New York Comic Con 2008: Video Slideshow

If there’s one thing I hate to do it’s to travel to the Javits Center in NYC: There’s no subway near by and even taking a cab can be painful. However I have to say that for the New York Comics Con the trip was well worth it this year. The first thing that impressed me is that most conventions don’t fill up the place, however the Comics Con took up pretty much every inch of floor space. The result is about two city blocks packed with everything a fanboy might want to see – a sort of mega shopping mall turned into a comic book store.

However it’s not just the scale of the evnt that I enjoyed, but the sheer diversity. Yes there was the usual things that you’d expect to see: booths for marvel and DC and rows of tables filled with vintage goodies from days of yore sealed in plastic bags. But the extra zing at the event was the number of toy companies, video distributors, indie artists and even podcasters to be found while roving around the floor. And while I did see the usual promotional material of superheroes running around in their underwear, I also found a wealth of comics from local small presses, and places ranging from France to Korea.

What’s also amazing to me is that given I wasn’t keeping a high profile I managed to run into quite a few friends going back to my art school and early multimedia career in the 90s. In fact I was really pleased to see a good representation of the local scene which featured a table crammed with students from the School of Visual Arts to MoCCA pushing their upcoming show in June. Although as I stolled through the artist’s alley it was fun to meet artists who came from every where from Canada to Tokyo, which made the thought of my cab ride quite a bit less labored.