Thanks for everyone who came by our booth at Comic-Con this weekend. We enjoyed meeting you. It was a great weekend, despite the fact we didn’t take home a coveted Eisner. As our buddy Brian Posehn said in his hilarious introduction to our award for best digital comic: Screw just being nominated. It’s about winning. Actually, it was an honor just to have been nominated. I was humbled to have been up there with the industry legends. This is my first work of published fiction, let alone my first comic. So I was psyched to be there (though we could have used more drink tickets).

The rest of the convention was fascinating for me. I checked out a panel about non-fiction graphic novels which included a guy who wrote a memoir about being a chronic masterbator sitting next to a woman who wrote one about escaping the Nazis in Hungary as a young girl. The panel organizers didn’t seem to see anything strange with having them sit right next to each other. Such is the Con, I guess. You gotta love it.
I never got the memo that Ray Bradbury, one of my literary heroes, has some rather surprising opinions about politics. So it was with a great sense of excitement that I headed to the Ray Bradbury panel.

Fahrenheit 451 was one of my favorite books as a kid. I loved its straight-forward style and eerily prescient warnings about creeping fascism and the rise of idiot pop culture. In many ways, it was an inspiration to the near-future dystopia in Shooting War. Interestingly, I always thought it was more about the dumbing down of our culture than about censorship, as Bradbury himself recently caused a stir by pointing out. Fahrenheit 451 predicted the TV show Cops as much as it predicted soap operas and celebrity worship, which existed, to a much lesser extent, when Bradbury penned the book in 1953. But I also thought it had even more to say about the creeping surveillance society that had begun during the Cold War.

Saturday’s panel included Bradbury’s more than slightly sycophantic biographer Sam Weller and his old friend Ray Harryhausen. The wheelchair-bound Bradbury received a standing ovation when he entered the room packed w/ at least 1,000 sci-fi fan boys and girls. He came off as a lovable old coot. As George Clayton Johnson, creator of Logan’s Run, told LA Weekly, “Ray has always been 14 going on 15.” He told heartwarming anecdotes about kissing Katherine Hepburn and another about meeting Walt Disney at a department store. He pretty much avoided talking about anything of substance about his work. But Weller mentioned that Bradbury had recently met with President Bush. So when the time came for audience questions, I happened to be sitting right next to the mic stand. I stood up and got on line. When my turn came I asked the following question:

“Fahrenheit 451 was about censorship and it was about the dumbing down of our culture, as you just said. It was also about the surveillance culture that was emerging at the time. You recently met with President Bush. Did you say anything to him about the surveillance culture that his regime has largely been responsible for, and if you didn’t, is there something you would have wanted to say?”

Bradbury responded bluntly, “We have no surveillance culture in this country.” What we do have, he went on to say, is people who want to kill us. America, he said, defeated the dictatorships of the Nazis and the Japanese, and we’re in a similar struggle today. “America brings democracy wherever we go,” he added.

He said more. But by that time, I was walking away shaking my head. Sean Hannity couldn’t have said it better.
Here’s some pics of me and Dan and some Comic-Con freaks from the weekend to cheer you up.

posted Tuesday, July 31st, 2007   leave a comment.