ESSAY:
DOES ARTIST'S ALLEY TURN INTO
EASY STREET OR SUICIDE SLUM?
BY PAUL T. RIDDELL

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Back at the end of November, I was invited to be a guest at a major multimedia science fiction convention. Never mind which one: the convention staff did its best, and I have no intention of slandering its efforts by naming it. All that matters is that, for the first time in over eleven years of being a guest at these things, I was given a table in the dealer's room in order to sell my dubious wares. It was at this locale that I learned that one of the most oft-repeated bits of folk wisdom about promoting oneself in the comics business was a blatant lie.

For those who have never been to a science fiction convention, a comics convention, or one of those collector fairs that somehow reads "Country Mayfair" on the marquee in front of the hotel, most people attend conventions for one of two things. Either they arrive to be able to meet the varying guests (usually one to ten stars for an extant or defunct science fiction or fantasy TV series and a whole crew of second-rans, usually hailing from literary or comics backgrounds), or they come to clean out the dealer's room. At most of these, the dealer's room is the largest room rented for the event, and it's usually packed solid with any amount of amazing crap from all corners of the genre. At many of them, the dealer's room is the only reason to attend, and the organizers arrange to have guest signings and minor events in the main room so that people will come to get their picture taken with their favorite "Star Trek" star and leave with a critically depleted MasterCard and a forklift full of toys and collectibles. At shows dominated by comics dealers and comics writers/ artists/ publishers, a certain amount of space is left in back, generally entitled "Artists' Alley", for creators to show off their work and maybe, just maybe, sell some of that work.

The basic idea behind Artist Alley is that this is a way for comics creators and publishers to meet up with existing fans and make new ones, and it works in a strange petting-zoo sort of way. The creators (almost always artists, but the occasional writer appears in the mix) are stationary except when called to do their dancing bear impersonations at panels or other sanctioned events, or when calls of nature or nicotine addiction force them to leave for a time. Through all of this, a never-ending wall of vaguely bored people walk by, and after three days of this, I understood why the cattle and chickens at the State Fair of Texas had that touch of bloodlust in their eyes.

As a PR exercise, Artist Alley is a joke. Even considering the number of people who want to see their favorite artist in the flesh, the emphasis is on seeing. Every creator attending a convention hopes to have hordes of adoring fans rampaging through the dealer's room in a mad panic to be the first to say hello, but that almost never happens. If it does, those rampagers are usually hauling handcart after handcart of stuff to be autographed, and they tend to get rather persnickety when they're told that the object of their affections literally doesn't have all day to autograph two metric tons of comics. (My most vivid autographing story happened at the summer 1993 Dallas Fantasy Fair, with Clive Barker as the guest of honor. Among the usual hordes of Hellraiser fans was one guy who came up to Barker during an autographing session, handed Barker a fresh scalpel, took off his shirt, and turned around, tapping his back and saying "Sign this." Naturally, when Barker declined, the guy threw a hissy fit, thus helping to explain why Barker doesn't do autographing sessions of this type any more.) For everyone else, while they may want to see the human face behind their comics, courtesy or even shyness keeps them from coming up and introducing themselves: after all, what else are they going to say besides "Hey, I really love your stuff..."?

Oh, and then we have The Thing That Wouldn't Shut Up (he described with self-loathing, having channeled for this parasite quite often in the past). We're talking about the guy (sometimes the Thing is female, lest ye think I'm being sexist) who assumes that because the creator touched him in some way in the past, that said creator is his friend. Because far too many of us were raised to be polite in conversations, we'll see a creator in Artist Alley talking with someone else and wander on, feeling confident that the creator doesn't want to be disturbed by a random fan while having a conversation of import. Usually, though, what happened is that the Thing crawled up, wanting to blather about everything and nothing, and the creator is stuck not wanting to be rude but also wishing that s/he could crawl on buttocks away from this purgatory. The Thing won't take a hint to go away and bother himself for a while, and it's bad enough when a guest at a convention is stalked by a fan who wants some attention while the guest is perusing items in the dealer's room, trying to talk to someone else, trying to track down someone else, trying to get something to eat, or trying to use the toilet in peace. When The Thing That Wouldn't Shut Up is on the prowl, a comics guest behind a table in Artist Alley has a lot in common with a wooly rhinoceros trapped in a tar pit.

As if The Thing isn't enough of a menace, then we have the ongoing horrors of being Second Fiddle. This usually happens when a new or moderately successful comics creator ends up with a table in Artist Alley next to one of the convention headliners: picture, say, Jim Mahfood getting a table next to Rob Liefeld. Within minutes, a line of supplicants spreads throughout the alley, usually blocking off access to any other guest with a moving wall of humanity. Some creators may feel "Oh, good: I have a captive audience," but that doesn't happen, either, as those mendicants are there only for the healing touch of the creator at the other end of the line, and most of those waiting couldn't care less about anyone else at the convention. In the meantime, because of the wave of Liefeld zombies, anyone wanting to talk to Mahfood, or anyone else on the other side of the Great Wall of Fandom, in many cases literally cannot get through without whining of "No cutting" or physical violence.

In my case, I wasn't bothered by the lines, seeing as how I was literally giving stuff away. (I was out with lots of work on my own projects, including big fat stacks of SAVANT and other magazines I had written for in previous years, as well as flyers for friends' projects and even some candy as an extra incentive.) I had big signs up saying "Free...To A Good Home", and I actively encouraged people to help themselves. That was when I learned the one overriding law of conventions: Everyone Wants Everything For Free Except When It Is Free, In Which Case They Don't Want It Any More. By way of example, I was sharing a table with Mark Murphy, creator of the exemplary House of Java, and he was trying to sell graphic novels and individual issues. Without fail, if anyone came by to poke through my freebies, they'd start pawing through Mark's comics, whining "Is this free, too?"

"Nope, sorry," I'd respond cheerily, "you have to pay for that. I'll tell you what, though: if you want a copy, I'll buy it for you." (Mark had put up with my prediluvian honk for two days, so I figured that getting another reader hooked on House of Java was the least I could do to make reparations.)

The attendee would then look at the comic, sniff "Oh," in that nasal way that anyone who attends conventions knows so well but can't explain without sounding it out, and left without getting anything. (And before anyone notes that maybe I wasn't offering anything of interest, I tried an experiment where I left out samples of the same stuff I had on my table on the "Freebie Table" out in front of the dealer's room. Everything invariably disappeared within fifteen minutes to an hour.) After one of these incidents, I suddenly understood and felt for the people manning the booths at tech conventions, where the attendees grabbed for every gewgaw they could, but only if they didn't have to make eye contact with the people offering the gewgaws.

For the first time as well, I understood the motivation behind having "booth bunnies" at a comics table, even if I still don't agree with their use. With all of the intervening distractions in a typical dealer's room, even the most patient of us ends up suffering from an otherwise debilitating case of Attention Deficit Disorder, making it impossible to conduct coherent conversations, much less stay on focus. About the only thing that draws the attention of a typical convention attendee is a pair of barely covered mammaries, and considering that attendees won't stop to look at good artwork, the only way a lot of marginal work stands a chance is by hiring a few girls from the local Hooter's to show off their talents (as Joe Bob Briggs would have put it) to slow down the lemming rush for a few moments. Yes, it's sexist, and yes it's degrading to both women and the comics industry, but the booth bunnies fill the same niche that Jeri Ryan's addition to Star Trek: Voyager did: they use the rampant and unused libidos of the audience to keep them from fluttering to the next attraction. Those comics creators who didn't have characters that could benefit from being modeled by denizens from the local strip club...well, they're fucked.

The worst part of this sojourn through the Alley was that most of my fellow sides of meat were resigned to using the Alley as their sole form of promotion. Never mind that artists and writers should be among the crowds, pressing flesh and making friends, or that if artists feel the need for a table showing off their work, then that work should be on display in the Art Show along with business cards and other contact information. Never mind that a lot of creators wasted half of their available time trying to drive off The Thing That Wouldn't Shut Up so that someone else could get a chance to say hello. Never mind that the same people who didn't think anything of going to the Sharper Image and blowing $10,000 on a life-sized Boba Fett model suddenly became misers over the thought of paying for a $2 comic that they thought they should get for free. Never mind that most of the audience that the comics industry is desperately trying to reach either can't afford or can't justify blowing $15 for a one-day pass or $35 for a three-day pass to go rooting around the basement of a hotel in search of the one comic that might make them regular readers. Never mind that the people who do show up are already faithful martyrs to the cause, so long as the cause is advocating lots of physiologically impossible superheroines. Oh, and never mind that when we're talking about people who see nothing wrong with sleeping 30 to a single hotel room, we're talking about people who are so incredibly cheap that they try to use both sides of the toilet paper, and usually won't buy comics at a convention unless they know that said comic will be worth Harry Knowles' weight in platinum once it's signed. In the meantime, the smaller publishers are screwed: even those who can afford to give out free copies of the latest issue of their latest title don't necessarily get a return for their promotional efforts, and since most creators are dead-poor and buy copies for promotion at the detriment of their grocery funds, only a very lucky few make enough at a convention to cover lunch in the convention hotel, much less enough to pay for their time and energy. It's been like this from the beginning, and so it shall be until the end of time: if you want to promote your comic, or at least get a few more fans, you have to do your time in Artist Alley.

Well, bollocks to this. What should replace the standard comics convention as a gathering place for creators and a showcase for publishers is a very good question, but the convention as it stands ill-serves the comics community. Conventions are great for fans to get together, exchange gossip, and pretend that the outside world doesn't exist for a weekend or so, but when creators and publishers depend upon the big San Diego show or innumerable little conventions as one of their only venues for reaching the general public, then it's time to come up with an alternative. Otherwise, the industry remains at the mercy of the twerps who have nothing better to do on a Thanksgiving or Labor Day weekend than drool over booth bunnies and argue over Silver Age versus Golden Age minutiae while fighting over the latest Spawn action figures.

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