Here’s the final installment of my look back—almost 15 years!—at the Comic-Con publications I edited and designed. These had a print-run of 250,000 copies and were distributed to both the Comic-Con mailing list and to comic shops in the U.S. via Diamond Comics Distributors … all for the amazing price of zero, zilch, nothing; in other words, they were FREE! This time we look at the final two publications I did, Comic-Con Annual #1 (2011) and #2 (2012).
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By the time 2010 ended, Comic-Con had made the decision to put pretty much all their eggs in the internet basket. This meant that the mail-out publication side of my job was winding down. We did two more magazines, and they let me go out with a semi-bang. I pitched a once-a-year publication called Comic-Con Annual, which was larger than the usual Comic-Con Magazine size, at least page count-wise (64 pages for #1 and a genuine “80-Page Giant” for #2), and square-bound, like all my favorite comic book annuals when I was a kid. (And by the way … more on those in just a few short weeks in my “Tales From My Spinner Rack” feature!)
Comic-Con Annual #1 debuted in the first quarter of 2011, just in time for WonderCon that year. This issue included some new features, including a new upfront section called “Splash Page” (see below for an example from issue #2, featuring the most recent Comic-Con Icon Award winner, voice actor June Foray, with an appreciation by Mark Evanier). This section covered some of the pertinent news from Comic-Con’s events, including WonderCon and APE, and a final page called “The Moment,” which for 2010 was the moment shojo manga creator Moto Hagio met Ray Bradbury at Comic-Con. Hagio had requested to meet him, if possible; as it turned out this was his final appearance at the event he loved and had visited, on and off, since the very first con in 1970. Hagio had produced a manga adaptation of Bradbury’s short story, “R Is for Rocket,” and was a huge fan. She gave Bradbury a gift—a autographed copy of her book, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories—and it was just one of those “only at Comic-Con” moments … the kind that inspired this special last page. And for whatever reason, I was just into that evocative Hall H moment from The Expendables panel (middle page above); it seemed like the perfect image for the contents page and publication info.
But Robert Kirkman was our “cover boy” (no skunks were harmed in the making of this cover) for this first-ever Comic-Con Annual. He was riding high with The Walking Dead TV series on AMC, based on his comic book series from Image/Skybound. It had just debuted and I was able to conduct a long interview with him, which was the cover story for this issue. Kirkman was a special guest at WonderCon and it was a year when the press people at Comic-Con got copies of the Annual placed in free newspaper and magazine machines all over downtown San Francisco. I remember talking to Kirkman at the show and he remarked how weird it was to be walking over to Moscone Center from his hotel and seeing his face staring back at him every few blocks.
Comic-Con Annual afforded me a few more pages to stretch out and do some special things. We did three articles that tied into special events and anniversaries we had planned for Comic-Con 2011, including the 50th anniversary of the birth of comics fandom. I relied on my friend Bill Schelly, THE expert on fandom, to do a short article. Comic-Con pulled out all the stops for this event, inviting numerous guests that were instrumental in the beginning years, including Roy Thomas, Maggie Thompson, Richard and Pat Lupoff, and Richard Kyle, and threw a Saturday night party for everyone involved. Schelly went on to write the definitive book on MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman, and a biography on James Warren, another comics giant. Schelly died in 2019 and I still miss working with him; the final major article he worked on was for me: A history of Comic-Con for the 2019 Souvenir Book celebrating the 50th anniversary of Comic-Con. This first annual also included articles on the 50th anniversary of the Fantastic Four and the 25th anniversary of “1986: The Year Comics Grew Up” (with the publication of Watchmen, Maus, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns).
Photos on photo album pages © 2023 SDCC.
Having the “extra real estate” of more pages also allowed me to stretch out the photo recap for the previous year’s (2010) Comic-Con. Instead of doing specific sections (Comics, Movies & TV, Masquerade, etc.) like I did in Comic-Con Magazine, I did one big photo album in both issues, utilizing a mix of photos on each page from all of the many facets of the event. I think this format was actually more successful, since it forced people to look at all the photos and not just the ones of the Twilight cast. (TWILIGHT RUINED COMIC-CON!!! … or so some of the protest signs said at the time.) I’d use this format again for Comic-Con Annual #2 in 2012 (see below).
The cover feature for Comic-Con Annual #2, the final mailed magazine, was the movie reboot of Spider-Man from Sony Pictures, starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. They had both appeared at Comic-Con 2011 and were scheduled to appear at WonderCon 2012 (that event’s final show in San Francisco) and I got permission from Sony to interview both director Marc Webb and—be still my beating heart—Emma Stone. I remember talking to Stone for about 20 minutes or so right before Christmas 2011 and she was funny, honest, and engaging, even if we were “chaperoned” by a publicist who kept counting down the minutes left before Emma had to go fry bigger fish, publicity-wise.
As it turned out, this publication—with the Webb and Stone interviews—was pretty much the first anyone read about the new Spidey reboot and some much bigger Hollywood websites started reporting on the mag once it started to hit mailboxes and comic shops. I got to meet Emma at WonderCon and she signed a copy of Comic-Con Annual #2 for me (I also have a copy of Annual #1 signed by Robert Kirkman), and I shall treasure it always, even though I’m sure she had no friggin’’ idea who the hell I was.
The Spider-Man movie reboot coincided with the 50th anniversary of the creation of Spider-Man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, along with the other superheroes who ushered in the Marvel Age of Comics in 1962. This issue featured three articles, including one on Steve Ditko by Blake Bell, and one on the legacy of John Romita and his son, John Romita Jr., the other most famous Spidey artists. I contributed an article on Stan the Man himself, which also touched on what he brought to the Marvel table and the creation of Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor, and Iron Man. In actuality, I wrote a lot of articles for these publications; I just seldom gave myself a written credit. Most of the upfront material was written by me, I conducted all of the interviews, and wrote all the promotional copy for the shows (with the exception of the special guest bios, which were provided by the guests themselves). Comic-Con Annual #2 also featured articles on the 75th anniversary of Prince Valiant and the 40th anniversary of Love and Rockets.
Photos on photo album pages © 2023 SDCC.
And then there was one last photo album, this time recapping Comic-Con 2011, and that was it: Five years of fairly intensive work for me, planning, writing, designing and editing these mags (a dozen in total), and—for the most part—enjoying every minute of it, or maybe I should say every page. I kind of hate the fact that this stuff was so ephemeral … printed, mailed, and gone. I kept my copies all these years; maybe some other people did, too. Like I said in the very first Countdown to Comic-Con a few weeks back, when you look at them today you see a kind of time capsule view of what was hot at the time. It’s been fun looking back at these publications (for me, at least!) and giving them another admittedly small moment in the sun. I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down my own personal memory lane, too.
If you’re lucky enough to be going to Comic-Con this week, I hope you have a wonderful time. And if you’re there on Friday, July 21, come see my panel, “Tales From My Spinner Rack LIVE!”, at 2:00 PM in Room 29AB, featuring my nostalgic look back on “Jimmy and Lois: Still Crazy After All These Years!”
@innocent-bystander.com 
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