Aside from the trip down here (our plane ran short on gas and needed to make a side trip to Ontario, California to fuel up), my visit to the San Diego Comic-Con is off to a good start. I’ve had fun chatting with folks like Jerry Beck and Earl Kress, enjoyed Mark Kausler’s wonderful It’s the Cat and Martha Sigall’s talk about her career, and bought–cheap–what purports to be a drawing from a Scrappy cartoon.
The endless dealer floor kind of feels like a retread of last year’s edition–same massive booths in same locations hawking same products–but as usual, much of the fun for me comes in just looking at stuff I’m not actually buying. Among the things I’ve run across are a 1930s membership card in the National Popeye Club, a poster for a silent Felix, and a jaw-droppingly great four-drawing sequence from Mickey’s Polo Team, with Mick, the Goof, the Big Bad Wolf, and Charlie Chaplin involved in a furious chase on horseback.
Also spotted: Skeezix and Walt, Drawn & Quarterly’s handsome reprint of early Gasoline Alley. And Fantagraphics will be reprinting the complete Ketcham Dennis the Menace. (Maybe everybody knows this already, but it had escaped my attention.)
More news as the weekend progresses…