Dragon*Con 2001: The Good and the Bad

digresssmlOriginally published October 19, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1457

Dragon*Con: The Good and the Bad.

Good: I was scheduled to be on two panels early Friday afternoon… both slated to be held before my actual arrival. For instance, a panel that was to consist of myself and Paul Jenkins was scheduled for 2:30 PM, at which time I was still 30,000 feet in the air. Paul showed up ten minutes late—figuring it was no big deal because I’d be entertaining folks in his absence—to discover that just about everyone had already left because they figured neither of us was going to show. So why is this “good,” you ask? Because Dragon*Con always schedules me for panels before I arrive. Isn’t it nice to know there are things in this world you can absolutely count on? Furthermore, I was also scheduled for panels on Sunday after I left, but I tricked them: I changed my airline reservations to depart Monday so I was actually able to attend the panels. Plus they forgot the other tradition of scheduling me opposite myself (for instance, having me on a Star Trek panel at 4 PM in one place while having me doing a reading at the same time somewhere else.) So all things considered, it wasn’t as disastrous as in previous years.

Good: I had the opportunity to perform, for the first time, with Atlanta Radio Theatre, taking on a small part in the dramatization of a Robert Heinlein story called “Solution Unsatisfactory,” about the horrors of nuclear war. (I would tend to think that it would have had even more emotional resonance now, considering the events of recent days.)

Bad: Kathleen attended with me (no, that’s not the bad part; the honeymoon isn’t over that fast.) During the course of the convention, she pitched in at the Del Rey booth in the Exhibitor’s hall. Since she’s an editorial assistant at Del Rey, she felt some sense of duty to help out, even though she wasn’t there on Del Rey’s dime. At one point, while she was helping hand out free books to eager fans, she placed her backpack down in a secure area behind the booth. Except… it turned out not to be secure at all. When she went to retrieve the bag—a blue Eddie Bauer backpack—it was gone. Filched. Stolen. Some of the contents were replaceable, such as a manuscript she was working on and her Palm Pilot. But the loss of other items in the backpack were personally catastrophic: Our entire album of wedding photographs, taken by the professional photographer. We’d brought them down to show to Harlan and Susan Ellison, who were in attendance at Dragon*Con. It’s possible to replace the album, but it will probably run us well over a thousand bucks to do so. There were dozens of other pictures as well, of the wedding reception and honeymoon, which we’d spent hours culling from hundreds more. Plus, worst of all, absolutely irreplaceable portrait shots of the girls and us, done by Disney photographers while we were on the cruise. There’s simply no way that Disney would still have them on file. They’re gone, all of them.

We figure one of two things happened. Either the thief grabbed the bag, went through it and snatched obviously valuable things like the Palm Pilot, and dumped the rest, which means our wedding and honeymoon pictures are in a Georgia landfill somewhere. Or else—more chillingly—the thief is a fan who discovered he’d lucked onto a wonderfully singular souvenir. One of a kind shots of Peter and Kathleen David’s wedding, complete with candid photos of Harlan Ellison, Bill Mumy, George Takei, and others. Wowee zowee, kids! Lucky, lucky fan, and you got another one you can add to Ellison’s “Xenogenesis” essay.

As bad goes, that’s pretty freakin’ bad. Not fly-a-plane-into-a-building bad, obviously, but a personal setback, nonetheless.

Good: The evening banquet on Saturday. Highlights included Andy Hallett (the Host from “Angel”) being pressed into MC’ing duties at the last minute, sometimes rising to the challenge, sometimes… less so. And my presenting Harlan with the “Julie” award for achievement in multiple media (named for Julie Schwartz, who was also there) , and then later watching Harlan and John Rhys-Davies trading increasingly bizarre jokes back and forth. (Yes, yes, I admit, I chimed in with a few, too.)

Bad: The food. Yeah, well, what else is new.

Good: The Iron Artist. I frankly cannot believe this worked. Dragon*Con approached Ellison and I separately (and then told each other that the other had agreed to it, apparently thinking we wouldn’t check) about the notion of doing a send-up of the TV series “Iron Chef.” The notion was that Iron Artist Don Bluth would take on a challenger (in this case fantasy artist Larry Elmore). There would be a “secret ingredient,” and the two artists would then have to produce a work of art in forty-five minutes using that ingredient. The notion was that Harlan and I would MC the thing.

There was a lot of initial dickering, including over the ingredient considering that Dragon*Con reps were thinking too closely to the source material and apparently believed that having genuine food colors (blue juice from blueberries, for instance) would be a good secret ingredient. Harlan and I pointed out the folly of that notion: Who’s going to want to buy artwork with food smeared on it? It’s gonna rot and get all disgusting. Harlan’s contention was that the ingredient had to be thematic, relating to art style, not an actual physical component as in the original series.

So Sunday morning, Harlan (clad in a long black leather coat and sporting a rubber Doctor Doom mask) dramatically announced, “And the secret ingredient which you must include in your drawings is,” and he whisked a cloth off a silver tray being proferred by Kathleen to reveal a solitary black cube. “Cubism!” he declared, and then added, “…in pastels… from the early Norman Rockwell period.”

I thought Bluth was going to have a cerebral hemorrhage on the spot. He just started going into convulsions. Larry Elmore, for his part, looked like someone had just smashed him across the face with a 2 x 4. Both of them were clearly wondering just what the hëll they’d gotten themselves into. All I can say is, hey, guys, it could’ve been worse. You could have had to crush blueberries onto the canvas.

Harlan and I then slipped into characters: He, the knowledgeable art commentator, me the utter dunderhead. He would be asking the judges (pulled from the audience) what they thought of the techniques being displayed by the artists, while I would ask them incisive questions such as, “What do you think my high bowling score is? Go on, guess.”

Bluth wound up winning hands down, cleverly doing a cubistic verison of the famed “Little girl with the bathing suit bottom” Coppertone ad (which made sense considering Rockwell did a lot of commercial work early in his career.) Elmore gave it a valiant try, but his design went more toward Peter Max than Norman Rockwell. As for the majority of what Harlan and I actually said: I have no idea. We desperately vamped for forty-five minutes, entertaining without a net while the artists worked. I remember a line here or there, but most of it is a complete blur.

Bad: Dragon*Con totally botched the taping. It was literally a case of two Dragon*Con people saying to each other, “I thought you put a blank tape into the recorder.” So if anyone out there has a complete tape of Iron Artist, please let me know. If nothing else, I promised one to Don Bluth.

(Should anyone have information regarding the wedding pictures, or an Iron Artist tape, please contact Peter David at Second Age Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport NY 11705. Thank you.)

 

 

4 comments on “Dragon*Con 2001: The Good and the Bad

      1. I’m sorry to hear that D*C 2001 went so poorly for you. I’ll always have fond memories of this one, as it was where I met my future wife face-to-face for the first time (we’d been seeing each other online for a few months, but this was our first time together in real life). Oh, and I got to meet Harlan Ellison, and he did a goldfish impression for our daughter. 🙂

  1. Hi Peter. I’m a Tai Chi practitioner and recent stroke survivor and also a Fan. Just wanted to say keep up the Tai Chi (even if your form is as gimped as mine currently is), keep up the Inner Smile and above all keep writing, please, as I enjoy reading your stuff.

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