Walls and Bridges:
by Joel Meadows

03-03-06

I got back from New York on Wednesday 1st March. I have had an association with the city going back to when I was about seven years old. We had a family friend who was a jeweller. He owned a building on West 48th Street and sadly is no longer with us but we would go and visit him every year when I was a kid. So the long and the short of it is that I’ve been to New York more than a dozen times. When the show was announced, it threw up a number of possible problems: last year, I made Wonder Con in San Francisco my first show of the year. It had lots of film guests and came across as San Diego without the insanity of 100,000 people taking over an enclosed space for five days. Unfortunately, this year, the New York Comic Con clashed with Wonder Con (alright it was two weekends apart but when you’re travelling from over here, that’s pretty close). Secondly, from my trips as someone in short trousers, I remember New York being horribly bitter and unpleasant in February. But the guest line-up was impressive enough to sway me so I put down my money and went with three friends. I’m not going to bore you with the excruciating minutiae of everything we did during the show and after it. You’ve probably read elsewhere how the organisers massively underestimated its attendance, leaving a couple of thousand people stranded outside for at least a couple of hours. Luckily I wasn’t one of those people. The feel of the show was upbeat with a real emphasis on comics rather than film with a side helping of comics (see San Diego Comic Con). There was enough of a presence from the major publishers to make it worth my while. Highlights of the trip for me were: interviewing Frank Miller and drinking porter with him in a pub in Midtown on Monday for three hours for the Studio Space book, getting time to interview Jim Lee at the show on Sunday, also for Studio Space and getting to do some touristy stuff on Tuesday, like going up the Empire State Building (bloody freezing but indescribable views), walking through Central Park and spending an hour at the Natural History Museum, which was also very impressive indeed. I also managed to fit in some time to show a proposal I’ve been working on with my friend, artist David Morris, to a number of people including Jonathan Vankin at Vertigo, Mark Chiarello at DC and Mike Oeming, It was also a pleasure to catch up with Bill Baker and his friend David Michael Beck and my friends Andy and Susie, who came from LA. Before this becomes too much of an Oscars thank you speech, I’m going to sum it up in one sentence for you: it was a great week, but too bloody cold, marred by some personal stuff. I’ve already pencilled in the dates for next year.