…to the byline. This is Peter, back on line. Unfortunately, I can’t get Kath’s name out of the heading. Should have that straightened out in a day or so.
I’m back from the woefully underattended Creation Con in Pasadena. Expecting between two to three thousand people, they pulled in perhaps 800 attendees on Saturday. On Friday and Sunday, you could have fired off a cannon in the dealer’s room and hit only frustrated dealers. This was a convention that included Stan Lee, Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, both Romitas, Russ Heath, and scores of others. I’m not sure whether it had to do with promotion, ticket prices, or the spiralling market.
Surreal moment #1: Driving to a Saturday morning business breakfast in LA, putting on the radio to hear traffic reports, and the first words out of the radio were, “shuttle debris.” And I thought, Oh, this can’t be good.
Surreal moment #2: Doug Murray, who spearheaded my coming out to the convention, pointing out to me some of the notables attending the convention, drew my attention to a leggy, gorgeous blonde. “That’s Lana Clarkson,” he said. “She’s an actress. She was in “Amazon Women on the Moon.” Barely 24 hours later, I would hear she’d been found lying in a pool of blood on the floor of Phil Spector’s mansion after being picked up by him at the House of Blues in LA.
PAD
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In re: the Lana Clarkson thing.
Though it is not politic or even that thought-provoking, only one thing can be said about the fact that you, from Long Island, saw her that weekend:
Dude, that’s fûçkëd up.
JLK
Why the low turnout?
I would have to say lack of advertising, seeing as how I live in Orange County, frequent two comic stores and a gaming store and my friends and I had no idea this was going on…Though if I did I would have definitely been there
My own theory about the low attendance; LA is exactly the wrong market for the sort of mid-level show Creation did. On the one hand, the Shrine Auditorium convention has been going on for around a decade now, every month just like clockwork. It’s not at the level of the Creation one, but has a fair number of dealers, a media guest event each month, and is darn cheap to get in (under $10 last time I looked). That takes care of the low end, as it’s probably the best monthly convention in the country. As for the high end, well, each year you’ve got the only a couple hours drive away San Diego megacon. Guests, dealers, media events, etc. out the wazoo, and for a ticket price not much more than what I heard Creation was charging. And many of the Creation guests were at San Diego last year. So why should one drop the money for something nowhere near as signifiant as San Diego and not that much above the monthly thing? I’d be interested in seeing how a similar show would’ve gone outside the Southern California area.
Btw, while I’ve not heard of a definite attendance count, I’m sure that Alternative Press Expo (APE) in San Francisco last week drew signifiantly more than 800 on Saturday. Ticket price was only $6/day, $10 for both Saturday and Sunday though, which may have factored in. Good show as always.
The Lana Clarkson is very surreal. Here’s my surreal space shuttle story…
I work at the local bus station on Saturday mornings. Usually I listen to a little bit of the local talk radio chit-chatter, the news, that sort of thing, on and off most of the time I’m there. No other radio stations come in. This weekend, I heard the CBS Radio update at 6 AM EST, heard that Columbia was coming back and not to worry when the astronauts come off in a stretcher, it’s the gravity adjustment. I think, “Hope everything goes all right.” I didn’t turn the radio on the rest of the morning. I get out at twelve and go with my parents and my daughter to help my folks out with their grocery order. It’s getting hard for them to carry them up three flights of stairs to their apartment. Anyway, so we go to the grocery store. I get in around 1:30 PM. I’m making myself lunch when, at 1:45 PM, my wife calls from her job, says she’ll be leaving at 2. Okay, says I.
“Did you hear about what happened?” she asked.
The last time she asked me that was on 11 September 2001.
“No,” I said, voice small. “What?”
“The space shuttle crashed.”
I told her to stop kidding. My wife wouldn’t have even KNOWN the shuttle was up there, she doesn’t follow that stuff. How could she be kidding? But I repeated it several times as I turned on the TV to find out.
I was 8 when Challenger blew up. I found out almost the same way back then.
What I can’t believe, though, is that NO ONE at the bus station said anything. That NOT ONE person talked about it at the supermarket. Nothing. That was MY surreal shuttle disaster experience.
B.G.
Ok. Now, I’m really not an insensitive guy. I really do feel bad about the Columbia accident. Its a horrible thing, but its not THAT horrible.
We lost seven people. Thats a bad car accident on a freeway in any major city. Thats a slow morning in Baghdad.
Look, I’ll admit it was a horrible thing. Its a blow to the space program, and we lost some of America’s best and brightest.
Sadly enough, it will probably prompt a lot more interest in the space program. Who here wants to bet me that the next shuttle launch won’t be televised live?
But its no 9-11.
Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear that the attendance at the Creation show was poor. Although it was something of a last minute deal, they advertised it on my site – Comic Book Conventions.com. I do have to wonder what the effect of APE on it was.
My surreal Columbia moment came at about the same time as everybody else’s. It was about 9:15 am Indiana time. I had just finished watching the episodes of Farscape and Stargate I had recorded while I was at work the night before. I turned off the VCR, and the first sight to greet me was the image we all became instantly familiar with of the smoke trail of Columbia burning across the Texas sky.
That image, so instantly and brutally contrasted against the fantasy in which I had just been indulging, caused a full minute or more of outright denial. I actually heard myself saying, “Not again.”
Lana Clarkson:
Just utter shock. I had a wonderful conversation with her on Friday. I didn’t find out until Tuesday Night as most of the reports had her listed as Un-I.D.’d Actress.
Disturbing…Truely.
I don’t know who this Lana Clarkson is, but that must be down right scray to see someone, and then the next day hear she’s dead. Who did that? Can you tell us if you hear anything.
And that on all top of the Space Shuttle disaster. Man, that Convention must have sucked for more reasons than low turn out.
Rich Johnston reported:
Lying In The Gutters had reported previously on the new comic conventions being created by Creation to steal WizardWorld’s thunder. And, indeed, their new big convention in Los Angeles this week is supposed to be getting in there before Wizard.
Publicity hasn’t been great however, and comic book professionals, the amount of whom attending often affects their popularity may well be staying away in droves.
Why? Well, comic pros traditionally get into such shows for free. Not this time, and the convention doesn’t mind who knows it.
Attempts to get a “pro” or “guest” registration have been met with clueless responses on the phone, and enquirers are told they’ll have to buy a table, if they work in the industry and want to attend.
A couple of B-listers rang recently and were told “We’re tired of you people trying to get in for free. You’re not special, you have to pay like anyone else.” When asked to speak to a supervisor, because they’d never heard of a con that didn’t want pros to attend in number, the manager refused to take the call.
Looks like the word is out and pros aren’t going to play ball. Looks like WizardWorld may have an opportunity to set up shop before 2006…
*
A follow up to the Creation LA convention story from last week. As well as continuing complaints about lack of pro passes, publicity and lack of communication, the entry fee caused much hilarity.
The on-the-door price is $20, but you can save $5 by booking online or on the phones in advance. Which incurs a $4.50 service charge.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=1555
http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=1561
It was definitely a surreal Groundhog Day this year. Pauxatawny Phil Spector came out of the ground, saw his shadow, and shot someone.
Wow, i hadn’t heard about Lana Clarkson… and found in Phil Spector’s house ?
Hmmm, another “O.J. / Robert Blake trial” soon
Do you have an alibi?
Creepy. Just…. creepy.
PAD,
Is that the same Doug Murray who wrote the Nam back in the 80’s? His Mom used to work at the comics store I shopped at for years.
My Columbia story:
I live in Melbourne, Brevard County, Florida, about 30 minutes south of Kennedy Space Center.
I woke up at 10:15 AM that Saturday, and stepped into my home office to check e-mail until STATIC SHOCK started at 10:30. I discovered I’d left my Instant Messages on overnight, and saw that I had a message from a dear friend, reading “Have you been watching the news?”
Uh-oh. That can’t be good.
She tells me what happened and I jump to the office TV. I watch for about five minutes before it registers fully. Then I run and wake my sleeping wife.
About five minutes later it hits me: call work. I work in the online department of FLORIDA TODAY, the only newspaper in Brevard County and one of the foremost papers in the world for space reporting.
I can’t reach any of my bosses. Finally, I call the news desk to try to find out what’s going on. A co-worker tells me “you’re bosses are here and all the bosses are in a meeting. I’m not your boss, but I’d go ahead and come in.”
Jump into the shower and dash into the office, arriving just before 11 AM, and before my bosses are out of the meeting. Start pitching in where I can until they get out of their meeting and can give clear directions.
When they emerge, they’re quite glad to see me already here. Through the day, the paper would call in about 2/3 of staff, including reporters from every department, production people — even ad reps were pressed into service as newsboys to stand on street corners and hawk the two extra editions we produced that day.
In my group, about half of us came in, and were working all day to get news posted to the site. Being the local paper on the site, our traffic hit a huge spike (and has continued to spike), as even the likes of MSNBC and USA TODAY were linking straight to our on-the-scene coverage.
We also have a TV studio in-house to act as a Brevard County bureau for one of the Orlando TV stations (all our TV comes out of Orlando), and there were several broadcasts from our offices.
They brought in food to keep us all fed and working at the same time. TONS of food. I’m still full.
I was here ’til 10 PM, an 11-hour day on a day I’m usually off. And I got off light compared to a lot of coworkers.
In between, keeping abreast of new developments, trying not to think about it too hard. I’ve been through this once before — my second day on this job was 9/11, and you just have to numb yourself to it and move on. Still, occasionally you look up and see the big picture, and you have to pause.
My wife was home with our daughter and couldn’t bear to watch. I called when I could to provide a little consolation.
Someone above said that this is not THAT horrible, that it’s no 9/11. And yes, fewer peope died. But where the victims of 9/11 seem faceless to me (save an aquaitence who was a firefighter that died at the World Trade Center), the astronauts are familiar to us, they’re public figures, and heroes.
Moreover, the posted above misses exactly how many lives this touches in more than just an emotional manner. The space industry is part of this communities identity and an integral part of its economy. There are people here only just starting to recover from the financial losses they suffered over the Challenger loss. This affects literally thousands of people, and an entire community’s way of life. And I’m sure the same is true in Houston, in Alabama, and everywhere else that aerospace industry is an important part of the community.
It’s not 9/11 in terms of loss of life. But the effect could be just as crushing.
Surreal moment #1: Driving to a Saturday morning business breakfast in LA, putting on the radio to hear traffic reports, and the first words out of the radio were, “shuttle debris.” And I thought, Oh, this can’t be good.
Surreal moment #2: Doug Murray, who spearheaded my coming out to the convention, pointing out to me some of the notables attending the convention, drew my attention to a leggy, gorgeous blonde. “That’s Lana Clarkson,” he said. “She’s an actress. She was in “Amazon Women on the Moon.” Barely 24 hours later, I would hear she’d been found lying in a pool of blood on the floor of Phil Spector’s mansion after being picked up by him at the House of Blues in LA.
Whoa, Peter, those are surreal, but have there been other surreal moments that have involved you in another city while you were there for a con or appearance, that somehow ended up on the mainstream news?
Not exactly surreal, but after days of hearing about the Spector thing, I had to find out who the victim was on a newsgroup posting. And dang it, I liked her.
BTW – Amazon is listing a Barbarian Queen/Barbarian Queen 2 – The Empress Strikes Back double-DVD coming out in…April, I think, for any fans who might be interested.
Zach,
You’re right, it isn’t like 11 Sept 2001 as far as the statistics or the tragedy. The thing is, for me, that reaching space is a dream-like endeavour. It’s a place I’d love to go and probably NEVER will. Sure, there are places on Earth that I’ll never see but, the thing is, they are reachable. Space, unless you work out a gazillion dollar deal with the Russians, isn’t achievable for the Everyman. Every time something bad happens with the space program, I wince, because it pushes us that much farther back from an Asimovian world. Everytime an astronaut dies on duty, that’s another time the dream dims in my lifetime. For me, THAT’s where the tragedy hits home. THAT’s why it’s such a big deal.
Bill
Here’s the thing: Last week I was driving home from work and hear on the radio that a commuter flight went down, all hands lost. It was just another newsbite. I offered up a quick prayer out of habit more than concern (yes, I know that makes me a selfish pig).
A couple days later I’m driving my son to Little League practice and hear about the Columbia. My eyes sting, I almost drive off the road.
They were the exact feelings I had when Challenger was lost. It was a weird co-mingling of emotion from across time.
Nothing I can think of makes the astronauts more important than the commuter victims. Which, like I said, makes me a selfish pig. 🙁
On the Shuttle… When I went to Florida last summer and visited the Space Center, when I saw the Astronaut Memorial, I was struck by how much space they had left for adding additional names. I didn’t think it would be this quick, though.
I had read news reports about the shuttle being visible in Arizona on its descent and thought about getting up to try to see it, but ended not getting up in time. I turned on NASA TV when I got up shortly after it was supposed to have landed and they were talking about a “Contingency” there, but not giving any details. Of course, turning over to CNN they already had the footage of the debris showing. Not a good way to start the morning.
As for Creation, they haven’t been doing any comic shows for a long time and they definitely sound like they are out of touch with the comic industry. If they didn’t advertise much outside of their regular patrons, they likely didn’t reach many comics fans, either.