a demand for some kind of fan convention because we fall in love with this stuff as kids. And to be a fan is to spend part of your adult life searching for that sense of wonder again. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Eric Brammer, Rob Selkowitz, and Erin Hanna. We are doing a special giveaway with the website Podchaser.

It's a fairly new independent podcast site, and we want to get up to 100 reviews, preferably five-star reviews. And once we reach 100 reviews, Podchaser will randomly select one of the reviewers to receive a prize package of an Imaginary World sticker, mug, and t-shirt. To learn more, go to podchaser.com slash imaginary worlds. And thank you to everybody who's already left a review. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and imagine world's pod. And if you go to the Imagine World's Instagram page, I put a slideshow of some of my favorite cosplayers that I've seen in years past.

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