025 Comic Con this weekend

New York Comic Con is this weekend and I’ll be making my very first appearance. I’ve wanted to go for the past few years but always balked at buying tickets. This year not only will I be in attendance, but I will be blogging like crazy, and will have a few guest bloggers on hand as well.

Here’s some panels I’ll be looking forward to, and writing about:

• Graphic Novels and Academic Acceptance: Led by comiXology’s Karen Green, Columbia University librarian, this panel includes creators, publishers, librarians, and professors discussing the academic acceptance of the graphic novel.
• Comic Book Club: Iron your capes, unplug the Bat Signal, and set your decoder rings on awesome! The Comic Book Club is in session! The Comic Book Club is a weekly comic book talk show featuring the best comedians in New York talking shop with industry professionals from all corners of the comic book world. And now they’re at NYCC!
• New York City Through its Authors: New York City may be the world’s most-written-about city. While sometimes romantic, sometimes mythic, and sometimes wicked, it’s always New York. New York Comic Con invites several of the city’s local authors to speak about how living in New York has influenced their words — whether they’re writing about NYC or not. Moderated by Suvudu.com.
• European Graphic Novels Cross the Pond: Finding great European graphic novels is easy. But publishing them in the US presents a whole set of — let’s call them — challenges very different from importing Japanese manga. Book sizes and shapes and page lengths are often a hurdle for booksellers, the intended reader age level sometimes doesn’t match US expectations, and the depiction of characters in a book for kids can set off the censors on this side of the Atlantic. What makes a graphic novel “too European”? Are readers interested in these books at all? Editors and creators from First Second Books and Lerner Graphic Universe discuss the process of bringing these books to the US and present advance previews of exciting new titles.
• Elvis Schmelvis! How Comic Books Spawned the Rock and Roll Era: The standard history of American youth culture is a myth, argues David Hajdu, professor at Columbia University and author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. It was in the pages of lurid pre-Code comics, not in jukebox records, that teen culture was born and nearly died. David comes to NYCC to discuss the true birth of pop culture.
• Asian Americans and Super Heroes: Secret Identities: It seems as if Asians and Asian Americans have always been a significant part of comics. In fact, Detective Comics #1 featured the Fu Manchu-like villain Ching Lung on its historic cover. Like Ching Lung, however, Asians — and by extension, Asian Americans — have not always been positively portrayed in the four-color world of comics. Too often, Asians were reduced to the easy stereotypes of the yellow peril, mystical martial artist, female seductress, or comic relief. Behind the scenes was a different story. Even though Asian American characters were not breaking through on the page, Asian American creators were shattering glass ceilings all over the industry. Pioneers such as Larry Hama, Stan Sakai, Ron Lim, and Jim Lee were making names for themselves as brilliant writers and artists. Today, some of the industry’s biggest names are Greg Pak, Bernard Chang, Frank Cho, Cliff Chiang, Dustin Nguyen, and Jae Lee. And while there has been some progress in bringing viable Asian American characters into mainstream comics, there is still a dearth of compelling Asian American super heroes to inspire new generations of comic readers. The editors of book Secret Identities have set out to rectify that shortage. Pooling together some of the biggest names in comics, up-and-coming talent, and voices from film, literature, and television, Secret Identities is the first-ever graphic novel collection of original stories exploring the universe of masked marvels and caped crusaders from the perspective of the nation’s fastest-growing and most dynamic emerging community. This panel will discuss the origins of the project, explain the editors’ and contributors’ reasons for participating, and illustrate the need for a more diverse set of heroes.
• The Beat Presents The Art of Storytelling: As comics have become a more influential part of pop culture, their stories and characters are known more widely than ever. Step inside the minds of some of the comic biz’s best storytellers to find out how they approach their craft and shape their visions to create their best known works. Moderated by Heidi MacDonald, with Jim Lee, Marv Wolfman, and more.
• Graphic Novels: A New Literacy for the Library, Classroom and Home.: Elizabeth Bird is a children’s librarian at New York Public Library’s main children’s room at the 42nd Street location. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, reviews for Kirkus, and currently publishes the blog A Fuse #8 Production on the School Library Journal website. Sophie Brookover is the Library Media Specialist at Eastern Regional Senior High School in Voorhees, NJ. She is an avid reader of graphic novels (forced to pick just one recent favorite, she offers two: Sidescrollers and Y: The Last Man), and is the co-author of Pop Goes the Library: Using Pop Culture to Connect With Your Whole Community (InfoToday, 2008). Matt Bird: Matt Bird is a writer and lifelong comics enthusiast. He will receive an MFA from Columbia University in May. His new graphic novel project is “The Gentleman” with artist David Baldeon (“Blue Beetle”) and inker Steve Bird (“Robin”).

Also, if you live in Brooklyn, don’t forget to go to ROCKETSHIP tomorrow night! Opening party for Brian Lee O’Malley’s new Scott Pilgrim book! For details head on over to the Rocketship blog.