Top tech and society guru, science fiction writer and Boing Boing-er – and soon to be comics creator – Cory Doctorow has put up a voicepost as he goes around the San Diego Comic Con. I was particularly interested by Cory contrasting the attendance – both numbers and the age range of attendees – of San Diego and the annual World Con and the fact that the major SF cons once upon a time attracted more people, now, although still going strong, attract far fewer than something like the SDCC and a lot of those are older folks where SDCC has a good age spread. He wonders how SF can borrow from the world of comics a bit to put more energy and attendance into the SF events like Worldcon.
This chimes with me because I move in both worlds too and I’ve noticed that the SF cons, while certainly by no means intolerant of comics, don’t seem overly eager to embrace them either, which I find odd because there is a lot of potential crossover between them (not least the amount of top SF&F novelists being asked to write comics these days). Obviously this varies from convention to convention and I know from personal experience of people involved behind the scenes who have tried to have more comics themed events at SF conventions with varying degrees of luck (and not all down to reluctance on the part of the con panel, sometimes the comics people seem to think, what? Why would we be at an SF con?).
Still, if an august event like the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the world’s largest literary festival, can embrace graphic novels then why isn’t there more crossover between SF cons and comics conventions? They aren’t mutually exclusive, far from it. Cory does note that this year’s Worldcon in Japan is reaching out to the anime and manga communities and it will be interesting to see how that goes and if future Worldcons build on it. Back on the theme of the Edinburgh Book Festival though and I was actually at their base in the city’s exclusive Charlotte Square this afternoon briefly this afternoon and I’m delighted to say the organisers I spoke with all seemed pretty enthusiastic about graphic novels and glad to be doing some events around the genre. I’m looking forward to those and here’s hoping they go well and we have even more in subsequent festivals.
July 27th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
There are some obvious things that Worldcon could do in order to be more like ComicCon. Top of the list are to pick a good facility and stay there every year, rather than keep moving about each year, often to facilities that don’t suit it well. There’s a price to pay for having an internationalist outlook.
As to encouraging cross-over, some of us do try. When we had Worldcon in Glasgow I went to the Bristol ComicCon to meet comics creators and try to persuade them to attend. But a one-off convention that isn’t familiar to people is a hard sell. You have to start by getting the convention better publicity, and by having a more commercial outlook, both of which are hard with a fan-run event.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
I well remember you talking about this and you were indeed one of the people I was thinking about when I mentioned some folks had been trying to integrate the two more.And as you say many SF cons like this are fan run by volunteers, not a full time staff who can more easily plan and accomodate for this sort of thing.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
What Cheryl said. Imagine if ComicCon was held in a different city every year, organized by a different group of people, with only the name “ComicCon” in common. There’s no way it would have grown the way it has.
Dragon*Con is a good example of another massive pop-culture event that has taken root and grown and grown. When you don’t move around, don’t lose all of your locally-based goodwill and institutional knowledge, and actively pursue growth, then you probably will grow. Worldcons, by the nature of the way it’s organized, is less likely to get the massive number of casual attendees that events like ComicCon draws.
If we permanently held Worldcon in, say, Anaheim, and hired a small number of permanent staff members to supplement the large number of on-the-day volunteers, and actively worked to promote it, it would start to grow. But it wouldn’t really be the WORLD Science Fiction Convention anymore, would it?