The wacky and wonderful world of the comic book convention (“comic con” to friends), a gathering of all things related, even distantly, to comic books, has grown big without growing older. The biggest of them, the San Diego Comic Con International, draws more than 100,000 attendees as well as some of the most famous celebrities walking the earth, and has two offshoots in WonderCon and the indie and artsy stuff of the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco.
“I’m a huge nerd and proud of it,” says Jesse Banda, performing arts and events sales manager for the National Steinbeck Center, who’s been going to San Diego Comic Con nearly a decade. “This past summer, our facilities coordinator, Matt, threw out the comment ‘Why doesn’t anyone ever do anything like that around here?’ I said, ‘We’re going to do it.’”
That is the origin story of Salinas Valley Comic Con, happening this Friday and Saturday, Feb. 7-8, at the Steinbeck Center. It starts just before the Oldtown Salinas First Friday Artwalk, packed with people like geek culture celebrity Chris Gore, TV show host of G4’s Attack of the Show and author of Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, and representatives from San Francisco’s Walt Disney Family Museum, coming to talk about the 50th anniversary ofMary Poppins. There will be artists and writers, and “cosplay” (short for costume play) fans dressed up as their favorite characters. A replica of the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future will be there; Saturday there’s a screening of Back to the Future at Maya Cinemas, followed by an afterparty back at the Steinbeck Center next door.
It looks like a colorful shindig of imagination and inventiveness. Banda calls it “chaotic fun” and a small taste of what bigger comic cons cook up. When local cartoonist Bridgett Spicer and her comics writer and artists friends (who call themselves the Funsters) first heard about it, Spicer thought: “Salinas is not a hub of cartoon happenings and certainly not comic cons.”
It is this weekend.
Crafters from Etsy are bringing fan memorabilia from British sci-fi TV series Dr. Who and Joss Whedon’s sci-fi/Western classic TV show Firefly. Kid Monarch Clothing, the makers of the Batkid logo T-shirt for 5-year-old cancer survivor and San Francisco savior Miles Scott, is coming. Hopefully they’ll bring their otherwise sold-out T-shirts. Folks from Current Comics, with a branch each in Monterey and Salinas, will be there with gear and comics and toys. They’ll all be in the Salinas Room off the lobby. In the huge Ag 2 hall, there are two panels scheduled: “From the Grapes of Wrath to The Wrath of Khan – How Literature has Influenced Pop Culture” and “Mary Poppins 50th Anniversary.”
Davidson L. Haworth, a historical fantasy author from San Jose, is doing the Wrath panel. He’s done these conventions before – signing books, taking pictures, answering questions – and will have little trouble talking literature and pop culture.
“If you hate Twilight, you’ll like my stuff,” he says. “My third book [The Vampires of Prali] is anti-Twilight. Not a single vampire goes to high school, takes his shirt off every five minutes, [or] dates the prom queen. It’s more Hammer Films from the ’70s, scary without being graphic.”
He’s also very popular in Russia and the Ukraine: “I’m the David Hasselhoff of writers in Eastern Europe.”
Haworth was invited to the San Diego Comic Con, but he cancelled on them.
“It’s more hassle than it’s worth,” he explains. “You have to buy a hotel, they charge $750 a night, parking is $25 a day and you have to get it six months in advance. I’d rather go where people can just drive up and see me, have a great time, and talk about comic books, anime and sci-fi.”
The young adults and teens of Artists Ink won’t have to travel far at all to attend; the collective of activist artists, actors, filmmakers and musicians – who last month assisted with the theatrical production of ReAlisal: Stories de Acosta Plaza – is based in Salinas. Emily Morales, the group’s founder, says they have a special showcase.
“Our booth includes artwork – maybe some costume pieces, drawings, sketches – of our students for A Tree in the Valley,” she says.
That’s a multimedia film they’re writing based on “Chicano comics superheroes” that they and Teatro Campesino actors will perform skits from in the Steinbeck Center lobby.
Meanwhile, over in Stockton, when Marisa Garcia isn’t “stuck” in her gray office day job, like Clark Kent, she lets her superhero colors fly.
“My husband and I went to several conventions,” she says. “There was no one who looked like me or my sister or my friends.”
So she created comic book heroes that did in Chunky Girl Comics, starring a foursome of bigger women called the Heavy Response Unit, with a real-life super-team of costumed women who attend comic cons and other public events.
“A lot of people like us because we are so comfortable with our body types, with who we are,” Garcia says. “We’ve gone through the bullying, name-calling.”
The group is focusing on teen workshops this year that emphasize positive body image.
“It hit home when my daughter was 7 or 8,” Garcia says, “and she said someone at school called her fat. It broke my heart.”
But now, she says, “My daughter and son, they tell people, ‘My mom is a superhero.’”
Then there’s Jaime “Jimmy” Portillo. Oh, man. He’s a comic book creator who actually laid three of his works on the Weekly. They are all unrepentantly violent; two of them are supernaturally dark; and at least one of them, about vampires in Juarez, Mexico, is disturbingly, gleefully sociopathic about its carnage. Be thee warned.
“One of the things at the Steinbeck Center is we touch on the art of storytelling,” Banda says. “No matter what it is, a book , a TV show, a movie, it all starts with a blank page.”
If you want to talk to a person who knows the challenge of the blank page, Bridgett Spicer will do nicely. For four years she’s drawn the self-syndicated comic strip Squid Row, a charming story about a struggling artist and her friends set in a fictional Monterey, which was published by the Herald until news last December that her strip was one of several they were discontinuing. So she’s been there and back, and, ever positive and sprightly, has perspective for aspiring comics artists.
“Looking back over the four years, I had a routine. Get to the office early, write on one day, do the drawings on another day. I probably didn’t hit my stride until the second year. You have to do the work first. I was doing it two years before it was published.”
Now she’s trying to turn the strip being discontinued into a positive.
“I was beginning to wonder what happens next,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I was growing. I had the routine down. I’m continuing the comic strip online, but I’m not going to do it as a daily, for now, which will free up two other projects.”
They are a best-of compilation of the last two years of Squid Row called Down But Not Out on Squid Row, and a graphic novel version of the strip. Spicer, a most amiable local ambassador for comic strips and comics, will be in good company at the comic con.
“I’m going for the camaraderie,” she says. “I think the Funsters are going to be there.”
Spicer is one of the people Banda turned to to assemble his cast of characters for his big pet project; previously, he organized private and corporate functions, including for Facebook.
“A lot of it has been word of mouth,” he says. “I haven’t had to go out and search for people.”
One wishes he had. He admitted he hadn’t heard of Jeff Hoke, a local who’s created one of the most intricately conceived hardback graphic novel books on the wonderful world of pre-science alchemy. He hadn’t heard of Greg Rucka, who once lived in Salinas and worked at Current Comics and has gone on to write for DC Comics’ Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and Marvel’s Wolverine, Elektra and Daredevil.
But that just means the con has room to grow, to expand its reputation, to get the word out, to get better.
It’s savory just thinking about what it might become, this signpost of pop culture in the heart of Steinbeck country, this brethren of literacy that also uses the same two tools that creators across many disciplines use – the pencil and the imagination.
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