New York Comic Con: Year II
The organizers of New York's second annual Comic Con learned a few lessons from their 2006 premiere convention, when hundreds of ticket holders were left out in the cold in front of the packed-beyond-capacity Javits Convention Center. This year the Con cut back its advertising budget, while its website warned people way in advance that Saturday tickets for the events were completely sold out. The long line out in front moved slowly but steadily into the building, thanks to improved crowd control. The exhibit hall, formerly tucked in the building's lowest level, doubled both in size and the number of booths (from 300 to 600) from last year, and moved upstairs to the building's main exhibit space.
Most of Friday was given over to programs for the library, publishing and distribution trades as Reed Exhibitions, the convention's organizers made sure that players in those fields could meet, make deals and take advantage of the booming graphic novel, manga and anime market. Finally, at 5pm the public sessions began. As with any oversize gathering, the overlapping schedule of events made one long for the power of bi (or tri-) location.
The first animation program belonged to Bill Plympton, the best known and hardest working of New York's many independent animators. Plympton offered a brief recap of his career, from his childhood drawings done on second-hand butcher paper (where bloodstains became his characters' heads) to his stint as an editorial cartoonist ("where I learned how to draw fast"), to Your Face, his first hit cartoon. Plympton shrugged off the warped and often morbid aspect of his toons, claiming "I'm a normal guy. I do crazy artwork. The people who do normal artwork are crazy."
Plympton screened Kanye West's Heard 'em Say video, built around his last-minute animation, a replacement for Michel Gondry's expensive, high-concept piece that West had ditched. "Kanye thought Gondry's piece was too wimpy. He told me I had one week to do it and Gondry had spent all the money." Next came Al Yankovic's Don't Download this Song, tracking a teen's life of crime in the aftermath of his intellectual property theft. "Al said it was okay to download his song," Plympton assured his audience.
Editor's Note: Michel Gondry has requested we print his thoughts regarding his work on the Kanye West music video.
Kanye West begged me for two years before I finally accepted to do his video.
The "high concept" of the video is in fact a complete alteration of my original idea by Mr. West, who was concerned it may "alienate his audience" in the Chrismas period with a concept that was too hardcore for his tastes. He shot a second video because he was overwhelmed by his indecision. Lately he sent me a message expressing how he loves my video.
I don't do fanciful high budget concept videos for a living. In fact, Mr. Plympton, which I deeply respect, was seen regularly on MTV a decade before anyone ever heard of my name. I do videos with zero budgets much more often than videos with just a decent budget. Videos with a good budget come to me every five years.
I have never received a single MTV award in the U.S. -- in case you believe I am the establishment -- and my videos are hardly ever played on TV.
I came from directing small videos for my own non-selling band in Paris. It took me decades and constant renewing my ideas for you to hear about me. Please, don't dismiss my hard work to make the point you want in your article and look at the ensemble of my work, then give your judgment if you need to.
With respect, The animator screened excerpts from his in-progress feature Idiots and Angels (due out fall 2008 or early '09), focusing on a barroom bully who grows angel wings but remains an unrepentant jerk. "This is one of the fastest productions I've ever done. I can do 20 seconds a day, maybe 30 when I'm really cooking." He extolled the film's "overly worked, dark mysterious look" and its east European/David Lynch vibe.
Michel Gondry
Plympton unveiled Shut-eye Hotel, his latest short. The abbreviated murder mystery (with the most unlikely killer imaginable) featured the animator's first use of 3D (courtesy of a Maya-trained intern), which he described as "time consuming and expensive... some people didn't even notice it was there." The animator ended the session by extolling the virtues of self-distribution: "why sign a 10-year deal for $40,000 when I can make that back myself... the secret is animated shorts are extremely popular and do quite well; features are a little more difficult."
On Saturday morning, Tad Stones and Mike Mignola screened their second animated, direct-to-video Hellboy feature, Blood and Iron. Like the first, B&I was filled with satisfyingly strong violence and vulgar language, along with priceless lines like a paranormal expert's warning "there are things that modern man relegates to fairy tales and video games." The film's intriguing, Memento-like structure followed a straightforward, modern-day vampire hunt (based on the true story of 16th century blood-bather Erzebet Báthory) interwoven with flashbacks inserted in reverse chronological order.
Blood and Iron is due for an early March run on Cartoon Network, with a DVD release following in May. Stones told his audience Starz Home Ent. had greenlit the script for a third Hellboy DTV movie, which was already half-written. Although Starz has yet to give a production go-ahead, a tiny teaser for the film -- The Phantom Claw -- followed Blood and Iron. ("The film's full of Nazis and exploding heads," Stones gleefully told the crowd, and described it as an old-fashioned Universal, Son of Frankenstein-style adventure.) He and Mignola discussed the three parallel Hellboy continuities: the original comic and its novel adaptation, the live-action movie (and upcoming sequel) and the animated movies.
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