MattBrady
07-20-2006, 09:48 AM
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/The_Monolith.jpg" align="right"><i>by James Lucas Jones</i>
Hooboy.
Comic-Con International 2006 started today and it promises to be the biggest, craziest comic related event in the history of human existence. I know there’s the annual Angouleme International Comics Festival in France that serves as a huge European celebration of our art form and I’m sure with the kind of cultural weight manga carries in Japan there have to be huge comics gatherings there as well. But, in all honesty, I can’t imagine anything else could possibly match the pure insanity of Comic-Con. But while “Comic-Con Madness” may have officially began when the doors opened for “Preview Night” a few hours ago, the mania at Oni Press started weeks, if not months ago.
The size and significance of the show really starts to weigh on us before summer even arrives. In May of 2005, I wrote up a game plan on a legal pad on my flight back from the E3 trade show in Los Angeles. Scrawled across the top in my awful printing was “Oh crap! An Eight-Weeks ‘Til San Diego To-Do List.” It proved to be such a complete and thorough list that it came out of the file cabinet again this year (no, I really don’t ever throw anything away…) to guide us through our prep for our biggest appearance of the year. It includes shopping lists, tasks, vendor information, and ideas for improvements. There is a lot to work out logistics wise and there are big huge important details that we have to deal with well before May.
Things like booth reservations and hotel accommodations are done so far in advance that they’re almost a distant memory by the time we start to look at things like plane flights, booth floor plans and fixtures, freight services, and registration for our attending creators. There are supplies to be ordered, books to get transferred from the offsite warehouse, and meetings with talent, distributors, retailers, and media to schedule. We have to figure out which of our upcoming projects we want to announce at the show, what we want to leak out right before the con, and what’s better left to get its own spotlight after the con craziness. And it’s not like the books stop while all this is happening—if anything, a lot of times the publishing side gets more hectic with creators scrambling to get books done in time to hit stores in early July so they have something to trade for beads when Nerdi Gras rolls around. Work days slowly start to stretch in mid-June and by the time July arrives, people are staying ‘til 8 or 9 or later to get everything done that needs to get done.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/Oni_SD_Pallet_Oni_Lobby.jpg" align="left">One of the last things we do before we head down for the show is carefully pack all the books, supplies, signage, and miscellanea onto a pallet and load it onto a freight truck about five days before we get on the plane. This year Randy, our kickass managing editor and logistics mastermind, had the shipment quoted out at 600 lbs. Well, Randy may be a planning mastermind but it turns out he’s a bit dodgy at guessing weights at random. By the time we finished “tetris-ing” all of the boxes into place, there’s no way that the thing weighed less than 1000 lbs., and I think it was probably closer to 1500 lbs. Once it was all wrapped in the black shrink wrap used to finish up the packing, it looked decidedly Monolith-ic. Luckily, the freight company is happy to accept pallets around eight feet tall, and the extra weight probably just meant we were in for a little higher of a freight bill and nothing more. The truck would still meet us down in San Diego on Tuesday and drop everything off at the convention center so Freeman, the convention contractor handling the massive job of coordinating the hundreds of thousands (millions?!) of pounds of exhibitor product, booth structures, and signage, could throw it on a forklift and deliver it straight to our booth. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen…
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/SLG_under_construction.jpg" align="right">Randy and I got on our plane early Tuesday morning and arrived in San Diego by 10 AM. We checked into our lovely room at the Omni Hotel across the street from the convention center and quickly grabbed a bite to eat before heading over to our booth to start setting up. Our pallet hadn’t made it to our booth by the time we arrived but we weren’t worried. Like I said, Freeman was working with hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions of freight and getting all that to its proper spot takes some doing. While Randy called on the truck, I went and checked in with our convention buddies over at the Slave Labor Graphics and Top Shelf booths. Top Shelf main man Chris Staros was like a man possessed, moving case after case of books while <b>Owly</b> author Andy Runton and <b>Surrogates</b> writer Robert Venditti helped him get the booth all squared away. Over at the Slave Labor area, Dan Vado and team were busy constructing one of the coolest indy comics booths I’ve ever seen. I could see the men were too busy to gab with the likes of me and returned to our empty booth up the aisle.
I arrived to find Randy still not getting any love from the trucking company and with nothing to do there but sit and play the waiting game (personally, I still prefer Hungry Hungry Hippos), I moseyed over to the Comic Relief booth to see if I could lend Rory Root’s team a hand in setting up the comic BOOK store’s impressive convention digs. Never one to turn down free labor, Shawn, Comic Relief field commander, quickly assigned me to one of the staff and soon I was sorting books for the Fiction section of the “store.” If you buy anything from Comic Relief that isn’t a superhero book and starts with the letter H through K, chances are I alphabetized it! Just as I started to crack into “G” boxes, Randy showed up at the Comic Relief booth in a mild panic and whisked me away. Sorry I couldn’t do more, Jessie!
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/Andy_Runton_Tuesday_Prep.jpg" align="left">As we speed walked back to our booth, Randy filled me in on the situation. It seems that the trucking company had lost all of the special instructions we’d included at some point during the trip down. Those instructions included details on how to schedule the truck’s arrival with Freeman, and without them, the truck driver tried to simply show up and drop them off—obviously, with the amount of stuff getting delivered to the convention center yesterday, that just wasn’t going to happen. With the setup hours for the day quickly disappearing, the trucking company offered to reattempt delivery on Wednesday. That sounded like a plan right up until they gave us the time frame. Since they weren’t a local company they couldn’t get us a delivery time any earlier than 10:30 AM and it was more likely that they wouldn’t return until noon. Even assuming the best case scenario, we knew we wouldn’t have time to setup the booth before Wednesday’s Preview Night.
Lucky for me Randy is a resourceful and quick thinking individual. After a couple phone calls and some mild pleading Randy had managed to get our hotel to okay us using their loading dock for the pallet delivery. We could have everything off the truck and at the hotel by 5:00 Tuesday, giving us at least some hope of getting setup in time for the doors opening on Wednesday. But how the heck were we going to get 50 cases of books from the hotel to the convention center? I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Omni is one of the most convenient convention hotels I’ve ever had the pleasure of staying at, but 50 cases of books is 50 cases of books. What I wasn’t counting on were three heroes waiting in the wings to swoop in and help keep Randy and I from making 25 trips back and forth from the hotel.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/James_hero--Joe_Nakamura_Jr.jpg" align="right">SLG publisher Dan Vado and shipping guru Joe Nakamura graciously lent us SLG’s monster handtruck for the rest of the afternoon, and dang if it didn’t totally save our behinds. The handtruck, which I now affectionately refer to as “Joe Jr.” cut would could have easily been a back breaking nightmare into little more than a pain in the butt. Yeah, it still took us six trips, and those six trips did a pretty good job on turning our legs and arms to Jell-o, but we had our books and that was way better than the alternative.
Exhausted and broken, Randy and I tried to go to bed early. I tried to tune out his snoring. He tried to tune out my grumpiness and I’m pretty sure the wake up call from the front desk came in earlier than either of us would have liked. But there was work to be done, what choice did we have?
We spent most of the morning Wednesday assembling our gridwall into the basic booth structure. Gridwall is heavy stuff that isn’t worth the shipping costs to transport via traditional methods, but isn’t exactly cheap enough to be disposable either. When we do shows like Chicago, we usually just abandon it and eat the cost but at San Diego we are fortunate enough to have a friend around to give us a hand. One of our pals and his crew store our pieces with theirs at their Anaheim office and generously bring it down to San Diego every year. It’s an unbelievably mensch thing for Bob to do and I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. Anyway, back to booth construction—we spent almost all of Wednesday morning bolting together gridwall and building the stands for our giant hand-made plastic Oni heads. Just as Randy and I both finished our transformation into balls of solid nerdy sweat, Joe, our publisher, and Doug, our editorial assistant, arrived at the scene along with writer Ian Shaughnessy and his partner, Martin. Martin and Ian both went above and beyond the call of duty, helping us shift boxes around, hang posters, and get the curtains on the gridwall. We were looking pretty good on the booth and it was getting late in the day so Randy suggested I walk over to the Pro-Registration counter and confirm that all of the creators that we’d arranged professional badges for were taken care of.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/Empty_Oni_booth.jpg" align="left">It’s a good thing he did, too, because in the chaos of the con vortex, something had happened to our list and virtually none of our people had been registered. I shouldn’t have worried though. The staff at Comic-Con are true professionals and while it took a couple hours to get it all resolved, their courteous behavior and fantastic attitude never wavered. I really don’t even want to imagine how difficult their job must be during this week. Think about it, no matter how well they do their duties, regardless of how hard they work 51 weeks a year, for the five days of Comic-Con they can always count on insanely long days filled with grumpy, impatient people mouthing off to them. With a con this big, mistakes are bound to happen and these people bend over backwards to be accommodating and helpful when they do. I just hope my little issue didn’t add too much stress to their day.
So, booth setup, creators all badged up. We were ready for the onslaught! The time for the doors opening kept changing. First it was 6, then it was 5:45, then it was 6 again. At 6:15 some gates still weren’t letting people in but by 6:30 the floor was packed. It was great to see so many fans and creators I get to see so rarely. Our booth got visits from Oni staff alumnus and current Oni writer Jamie S. Rich, the <b>Apocalipstix</b> creative team of Cameron Stewart and Ray Fawkes, <b>Gun Theory</b> writer Daniel Way, comic book rockstar-to-be Kelly Sue DeConnick, newly appointed <b>Shoujo Beat</b> editor Laurenn McCubbin, <b>Shenanigans</b> artist and Canadian puppeteer Mike Holmes, Ian, <b>Casanova</b> writer Matt Fraction, Jen Van Meter, Jeremy Haun, well connected problem solver Charlie Chu, and the manliest Wonder Woman ever to don a tiara, Greg Rucka. The fans were great, too, though many expressed frustration that we didn’t release our signing schedule ahead of time. Sorry, folks, that one was all me. Sometimes things just fall through the cracks and while I know it’s late in the game, you can get download it right now from right here (http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/oni_cci_2006_signing_sched.pdf).
So far Comic-Con International 2006 is off to a great start for everybody here at Oni, and we owe that in large part to our friends and fans who are truly some of the best people in the world. I can’t wait for tomorrow…
James Lucas Jones
Editor in Chief
Oni Press
<blockquote><I>Newsarama's Comic-Con International '06 Coverage is brought to you by Miramax Films’ <b>RENAISSANCE</b>. In theaters this fall.</i></blockquote><center><a href="http://www.renaissance-movie.com" target=blank><img src=http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/sponsor/300x250_b.jpg border=0></a></center>
Hooboy.
Comic-Con International 2006 started today and it promises to be the biggest, craziest comic related event in the history of human existence. I know there’s the annual Angouleme International Comics Festival in France that serves as a huge European celebration of our art form and I’m sure with the kind of cultural weight manga carries in Japan there have to be huge comics gatherings there as well. But, in all honesty, I can’t imagine anything else could possibly match the pure insanity of Comic-Con. But while “Comic-Con Madness” may have officially began when the doors opened for “Preview Night” a few hours ago, the mania at Oni Press started weeks, if not months ago.
The size and significance of the show really starts to weigh on us before summer even arrives. In May of 2005, I wrote up a game plan on a legal pad on my flight back from the E3 trade show in Los Angeles. Scrawled across the top in my awful printing was “Oh crap! An Eight-Weeks ‘Til San Diego To-Do List.” It proved to be such a complete and thorough list that it came out of the file cabinet again this year (no, I really don’t ever throw anything away…) to guide us through our prep for our biggest appearance of the year. It includes shopping lists, tasks, vendor information, and ideas for improvements. There is a lot to work out logistics wise and there are big huge important details that we have to deal with well before May.
Things like booth reservations and hotel accommodations are done so far in advance that they’re almost a distant memory by the time we start to look at things like plane flights, booth floor plans and fixtures, freight services, and registration for our attending creators. There are supplies to be ordered, books to get transferred from the offsite warehouse, and meetings with talent, distributors, retailers, and media to schedule. We have to figure out which of our upcoming projects we want to announce at the show, what we want to leak out right before the con, and what’s better left to get its own spotlight after the con craziness. And it’s not like the books stop while all this is happening—if anything, a lot of times the publishing side gets more hectic with creators scrambling to get books done in time to hit stores in early July so they have something to trade for beads when Nerdi Gras rolls around. Work days slowly start to stretch in mid-June and by the time July arrives, people are staying ‘til 8 or 9 or later to get everything done that needs to get done.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/Oni_SD_Pallet_Oni_Lobby.jpg" align="left">One of the last things we do before we head down for the show is carefully pack all the books, supplies, signage, and miscellanea onto a pallet and load it onto a freight truck about five days before we get on the plane. This year Randy, our kickass managing editor and logistics mastermind, had the shipment quoted out at 600 lbs. Well, Randy may be a planning mastermind but it turns out he’s a bit dodgy at guessing weights at random. By the time we finished “tetris-ing” all of the boxes into place, there’s no way that the thing weighed less than 1000 lbs., and I think it was probably closer to 1500 lbs. Once it was all wrapped in the black shrink wrap used to finish up the packing, it looked decidedly Monolith-ic. Luckily, the freight company is happy to accept pallets around eight feet tall, and the extra weight probably just meant we were in for a little higher of a freight bill and nothing more. The truck would still meet us down in San Diego on Tuesday and drop everything off at the convention center so Freeman, the convention contractor handling the massive job of coordinating the hundreds of thousands (millions?!) of pounds of exhibitor product, booth structures, and signage, could throw it on a forklift and deliver it straight to our booth. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen…
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/SLG_under_construction.jpg" align="right">Randy and I got on our plane early Tuesday morning and arrived in San Diego by 10 AM. We checked into our lovely room at the Omni Hotel across the street from the convention center and quickly grabbed a bite to eat before heading over to our booth to start setting up. Our pallet hadn’t made it to our booth by the time we arrived but we weren’t worried. Like I said, Freeman was working with hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions of freight and getting all that to its proper spot takes some doing. While Randy called on the truck, I went and checked in with our convention buddies over at the Slave Labor Graphics and Top Shelf booths. Top Shelf main man Chris Staros was like a man possessed, moving case after case of books while <b>Owly</b> author Andy Runton and <b>Surrogates</b> writer Robert Venditti helped him get the booth all squared away. Over at the Slave Labor area, Dan Vado and team were busy constructing one of the coolest indy comics booths I’ve ever seen. I could see the men were too busy to gab with the likes of me and returned to our empty booth up the aisle.
I arrived to find Randy still not getting any love from the trucking company and with nothing to do there but sit and play the waiting game (personally, I still prefer Hungry Hungry Hippos), I moseyed over to the Comic Relief booth to see if I could lend Rory Root’s team a hand in setting up the comic BOOK store’s impressive convention digs. Never one to turn down free labor, Shawn, Comic Relief field commander, quickly assigned me to one of the staff and soon I was sorting books for the Fiction section of the “store.” If you buy anything from Comic Relief that isn’t a superhero book and starts with the letter H through K, chances are I alphabetized it! Just as I started to crack into “G” boxes, Randy showed up at the Comic Relief booth in a mild panic and whisked me away. Sorry I couldn’t do more, Jessie!
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/Andy_Runton_Tuesday_Prep.jpg" align="left">As we speed walked back to our booth, Randy filled me in on the situation. It seems that the trucking company had lost all of the special instructions we’d included at some point during the trip down. Those instructions included details on how to schedule the truck’s arrival with Freeman, and without them, the truck driver tried to simply show up and drop them off—obviously, with the amount of stuff getting delivered to the convention center yesterday, that just wasn’t going to happen. With the setup hours for the day quickly disappearing, the trucking company offered to reattempt delivery on Wednesday. That sounded like a plan right up until they gave us the time frame. Since they weren’t a local company they couldn’t get us a delivery time any earlier than 10:30 AM and it was more likely that they wouldn’t return until noon. Even assuming the best case scenario, we knew we wouldn’t have time to setup the booth before Wednesday’s Preview Night.
Lucky for me Randy is a resourceful and quick thinking individual. After a couple phone calls and some mild pleading Randy had managed to get our hotel to okay us using their loading dock for the pallet delivery. We could have everything off the truck and at the hotel by 5:00 Tuesday, giving us at least some hope of getting setup in time for the doors opening on Wednesday. But how the heck were we going to get 50 cases of books from the hotel to the convention center? I mean, don’t get me wrong, the Omni is one of the most convenient convention hotels I’ve ever had the pleasure of staying at, but 50 cases of books is 50 cases of books. What I wasn’t counting on were three heroes waiting in the wings to swoop in and help keep Randy and I from making 25 trips back and forth from the hotel.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/James_hero--Joe_Nakamura_Jr.jpg" align="right">SLG publisher Dan Vado and shipping guru Joe Nakamura graciously lent us SLG’s monster handtruck for the rest of the afternoon, and dang if it didn’t totally save our behinds. The handtruck, which I now affectionately refer to as “Joe Jr.” cut would could have easily been a back breaking nightmare into little more than a pain in the butt. Yeah, it still took us six trips, and those six trips did a pretty good job on turning our legs and arms to Jell-o, but we had our books and that was way better than the alternative.
Exhausted and broken, Randy and I tried to go to bed early. I tried to tune out his snoring. He tried to tune out my grumpiness and I’m pretty sure the wake up call from the front desk came in earlier than either of us would have liked. But there was work to be done, what choice did we have?
We spent most of the morning Wednesday assembling our gridwall into the basic booth structure. Gridwall is heavy stuff that isn’t worth the shipping costs to transport via traditional methods, but isn’t exactly cheap enough to be disposable either. When we do shows like Chicago, we usually just abandon it and eat the cost but at San Diego we are fortunate enough to have a friend around to give us a hand. One of our pals and his crew store our pieces with theirs at their Anaheim office and generously bring it down to San Diego every year. It’s an unbelievably mensch thing for Bob to do and I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. Anyway, back to booth construction—we spent almost all of Wednesday morning bolting together gridwall and building the stands for our giant hand-made plastic Oni heads. Just as Randy and I both finished our transformation into balls of solid nerdy sweat, Joe, our publisher, and Doug, our editorial assistant, arrived at the scene along with writer Ian Shaughnessy and his partner, Martin. Martin and Ian both went above and beyond the call of duty, helping us shift boxes around, hang posters, and get the curtains on the gridwall. We were looking pretty good on the booth and it was getting late in the day so Randy suggested I walk over to the Pro-Registration counter and confirm that all of the creators that we’d arranged professional badges for were taken care of.
<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/Empty_Oni_booth.jpg" align="left">It’s a good thing he did, too, because in the chaos of the con vortex, something had happened to our list and virtually none of our people had been registered. I shouldn’t have worried though. The staff at Comic-Con are true professionals and while it took a couple hours to get it all resolved, their courteous behavior and fantastic attitude never wavered. I really don’t even want to imagine how difficult their job must be during this week. Think about it, no matter how well they do their duties, regardless of how hard they work 51 weeks a year, for the five days of Comic-Con they can always count on insanely long days filled with grumpy, impatient people mouthing off to them. With a con this big, mistakes are bound to happen and these people bend over backwards to be accommodating and helpful when they do. I just hope my little issue didn’t add too much stress to their day.
So, booth setup, creators all badged up. We were ready for the onslaught! The time for the doors opening kept changing. First it was 6, then it was 5:45, then it was 6 again. At 6:15 some gates still weren’t letting people in but by 6:30 the floor was packed. It was great to see so many fans and creators I get to see so rarely. Our booth got visits from Oni staff alumnus and current Oni writer Jamie S. Rich, the <b>Apocalipstix</b> creative team of Cameron Stewart and Ray Fawkes, <b>Gun Theory</b> writer Daniel Way, comic book rockstar-to-be Kelly Sue DeConnick, newly appointed <b>Shoujo Beat</b> editor Laurenn McCubbin, <b>Shenanigans</b> artist and Canadian puppeteer Mike Holmes, Ian, <b>Casanova</b> writer Matt Fraction, Jen Van Meter, Jeremy Haun, well connected problem solver Charlie Chu, and the manliest Wonder Woman ever to don a tiara, Greg Rucka. The fans were great, too, though many expressed frustration that we didn’t release our signing schedule ahead of time. Sorry, folks, that one was all me. Sometimes things just fall through the cracks and while I know it’s late in the game, you can get download it right now from right here (http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/Oni/JLJ/01/oni_cci_2006_signing_sched.pdf).
So far Comic-Con International 2006 is off to a great start for everybody here at Oni, and we owe that in large part to our friends and fans who are truly some of the best people in the world. I can’t wait for tomorrow…
James Lucas Jones
Editor in Chief
Oni Press
<blockquote><I>Newsarama's Comic-Con International '06 Coverage is brought to you by Miramax Films’ <b>RENAISSANCE</b>. In theaters this fall.</i></blockquote><center><a href="http://www.renaissance-movie.com" target=blank><img src=http://www.newsarama.com/SDCC06/sponsor/300x250_b.jpg border=0></a></center>