New York Comic Con

For all intents and purposes, NYCC is now my big hometown show. I still didn’t go, despite the fact that between getting a press pass and having a monthly Long Island Rail Road ticket, it would have cost me basically nothing to do so, and despite the fact that nearly all of my friends were there. There are a few reasons for this, including a major one involving the health of a family member (the good health, fortunately) that has nothing to do with the show itself. But it’s also for the reason I talk about in this comment thread discussion with The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald: There wasn’t a thriving alternative/art/literary/underground comics presence.

Heidi points out that Pantheon and First Second and Top Shelf all had booths at the show, which is true, and which is good. I like tons of Pantheon and Top Shelf books and usually one book per First Second slate. But when I say “thriving presence” I don’t mean “are the individual altcomix-y publishers that are there awesome or not,” I mean “Does the altcomix-y section of the show do well, attract attention, get press, draw attendees and creators, put up a formidable programming slate.” In that light, I don’t think that segment of this show is thriving vs. the rest of the show, no. For example, did Pantheon have X’ed Out, its eagerly anticipated, apparently awesome new book from titanic talent Charles Burns, available at the show? If so, awesome, but did you read word one about it in any show coverage? I sure didn’t. That little group of publishers Heidi speaks of–which by the way is mostly the alt-ish wings of gigantic NY publishing houses, not the alternative comics press per se–doesn’t reach the critical mass that it does at San Diego, even San Diego circa 2010, let alone TCAF/MoCCA/SPX/APE/BCGF/etc. I know there are any number of reasons why NYCC lacks the altcomix component that even San Diego has been able to preserve. I know that not all of it rests at the feet of NYCC’s organizers at Reed. I still think it’s a dealbreaker.

The reason I popped into the comments at Heidi’s place to talk about this was because she characterized the show as “a complete success from where we stand,” aside from crowd-related problems. On a meta level I just don’t feel comfortable using “complete success” as a rubric–I don’t think complete success is possible, for one thing, unless of course we’re talking about Acme Novelty Library #20. It was Heidi’s use of those words themselves that struck me at least as much as what it connoted in terms of what she thinks of NYCC and the mission of big shows like it. But beyond that I will say that I, personally, don’t have much interest in going to a big giant show with out much altcomix presence on the floor or in the programming schedule, and I think the proliferation of such shows is…get ready…Bad For Comics. I really do think that the best altcomix are more vital to the industry than the best superhero or media-tie-in comics, and I obviously say that as someone with a great deal more affection and admiration for contemporary superhero comics than most people. Thus Heidi’s counterexamples, which challenge me on whether I’d characterize a show like TCAF as something other than a complete success because Jose-Luis Garcia Lopez or Grant Morrison weren’t there, don’t really cut much ice with me. Like I said, I don’t count anything as a complete success, but semantics aside I think a show with a major altcomix presence but not much in the way of front-of-Previews stuff is more successful in all the ways that matter to me than the other way around.

Moreover I think NYCC benefits from a really low bar to clear in terms of press assessments of its success, complete or otherwise, for several reasons. For one thing, its nearest competitor is Wizard’s late-model shows, and NYCC looks like something curated by Dan Nadel by comparison. I know we can quibble as to whether Reed’s creation of a new Chicago con was the first shot fired. But it seems to me that the Wizard-initiated full-scale stage of the Con War, which started when Wizard scheduled its Anaheim show directly against Reed’s C2E2 and really exploded when the Shamus Brothers announced they were putting their New York City-based Big Apple show on the same weekend as Reed’s NYC show, was more than just a disaster for Wizard–in terms of how lightly attended and all but ignored Wizard’s shows have turned out to be, in terms of how they’ve been forced to back down from their most direct challenges to Reed’s dominance, and in terms of giving prominent industry figures the cover they needed to totally walk away from Wizard after all these years. No, it was also a huge and direct boon to Reed. In the public eye it provided Reed a convenient heel for their babyface, but it also made the multimedia component of Reed’s shows look comparatively classy and the comics portion look comparatively prominent.

Meanwhile, Reed’s staff and spokespeople are about a billion times more accessible, attentive, receptive, and honest about their shows. Whatever the organization’s faults, I think it’s pretty clear they care about comics and care about people having a great time at the show and getting something out of it, rather than prioritizing making a buck, trying to punish one’s perceived rivals, and papering over problems with inflated attendance numbers and incredible disappearing guest lists. There’s not really anything to complain about there–that’s admirable and awesome on Reed’s part–other than maybe that crowd control and staffing seems to be a problem year after year regardless, and that Comic Con International’s people are also pretty great shakes.

Finally, NYCC also gets a lot of free goodwill because half the comics press and at least 75% of the staff of its big-name publishers can booze it up and have a great time at karaoke and then take the MTA home. If the social scene is the main reason why you go to comic conventions, or even if it’s just a close second to actually engaging with comics, NYCC is your show of shows. Its location itself–hometown for many and The Greatest City in the World for everyone else–flatters that party-based conception of a show for, I’d go so far as to say, most of the industry’s power players and opinion makers. This isn’t true of San Diego, with its expensive cross-country flights for the NY-based publishing and press scene and its touristy environs in which the Con as a presence is inescapable in a way that isn’t true of Manhattan and the boroughs. I really do think this accounts for a lot of the inevitable post-SDCC kvetching every year. How else to explain the relative volume of complaints about how little publishing news there was at SDCC, when there was so much more of it there than at NYCC? Yes, I know San Diego has more multimedia stuff going on than NYCC (perhaps not through lack of trying on NYCC’s part, mind you), but it’s San Diego–it has more of everything. Including the comics that matter the most.

Big Apple Comic Con

Wizard Entertainment CEO Gareb Shamus has announced an additional New York City convention set for May 6-8, 2011, overlapping with Free Comic Book Day and the premiere of Marvel’s Thor.

Comic Con NYC — not to be confused with rival Reed Exhibitions’ New York Comic Con, certainly — will be held in the newly renovated Penn Plaza Pavilion, which will play host in October to Shamus’ Big Apple Comic Con.

“Response to last year’s Big Apple Comic Con and advance interest in the show this October has been so strong that we had to add the Spring event,” Shamus said in the announcement. “Everyone – the celebrities, the fans, the dealers, manufacturers, artists, and the entire community we deal with was begging us to bring a huge Spring event to New York. And now we have Wizard World Comic Con NYC.”

Rich Johnston suggests the date might be “ideal” to tempt Marvel back into the Wizard fold. However, it’s tough to imagine Marvel viewing as some sort of olive branch an event that stands to compete with Thor‘s opening weekend, at least regionally. What’s more, the studio doesn’t need Wizard World to market the movie — to its core audience, no less — particularly that late in the game.

What may be interesting to see is reaction from New York-area retailers regarding the possibility of the convention siphoning off Free Comic Book Day traffic. I don’t know, maybe some attendees will still wander over to Midtown Comics or Jim Hanley’s Universe to pick up free comics before heading back to the Penn Plaza Pavilion.

The battle of New York is over without so much as a shot fired.

On its convention website, Gareb Shamus’s Wizard Entertainment announced this morning that it is rescheduling its suite of Northeastern comic conventions, eliminating the head-to-head, same-town, same-dates match-up between its Big Apple Comic Con and Reed Exhibition’s New York Comic Con on October 7-10. Now, the Big Apple Comic Con will now be held on Oct. 1-3, the New England Comic Con on Oct. 15-17, and the New Jersey Comic Con on dates to be announced later. In addition, Big Apple has changed locations from Pier 94 to the Penn Plaza Pavilion, while the New England show will be hosted at Boston’s John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center. It’s unclear whether the New Jersey con’s date change will lead to a move from Edison’s New Jersey Convention & Exposition Center upon rescheduling.

Wizard made headlines, and drew a significant industry backlash, beginning late last year by making a series of aggressive scheduling moves against veteran convention promoter Reed and its slate of comic and pop-culture shows. Most notoriously, Wizard scheduled its Big Apple show the very same weekend as Reed’s New York Comic Con, October 7-10, and in 12th Avenue venue literally blocks away from NYCC’s Javits Center location. Later, Wizard scheduled its New Jersey con for the following weekend. Ever since, guest-list comparisons and official industry presences have weighed in mightily in Reed’s favor.

Wizard’s move is not without precedent: Shamus’s company earlier switched the dates for its Chicago Comic Con from Aug. 12-15 to Aug. 19-22 following Reed and Lucasfilm’s scheduling of Star Wars Celebration V for the original dates. But this move seems more likely an attempt to accommodate comics industry players who did not seem keen on shuttling back and forth between two competing shows in their New York City backyard.

Of course, the date-shuffling and venue-switching hardly represents a cessation of hostilities: Scheduling shows in Manhattan and Boston the weekends before and after Reed’s NYCC could be seen as an attempt to leech business away from more established show. But we’ve already had a same-weekend Reed/Wizard match-up a few weeks back, when Reed’s inaugural Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo more or less forced Wizard’s Anaheim Comic Con into obscurity despite underwhelming attendance (to which, it must be said, Reed admitted with refreshing candor). At this point, it’s tough to say whether there’s really any direct competition between Wizard’s nostalgia-tinged line-up of genre-TV stars and Reed’s much more comics-focused conventions. But whatever competition there is has just gotten much less direct.

Eliza Dushku ad for Wizard World Toronto

She was the top-billed star of the Wizard World conventions in Toronto and Anaheim — and briefly the victim of a case of mistaken identity with Warren Ellis. But now Eliza Dushku, the Joss Whedon mainstay who starred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse, has quietly been dropped from the guest lists of both shows.

Is this a victory for the shows’ Con War rivals, Fan Expo (the same city as Toronto) and Reed’s Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (the same weekend as Anaheim), a sign that Wizard’s rapid convention-circuit expansion isn’t making it any easier to attract big-name talent, or just schedule churn?

This latest rebranding of a small local show with the Wizard/”Comic Con” name is part of a now-established pattern; interestingly, Johnston describes it as one in which “no money actually chang[es] hands,” but rather an existing con infrastructure is essentially bartered for Wizard’s name recognition. I hadn’t heard that before, but it may be the only way such rapid expansion makes sense for a company with fewer employees than it’s had since its very earliest years.

In other recent Con War news, Johnston reported last week that Wizard has now sandwiched Reed Exhibition’s New York Comic Con with nearby shows of its own the weekend before (New England Comic Con, Oct. 1-3), the weekend after (New Jersey Comic Con, Oct. 15-17), and of course the very same weekend in the very same city (Big Apple Comic Con, Oct. 7-10). Johnston sees this as an attempt to crowd NYCC out; piggybacking off the press of the larger and more established show could also be a motivation.

For their part, Reed continues its M.O. of adding guests, rather than shows: Recently announced additions to Chicago Comics & Entertainment Expo — a competitor of Wizard’s Chicago Comic Con that runs head-to-head against Wizard’s Anaheim Comic Con the same weekend — include Dan DiDio, Paul Levitz, Mark Bagley, Peter David, Mark Waid, Dash Shaw, Chip Kidd, Art Baltazar, Bob Layton, Jonathan Hickman, Peter Tomasi, James Robinson, Greg Pak, Jim Valentino and, in all likelihood, probably quite a few I’m missing. The presence of DiDio, Levitz and Geoff Johns seems to be a pretty clear vote of confidence from DC, by the by. Meanwhile, reports that the city of Anaheim is strongly trying to woo Comic-Con International away from San Diego indicate that Wizard’s show isn’t quite what the city is looking for.

Apart from the early-December announcement that Wizard rival Reed is partnering with Lucasfilm to put on the next Star Wars Celebration — a move that forced Wizard to reschedule its Chicago Comic Con — the outfit behind the New York Comic Con and Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo has left the expansion arms race to its opponent.

Instead, perhaps attempting to make good on its nose-tweaking tagline “The con Chicago needs, the con you deserve,” Reed has focused on shoring up its C2E2 guest list. The show boasts some true heavy hitters, including Geoff Johns (superhero comics’ biggest writer), Alex Ross (superhero comics’ biggest painter), Gail Simone (superhero comics’ most prominent female writer), Jeff Smith (arguably the biggest name in children’s comics with Bone) and, in a very rare con appearance, Chris Ware (arguably the biggest name in alternative comics with The ACME Novelty Library).

Additional guests on the pretty-massive roster include Jim Cheung, Mike Mignola, Steve McNiven, David Finch, Steve Epting, Geof Darrow, Frank Cho, Gene Ha, Adam Hughes, Greg Land, Ethan Van Sciver, Ben Templesmith, Mike Perkins, Butch Guice, David Lloyd and a dedicated line-up of women creators spearheaded by Amanda Conner, Jill Thompson and Sherrilyn Kenyon. And as best I can tell, every single guest C2E2 has announced actually makes comics.

What of the two Wizard shows that provide C2E2 its most direct competition, Chicago (with which it shares a town) and Anaheim (with which it shares dates)?

Anaheim is closer to us on the schedule, and unsurprisingly its guest list is a bit better fleshed out. Long gone are Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev and Phil Jimenez, who pulled out almost immediately following Wizard’s announcement that its Big Apple Comic Con will compete directly against Reed’s NYCC on the same October weekend. Gone also is Heidi Klum, the model/host of Project Runway who shared top billing with Bendis. I’m also not seeing Ernie Hudson or Mick Foley, despite the presence of press releases trumpeting their attendance.

Heading up the Anaheim guest list right now is a genuine comics giant: The Man himself, Stan Lee. After that, the most prominent names are nerd god William Shatner, Dollhouse star Eliza Dushku, Battlestar Galactica‘s Mary McDonnell and Hung star and occasional comics creator Thomas Jane. Anaheim also has a moderate comics-centric guest line-up that includes Bernie Wrightson, Tim Bradstreet, J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Mayhew, Mike McKone, Simon Bisley, Glenn Fabry and Charlie Huston.

But this is simply dwarfed by the number of guests attached to old TV shows and movies (which Wizard’s Anaheim sub-site helpfully groups by franchise), including Star Trek‘s Shatner, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig and Michael Dorn; Futurama‘s Billy West, John DiMaggio and Phil LaMarr; Batman‘s Adam West, Burt Ward, Yvonne Craig, Julie Newmar and Lee Merriwether (plus the Batmobile); and an assortment of (mostly supporting) actors from Stargate, Seinfeld, Hill Street Blues, Austin Powers, Three’s Company and so on. There’s also the usual sprinkling of other celebs (Adrianne Curry, Angie Everhart, Jason Mewes, Erik Estrada, Micky Dolenz, Tia Carrere, Jake Busey, Doug Jones, Taylor Dayne) and ’80s wrestlers (Ted DiBiase, Virgil, The Honky Tonk Man, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine). Interestingly, the list contains several guests — Joe Viskocil, Mark Sheppard, Michael Pappajohn and J.M. DeMatteis — who were among the wave of ostensibly last-minute no-shows at 2009′s Big Apple Comic Con.

The Chicago show is further away and thus its current guest list is shorter. But the make-up is mostly the same: nerd celebs like Shatner, West, Newmar, John Schneider and James Marsters, and a smattering of comic creators topped by David Mack, Michael Golden and Mark Texeira.

What to make of all of this? A few things, I’d argue. If we’re judging by the guest lists alone, then Reed clearly appears to have the edge in terms of support within comics. I’d guess that this isn’t just pro-community support, but institutional support as well — you’ll notice how well-represented big-name exclusive creators with Marvel and DC are at C2E2 versus Anaheim. And if we extrapolate the goals of the two convention organizations from the guest lists they’ve produced, it appears we have two very different conceptions of what a comic con should be, and perhaps more to the point, who their audiences are and what those audiences want. Neither is necessarily my ideal — Chicago is one of North America’s great alternative-comics towns, so I’d love to see C2E2 support Chris Ware’s appearance with a slate of local and regional creators of that sort, for instance — but when given the choice of the two approaches, certain distinctions are not difficult to make.

That, of course, places it just one week after both Reed Exhibition’s New York Comic Con and Shamus’s own Big Apple Comic Con, controversially scheduled in the same city and on the same weekend as Reed’s effort in a move widely seen as launching a Con War between the two companies. Since then, the two outfits have rolled out distinct battle strategies, with Reed focusing on top-tier comics guests and Shamus/Wizard concentrating on adding more and more shows to the Wizard World Tour.

The running battle between rival convention promoters Reed Exhibitions and Gareb Shamus’s Wizard Entertainment just saw a game-changer of Death Star proportions enter orbit: Reed has announced it’s partnering with Lucasfilm to become the exclusive producer of the Star Wars Celebration conventions. The relationship officially begins with the announcement of Star Wars Celebration V, to be held in Orlando, Florida, on Aug. 12-15.

Of course, those are the same dates for which Shamus’s Chicago Comic Con had been scheduled.

Until this morning, that is, when Shamus announced via press release that he is pushing the Chicago show back a week, to Aug. 19-22. In a statement that will no doubt raise some eyebrows given his past scheduling maneuvers, Shamus said:

We respect our 20 year relationship with LucasFilms [sic] and everything Star Wars has meant to the fan community. In deference to our attendees, guests and friends at Lucas, we are changing dates. We are all fans of the Star Wars films, and this slight change enables us to bring the type of presence the fans would expect at our annual Comic Con.

Shamus, apparently, has been doing some partnering-up of his own: According to this post at the message board for the horror magazine Rue Morgue, recent Wizard emails to potential exhibitors have touted coming partnerships with horror-con outfits Rock and Shock and Monster Mania. But can it compete with the firepower of a fully armed and operational alliance between Reed and Lucasfilm — one that’s apparently quite willing to take aim square at Shamus’s own schedule?

Take the back-and-forth we noted last week between PvP creator Scott Kurtz and Comics Alliance honcho Laura Hudso . It started when Kurtz publicly blasted a Wizard/Shamus functionary with both barrels after the staffer obliviously sent him an email addressed to “Kurt” — hey, these things happen — soliciting his attendance at Anaheim Comic Con. Hudson took Kurtz to task for tarring all Wizard employees with a brush perhaps better reserved for the company’s decision-makers. This led to a lengthy and ugly comment-thread roundelay between Hudson — who, as the former senior editor of Tim Leong’s defunct Comic Foundry magazine, need bow to no one in the “taking cheap shots at Wizard and its employees as though the two were fungible entities” department — and Kurtz, some of his fans, and former Wizard staff writer Chris Ward. Over the course of the argument’s five pages, posts were deleted; accusations of trollery, spamming, egomania and hypocrisy were thrown about like so much confetti; Hudson’s problems during her tenure with Jenna Jameson-publishing Virgin Comics were hashed out; former Wizard President Fred Pierce was accused of buying off former Wizard critic Frank Miller; and a horrid time was had by all.

But as unpleasant as that argument got, it looks like one of those Sam-and-Diane fights from Cheers where they end up making out compared to the blistering comments made by former Wizard Senior Vice President of Operations Joe Yanarella regarding former WizardUniverse.com Editor Rick Marshall. After Robot 6 reported the shuttering of Wizard’s message board following its users’ vociferous criticism of the company’s recent convention maneuvers, Marshall, currently the editor of MTV’s Splash Page comics/movie news blog, commented that he wasn’t surprised by the move given what he characterized as Wizard’s longtime neglect of the board. Marshall said that after he was let go by the company, for a time he remained in financial and administrative control of the board because Wizard hadn’t paid the hosting company. Several days later, Yanarella, currently a writer for the sports news site Bleacher Report, stepped in to dispute Marshall’s story in strenuous terms. According to Yanarella, Marshall held the board and its passwords “hostage” to extract monetary concessions from Wizard. After disparaging Marshall as an employee and as a person, Yanarella went on to say, “I’d also recommend you move to the other side of the street should we ever see each other again.” It’s worth noting that from lawsuits to rumor mills, the engendering of serious hostility by forced departures from Wizard is not uncommon.

So yes, tensions run high, and the Con War is spilling a lot of bad blood. But what of the competing cons themselves?

All we can do at the moment is compare guest lists. Today, Reed’s C2E2 announced its newest guest of honor, Blackest Night writer Geoff Johns, and a trio of featured guests: Beasts of Burden‘s Jill Thompson, Green Arrow/Black Canary‘s Mike Norton and The Stand‘s Mike Perkins. Wizard’s competing Anaheim Comic Con — being held the same weekend as C2E2 (April 16-18, 2010) in a move widely seen as a tit-for-tat response to Reed’s encroachment upon Shamus’s Chicago Comic Con turf — recently announced Power Rangers and Naruto voice actor Neil Kaplan, Hellboy 2 performer Doug Jones, ’60s Batman villains Lee Merriwether and Malachi Throne, Babylon 5 actress Tracy Scoggins and CHiPS star Erik Estrada. I for one am left wondering who among them realizes they’ve just enlisted.

Full-scale warfare between convention promoters isn’t universal, believe it or not — some are giving peace a chance. In addition to the recent arrangement worked out by Heroes Con and Supercon to avoid a date conflict, Emerald City ComiCon‘s Jim Demonakos tells Robot 6 that following an unavoidable conflict with Orlando’s MegaCon the weekend of March 13, 2010, he and MegaCon’s Beth Widera collaborated on choosing dates for 2011 so that future overlap could be avoided. “We ended up on the same dates for 2010 and neither of us could move, but we’ve talked and coordinated and our mutual 2011 dates will not be on each other’s dates at all,” says Demonakos. “Con planning, always an adventure.”

Indeed. While it’s not quite “all quiet on the Con War front” in terms of open hostilities between the nebulous Gareb Shamus/Wizard Entertainment empire and Reed Exhibitions, things have at least died down to a dull roar at the moment. Shamus remains silent, Reed insists it’s business as usual regardless of Shamus’s confrontational scheduling moves, and about the closest you can get to one-on-one antagonism between the two rival convention promoters is a do-it-yourself comparison of their pre- and post-Halloween guest announcements: Hellboy creator Mike Mignola will be a guest of honor at Reed’s C2E2, while Batman TV star Burt Ward will be appearing at Shamus’s Anaheim Comic Con that same weekend.

But the lack of direct conflict doesn’t mean a few verbal grenades haven’t been lobbed Wizard/Shamus’s way over the past week by other parties, ranging from former employees to a pair of recent Wiz sparring partners, cartoonist Scott Kurtz and Marvel’s C.B. Cebulski.

One such explosion took place at the message board of Panels on Pages, a site founded by now-ex-Wizard Universe Message Board users-cum-Wizard website/magazine writers. With the shutdown of the WUMB last week, PoP has become increasingly required reading for dedicated Wizard watchers. Case in point: PoP message board user Foxy recounted a story of how earlier this year, Wizard employees Brett White and Adam Tracey used the WUMB to search for fan-owned Michael Turner sketches the company could publish in an expanded version of its Turner tribute hardcover. The staffers announced that a portion of the proceeds would be donated to the Sam Loeb Foundation, set up by comics superstar (and Turner’s friend) Jeph Loeb in honor of his late son, who like Turner died (too young) of cancer. But after White was fired, Tracey unceremoniously quit, and the book finally came out, Foxy and other WUMBers discovered that the promised donation was never made. The WUMB thread announcing the search for sketches and chronicling the subsequent demand for answers as to what happened to the charitable donation never received an official response and disappeared (as did two similar threads) with the WUMB itself — but not before PoP member Solstrom preserved and reposted it on PoP’s board.

The outcry attracted the attention of Rich Johnston, who since his Wizard-funded trip to the Big Apple Comic Con has emerged as the only writer able to get Wizard staffers to comment on the record (outside of press releases and the now-defunct WUMB). Writing both on the PoP board and his own Bleeding Cool site, Johnston said he got in touch with Wizard VP of Business Development Stephen Shamus (brother of owner and CEO Gareb Shamus), who blamed the disappearing donation on a communication breakdown caused by staff turnover, and said that now that they’d been made aware of the problem, the company would contact the Sam Loeb Foundation to make the donation — and to see if they’d be interested in setting up a donation drive at future Shamus conventions.

However, Shamus’s explanation, and Johnston’s subsequent statement that “it’s possible the right people did not read the right thread,” didn’t fly with the PoPsters, who point out that threads about the Turner book, customer service issues, and other problems went on for months with the clear knowledge of Wizard staffers. Indeed, the frequent intervention of Wizard higher-ups in ordering the deletion and banning of threads and users critical of the company appear to indicate that if anything, this sort of thread received extra attention from decision-makers within the Shamus organization.

Elsewhere on PoP, former Wizard staff writer, frequent WUMB pot-stirrer, and Political Power: Barack Obama author Chris Ward was a guest on the site’s weekly podcast. (Discussion of Wizard and the death of the WUMB begins at 1:04:20; Ward’s appearance begins at 1:09:38.) Ward minces no words for his former company, which he calls “totally mismanaged.”

“These guys literally have no fucking idea what they’re doing… They have neither the skills nor the insight to keep up, and the people that had that, they fired,” Ward says of Wizard’s upper echelon. [Full disclosure: I don't know from skills or insight, but I was one of the people the company fired.] Though he does praise managing editor Andy Serwin, Ward also reveals that he’s been blacklisted from the magazine for making a joke about a freelance check bouncing, tells tales out of school about the work environment, and takes some pretty vicious shots at Stephen Shamus (and, in passing, Rich Johnston). For their part, hosts Lee Rodriguez, Jason Kerouac, Tripper McGee, and Jason Knize describe the experience of being plucked from the WUMB to write for Wizard proper, only to watch their gigs disappear as the editors who hired them got laid off one after another.

But it’s not just ex-Wizard writers who have a bone to pick with the company. Fresh off his Twitter tirade against the company, PvP writer-artist Scott Kurtz really let loose after receiving a letter from Sales Manager Larry Ernst, addressed to “Kurt,” encouraging him to attend the Anaheim Comic Con, apparently sent without knowing that Kurtz had already made his feelings about Gareb Shamus’s conventions abundantly clear. In an open letter to Ernst and Wizard, Kurtz writes “Your conventions are total horseshit” and gets angrier from there, reserving his most undiluted fury for what he describes as the magazine’s ignoring of late artist Mike Wieringo, then its public about-face upon Wieringo’s passing. Kurtz’s sentiments echo those of Wieringo himself, as expressed in this impassioned defense of Heroes Con and attack on Gareb Shamus, written by ‘Ringo during Heroes Con’s initial scheduling conflict with Shamus’s never-realized Wizard World Atlanta. (Ironically, a gallery of Wieringo’s Wizard covers, which might offer proof that the magazine did indeed pay attention to the artist, has disappeared along with the bulk of Wizard’s website.)

Reactions to Kurtz’s post have varied. Marvel talent liaison C.B. Cebulski, himself no stranger to public disputes with Wizard, tweeted a link to the open letter in seemingly supportive fashion, indicating that a recent high-level meeting between Cebulski and Wizard editorial either didn’t produce a rapprochement or was subsequently undermined by the Big Apple/NYCC battle. Comics Alliance’s Laura Hudson’s defense of current and former Wizard employees against Kurtz’s blanket statements (coupled with a few shots at Kurtz’s self-described status as “a pioneer in my field” and “‘tastemaker’”) met with vehement comment-thread opposition from Kurtz’s fans (UPDATE: and from Kurtz himself), and with considerably more polite dissent from Tom Spurgeon, who argues that getting yelled at from time to time is the price of working for a company with divisive policies. And on his own blog, Chris Ward returned with the inside story of the incident Kurtz says turned him against Wizard — a “convention horror story” involving Kurtz, Ward, Ethan Van Sciver, a deaf fan, and “the world’s shittiest band.”

As Shamus/Wizard higher-ups continue to strategically distance themselves from the comics industry (even as seemingly contradictory moves are rumored behind-the-scenes); as decision time approaches for guests of the conflicting Reed and Shamus shows; and as sharper contrasts are drawn between the tactics used by Shamus and those employed by Reed and by regional con organizations like Emerald City and MegaCon, we may see more and more professionals and Wizard alums become comfortable publicly taking aim at the house that Gareb built.

(“Con War” graphic courtesy of Jason Erwin)

Tweet #1:

sadly, i will not be guest of honor or attending the wizard anaheim show next year. i will be staying home and making comic books.

Tweet #2:

i will be at the excellent emerald city con. why? no con war.

When asked to elaborate on the rationale for his cancellation by a user of his message board, Bendis replied:

you can figure it out.

[Wizard Editor] mike cotton and those guys are good guys. there’s just stuff going on behind the scenes i don’t want to be part of. when those things stop, i’ll do more cons.

Though it’s not 100% clear, the three posts at the very least imply that the writer will also not be attending Reed Exhibitions’ Chicago-based C2E2 show, against which Shamus scheduled Anaheim, choosing instead to opt out of the con conflict entirely for the unaffiliated Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle this March.

For their part, Wizard continues to soldier on in the wake of their decision to schedule next year’s Big Apple show for the same weekend as the New York Comic Con in much the same way as they have in the past: by releasing ebullient, yet vaguely worded, press releases. Their post-BACC PR refers to the show as “the tri-state area’s largest pop culture festival,” a claim Reed will no doubt take issue with, and claims “this past weekend’s convention broke the event attendance record for Pier 94 in New York,” though no attendance figures are cited.

Perhaps the key passage of the press release is its list of mainstream media outlets that covered the con: “People magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Crains, AOL, National Public Radio, CBS, ABC, NBC, AP, Reuters, Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood, Variety and more.” If, as rumored, Shamus plans to more or less openly move away from a comics-based model for his shows, an ability to successfully land favorable stories in the mainstream press, as opposed to navigating the more skeptical waters of the comics press and promotional outlets, is all the more important.

While individual Wizard staffers still remain tight-lipped about the show, Stephen Shamus — Wizard’s VP of Business Development and brother of founder and CEO Gareb Shamus — could hardly contain his enthusiasm about his on-stage appearance with Big Apple guests Naughty by Nature. On his Facebook account, Shamus posted a video of his cameo during the hip-hop group’s performance of “Hip Hop Hooray” and wondered “if any other Comic Con ever had such a high profile act perform on site.” (That’s him on the right, next to NbN’s Vinnie.)

Meanwhile, the Con War has claimed some unusual casualties online. Rich Johnston’s post quoting Wizard writer Mark Allen Haverty’s defense of the Shamus organization’s moves is now missing in action, while Wizard’s own website has been replaced with a bare-bones portal containing little more than links to purchase magazine subscriptions and convention tickets. (The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald also yanked a Con War post, though as she explains, this is because it was an unfinished post that went up accidentally.) Further developments are no doubt forthcoming.

"Last minute cancellations" at last weekend's Big Apple Comic Con (via The Beat)

With the initial salvos — head-to-head scheduling, employee ejections — out of the way, the battle between Reed Exhibitions and Wizard Entertainment’s Gareb Shamus that began in earnest this past weekend may have produced its first major fallout.

Following Shamus’s scheduling of next year’s Big Apple Comic Con directly against Reed’s New York Comic Con, previously announced Anaheim Comic Con guests of honor Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev and Phil Jimenez — all marquee names under Marvel-exclusive contracts, for what it’s worth — are now nowhere to be found on the Shamus show’s guest list. Will Shamus’s apparent loss be Reed’s gain, particularly for that same weekend’s C2E2 con?

For now, Con War watchers’ eyes must turn to the PR front for answers — and there, the battle’s been mostly one-sided. Reed showrunner Lance Fensterman has been taking to news sites to discuss Shamus’s Big Apple/NYCC maneuver. (Not to mention his pitting Anaheim against C2E2 — itself seen as a rival to Wizard’s Chicago Comic Con — and Toronto against Boston’s PAX East.)

Speaking with CBR’s Kiel Phegley, Fensterman called out Big Apple’s practice of allowing its big media guests to charge for autographs:

But to be honest, we’ve always shied away from “pay-to-play” guests, meaning you have to pay to get a signature, because we’ve always tried to view ourselves as all-inclusive. When you buy a ticket, the many guests of honor that we’ve lined up are there for free. You buy a ticket, and you have a right to see those people and get a signature. We never felt it was our philosophy to say, “No. Buy your ticket, and then everyone you want to see costs $100 to get a signature.” It wasn’t our thing.

And in this interview with The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon, Fensterman gingerly addresses rumors of misconduct by Shamus’s organization:

I don’t think there is any question when someone puts a similar named event, in the same city as the market leader on the same weekend, they are counting on drafting off our success and confusion as part of there business model. To me that’s without question. We are aware of guest issues and exhibitor issues that are not what we would consider “above board” on the part of other events and we’ve chosen not to take action because, frankly, we believe we have a better business model because we consistently put the industry, the exhibitors, the fans and the guests first. That’s a headache we don’t need, we’d rather focus on our customers and growing this industry.

In both cases, Fensterman calls on potential attendees and other observers to take a look at existing declarations of support from both the industry and the fan community and draw their own conclusions about the differences between the rival convention circuits.

Creators continue to weigh in as well, largely on the side of Reed and NYCC. Following her recent photo parade (from which the above shot is taken), Heidi MacDonald’s latest “Con War” round-up at The Beat directs us to A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran’s Big Apple horror story from the pre-Shamus days, the gist of which is that Big Apple’s current complaints about Reed’s “soliciting” at their shows are the height of irony. And on his Twitter feed, PvP”s Scott Kurtz offers the most scathing assessments of Gareb Shamus and his cons yet to surface from a comics pro.

But what about the other side? CBR reports that Wizard offered only a “no comment” when asked for its take on the controversy. Indeed, the only source for on-the-record comments by Wizard staffers on this weekend’s show and next year’s scheduling appears to be the Wizard Universe Message Board. Reacting to complaints about guests showing up late to their announced signings and the media-heavy make-up of the guest list, Big Apple Convention Coordinator Spat Oktan offered the following rationale:

The guests that we book to the show know what time the show opens (or their agents/reps/handlers do), and are adults. If they arrive late, there’s not a lot we can do about it. Short of kicking in their hotel room doors and dragging them out, we have to just wait until they arrive. I know I asked one of the agents every hour when their guest was going to arrive (I don’t want to mention any names), and was told over and over again that they would be there within the hour. So again, there’s just nothing we can do. Some guests like to get there before the doors open to set up, some sleep in and show up a little late, and others like to stop in later in the afternoon.

And as for the focus on comics, I consider our Media Guests who appear in movies or TV shows that are based on Comic Books to be Comic Guests in their own way. John Schneider played Jonathan Kent on Smallville, so as far as I’m concerned, he fits right in.

Thomas Jane had nothing to do with the Punisher comics, but a lot of people brought their Amazing Spider-Man 129 to the show for him to sign.

And I do believe that little kids are more likely to start collecting comics after seeing an awesome movie based on a comic.

Does everyone at the show have a comic? No. But if you look at the number of comic writers and artists we have at the show, and add the number of media guests from movies and TV shows based on comics or that spawned into comics, then you will see how heavily focused we are on the comic genre as a whole.

But that’s just my opinion.

A more impassioned and wide-ranging defense was offered by Wizard freelancer Mark Allen Haverty. As Rich Johnston notes, Haverty’s WUMB post read, in part:

If Reed had shown any respect, they would not have shown up to not one but two Wizard cons to hand out their fliers for their con. They did so not as vendors, retailers, or exhibitors, but as people buying tickets. That’s unethical on multiple levels.

But, please, feel free to think that Wizard is somehow a bad guy.

This will be my last reply here, because I really don’t want to sit here and listen to 20 people scream at me. Here are the facts, though:

1. You don’t call Marvel a–holes when they make you choose between buying X-Men or a DC book.

2. You don’t call Sony an a–hole if they release a movie you want to see at the same time as another studio releases a movie you like.

3. You don’t call Coke a–holes because they force you to choose between Coke and Pepsi.

Business is business. Just because some comic fans on a message board want to make it personal does not make it so. In business, there is going to be competition. Wizard and Reed are competing for the convention market. Reed has been playing dirty by walking into Wizard shows and handing out fliers – which, by the way, is a fact that multiple sites will confirm. Wizard shot back by deciding to go head-to-head with them. That’s called the free market — if Reed is better, it will win; if Wizard is better, it will win.

Interestingly, these comments, along with incredulous responses from other users and several entire threads responding negatively to Shamus’s moves, have since been scrubbed from Wizard’s site. However, Johnston has preserved the bulk of Haverty’s posting on Bleeding Cool, while many of the responses have also been copied to this thread on PanelsOnPages.com, a site set up by former Wizard contributors and message board users. And the battle continues …

All smiles: Joe Quesada and Gareb Shamus at the Big Apple Comic Con

Next year’s same-weekend, same-city showdown between Reed Exhibitions’ New York Comic Con and Wizard Entertainment/Gareb Shamus’s Big Apple Comic Con looms large in fandom’s collective mind. But what about the here and now?

By several important measures, this weekend’s inaugural Shamus-owned Big Apple Comic Con was a major success. For starters, it received an avalanche of enthusiastic coverage from the mainstream press, from both local and national outlets. (Lack of this kind of promotion has been a problem for Wizard shows in the past.) Meanwhile, guest of honor Jim Lee was thrilled with the show, while his fellow headliner Joe Quesada signed on with Shamus’s new GeekChicDaily newsletter (as seen in the photo above). And a look around relevant message boards, Twitter accounts, and comment threads provides any number of happy anecdotes regarding apparently terrific bargains from the show’s retailers (Acme Novelty Library #19 and The Collected Doug Wright for four bucks apiece!) or delightful interactions with its nerd-heaven line-up of comics pros (Lee, Joe Quesada, Joe Mad, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams), geek icons (William Shatner, Adam West, Billy Dee Williams, Linda Hamilton, Carol Cleveland) and crush objects (Kelly Hu, Adrianne Curry, Bottomless Suicide Girl, Linda Hamilton, Carol Cleveland).

But it wasn’t all sunshine. (In fact, thanks to the lousy weather, there was barely any sunshine at all.) The show was dogged by the usual complaints, from lack of carpeting to lack of comics content to the location’s drab industrial design to sparse attendance, particularly on Friday and Sunday. Programming woes continued to plague the show, as Gary Coleman canceled and promised spotlight panels on big-name guests William Shatner and Pete Rose failed to materialize (or, in Rose’s case apparently, were never actually planned in the first place). Meanwhile, industry figures including Mark Waid, Cully Hamner, Jeff Suter, Chris Sotomayor, Chris Eliopoulous, and Matt Fraction reacted negatively, and publicly, to aspects of the show and/or Shamus’s conduct.

The strongest response, unsurprisingly, came from NYCC’s Lance Fensterman. On his blog and in an interview with Newsarama, Fensterman used the occasion of Shamus’s 2010 Big Apple date announcement to tout the thus far overwhelming industry-exhibitor advantage NYCC has over Shamus’s show. His blog post includes a litany of positive qualities he argues NYCC possesses (and, implicitly, Big Apple lacks), many of them hinging on issues of honesty and ethics, and concludes thusly:

So what do I think of the Big Apple dates? Ask Marvel. Ask DC. Ask Sony. Ask an artist alley participant. Ask a creator. Ask a fan. You’ll get a clear answer of just who these choices of dates are intended to serve.

With many in the industry taking sides, former CBR columnist Rich Johnston, of all people, emerged as something of an unofficial spokesman for Shamus and Wizard during the show (at which he appeared on Wizard’s dime, although his accounts are probably more accurately attributed to his greater access to decision makers in Shamus’s organization than to his self-deprecatingly described status as a “paid shill”). At his Bleeding Cool site, Johnston reported big advance ticket sales. He described Big Apple’s ejection of NYCC staffers as a response to the Reed employees’ “soliciting” (a charge Fensterman denied on his blog). He trumpeted the Saturday afternoon intervention of FDNY fire marshals to ease overcrowding (in an echo of similar events during NYCC’s first year, which was either wildly successful or disastrously disorganized depending on who you ask). And he announced the initial guest list for Shamus’s Anaheim Comic Con, whose scheduling directly against Reed’s C2E2 show in Chicago presaged the BAC/NYCC smackdown. The Star Trek-heavy list also includes Brian Michael Bendis–a huge name whose attendance, like that of Lee and Quesada at Big Apple, proves Shamus still has some major industry pull–and Heidi Klum, the recent Wizard/Shamus slate’s most A-list celebrity yet (provided she shows up).

Finally, Johnston offered the most in-depth rationale for next year’s controversial scheduling move thus far offered by Shamus or his spokespeople:

Wizard World wanted an October date because they believe it’s the best month for such a show – which is why this year’s show is happening now. They initially went for the weekend before NYCC but were bumped due to a bicycle race. Wizard know the comic publishers and comic creators will go to NYCC over Big Apple, although hope some may do both. They know that people have already committed to the NYCC. But they regard “Comic Con” as no longer defined as being principally, or indeed at all, to do with comics, something that coverage of the shows seems to back up these days. They’ll be running a pop media show, so we’ll get wrestlers, sci-fi show actors, musicians, traders and a batch of star guests – and what they lose in comics, they’ll make up in prosthetic aliens. With the NYCC combining with the Anime show taking over the whole of the Javitz, you may get two very different shows on the same street with less crossover that you’d initially expect.

This appears to jibe with what one user of the Wizard Universe Message Board says he was told by Shamus himself:

Now – here’s something new “straight from the horse’s mouth”, while my friends and I were in line for Joe Mad who should walk by but Mr. Gareb Shamus himself. Now, I’ve met Gareb years ago at the Philly show and I asked him (not in a mean way) what was the idea behind his deciding to make his show the same weekend as the NYCC. Gareb answered that they felt that weekend was the best weekend to have it because September had too many holidays. He followed that up by saying that the guests they have (Media guests I would assume) lined up for next years show are going to be so huge that nobody will want to miss his show. And yes, for those wondering he had a straight face when he said all this to me. He truly feels that everyone will come to his show instead of NYCC.

While a conscious move away from comics as even the nominal focal point of Shamus’s “comic cons” may make sense from the point of view of positioning, it’s not difficult to anticipate fan reaction. But perhaps fan reaction isn’t what Shamus et al are concerned with: The wave of mainstream-media press, the shift to an email newsletter as opposed to a blog or other less one-sided methods of online interaction, and the emphasis on multimedia guests all appear to indicate that Shamus’s target audience isn’t comics fans or other hardcore fandoms at all, but nerd-curious, celebrity-centric civilians. But will they find Shamus’s product more appealing than they would NYCC, an already wide-ranging entity (to put it mildly) whose comics content nonetheless looks like Angoulême or APE by comparison? Only time will tell.

Next year's dates announced in this weekend's Big Apple Comic Con program

Many things can be and have been said about Gareb Shamus, founder and CEO of Wizard Entertainment, but “he lacks chutzpah” isn’t one of them: As reported by Comic Book Resources, Shamus has pitted his recently purchased Big Apple Comic Con head-to-head against Reed Exhibitions’ New York Comic Con. Both shows will take place in Manhattan on Oct. 8-10, 2010, with Big Apple starting a day earlier on Oct. 7.

Shamus is no stranger to aggressive scheduling and positioning against rival comic conventions. Word surfaced in 2005 that he’d planned a potential Wizard World Atlanta against regional staple Heroes Con; though company spokespeople quickly backpedaled in the face of withering industry criticism and the Atlanta show never materialized, the increasingly crowded convention scene saw this year’s Heroes Con once again overlap with Shamus’ rebranded Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con.

Shamus also responded to convention powerhouse Reed’s announcement of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, a rival show to his Chicago Comic Con (formerly Wizard World Chicago), by creating the Anaheim Comic Con and scheduling it directly against C2E2′s debut. He also waded into one of the most acrimonious con feuds in North America by purchasing the Paradise Toronto Comicon, which itself has a history of disputes with the larger, more pop culture-focused Fan Expo Canada. Shamus’ convention organization has also been quite aggressive in fending off a perceived challenge from the nascent Long Beach Comic-Con, created and staffed in large part by former Wizard employees, going so far as to ban LBCC’s Steve Hoveke from Wizard’s Philadelphia show despite having okayed him as an exhibitor.

New York Comic Con

However, scheduling a show not just on the same weekend or in the same city but both on the same weekend and in the same city is a whole new level of aggressiveness. It’s also a move that comes after a long string of public relations black eyes for Shamus and Wizard. A years-long string of layoffs and magazine closings has seen many former Wizard employees land at other industry outlets and given the impression that the publishing, convention and retail empire is less than healthy. The IFL, Shamus’s mixed martial arts venture, went under during this time, while 2008′s holiday season saw Wizard’s online retail component slammed with customer complaints. On the convention front, shows have been canceled or placed on indefinite hiatus (Atlanta, Boston, Texas, Los Angeles), attendance figures have been viewed as exaggerated, and announced guests have pulled out (including at least one who was never actually booked at all). Meanwhile, major publishers like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image have ceased to have official exhibitor presences at Wizard shows, though their support for San Diego and Reed’s shows has simultaneously all but increased. This has led to an increased non-comics presence at Shamus’ shows: This weekend’s debut installment of the Shamus-owned Big Apple Comic Con is heavy on sports and wrestling stars, for example, although Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada and WildStorm Editorial Director Jim Lee are guests of honor.

Big Apple Comic Con

Moreover, Big Apple’s impending smackdown with NYCC comes as Shamus has slowly moved away from the Wizard brand by purchasing the Big Apple and Toronto shows in his own name rather than Wizard’s and dropping “Wizard World” from the names of all of his shows save Philly (where a Philadelphia Comic Con already exists). This latter move does make sense, given the well-publicized size and success of San Diego’s Comic-Con International and Reed’s New York Comic Con — the general public likely has a sense of what they’d get from a “comic con,” while a “Wizard World” is a largely unknown quantity. Meanwhile, just today Shamus officially launched an e-newsletter called Geek Chic Daily, which contains no Wizard branding whatsoever; back-doored in this announcement was the news that former FHM Editor-in-Chief Scott Gramling has been moved from heading up Wizard’s magazine line to EIC of GCD.

These moves have not been without controversy in the industry, either: Marvel Talent Coordinator C.B. Cebulski’s angrily tweeted thoughts and declarations of support for Reed’s shows are (so far) the most public manifestation of displeasure with Wizard by industry power players. But Shamus’ move against NYCC clearly indicates he’s playing to win.