Old Guys at Comic Cons

[dan bailey]

I also caught Art Suydam in AA a couple times

I had no idea he had a drinking problem.

I hope both of you are doing better these days.

[dan bailey]

Kids have been spoiled by the amount of information that they have at their fingertips that we didn't have.

I suspect this is actually part of the scenario. As it happens, just a few days ago a friend who's about 8 years younger than me was lamenting the fact that his son, who's probably around 12 & is a sports fan (like him), was utterly ignorant of baseball & basketball history, even as regards local icons like Julius Erving (they're in the Philadelphia area). My response was that we grew up more or less immersed in the lore of past teams & players because when & if we wanted to read about the sports in question, as likely as not we went to the library & checked out books that addressed those subjects. Other than, say, Sports Illustrated & The Sporting News & the occasional monthly, as well as the daily paper(s), coverage of the contemporary scene was lacking.

Whereas now, thanks mostly to the internet but also to a certain extent to ESPN, keeping up with today's players & games could easily be a 24/7 pursuit for any sad individual so inclined. To delve into a given sport's past, one has to be driven to do so.

Same with comics, movies, music, etc. If I wanted to read about those subjects as a kid, my options were extremely limited. The closest library of any size, one county over, had All in Color for a Dime & Seduction of the Innocent, Denis Gifford's Pictorial History of Horror Movies, & ... well, nothing on rock, really, but the college library had a book that came out not long after Sgt. Pepper's did.

A large part of the coverage in Famous Monsters & The Monster Times & Castle of Frankenstein concerned movies & auteurs of the past; that wasn't as much the case with Rolling Stone & Creem & Crawdaddy, but there was a certain element of that as well. And as for comics, print coverage was limited to fanzines, which about as often as not were focused on the classics.

These days, though ... as with sports, thanks to various news sites & blogts & message boards one could easily oversaturate oneself with coverage of stuff that's a month old, or for that matter that hasn't come out yet. Most people probably don't have the mental energy, much less the time or inclination, to explore how things got to be the way they are.

Which I guess is why there's a separate Classics forum here.

Thank god!

[Parch]

Most people who listen to pop music don't give a damn about anything preceding their own listening experiences; most baseball fans probably don't care about the players & teams of previous eras; most people who watch movies have no clue about anything that came out before their lifetimes; etc. etc. etc.

I once heard a teen describe the term "old school" as meaning inferior or poor quality.
Ageism is reality.

[inferno]

How about "Comic Guys at Comic Cons" getting no love?

The one time I went to San Diego, five or so years ago, the room where that year's Eisner winner was speaking was more than half empty -- and the line to see the voice actors from Family Guy was five hours long....

[dan bailey]

I once heard a teen describe the term "old school" as meaning inferior or poor quality.
Ageism is reality.

With that particular individual, it's pretty clear that the term "teen" means idiot or moron.

[Grapeweasel]

These days I'd be the old guy.....

[dan bailey]

These days I'd be the old guy.....

I must say that when I first saw the thread title, I assumed it was talking about those of us of a certain (Silver) age ...

[verslibre]

I had no idea he had a drinking problem.

I hope both of you are doing better these days.

Hahaha...AA = Artists' Alley.

[The Confessor]

I once heard a teen describe the term "old school" as meaning inferior or poor quality.
Ageism is reality.

Ageism and stupidity both.

[AdamYJ]

I've gotta say, I haven't been to a lot of cons, but one of my best memories was getting the one and only Ramona Fradon to sign my Showacse Presents Metamorpho trade.

I told her that the Metamorpho stuff was some of the most fun comics I had read in a while and she said "They were something else, weren't they."

[MDG]

This attitude goes way back. In 1974 or 75, after NYC cons started getting crowds of 2-3,000, the National Cartoonists Society decided it might be a good idea to do something around comic strips, and had a convention. I don't remember everyone who was there, but I know I have autographs or sketches from Mort Walker, Roy Crane, John Prentice, Leonard Starr. Eisner and Kubert were there as well.

Anyway, I don't think they got 100 fans to show up, if that--in New York. If it wasn't comic books, fans didn't care.

[dupont2005]

This is a topic that has bothered me at nearly every show I've gone to, especially the bigger ones (NYC, Chicago), but it's even an issue at the smaller shows: the Golden Age and early Silver Age creators don't get a FRACTION of the love that the current creators get.

Here's a good example: In New York 2010, I walked by a table where an older gentleman sat and ONE fan was at the table watching him do a sketch. I didn't recognize the artist so I scanned for his nameplate somewhere on the table.....it was Jerry Robinson.

I talked with him for a half hour and, in that time, he had maybe 4 or 5 people come up and look at his stuff and leave. He was sharp and intelligent even in his later years...it bothered me that no one was stopping to say hello.

This is the guy who CREATED arguably the greatest super villian of all-time. He also co-created the most popular sidekick of all-time and had a hand in creating Alfred and Two-Face, too. You can argue that Bill Finger and Bob Kane were central, too, but that's not the point....the point is that there were literally, THOUSANDS, of people in line trying to get sketches of The Joker from new artists, while the man who created it with Bob Kane sat at an empty table.

Mr. Robinson died last year. None of those old guys made much money from creating the characters that we all love so much today.

As much as I personally like being able to interact with the original creators, pick their brains, and just flat out talk about the early days of comic books, I'd much rather see them have a large line that makes it too difficult for me to talk with them.....they deserve the attention and, pretty soon, they'll ALL be gone forever.

It is what it is. Now imagine if it were strictly a classic comics convention, and all the attendees were collectors of comics from 1979 and earlier. We'd have to pretend that many of these guys were still alive, but lets say we had Kirby and Lee, we had Romita Sr., we had Seigel and Shuster, and off to the side we had Speigelman, Crumb, Peyo, Wood, and any number of Warren, EC, and Heavy Metal contributors. To see who had a line and who sat in front of an empty table would likely disappoint me.

[Sean@CharitablePress]

Whether or not these guys are acknowledged by the ignorant masses at each individual show, they should ALL be recognized if they're in attendance and given a round of applause at the very least, if only for sheer respect out of their longevity. As many people in this thread have mentioned, they built the foundation that everything we have today rests upon.

How about a simple, 10-second "Attention Baltimore Comic Con fans, in attendance today we have Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America and the editor who first told Stan Lee what to do <chuckle chuckle>. How about a round of applause for him..."

The Mr. Simon gets to feel the love of an entire auditorium full of people who are there in large part due to his work directly, whether they know it or not. He can't ever experience that now because he's gone. I'm just saying that, rather than just accept that it's the status quo and the status quo sucks, we can tell these dudes that we appreciate them.

They had Ted Williams Day at Fenway before he died and he had a notoriously bitter break up with the organization....but they brought him back because he deserved some glory in his old age. If there were kids in the audience who didn't know who he was before THAT, they certainly knew after that day. These are the same kids who said "Who the hell is Paul McCartney?" on Twitter when he was performing on the Grammy Awards this year.....just because they're dumb and lazy doesn't mean we shouldn't at least TRY. After all, we aren't trying to educate THEM...we're trying to show appreciation to the men they've forgotten.

I think that we as comic book fans, because we're a tighter group, can at least do the Ted William's thing for the aging giants of this genre. It's not meant to be a whine session; just a plea for all of us to remember to think of the old guys the next time we're at a show.

[bizmopeen]

A buddy of mine and I were at the San Diego Con about 20 years ago ('92? '93? the memory fades...) and were walking around in one of the side aisles and there, standing behind a small table, was JACK KIRBY, pretty much ALONE and just hanging out. We both literally did a double-take and rushed to meet him and get pictures...he was very affable and polite, but to this day it mystifies me that he wasn't being mobbed by other eager fanboys. It seems like there's been a renewed interest in his work as the decades have progressed, but even in that era when you'd have to wait hours to meet Rob Liefeld it seems more people would have shown him some love...

[Perseus]

The same thing happened at a recent con I attended and I saw Don Rosa sitting there and sketching with not many around him. But they'll kick me and my girlfriend away from the Image booth because they wanna form a line for Kirkman. She wasn't happy about that since we were thinking of buying some Image trades.