JOHN
San Diego, CA 1998
“You have to come home. Right away. She’s in the hospital and…you have to come home”.
I hang up my cell phone, one of those brand new flip ones, stare out the window of my hotel room…and I know everything in my life has just changed.
Just before my flip phone rang, I was at the pinnacle. I’m under contract with DC Comics, working in the Bat office (and others). I’m told that I’m being ‘groomed’, ( not sure if the editorial staff means for my career in comics or my hair style(!)), and, I’m writing a novel. My first novel. A sci fi novel that was originally pitched to DC Comics (at their request) and passed on.
I’m in beautiful San Diego for comic con. It’s 1998, and I’m at the top of my life. I LOVE attending SDCC, I try to do it every year. This is a time before Hollywood descended upon the con, superhero movies are not really quite a thing yet, and the show is all about comics and their creators.
I usually plan to be in San Diego for ten days. Four days for the show and the rest…La Jolla, Black’s Beach (I kept my clothes mostly on. Mostly), The Coronado Hotel, and you get the idea.
The con is also quite lucrative for me as I am inking Jim Balent on Catwoman, among other books, and Jim doesn’t sell his original art. So I have every art dealer offering me top dollar for those cat pages! MEOW!!!!
But, I’m writing a novel. It’s called LIFEDEATH and it’s a story about how, in the future, mankind discovers the afterlife is an ancient computer program, designed to upload our consciousness when we die…and now that program is crashing. I’m a HUGE X-Files fan so, of course, I have my ‘Scully’ and ‘Mulder’ in the form of Martian military Deke Renner and Earth Meta scientist Dr. Meredith Ross, who get thrown together on Mars Colony Six for the adventure.
I’m 250 pages into the first draft of the novel. I’m up every morning early to get in those three or four quality hours of writing before I have to jump into inking pages for DC. At times, I almost have to pinch myself because I can’t quite believe that, after years of struggling to break into comics (my childhood dream) that …I made it. This is my life. I get to write a novel and work for DC, Marvel, Milestone and others doing what I love. It is almost too good to be true.
San Diego is approaching. I almost don’t want to go as I am SO into the writing of the novel. I don’t really want the break in my flow. But, as I said, I LOVE San Diego and the con. Love it. The show affirms everything I love about being in the business.
So I go. Ten days. Ten days and I’ll be back to my book, back to LIFEDEATH and Deke Renner and Meredith Ross.
And then I get the phone call and once I hang up the call…everything has changed.
A sick parent is no joke. Becoming a caretaker for that sick parent…takes everything a human being has. I’m an only child and, well, there wasn’t really anyone around but me. The care of my parent became the focus of my whole life.
I stopped writing. Not for a little while, but more like twenty years. I had a teacher once who used to say, “There are no excuses, but, sometimes, there are reasons”. I won’t bore you with all the traumatic details as we ALL have our crosses to bear. I will say that I would NOT trade a single moment of the years I spent as a caretaker. I have memories and moments that I will cherish all the days of my life.
However, when it was all over, and I grieved and decided to try to resume the life I had before that phone call, I knew that I missed writing. I missed my story.
I haven’t been back to SDCC since that fateful phone call. But I plan to. This year…well, this year, I wanted to launch LIFEDEATH as a comic series the same week as the con. Maybe it’s silly and sentimental, but it has great significance for me. I’m starting all over with the story I loved and put aside for so long, and I’m doing this series now with someone who has become as family to me, my friend and business partner, Jeremy Atkins. For me, it’s full circle.
I’m not physically in San Diego this year, but, because of the launch of LIFEDEATH, as far as I‘m concerned, I’m attending San Diego Comic Con for the first time in a long while. And, this Thanksgiving, I am eternally grateful that I have this second chance to tell my story.
But next year…next year, during SDCC, I plan to take that long walk through the mountain pass to Black’s Beach…
JEREMY
From 30,000 feet over the west coast…
My first Comic-Con as a professional was in 2004, and I couldn’t have been more excited. I was sharing a room with a coworker I barely knew at the time, but would later stand by my side on my wedding day. This is only one of the ways that this experience would come to define my life and my career, as my personal and professional worlds would eventually become one and the same. I was running the retail portion of the Dark Horse booth, and I don’t know that I can recall a time in my life that I had ever worked that hard over the course of the week.
One moment that sticks out, and one that I informed Mike Richardson of years later to his disappointment, was during the set up for a signing tied to an upcoming film (what it was and who was involved is not important, names withheld for good reason), and a producer came up to me, frantically looking for the comics that were to be signed. I had already been handling this with no problems for each and every signing that week and for everyone from Mike Mignola to Frank Miller. This just so happened to be a particularly busy time in the Dark Horse store and we were short staffed while my overworked coworkers were off to get a well-deserved and needed lunch of, you know, a pretzel. After telling this producer that I would have the comics right over, he came back frustrated and said “Look, I’m a somebody here, and you? You’re a nobody. And when a somebody asks you for something, you take care of it right away.” I handed him the box of books and walked off with no time to let the feeling of defeat sink in, instead headed back to the register.
The following year was my first year as the company’s publicist, and when the doors opened on preview night, I was besieged by people looking for me. And yet, I still carried with me the feeling of being scolded and dismissed the year before, because that feeling I had shrugged off and buried was bound to resurface at some point. In the years since then, I have stood on stage in Hall H and Ballroom 20 introducing or moderating panels with some of the biggest “somebodies” in the worlds of film, music and of course comics, and never lost sight of the privilege I have experienced in my life and career to having that kind of access.
Admittedly, as a marketer, the lead up to the show every year is always one of the most stressful times you can experience in this business. However, when you step in from Harbor Drive, the feeling is akin to the first day of summer camp as a returning counselor, with a week of hugs to exchange, drinks to share, and lots and lots of hard work.
San Diego Comic Con will always be the most important week of the year for comics, whether your career is just getting started, or has reached its apex. If you’re lugging around a portfolio, a pitch packet you meticulously put together, or are just a fan in furry ears carrying around that backpack too full of god-knows-what, take the chance of saying hello to that person standing in the booth of your favorite publisher. After all, they may have been just like you once, and if they’re not as friendly as you hope, they are likely just having a bad day caught up in the stress of it all. Don’t let it discourage you.
Enjoy it and never lose sight of the fact that you can be anyone you want to be there, and you never know who you will come back as the following year.
That, my friends, is the spirit of what we are trying to achieve with this very newsletter you are reading week after week. We’re glad to have you, and hope to see you on the show floor this weekend or someday soon. Please come say hello.