Continuing our after-the-fact NYCC coverage, The New York Observer has a nice, albeit slightly hyperbolic, round-up of the weekend:
Clutching was a common motion at the Comic Con. For all the frenzy of these recent boom-time years—years when comics went from sub-culture to super-culture—the comic-book faithful still had a whiff of punchy disbelief about them, a kind of swan-in-her-moment-of-unveiling quality. It was as if a giant, invisible exclamation point hung over the whole Con, punctuating every statement and syllable: Graphic novels generated $330 million in 2006! Ghost Rider raked in $44.5 million its first weekend! American Born Chinese was nominated for a National Book Award! Stephen King has teamed up with Marvel to turn The Dark Tower into a comic-book series! Everybody wants a piece of the comics madness!!!!
They even got Michael Kupperman to do a comic about his experience at the con! Sweet!
Meanwhile, Nickelodeon Magazine has put up a photo diary of their Comics Carousel panel. Man, I wish I had gone to that.
Elsewhere, Laura Hudson posts her impressions about the con and uses it as a springboard to talk about the treatment of women in mainstream comics:
The problem isn’t that girls don’t like to read, or that girls don’t like to read sequential art, or even that girls aren’t willing to read about superheroes (which is essentially what the magical girl genre is, albeit with more transformation sequences). The problem is that the mainstream comic book publishers aren’t giving them anything to read that doesn’t insult them or completely misunderstand them. I can’t tell you how many times mothers (or fathers) have come into the store looking for something appropriate for their pre-teen daughters, preferably with role models that don’t have double-D breasts flouncing around. We almost end up in the manga section, and that makes me sad, because I’m a female comics fan that isn’t really into manga, and I wish there were more of me. Unfortunately, people like me exist despite the entrenched comics industry as it exists, not because of it.
mostly via Heidi
