COMIC CONS

Stepping Stones to Metronomes

Oct 02, 2024

Once the cons were like stepping-stones.

They were the firm-footing that anchored me to my medium, which otherwise flowed in blurs of time, year to year, in the changing space that lay behind my drawing board; the monitor of my computer.

Cons are different now. Back then we fancied ourselves street poets, fashionistas, radicals, and rockstars. We drank, smoked and caroused until a blurry sun rose again. We had dreams of artistry and decadence. We were newly minted in the afterglow of revolution, certain that at last our stories mattered. We were the shocking new, the foot soldiers of consequence that would scrawl indelible legacies in paint and ink – great works, monumental works, works that could change everything.

It mattered. We mattered.

First nervous meetings with legends that would eventually mellow into old friendships, swell, dreamlike, in memories festooned with wreaths of smoke and distorted through a wash of alcoholic amber lenses.

Falling and failing words that nevertheless flow endlessly, because there is never enough time – it will all soon be over, and there is so much to say...

I loved the cons back then. They were messy and rude, and we were an ill-disciplined rabble, but they were effervescent with nascent excitement. Great icons of the industry traversed the vast Atlantic ocean from another world – a bigger, more heroic place that only existed for us Brits on the TV – and deigned to give us a few spare moments of their precious time.

Eisner came, like a statesman.

Michael Kaluta regaled us with tales of New York and The Studio.

The unimpressive green room at UKCAC was none-the-less a hub of clamoring, half-voiced dreams when Karen Berger came to London for the first time. We knew well enough, us beginners, who had her eye. We knew our place behind those whose names were household – the true veterans of 2000ad, that great shop-window for talent, the test-bed of almost everything important that was to come, or had already come, from our little, influential island.

We drank till the morning light briefly turned the dusty grey London concrete to gold. We slept fitfully in the packed all-night film show theatre.

I brought Alan Moore a pint of Guinness, and Glenn Fabry a pint of white wine. I bummed smokes off Jamie Hewlett, and found myself wandering the empty early-morning streets with David Lloyd and Barry Kitson in search of more beer.

The wake of such cons was bleak and depressing. Week-long hangovers, topped up with half-hearted semi-reprisals in dim London pubs, dulled the will to create. Life was never quite as good, day to day, as it was at those shows. We would return to the normalcy of our unremarkable existences, that other place where nobody knew or cared who we were or what we did. The z-list fame of the youthful creator. We imagined heroic lives on other continents, and dreamed of what our own great books might be, planned our heirs to The Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Electra Assassin, and all that was good and proper and radical and brilliant in comics.

Social media has changed many things, some good and some bad. For me, though, knowing too much of my peers lives online has taken away much of that familial excitement - the genuine joy I felt on seeing a fellow creator I had not seen for a year, or not since that show in Spain two years earlier, or in Belgium the summer before. We don’t trip over a torrent of words as we strive to catch up, fill in gaps and share work stories. We are all older, more jaded. Somewhat battle-worn.

But we are the survivors, hidden amongst all the new faces. We’re still here, plying our trade. Some of us still reach for greatness, dream of producing that masterwork that never quite materialized, and remained just out of sight – but only a step away.

The cons are no longer stepping-stones, they are the great metronomes of the industry, marking time and driving us forward. They are the heartbeat, the strong and telling rhythm of it. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, they are the industry observing itself.