Photo Essay: Imagination and Craft Combine at Rose City Comic Con

This past weekend, the Rose City Comic Con—Portland’s biggest annual comics and pop culture show—brought an estimated 65,000 attendees to the Oregon Convention Center for a weekend of “stuff.” 

What is “stuff?” It’s everything. It’s comic books—like the name of the event suggests—but it’s also anime, collectables, some Pokemon cards, a room full of old-ass video games, a big convention hall where people watch cultural luminaries have panel discussions (and sign autographs), a DJ in the lobby, demonstrations of tablets designed for drawing, and a massive alley where artists from all over the country peddle their comics, drawings, and other ephemera. In short, every genre, every medium, every form of expression collides in one building, populated by a burbling mass of thousands of people in various states of cosplay, all chatting, browsing, sharing, and hunting for their own personal object of desire in a mass of everything. “Stuff” is the only word vague, yet material, enough to describe it. 

The modern comic con is a large and lucrative event appealing to wide swaths of pop culture enthusiasts. This form is a pretty recent development. The comic book convention in its nascent form was much smaller, a gathering of comic book collectors and dealers looking to sell and trade old books and chat about comic storylines, maybe meet some writers and get an autograph—a thing resembling a trading card show more than the massive influx of energetic oddballs who attend Rose City every year. 

Joseph Schmalke, a comics industry veteran from Portland, Maine (“It’s exactly like here but with fewer people”), was promoting Midnight Factory Press, a small comics publishing operation he owns and operates that specializes in “horror, sci-fi, and the bizarre.” 

“The first comic book convention I ever went to was Boston Comic-Con,” he said, “which used to be held in, like, the basement of a hotel. There were three guests and a bunch of vendors selling Silver Age comics. I showed up with a stack of [Uncanny X-Men author] Chris Claremont books I wanted him to sign.” 

The fundamentals of Schmalke’s experience live on in this new age of conventions. There are still guys on the floor with big-ass boxes of comic books, buying and selling and chatting with customers, there are still panels where creators talk about the industry and their work in front of audiences, and there are still artists at booths, chatting with fans and signing hundreds of books at a time. 

Two of those creators, writer Matt Fraction and artist Steve Lieber, were at the show signing copies of Lieber’s variant cover of the first issue of Fraction’s run on DC’s Batman. Fraction and Lieber are two of many comic book professionals who have adopted Portland as their home base, and paid tribute by placing the Caped Crusader atop the marquee of the historic Hollywood Theatre. Fraction, sporting a plastic children’s Batman mask on top of his head, signed books at the Movie Madness booth all weekend.

“My spouse got a job at the Multnomah County Library in 1997 and I followed,” says Lieber. “I had no idea this would be comic book Mecca, it was just dumb luck.”

“I was stalking Steve’s wife at the time, so I moved out here as well,” joked Fraction. “My wife and I moved here from Missouri in 2009, and wanted a place where we weren’t leftist liberal freaks, but boringly mainstream, middle of the road. It’s a great place to raise kids, and there were a million people in our fields. It felt like we were moving to a place with a turn-key social network.” 

“I love meeting people who read the work,” says Lieber of the comic convention. “You sit in a room by yourself creating these things, and it’s nice to see who’s reading them and getting the buzz of having your best jokes said back to you.” 

Variations of Lieber’s sentiment were common when I asked comic creators about attending shows. Writing and drawing are solitary pursuits, and the comics industry in particular—a contract business these days—can be a very lonely place. (Lieber and many other local creators fight that alienation by working out of Helioscope, a big co-operative comics artists’ space in the city.) At conventions, the artist encounters their audience person-to-person and discovers the visceral impact their work has on people. 

“We’re in a weird place with the internet—buying things online, art that may or may not be made by humans—so this is my way of being able to actually interact with people who want to buy art from human beings,” said Hannah Hillam, a cartoonist from San Jose, California, who’s at the show selling books and personalized portraits of people’s pets. “In-person shows are where it’s at right now, because you get to connect with people. I try to push my work online and it just gets lost in the flood of stuff. People come here to buy art from artists, that’s why I love it.” 

Is it an economic thing, or a social thing? 

“Both. We’re all very isolated. We’re all in our own little places. We can live anywhere and so coming here is like summer camp with a bunch of other artists. We can sell art to people who really appreciate it.” 

“[This is] very much why I’m here,” Fraction said. “In those pre-internet days, when it wasn’t quite so easy to find people that shared your interests and hobbies, when comic books were the things that spawned billion dollar film franchises, it was hard to find people who read comics, liked them, and feel about them the way I do.”

So how have conventions changed over the years? Fraction answers immediately. 

“More women. There’s more women now, statistically, than men at comic conventions. In comic conventions across the country, women are more than 50 percent of the attendees.”

How did this happen? There are many answers, but the first and most apparent is cosplay. Cosplay was not a feature of the old basement-of-the-Veterans-Memorial-Coliseum comic book show. It was a product of anime culture in Japan, a widespread practice at their equivalent of conventions. Being good at cosplay requires a lot of skills that are feminine coded: skill with a thread and needle, the ability to receive and give compliments freely and without neurosis, the communal spirit it takes to coordinate a group of people who cooperate on a group costume. 

It’s also the case that the Japanese comics industry has never relied on a male audience the way the American industry has. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, while the American comics book industry was sinking deeper into the mire of male superhero fantasies, entire genres of elegant looking comics for girls were emerging in Japan. Some series that are ostensibly for boys—like Japanese-ultra-genius Rumiko Takashi’s dog demon/time traveling/romantic comedy/action series InuYasha—attracts female fans with equal ease. 

“I remember getting into arguments with retailers, once upon a time, about how women and children weren’t being served by the industry, INSISTING that women and children didn’t read comics,” says Fraction. “Then I’d go to a bookstore and see women and children buying two hundred dollar stacks of manga, and I was like, ‘Oh no, they just don’t want your comics’.”

Mainstream comics in America served two audiences in post-war America: funny page gazers and young men. In Japan, it was different, encompassing different genres and audiences and modes of address. When that culture really hit in the west 20 or so years ago, it served to expand the aperture of what “geek culture” was in America. Once severe, gatekept, and extremely male, it has become enthusiastic, globalized, and a repository for all gender expressions. The power fantasy has shifted: away from Thor, with his bulging muscles and big phallic hammer, and towards Loki, with his androgyny and his playful, chaotic nature. 

“I meet a lot of young artists at shows like these,” Lieber said. “I look at their portfolios and offer feedback, and that’s always just the biggest joy in the world for me. I was that young artist a million years ago, and I remember how hard it was to get feedback from people….”

Fraction chimed in. “…especially generous feedback.”

“Yeah,” Lieber continued. “I love being able to talk to them, to tell them ‘This works, this doesn’t, or this is artistically a good choice but will commercially hurt you, so you have to make choices with that.’ When I was a kid, some artists very generously did that for me.”

Portfolio review is an old tradition at comic shows and it lives on at Rose City, who have sought to streamline the process by accepting submissions, free of charge, and giving them to industry editors who can offer constructive criticism on the work. In the shadow of this wild extravaganza, a small industry event is happening, where people pursue the apex of the craft in a small room far away from a DJ. Leslie Fensinger, the senior content manager at Leftfield Media, the events consortium that puts RCCC on, coordinates the convention’s portfolio review program. 

“We built this creator pro track with them in mind,” she said, “knowing there are so many publishers around here. We set them up, we build the schedule, we make sure there are ample breaks in there.”

The process is not always easy. Cat Ferris, another Portland-based artist, got her portfolio reviewed at the big San Diego comic show back in the day. “It was extremely discouraging—although I didn’t have a comics portfolio, I had an animation portfolio. It was a mess, but I was so excited to show people everything I could do. I had life drawing, scenery drawing, cartoons, so much stuff. Most people were like, ‘Kid, this portfolio is a mess, I don’t know what to tell you.’ But I did get one good review that saved my career and god bless them for that.” 

Phil Hester, a forty-year veteran of the comics industry, had his portfolio reviewed at a show in the beginning of his career. 

“I used to just hang out in that portfolio review room and get eaten alive by these editors,” he remembered. “But it was all really valuable information. Your friends, they want to boost you up, and they know what they like, but they don’t know why.”

“When you’re a kid you have your favorites, the artists you admire,” Hester continued.“ Then there are others who seem boring, staid, and you don’t understand why they’re working and you’re not. An editor can tell you, ‘Look, you don’t draw credible buildings,’ or, ‘This baby looks like a goblin,’ when all you think about is like, ‘I draw cool barbarians.’ That added perspective opened my eyes up to all the stuff I wasn’t good at and needed to get good at. We had a rule of thumb: If you heard a note from more than one editor, it’s probably a good note.” 

It’s comforting, I think, sitting in this vortex of cultural consumption, to know that, somewhere in there, people are helping the next generation of creators keep the craft alive— all for love of the craft.