A brief respite in a busy day...

Saturday I wound up going with Brian to a comic convention in Manhattan. It was a chance to revisit the Garden (which I’ve gone to sparingly since I worked there years ago). There’s always a mixture of feelings you have revisiting a place you once worked. Depending on the terms you left under, the feelings can be good or bad. My departure from the Garden was under weird circumstances to say the least - I freelanced there for just over a year, it was my “second tour of duty” there and there was as much good as there was bad.

I got a chance to work closely with Mike again, which was a plus. Also I got a chance to learn quite a bit. I worked at the Garden as a designer (as well as doing the production work I normally do), because of the structure (or lack thereof) - I wound up doing much, much more than I would have if I had worked in a traditionally structured agency or design studio. At the time, the art department at the Garden was constituted of 5 designers (with an occasional freelance person coming in for a special project) now I understand they have over 15 people in the art department which should give you an idea of the kind of work load we dealt with.

The bad thing was you always had a pile of projects on your desk and they all were due yesterday.

The good thing was you always had a pile of projects on your desk and they were due yesterday.

When you worked on a project, you had to make decisions much, much faster than you would in a normal situation. You had to come up with solutions quickly and if you failed you didn’t have the time to spare to dwell on your failure, then again, it made your successes all the more sweeter.

I had a couple of successes while I was at the Garden. They’re still using one logo I designed for one of the TV shows on the MSG Network (this after six years - even though I’m not really happy with it). When I went to get my ticket at the box office, I saw another logo I remember working on (I can’t remember if it’s mine or not, a lot of the projects blur together).

I probably would do things differently now if presented with the same situation but only from a design sense, I don’t know if I would have reacted any differently to the situation there as I think in many ways I’m still the same person. I wasn’t happy with how I left but, I didn’t have to leave and the sense I got was the place was better off for my absence so, I took some solace in that (not being the problem).

So, I had my eyes open in the building, looking around to see what was up and what they had done around the place. The Garden lacked any kind of cohesive “brand” for themselves and many of their divisions so, I was curious to see if any of the thinking I had been a big proponent of while there had taken hold - still looks like they’re struggling.

The convention was in the Expo Center. MSG’s Expo Center is the area surrounding the bowl of the main arena (what people think of when they envision the garden). The arena is a bowl sitting in a cylinder and the MSG folks looking to make money any way they can will rent it out (it’s notably the place where they keep the animals when the circus is in town and is known for having a odor reminding one of a stable).

As conventions go, the thing was pretty tiny. I got a little creeped out being there. I had gone to this other thing, held by MOCCA down at the Puck building last year and was jazzed by the energy of the place. There were as many women as men, lots of young people (twenty somethings), people with their own books - not superhero stuff, using comics as a medium of expression. The Puck building is a nice space too, even though they had the windows covered with gauzy curtains a good amount of light still made it into the space and it had a nice ambiance.

The Garden didn’t have anything like that. “(steel) Pipe and crepe dividers, narrow aisles, cheap folding tables and chairs and a grey concrete floor in a windowless cinder block space - comics as prison sheik. Lots of guys (circle jerk) looking as if they all needed pointers in the how to dress yourself department. The whole place kind of reinforced the clichéd vision of the comics fan (ala the comic guy from the Simpsons).

It wasn’t pretty.

I got a chance to have a brief conversation with one of the artists who was a childhood idol if you will (Jim Starlin). He’s in his fifties and was just a gas to chat with - the comics business isn’t any different than a lot of other businesses are these days. He grumbled about some of the stuff he had to deal with getting his projects done (which I will not go into detail about erring on the side of discretion) and was anxious about something he had been
working on for awhile.

There were lots of artists there as a matter of fact, lots of people you could meet but it was in such a crappy, dismal space - the opposite of the beautiful, sunny day Saturday was, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time there.

I felt bad for the artists too. You had bunches of them behind these folding tables offering to do convention sketches and sell pages of artwork - a good chance for them to make some money of the books. It just seemed wrong, here these guys are responsible for things like Spider Man which makes hundreds of millions of dollars and they’re trying to scrape together a few extra bucks at a convention - the phrase “quiet desperation” came to mind.

After we left, I made up my mind that I like reading the books but, I don’t like going to things like that (the convention). It spoils my enjoyment of comics.

Good seeing Brian though, he’s slowly dipping his foot back in the pool. He did a sketch of the Hulk and I expect any day now he’ll surprise me and tell me he’s penciling a book just for the heck of it.