HobbyStar Toronto ComiCON 2013

Date: Date: March 9 - 10, 2013 Location: Toronto Metro Convention Centre Attendance: 20,000   Saturday I arrived a bit before the doors opened. I noticed that the convention was only using part of the South building room. They used the unused part for line up to get into the con. Thankfully the convention had a coat check which was handy to those of us wearing winter coats. Inside the exhibitors room there was no carpet, just hard concrete floor. It quickly got squishy walking through the aisles as well. The first panel I attended was: Ty Templeton's How To Write a Graphic Novel (47:32, 43.5mb) Ty talked about Jim Shooter's theory of the triage of storytelling, with Information, Change and Emotion driving the story. He first disabused that people want to read your GN unless it was really compelling and told people new information in some manner. He laid out 5 types of stories, and 6 flavours of fiction. He used several volunteers from the audience to represent the flavours and with the crowd they came up with 3 ideas, that they ran through the flavours to see if there was enough of them to make an interesting story. Ty only had an hour and did have to rush through the last part, but he gave you a taste of his Comic Book Boot Camp course and made the impression that people could write a decent book if they went through the process of testing their ideas against the stuff he put out there. Throughout the panel Ty walked around and engaged the audience. There were about 30 people in attendance. Mike Zeck Spotlight (40:00, 36.6mb) Moderated by Fred Kennedy, Mike Zeck explained what he has been doing over the last 20 years. He said he is doing licensing work for DC Comics. Said DC comes up with art for companies that want to license their characters and he draws it. These would be pictures that would go on products. He learned Photoshop and Illustrator in the 90s and was one of those that was good with both computers and drawing. He has to make his work in multiple styles for black and white, limited colours and full colours. He also draws something custom made if a licensor needs it. He says his work Is still out there only he doesn't sign his name on it anymore. Mike talked about how he broke in, at first doing work at Charlton, then meeting Stan Lee who recommended him to Marv Wolfman. Marv didn't give him any work, but Archie Goodwin did. He started out doing fill in work for missed deadlines, once drawing a comic in a week. Eventually he got a regular gig on Master of Kung Fu. He said when he read the script to Kraven's Last Hunt he thought it was the best Spiderman story ever written and he was lucky to be the one to draw it. He said his favourite character is Captain America. He said he might be willing to draw a story but he has no desire to work full time in editorial comics. He called it a young man's game as it requires long hours, lots of motivation and enthusiasm. He mentioned doing some non-Marvel DC work in the 90s for Malibu and Image but they didn't do very well. He talked a bit about Jerry Ordway's recent blog post about Ageism and mentioned Ordway is younger than he is. Between and after the panels I did some walking around, one thing I noticed that is growing in Toronto are cosplay related exhibitors. 501 Legion and the Ontario Ghostbusters were 2 dedicated booths. The show was very busy on Saturday. As usual it seems less and less of artist alley were people doing comic books. There were some people doing jewelry and crafts that were non-comic related.   Sunday Sunday there was a long line in the morning. The convention doors were to open at 11am, but as the first panel I wanted to go to started at 12pm, I decided to forgo the line up and go to the panel room. I took the spare time to do some convention report writing. The first Sunday panel I attended was: Sketch Duel: Mike McKone and Lee Weeks (50:34, 46.3mb) It took a bit for this panel to get started because the artists pens and pencils were not there. They did some Q&A while waiting for them. Mike McKone and Lee Weeks had already decided that they wanted to draw the Hulk for the sketch duel but people in the audience gave out suggestions to what the Hulk would be doing. A young girl suggested Hulk running away from a bomb so that's what they drew. While the sketching was going on they answered more questions for the audience, talked about other artists they loved, characters they wanted to work on, working with writers and how much input they get on a story among other topics. There were tickets drawn for the sketches and two people won the sketches at the end. The panel was moderated by Fred Kennedy. Lee Week's Sketch Winner Mike McKone Sketch Winner Sketch Panel: Joe Jusko (53:03, 48.6mb) This was supposed to be a sketch duel between Joe Jusko and Mark Texeira but Texeira did not show up for some reason. Joe had no problem doing the panel by himself, he took the suggestion of drawing Vampirella for the audience. As he drew, he answered questions for the audience and occasionally stopped to show his progress with the drawing. About 10 minutes into the panel Renee Witterstaette (former Marvel editor and now agent) came in and began moderating the panel, taking questions from the audience and asking questions of her own. Jusko about talked about being at the Joe Kubert school and winning a DC award of most promising new talent. He talked about how after school he immediately decided to paint and learned how to do it via trial and error. Joe said he was an assistant to Howard Chaykin and explained how he helped him get started at Heavy Metal and Marvel Comics. Chaykin had asked Heavy Metal to look at Joe's work. They bought one of his paintings and used it as the cover which was quite an accomplishment. Then he got work at Marvel and worked with them for many years. Joe also talked about how early in his career he was also a police officer and was working nights and weekends doing comics. He brought up a 4 issue mini-series that he along with Larry Hama had wrote called Cops the Job. It was based on people he knew and actual events that happened to him while on the job. Joe eventually made the decision to become a full time artist. Joe gave advise to the artists in the crowd on learning life drawing. He said by copying other artists you are copying what they got out of life drawing, along with all of their mistakes. It is better to learn from the books their favorite artists learned from. He also recommended building a clip file for photo reference. Joe revealed he had done this his whole career using magazines and one big advantage is of using them is he's not using the same picture found via google that other artists keep using. He also talked about the Marvel Cards he's known for and how he and Marvel were talking about doing an anniversary set but the card market is really weak right now. When asked about digital art he said it did affect the painted market quite a bit, saying digital become the popular thing and nobody wanted painted work anymore. He said many of the painters got out of comics and rates dropped to half of what they were 20 years ago. He said it's picking back up and he's now getting work as he one of the few painters still around. Joe Jusko's Sketch Winner Towards the end of the show I talked to 5 people in artists alley. 3 were quite happy, 1 said it was okay, the last said it was middling. Comic dealers seemed to have a better show. I talked to 19 of them and 10 said it was better than last year, 7 had a good/steady/can't complaint/not bad comments. 2 said they were down from last year. I had a decent show myself. I got to see some new creators I haven't seen before and bought some books. My feet did miss the carpet though and I got the impression that some exhibitors were not happy standing on a concrete floor for 2 days either. But I got the impression that most of those at the convention were pretty happy with the show. Audio recordings for other conventions can be found at TheComicBooks.com   Regards, Jamie Coville http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com

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Text Copyright © 2013 Jamie Coville About the Author E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net