By Bon Alimagno
Last year I wrote on my personal blog that the 2008 NYCC was the best show I’d ever been a part of. The comment got picked up by a widely read blog and I got a call from someone working for another publisher. He asked if I attended the same show he did, all but saying I must’ve lost my mind. I insisted that NYCC was less of a circus and more comic book friendly than San Diego Comic-Con International and I made some very fruitful contacts who’ve I’ve actually hired since then.
Maybe I was just asking for trouble: the scales tipped the other way this past weekend as the Harris Comics crew attended the 2009 incarnation of NYCC. To call the show floor a circus would be an understatement. This was one of the most trying conventions I’d ever been a part of. The video game exhibitors seemed to overshadow everything and made a large chunk of the show floor an obstacle course of people. After it was over, I couldn’t think straight, I felt like my mind had been removed from my skull, put in a blender and then poured back in through the nose.
I don’t know if I can quite explain to the average con goer how difficult sitting on the other side of the table from them really is. After all, it looks like all we’re doing is just sitting around, making small talk and exchanging business cards with professionals and merchandise with fans. How hard can that be, right?
Let me begin with this: near one of the main entrances of the Con was an elaborate booth for the new Cinemax show Forbidden Science. It featured four clear plastic chambers shaped like tubes that people would enter. There they’d put goggles on that showed them a video. Around the chambers, models in lab coats (and seemingly little else) gave away promo postcards and encouraged people to wait in line for the chambers. I asked one what would be shown in the goggles and she told me without any reservation, adult content. Later that night I Googled about and discovered the show was unabashed softcore porn. Not even a drama with some nudity. Softcore porn. The show described itself as The X-Files meets Red Show Diaries. You had a situation then where people were watching softcore porn in public and other people could watch them though the chambers while they did so. This spectacle was near the entrance of the largest American comic book convention east of San Diego. Really think about that: imagine if you or anyone you know would be comfortable being watched by thousands of passer-bys as you watched porn.
Thing is I doubt more than a few thought about that as they put on the goggles and in some way became part of the spectacle of the show. That’s what these comic conventions do: they make the attendees themselves an attraction worth observation. Some people take this all the way. They let their freak flag fly. Whether it’s in the costumes they wear, the things they buy, the unbridled enthusiasm they show for comics, TV shows, movies, artists, actors, whoever and whatever outside that show floor most people could care less about. There at the show is a new kind of reality, a hyper-reality where things are skewed away from the mainstream and normal is dangerous.
Sitting behind a table all day you get to meet a lot of these people. While it’s a minority of the 77,000 that attended the show, it’s still more than enough to leave their mark on you. Without getting into specifics, they talk to you in a way no one would normally speak to a complete stranger. I think they forget we’re regular people. We become something else to them and they feel almost obligated to talk to us, sometimes AT us, about things we’d rather not discuss. At one point I turned to my boothmates and told them I felt like I hadn’t spoken to anyone sane in a half hour. In some ways we become trapped in a metaphorical chamber ourselves, forced to watch a spectacle that’s just as bizarre as whatever it was those goggles were showing.
You are down the rabbit hole. You are through the looking glass. You’ve taken the red pill. Welcome to the show.
Till next time…
Bon Alimagno is Director – Publishing & Editorial for Harris Comics, publishers of Vampirella.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:34 am
The only thing this article tells me is exactly how huge this convention was. How in the HELL did I miss a bevy of booth babes offering the chance to see forbidden science? Can I go back and try again?
February 11th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Yeah, I totally missed that, too. What probably happened was that I saw it, wasn’t interested in it at all, and it left no mark.
I’m sorry you had a bad con. As a con go-er, I did my best to treat everyone with respect. Almost universally, that’s what I saw from other people, too.
The only time I saw a significant deviation from this was during the Sunday Conversation with Dan DiDio when a guy admitted he downloaded comics on a weekly basis and then tried to justify it (essentially saying comics now suck, which if they do …).
February 11th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Unfortunately Bon has mixed the truth with an immense amount of fiction regarding the Forbidden Science booth (what he called “softcore porn”). First, the women were NOT — I repeat NOT — scantily dressed underneath lab coats, they wore skirts and blouses, and quite conservative. Secondly, the show is first and foremost a drama, which Bon would understand if he’d watched a couple episodes before defaming my show. My name’s Doug Brode, I was a concept artist on JJ’s Star Trek, Iron Man, Planet of the Apes, etc. and I wrote and created Forbidden Science to be a sci-fi show that’s specifically geared towards many comic book fans, and YES, it’s adult and erotic, but to make the booth out to be some perverse thing that it wasn’t is completely unfair. Now, if Bon watches our two parter this friday (entitled PROPERTY) and THEN wants to call it porn or make it out to be obscene, then fine, that’s fair — but it’s not…and absoluetely NO ONE saw anything even remotely risque in the booths, they were simply scenes from the show about cloning and morality vs science, nothing more. So before we start taking out the torches, how about doing more than five seconds of research, don’t lie about what the women were wearing, and actually SEE the product you’ve labelled as “softcore porn”. I’m genuinely hurt that you would misrepresent what we did, because it makes parents think we did something we shouldn’t have, and that is completely FALSE. There was ABSOLUTELY nothing risque in our booth, and compared to some of the other stuff I saw at the convention we were practically puritans. Literally.
Ease up there Bon, and try not to damn something with only a glance. Regard, Doug Brode (creator of Forbidden Science).
February 12th, 2009 at 5:01 am
I found a photo of the before mentioned models wearing seemingly little else other than a lab coat:
http://flickr.com/photos/edwick/3266216008/
To say you are exaggerating is a complete understatement. These women are certainly wearing a lot more clothing than say, Vampirella.
February 12th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
For Doug Brode: I apologize if it came across as if I was taking a shot at Cinemax, Forbidden Science or yourself. That was not my intention. I wanted to make a point about the show and the types of people it attracts and I may have unwisely held your show’s booth up as an example of that.
I am not a prude, far, far from it. I was trying to make a point about people being exhibitionists and letting their “freak flag fly” at the show in a way they would never elsewhere, with people watching other people watching softcore pornography as an example. Maybe there were better examples but I thought this was the most interesting. Yes, a woman told me that “adult content” was shown through the goggles. Maybe her idea of what “adult content” is is different than mine or yours. Maybe I misheard. And yes she was wearing a blouse and skirt though the skirt was so short it could barely be seen beyond the hem of her lab coat, making it look like she wasn’t wearing one.
I don’t want to turn this thread into a debate about what is or isn’t softcore pornography. I’ll say I’ve watched Forbidden Science and will continue to watch the show and l’m sticking by my assessment.
February 12th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
And when I say “a point about the show” I’m talking about Comic-Con and the types of people Comic-Con attracts.
For Rick: Thanks for posting the picture. As with Vampirella, people can decide for themselves what’s scantily clad and what’s not. I would certainly describe Vampirella as that and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, that’s the character.
What I wrote in the piece however was “models in lab coats (and seemingly little else)”. I believe the woman I spoke to was the one second from the left and I believe that’s an accurate description of what I saw and still see in the photo. I added “seemingly” more as a joke since obviously she wasn’t naked but almost seemed to want to look that way.
February 13th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Ive been pretty accurate in predicting the future of media;) And I think that “Forbidden Science” represents a very prominant “type of IP” that will only increase via the online-networked future of entertainment. As a late night cinemax “special” its being overlooked for it’s hook.- the soft core sexual scenes. – but for its production, its possible relation to the web and internet and communities, and to digital entertainment for adults( all i mean is above 18) as opposed to the rated M games from EA adn others which are comic book cg animated pop violent/titlation porn for mental 15 year olds for most of the time.
Doug, if interested email me. I actually swiped the URL of the showtime teaser and let it play 24/7 in our SKY CINEMA FLY IN in Second Life…got interesting reviews in house by the avatars of the actual virtual worlds.
Theres a linkage that needs to be explored so that the comments above confusing adult with ADULT and what was to what WILL be become less.:)
Best
Cube3
http://www.cube3.com