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Looking for Something We Don’t Know: Exploring Denver Comic Con 2015

By | June 2nd, 2015
Posted in Longform | % Comments

1.

I had gone to the wrong room.

I had been trying to get to the Comics from Brazil panel, featuring Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba (“Daytripper”) and Rafael Albuquerque (“Ei8ht”), but I had accidentally misread my schedule. With only two minutes to go, my boyfriend and I raced through the throngs of people sporting enormous weapons and elaborate costumes; we dodged out of the focal range of about three million flashing cameras from guests trying to preserve and remember every moment; we slid past these massive groups pouring over the guidebook, trying to figure out where they were and where they wanted to go; we cut through the lines for the escalators, the snack kiosks, and the ATM; and jumped between security personnel on their segways, who were all too happy to run people out of their way, before finally slipping into the panel room just as the convention volunteers were shutting the doors and Moon, Ba, and Albuquerque were clearing their throats to begin.

This panel was about what it was like to make comics in Brazil and how these particular artists had made their way stateside. They talked about their careers, their influences, and contemporaries, and graciously asked the audience to give them questions. The room was a little over three-quarters filled, enough that Fabio Moon even said, “It’s surprising to see so many of you interested in Brazilian comics.” It’s rare for anyone to support themselves with their art in Brazil. Moon and Ba are currently on their World Tour and Denver Comic Con was one of their first stops. There is so much to see and discover in the world, they said, that to only hang out in a few major places was incredibly limiting. You needed to get out. You needed to explore.

“The audience is here to discover something they might like, because they don’t know about it yet,” Ba said. And I think this basically sums up the purpose and fun of cons.

Over Memorial Day weekend, my boyfriend and I, along with over one hundred thousand other people, crowded into the Colorado Convention Center, just north of the art museum and a couple blocks from the 16th Street Mall, for the fourth annual Denver Comic Con. We came ready to hemorrhage money and get books signed, to show off costumes and meet cool people, to hear interesting conversations and hopefully find something new. There was a sense of discovery all throughout the con, from the attendees wandering through the makeshift corridors, to the slew of new creators who had booths and tables scattered throughout the showroom floor. Over the last couple years, the biggest publisher to make it out had been Boom Studios, but now we were seeing representatives from Oni and Valiant and even DC (kind of), and with them, even more high profile creators who ventured to the Mile High City. Denver Comic Con, from here on out called DCC, remains relatively new, and that sense of excitement and experimentation and exploration helps give it its personality.


2.

Charlie LaGreca, Frank Romero, David Vinson, and Kevin Vinson of Comic Book Classroom founded Denver Comic Con in June 2012. It was a moderate success, surviving a scandal and the rebranding of Comic Book Classroom to Pop Culture Classroom. The whole idea of Pop Culture Classroom is to help teach literacy skills to elementary and middle school students using “comics and other pop culture media in our own lives.” Reading comics, as you probably know, is this incredibly interesting and practically impossible ability we have, that utilizes elements from both the left and right sides of our brains, as the words and pictures we’re seeing work together to create the life of the story. I don’t see comics as either a strictly visual medium or a strictly imaginary medium: part of the glory of them is that they exist in this boss in-between space. Pop Culture Classroom realized long ago how strong a tool this can be, especially for developing readers, and DCC itself came about to help fund staffing, activities, and programs for the organization.

DCC may very well be the almost altruistic comic book convention in existence, and it makes paying some of those exorbitant fees far less frustrating knowing that it’s all going to a good cause.

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DCC may very well be the almost altruistic comic book convention in existence, and it makes paying some of those exorbitant fees far less frustrating knowing that it’s all going to a good cause.

Since its inception, DCC has remained in a seemingly constant state of experimentation. Although many aspects have remained the same since this event started (the layout of the floor, the available rooms open for panels and whatnot, the housing of certain merchants), there’s a whelming feeling that the con administrators are consistently trying to improve. For the first time since the con started, the officials decided not to sell tickets through the usual venues: the comic shops, game stops, bookstores, or any of the other, smaller cons that occur throughout the state on any given weekend. Instead, they went for this online store. Initially, I thought this was a sort of weak move, cutting out that portion of the sellers, but our badges were mailed directly to us and we, the attendees, didn’t have to wait an hour or more after the doors opened in a line that wrapped around the entire building just for a chance to get inside.

Okay, to be fair, the Convention Center’s security personnel upheld the tradition of not opening the front doors until they were good and ready, the opening times be damned, but that was only for the first twenty minutes of the day, tops, and it didn’t seem like anyone missed any of the panels they were trying to get to this year.

Photo by Rio Herrera

That being said, long, unruly lines are nothing new to conventions or unique to Denver. When one hundred thousand people are shoved together in one area, there’s obviously not going to be a lot of space to maneuver around. There’s also so much stuff to see that the organizers had to cram everyone into these ordered rows with only so much space allotted to each of them. Where else can these lines go except directly into the walkway, no matter how much it zigzags around the table?

Against one of the walls, DCC had set up a long row of tables for people like Tommy Lee Edwards (“Mad Max: Fury Road”), Klaus Janson (“The Dark Knight Returns”), Tim Sale (“Batman: The Long Halloween”), and Andrew Robinson (“The Fifth Beatle”), and the line to meet these people was held back at the end of the corridor. Passing through, it felt like you were touring a museum exhibit of these artists. That was all right, even though it felt like you couldn’t stay too long talking to these people, but for the Amanda Connor/Jimmy Palmiotti (“The Pro”) table, stuck right at the corner of another row, the line was practically impossible to control. An unruly, uncountable amount of people dressed like Harley Quinn congregated around the Connor/Palmiotti table, and at one point, the line grew so large that some of the officials were forced to split it because no one was able to pass through. However, some of the other officials didn’t hear about this and they let a group of new people in at the back of the first line, effectively having them cut in front of people who had been waiting several millennia to meet Amanda Connor and Jimmy Palmiotti. Connor looked a little flabbergasted by this, but there was little she could do save put her head down and continue signing and greeting everyone. At any convention, whatever security or con officials want to happen is going to happen.

The thing is, though, it’s apparently not even all the bad. Kieron Gillen (“The Wicked + the Divine”, “Young Avengers”) was visiting on behalf of Avatar. “This is one of the biggest halls I’ve been in in my life,” he told me. “It’s like a very big, sizable con, but it’s still very airy.” Marguerite Bennett (“A-Force”, “DC Bombshells”) — whose name I kept mispronouncing like a total ass, so I’m sorry for that, Ms. Bennett — agreed: “It’s just a wonderful mix and everyone seems so positive,” she said. “It’s very well run and there’s obviously a lot of love that went into making a show this fabulous.”

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Context counts for everything, and I’ll admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with huge, mega cons (San Diego, New York, Emerald City), which makes DCC still sort of staggering for me. I thought back about it, and figured that these shows exist for us to have fun, to discover new things, and though the layout and presentation of the floor seemed cramped, there were only a few times where I felt like we were being prepared to be entombed or where I was prevented from seeing something that I was interested in seeing. And I think that speaks a lot to the success of its design. These things can be unmanageable and from all the people I spoke with, it seemed like DCC had gone a decent job wielding the impossible.


3.

Unlike previous years, I didn’t attend a lot of panels, mostly because none of them interested me. There were a lot of them, to be sure, about 400 hours worth of discussions and meetups, but many of them were very niche or odd. On the schedule, there were discussions like Is Your Favorite Book Overhyped?, The State of the Star Wars Universe Now that Disney has Control, and The Science of Harry Potter. In fact, there were a lot of Science of… or Explaining the Realities of… panels, and I honestly find most of those megaboring. I think trying to determine whether magic comes to wizards through sex chromosomes or debating whether Emperor Palpatine was a terrible economist takes away a good portion of what makes these stories so special.

I did see the DC Artists panel with Becky Cloonan, Dan Jurgens, Jeremy Haun, and Art Baltazar. While they were talking about their careers and their favorite DC superheroes, the moderator asked them to draw their favorite character from the DCU. Cloonan turned in a boss Batman; Haun, a masquerade Batwoman; and Jurgens, a classic Superman; but the real star of this was Art Baltazar, who decided he wasn’t going to limit himself by the rules and drew about a dozen pictures, just tearing through page after page of the sketchpad the moderator had brought along. At the end of it, the moderator invited all the kids to come up and take the pictures and Baltazar drew like three more for kids who didn’t get one.

I sat through a panel called Fairest, which was supposed to be about modern day interpretations of fairy tales and how those tropes continue to define the world around us, but the panelists only brought along a list of majorly bland-sounding YA novels, many of which weren’t even going to be released for a couple months. Nothing new or insightful about them, but a “Here’s a book I read. I thought it was cool” report. There was a Deadpool costume show next door, and Deadpool fans are crazy loud, so much of the Fairest commentary was also drowned out by the ruckus next door. I attended another one called Level Up: Queer Dystopic Bi Sci Fi Compelling Homos, which again the guidebook claimed would discuss non-heteronormative representation in various media (Legend of Korra was apparently the jumping off point for this panel), but the panel again was only more bland YA book recommendations.

DCC, though, did try to organize for all types of representation. The schedule featured discussions about Native American portrayals, transgender in media, DiselPunk culture, gender bending, and so much more. The organizers went broad and the schedule was filled with plenty to talk about, even if it felt more like dissertations, lectures, and thesis defenses than a conversation.

Of course, the biggest snafu at DCC this year dealt with the Women in Comics panel, namely that there were not any women on the actual panel. It was populated by three academic dudes. I mean, it’s not like was the first year DCC hosted a Women in Comics panel: last year’s had been basically standing room only and there was a very interesting roundtable discussion that generally centered around what these people had accomplished in their careers.

The Velocirapture

But this year. . . .

What strikes me as so strange about this is how all the convention organizers were able to look onstage at the three dudes sitting on the panel, or see their names listed in the solicits of the guidebook, and not think to themselves, there’s a missing component here. Where was the break in the rails that prevented them from going, “Yo, wait a sec this panel is not ready to go live”? It wasn’t like there was a lack of female representation on the floor right above their heads. High profile creators like Becky Cloonan, Amanda Connor, Leila deal Duca, Joelle Jones, and Jen Hickman were literally a story above them, yet not a single official thought to run up there and invite them down? On Twitter, you could sense the confusion of the audience members as they wondered if they were going to parade the real panelists out or something (which would have probably been a problematic situation in its own right).

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I can understand that DCC had a lot of events going on and it just so happened that this particular panel was the one to be unfortunately fucked up, to be sort of glossed over and approved more on the title rather than the content. Officials claimed that it was meant to take “an historical view of women characters in comic books rather than the current role of women creators in the industry or diversity in comics,” and besides, it was filled with “respected academics on the subject.” It probably didn’t help matters that the dudes on the panel said something about how “girls get bored with comics easily” or that they’ve only “lately” taken an interest or that the panel itself was a last minute addition and they “couldn’t find any women” to be on it, or, sensing the vibe, the panel shifted to a lecture-like thing, with the panelists trying to postpone a Q&A session as long as possible. A lot of elements were just going wrong for this panel and I think it could safely be labeled as a total FUBAR.

The convention did try to do right in the situation. I saw one girl make her way through all the booths staffed by women, collecting signatures to show that, hey, girls care about comics yo. Crystal Skillman and Trina Robinson organized a popup/flash panel to hold a wider conversation that included any and everyone who wanted to attend, lobbying to hold it in their hotel room or right on the 16th Street Mall if DCC didn’t want to play nice. This popup panel was apparently successful and featured an interesting discussion. I missed it and therefore cannot comment much about it, but Bleeding Cool has posted an audio track and summary of the whole thing.

Hopefully, DCC plans better for next time. It’s kind of frustrating that this was such a disaster, when the convention did so much right this year, including but not limited to the treatment of cosplayers and the expectations of convention goers.


4.

Posted all throughout the convention center, all along the showroom floor, in the stairwell corridors, and pretty much anywhere people could see it, was a giant sign that said, “Cosplay is not consent.” Loud and clear, so you wouldn’t be confused otherwise, DCC declared that “harassment is defined by the harasses.” More than a fair number of booths announced themselves as safe zones, places where anyone, regardless of whether or not they were in costume, could go if they were feeling uncomfortable or hounded or beleaguered or anything, while one of the people running the table would go get security.

This year, DCC was 100% no nonsense when it came to the treatment of the convention goers. Don’t forget, the entire reason the convention exists is to help fund literacy programs, and to have that marred by ridiculously rude and abusive people pretty much contradicts everything the show stands for.

Before the show even began, DCC said that any GamerGate paraphernalia, especially T-shirts, was going to be considered “hate speech” and a violation of their dress code and code of conduct. Anyone who wore a T-shirt or tried to sell anything that supported these meninists or GamerGaters would be outright asked to leave. “Hateful symbols aren’t welcome,” DCC said.

GamerGaters quickly rallied against the con. “You really shouldn’t choose sides if you want to keep making money from both,” one meninist said, before mocking the harassment is defined by the harassed policy and continuing with, “See how long the feminists stick around after hating on nerds goes out of style.” The guy claimed that GamerGate was all about fighting censorship and ethics in game journalism, because there are still people out there who still actually believe that I guess? He told DCC officials they really ought to do their research.

“We don’t need to research, because we are not invested in this nonsense,” Denver said. “This is NOT our mission, NOT our cause and you’re not going to make it our cause.”

Still, Denver stepped back, conversed, and returned, saying they had changed their mind.

Kind of.

They agreed to allow GamerGate supporters to wear their GamerGate gear, but with a massive addendum. “Here’s the bottom line,” a DCC representative said, “wear shirts with GamerGate on them or don’t. If it causes no issues, then your point is proven, right? But if it starts a bunch of trouble, the people starting said trouble can go right back out the way they came in, sans badge.” Even if DCC were caving, they weren’t going to simply give in and let GamerGate representatives have free reign. “What’s sad is if fighting censorship and having integrity is truly your purpose . . . it’s a shame that so many of your colleagues have made this issue an ugly and publicly hateful thing from every angle. Asking someone not to wear something that will surely inspire trouble is not in anyone’s best interest and we are not interested in being a forum for someone else’s nebulous cause. Our goal [with this issue] is the safety and security of all our attendees.”

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They weren’t done: “If you want to change the perception that GamerGate is an angry organization full of threats and bullies, perhaps you could prove it. You can do so by not continuing this nonsense conversations and asking your colleagues to stop threatening people and cease trying to paint a picture showing we are something we are not. Everyone is welcome at DCC, and everyone should feel safe at DCC.”

Naturally, GamerGate supporters were not satiated. They bonded together and said, “We find every SJW offensive, so they are harassing us.” They decided to “record everything,” but then realized the people in their group took that to mean literally record everything, and therefore revised it to be “prepared to record everything.” On their subReddit, they worried about brushing up against a person and being ejected; about being targeted and followed and shamed for supporting this cause. And I’m wondering how they could feel this, but still so adamantly target and shame most of the world, how these vocal individuals maybe could not be able to extend anything resembling empathy in another person’s direction?

Literally made out of condoms

I feel like DCC did handle this issue well, sticking as closely as possible to this for all three days without excluding anyone. Generally, I only saw officials only sort of push their way through heated group arguments before everyone involved dispersed. I saw security escort only one person off the premises, but I was far away, and that person seemed more drunk or stoned than anything. They were left on the sidewalk, brewing with anger and more than a little disappointment. It was a safe, fun environment and Denver’s challenge to keep it as such made the con feel all the more welcome.

As for the cosplayers, I had a real blast with them. Yes, there were a lot of Deadpools and Harley Quinns, but Dipper and Mabel from Gravity Falls also had a huge presence. This might have also been one of the first cons I’ve attended that didn’t have many Batmans. There was this lady in a Captain America costume made entirely out of condoms. She said the getup weighed something like seven pounds and she had to put straps on it to keep everything in place. I followed a guy dressed as the Wanderer from Fallout 3 for a bit, but that was mostly because he had a radio attached to his hip and was blasting out some fun tunes.

 


5.

Although cosplay seems to be one of the biggest draws of any convention, the real heart of the show lies with the artists and creators who come with their gorgeous illustrations, interesting comic books, and adorable sketch cards; they come with stickers and bookmarks and handmade pendants and all sorts of generally cool trinkets.

All right, sure, the Merchant Mesa part of the floor is generally the most crowded and impenetrable and I did, admittedly, did spend a fair amount of time there. The convention had an open bar and I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing someone trying to juggle bags of merch with their beer bottles. I found Finn’s Yellow Sword of Battle, which I carried around with me for the rest of the show, using it as a pointer and generally keeping it as something to keep my hands occupied. My boyfriend confiscated it from me at one point. “You keep smacking all the art we bought, so this is mine now.” But eventually, his hands got too full and he thrust it back at me.

We passed by about four different booths selling swords and other battle ready weapons, and I kid you not, there wasn’t a single goddamn time we passed by where the table wasn’t crowded with people literally waving money above their heads. Pop Funkos also had crazy representation this year: I’m not talking little displays, but full out booths stocked to the ceiling with these little figures. I’m a fan, but none of them truly called out to me. Oni, Boom Studios, Avatar, Valiant, and handful of other publishers set up displays, bringing with them special guest writers and artists, who were crammed into whatever space they made on the table, surrounded by these towers of comics. DC even showed up, in a way. The T-shirt company, Graphitti Designs, produces a lot of merchandise for the company, and DC attached themselves to the booth. I feel it was a way for DC to test DCC to see whether or not it was worth pursuing a bigger presence the next year. I had been harboring fantasies involving confronting the DC representatives on some of their silly decisions like the half-page ads or letting the Finches continue working on “Wonder Woman,” but those ultimately remained fantasies. Anyway, I got a “Love & Rockets” shirt.

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Photo by Rio Herrera

I found the complete “Night Music” series from P. Craig Russell and was pretty jazzed about that. I watched some Institute of the Arts students work on an animation project and even got to help sculpt a rig. I played in a quick Dungeons & Dragons Adventure League game. I was a water genasi and I fought a wizard in a balloon. I wanted to play this game called Houseboy, where you’re competing against a bunch of other hunky guys for this daddy, but pheromones are raging and it’s crazy, but that game was on display only. I pushed my way through the line for the Iron Throne, which everyone seemed to want to sit in.

I skipped over all the movie and TV celebrities and I missed the 3D printer and model room. I’m sure they were cool.

In the center of the floor, dividing the Merchant Mesa from Artist Valley, was this huge structure DCC called The Laboratory, which was like a cross between a McDonald’s play area and the Thunderdome. Actually, I feel like this was one of the coolest setups DCC sported: a space set aside specifically for kids to draw their own comics, work with some artists, get their faces painted, play around, and show their costumes off to each other, free from the pushing people around them. Guest speakers like Olivia Olsen, the voice of Marceline the Vampire Queen, and artists like Art Baltazar held presentations on the small stage, and the kids watched them, enraptured. Their genuine excitement and giddiness about finding something almost entirely for them definitely filled the hall with all manner of positive energy.

The people who populated Artist Valley stretched far back, nearly to the back doors of the showroom floor. All the ones I spoke to seemed to be having a great con, even on Monday, when they said they thought it would be a chill day, empty and easy, but was still just as busy as any other day that weekend. The more local people had a tendency to have someone stay behind at their table so they could go wander around while the more seasoned professionals stayed relegated to one place. “When I’m at a con, I’m behind a table,” Ben Templesmith told me. Nearby, Marguerite Bennett said, “I’m hoping to spend the last hour or so wandering around. I just hope there are people still set up.”

This section is my favorite part of a convention, and over the three days, I walked up and down rows A-J, just looking at what people had to offer, listening to their pitches, and spending money. I don’t even know how to approach talking about it, so I’m just going to list some of the things I remember. I don’t think I made a complete ass out of myself this year, (the previous year I was talking to Colleen Duran and was honestly trying to say how much I enjoyed her work, but kept backing myself into corners and flubbing up everything; it was embarrassing) but I remained a nervous, awkward mess, so most of the people I spoke with were probably like, “This dude works for Multiversity?”

Anyway, there was:

  • Skylar Partridge, a Santa Fe artist with some lovely design work and strong line drawings. She told me about how she inks with the Noodler’s Ahab Flex pen and I picked one up based on her recommendation.
  • Becky Cloonan, who had a modest line pretty much the whole time she was there. She mostly signed books and made sketches for people, including a fairly dope Furiosa. My boyfriend and I were going to eat at Sam’s No. 3 before the show and she exited in front of us with her own friend. We didn’t talk or say hello or even nod at each other, but that was the memory I have most of her. Oh, and she also drew and sketched so much she killed all her pens.
  • Marguerite Bennett, who didn’t have anything to sell, but was happy to greet people, sign their books, and give out free chocolate. I was chatting with her when Kieron Gillen suddenly appeared, saying he wouldn’t be long, he just needed a break and decided to steal some of her chocolate.
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  • Speaking of Kieron Gillen, the dude talks like a walking Pynchon novel: long, entertaining passages prone to digressions, allusions, casual bits of aside information, and frantic energy. I honestly didn’t catch everything he said, but there was definitely a flow to his stories that made him all the more engaging anyway. He apparently lived in Denver something like 18 years ago.
  • Mike Kunkel (“Herobear and Kid”) and Ted Naifeh (“Princess Ugg”) were a couple rows separated from each other, between a temporary tattoo tent playing a never-ending playlist of TV themes, catchy pop culture songs, and other danceable music. Kunkel was all too happy. “It’s been a great playlist this whole time,” he told me. Naifeh was like, “I literally haven’t heard half these songs.” Then he, my boyfriend, and I awkwardly danced to the Wonder Woman TV show theme. It was magical.
  • Jorge Corona was there with Morgan Beem. He had brought along a bunch of “Feathers” art and was promoting this anthology collection he was part of called “Horizon”, which centers on what happens to the heroes of adventures after the big bad has been defeated. (Sort of like Into the Woods — the original play, not that stupid movie adaptation.) He pointed me out to his “Feathers” colorist, Jen Hickman, and her table partner, David Stoll, all of whom were great people. We talked a lot about process, their stories, and some of the neat things they encountered at the con. Morgan Beem had this really pretty watercolor painting of the Adventure Time princesses, but someone bought it before I could get to it.
  • Leila del Duca was there dressed in a Star Trek uniform. Trek isn’t really my forte so I can’t tell you much about it other than it was yellow? She was with Erik Taylor, promoting “Shutter” and her recently finished “Pantheon Project”. Del Duca has roots in the Denver scene and you could tell there was a sense that she was home.
  • Jed Henry of Ukiyo-e Heroes had a much smaller layout than last year, but just as huge a crowd. This guy and his team make traditional woodblock prints of pop culture figures in traditional Japanese style. Some are gorgeous (like his Shadow of the Colossus) and others are just hysterical (the Mario Kart one) or simply creative (the Pokemon match as underground fight).
  • Val Hochberg had brought along her “Mystery Babylon” series. She and her husband were all around happy and chipper people and it was difficult to be bummed or down around them.
  • Same for Robin Childs of “Ley Lines.” She’s Colorado based as well and I’ve met her before at all these other conventions and at talks she’s given at random comic book stores. She remembers my face, which says a lot. There’s definitely this thing where we the attendees see these creators and it makes this huge impression on our minds, but the creators themselves don’t remember as well. They see a lot of people every day. It’s impractical to imagine they’d remember every interaction.
  • DiHA, whose prints took a bunch of pop culture characters and put them in different situations. I bought a button from her of Han Solo and Chewbacca fist bumping, with a giant caption saying SMUGGLER TIME exploding over their heads. I was flipping through her sketchbook and came across the Sailor Moon image. “Oh look! It’s like that Vampire Weekend record,” I said. “No, I think it’s Taylor Swift,” my boyfriend said. I looked at it a little longer. “Well, like with everything Taylor Swift-related, she blatantly stole it from something else.”
  • Rhiannon Owens, a Magic trading card artist, literally had a suitcase full of Copic markers. Not a tiny suitcase either, but this big, honking motherfucker. She also sported an epic mohawk that puts Storm’s to shame, but if you were to ask me about her, I’d immediately talk about the massive suitcase of Copic markers.
  • Thane Benson had these huge, elaborate drawings depicting adventurers in a dungeon and a girl escaping from a chicken monster’s stomach. Even the minicomic he was selling, “Quick the Clockwork Knight,” was filled with painstaking detail and crazy sequences. We chatted about process and he said it took him hours to scan the thing in, because he drew it on an enormous sheet of paper and had to import it into the computer one section at a time. One section at a time.
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  • Jay Peteranetz, the artist for the con’s badges, has this comic with De’Vo vom Schattenreich called “Magicians Must Die” which is printed on the back of a deck of playing cards. You lay them all out and it creates this huge spread of the whole story. Ideally, the narrative unfolds each time you put a new card down, but you could totally just read the whole thing laid out in front of you like a game board. It’s a really cool concept, with four of the five issues available, and they said they’ve sold 10,000 copies of their book so far. It can be unruly, but it does well in making a new reading experience.
  • Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba pretty much went everywhere together. It was sort of charming.

There was more, obviously there was more, and I know I’m going to look back, decipher something in my notes and go, “How did I forget to include that? I loved that person!” But that’s one of the things with cons, you see so much, you meet so many people that memories come in and out like tides.


6.

Denver Comic Con has only been around for four years, and it does need a lot more growing to do; it still has lots to figure out or learn how to do better. But from last year to this, great strides have been made. This is a convention run by people who want to make the best thing they can make, who want high profile creators to mark the dates down on their calendars and drop everything else because it’s time for DCC yo. The Women in Comics panel was a disaster, but what can DCC do but push forward and try to learn from their mistake? I’m sure the approval process for panels next year will be much more in-depth and extensive. It’s a shame that that one overshadowed so much of what DCC did well or right, of whom they invited and who showed up. Overall, the convention was safe, clean, and fun, with that fulfilling sense that you’re supporting something worthwhile.

I was wandering around on one of the last days, looking at T-shirts at some random booth, and I happened to glance up and see Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba standing next to me, picking through a bunch of merchandise, talking to each other in quiet Portuguese. I considered approaching them to let them know how much I appreciated their work, from “Daytripper” to “The Umbrella Academy” to their stint with the B.P.R.D., but I thought, this is probably the first time these guys have had a chance to themselves. They’ve been behind a table all day, and right now they’re finally getting a chance to explore what the con has to offer. DCC isn’t representative of all of Denver or of Colorado, but it does have its own flavor, its own atmosphere. And Moon and Ba seemed to be delighted by whatever thing it was they had found. I snuck away and let them continue exploring.

I still snapped a picture though.

Matthew Garcia

Matt hails from Colorado. He can be found on Twitter as @MattSG.

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