2000 Canadian National Comic Book Expo

Originally published October 13, 2000, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1404

Some assorted rambling from the Canadian National Comic Book Expo up in Toronto at the end of August…

I’m Super, thanks for asking. This convention was the first one where the writer (moi), penciller (Leonard Kirk) and inker (Robin Riggs) of Supergirl have all attended. We had a good time hanging out together, goofing around at the autographing tables, and at one point posing for photographs looking like gangsta rappers. Well… looking as much as gangsta rappers as three white guys with varying degrees of paunch and thinning hair are gonna look. (Although Robin does have a sort of George Constanza thing going for him.)

During one of my Q&As, I did a dramatic reading of the full script for Supergirl #49. With the British Robin sitting in the audience, I was suddenly self-conscious over essaying the voice of the distinctly Brit character of “Buzz” because I could envision him visibly wincing every time I tried it. So I sandbagged Robin into joining me in the front of the room to read Buzz’s lines. Robin tried to beg off, saying his voice was too soft; an argument that went nowhere since I was able to thrust a microphone in front of his face. And to make it a family thing, I also brought up his wife, Elayne, to read the part of “Andy”… which, of course, makes sense, because if you want to cast a character who is a lesbian merged with a super-powered half-man, half-horse with wings of ice, naturally you’re going to want Elayne for the part. I mean, who wouldn’t?

* * *

Chris Claremont was there, notable for his jocularity, his astoundingly long lines, and his utter unawareness that Marvel was going to show him the door a few weeks later (because, y’know, it makes perfect sense: The X-Men movie didn’t have a significant impact on the sales of the comic, just as movies and TV shows have historically had little-to-no impact on comic sales, but just for fun, let’s actually try to blame it on someone this time. And let’s have that person be the guy whose work on the series over the years included everything from creating characters such as Rogue and Mystique, to transforming Wolverine from a character fans hated (remember the “Dump Wolverine” campaigns?) to one of Marvel’s bread-and-butter characters, to writing God Loves, Man Kills, which served as the basis for much of the film’s underpinnings… that guy, that Claremont guy, whose labors on the series are as significant as that Stan Lee guy who co-created the series in the first place (and who we also dumped)… let’s make that Claremont guy the scapegoat. Let’s say he’s to blame. Instead of saying, “Thanks for taking a little bi-monthly title and building it up into a franchise that resulted in the first good Marvel Comics-based movie ever” and buying him a car or something in appreciation… let’s boot him out because he didn’t make even more money right this very minute. Was this truly, as Baldrick would have said, a cunning plan? Or was it in fact, as Blackadder was once heard to retort, “the stupidest thing we’ve heard since Lord Nelson’s famous signal at the Battle of the Nile: ‘England knows Lady Hamilton’s a virgin, poke my eye out and cut off my arm if I’m wrong.’” You decide.)

Annnnyway…

Chris at one point came running up to my autographing table and said, “Close your eyes. Got something to show him.” I went along with it and when I opened them, there was Supergirl standing there. A very blonde young woman in a very accurate costume was in attendance. We goofed around for a couple of photos, including the one printed here.

It seemed that every person at the show had horror stories about their Air Canada flights. This prompted Claremont to start riffing on the Oscar-nominated song “Blame Canda” by singing, “Air Canada, Air Canada,” and Leonard Kirk piped in with, “They’re not even a real airline anyway.” Unable to get the notion out of my head, that evening in the hotel room I started producing a whole song, and by the next day I had the following:

Gates have changed, the time is slipping past,

We’re sitting in the airport and we’re going nowhere fast.

Are we flying Delta? Or on TWA?

Or on an airline to take us up and away?

No!

Air Canada! Air Canada!

Where on the tarmac you will wait, while running twenty hours late

Air Canada! Air Canada!

Yes here’s what everybody thinks—

Air Canada stinks!

 

Don’t blame me, it’s not my fault

That all our travel plans have grounded to a total halt.

They overbooked the aircraft, and now our tire’s blown,

If only we’d been warned, we’d never have flown—

Air Canada! Air Canada!

Where they will serve you airline food, but only when they’re in the mood

Air Canada! Air Canada!

They’re not even a real airline anyway.

 

If you wanna fly in Canada they’re the only ones around

Which wouldn’t be so bad if they would just get off the ground

Their ticket price is up while their computers have gone down

Just wait’ll I get my hands upon the clown (who runs)

Air Canada! Air Canada!

My plane took off! That’s really neat!

Too bad they gave away my seat!

Air Canada! Nowhere Canada… where…

The lines to check in are 95 plus, in English and French, they’re cursing at us

The hëll with all of this I’m gonna go and buy a ticket on a buuussssss!

Which just goes to show what you can do when you have entirely too much time on your hands.

* * *

One of the big attractions near the convention is this gargantuan tower which has—on one of its uppermost stories—a glass floor. You stand on it and there’s nothing between you and a mile-long drop except thick panes of glass.

Kathleen, of course, strode around on it like Xena, Warrior Princess surveying Olympus. Me, I was terrified. I took one tentative step out onto it and then, heart-thudding, clutched the wall. I have no idea what holding on to the wall was supposed to accomplish. In the event that the glass had suddenly given out beneath my feet, the only way having my hands against the wall was going to do me any good is if I’d been bitten by a radioactive spider shortly before. In the meantime five and six year old children were blithely running around on the thing, uncaring about the certain death that was directly under their feet. Had my vocal cords not totally seized up, I might have yelled at them. Instead all I managed to get out was a whispered, “Get me off here.”

* * *

And now, a quick view into how rumors get started.

Attending the convention was Anthony Stewart Head—“Giles” of Buffy fame. Now… on Saturday evening at 6 PM, Tony—as he’s called—was scheduled for a meet-and-greet at Planet Hollywood. Kathleen and I saw him shortly before he headed out. He was drinking bottled water. The thing ran about an hour. In the meantime, there was a convention dinner scheduled at 7 at a nearby restaurant. We ran into Tony again at about 7:45 at the restaurant, in the restaurant’s bar. He had arrived not too long before, and he was having a drink and chatting with fans. He was perfectly sober. A bunch of us then went to a party at a harbor-side club. I noticed that he tended to nurse drinks for quite some time, and wasn’t consuming much more than one an hour, which is what the human body can safely metabolize without ill effects. In short, he was obviously aware that he was in a very public venue and was taking all pains to do nothing to embarrass himself.

The next day we heard fans talking about having seen him at Planet Hollywood. “And boy, was he drunk,” one of them snickered. Which, of course, made a much better story than, “Tony Head was here, and boy, was he perfectly lucid and stone-cold sober.”

So either Tony Head went to the meet-and-greet sober… got totally hammered in the course of an hour or so, then frantically drank coffee in the intervening thirty minutes so that he could conduct himself in a perfectly temperate fashion for the rest of the evening… or else the fan was fulla crap. Occam’s razor. You decide.

But next time you hear about outrageous, inebriated behavior on the part of a convention guest, be aware that there are people out there who are much more interested in telling a vivid and entertaining account than in sticking to the facts.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)