So once the doors opened to the exhibit hall tonight, I made a beeline to the IDW booth for a press conference they were holding to announce Darwyn Cooke’s new series of Parker graphic novels, which are adaptations of the crime fiction novels by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald Westlake). Newsarama chief Matt Brady was there and covered the announcement already, so I won’t repeat the details of it. But as you can see from the picture above, we all stood in front of Cooke as he spoke, holding out our tape recorders and scratching down notes … I think Maggie Thompson from Comic Buyer’s Guide even filmed it. Afterwards, when talking to Heidi MacDonald of The Beat, she commented that with all the big movie, TV, video game, etc. press conferences going on in San Diego this week, it was pretty cool to have a comic company doing a press conference about a comic book at Comic-Con. Sure, there are panels to cover and one-on-one interviews set up and stuff like that, but a good old fashioned press conference really seemed to work here. And IDW did a nice job with the collateral material as well, handing out Cooke artwork with a disc, as well as Parker T-shirts to the press. Well done, guys.
One more note, this one a bit more on the personal side … afterwards, I got to chat with Heidi, Maggie and blogger/retailer Chris Butcher, all of whom I’d never had a chance to meet in person before. CBG introduced me to the concept of fandom and comics journalism well before the internet was around, and of course Heidi is one of the pioneers of the whole comics news blog idea, so it was awesome (and maybe even a bit overwhelming) to get to meet them. Chris took a picture of us, which is up on his Flickr account.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Congrats to IDW and Cooke! That press event was a fantastic idea, and I’m glad to see it well attended.