A Comic-Con Diary: The Eisner Awards
Monkey See contributor/longtime nerd Glen Weldon recently attended San Diego Comic-Con. He kept a diary during one of the largest media events in the world.
8:28 p.m.: Jennifer and Matthew Holm are an adorable brother-sister team. They are standing at a podium less than 6 feet away from me and thanking their publisher, because their charming book, Babymouse for President, has just won the Eisner for Best Publication for Early Readers.
They are beaming, humbled, happy. I, too, am happy for them. I am also a terrible terrible person, a base, disgusting, self-obsessed churl, because even as I applaud their well-deserved success, my mind floods (DON'T SAY FLOODS) fills with images of dry and parched vistas, of deserts, of canyons, of dust-choked, sun-scorched mesas, because I have to pee like a racehorse. Like two racehorses. Like a team of Clydesdales.
Bladders don't explode, do they? That's not a thing that can happen, right? Do humans have, like, gaskets? Blowable gaskets?
What happens to a pee deferred? It doesn't dry up, I'll tell you that for free.
Okay, focus.
A shelf at the rear of the stage holds the remaining Eisners to be given out. The 25 remaining Eisners. Plus the six inductees into the Hall of Fame, and the In Memoriam (presented each year by the great and good Maggie Thompson), and the Bill Finger Writing Award, and the Retailer Award, and the Most Promising Newcomer Award, and the Humanitarian Award.
In that shelf I see the next two hours and 29 minutes stretching before me. It is a grim, dystopian future. Like The Road, but with lower abdominal pain. Okay, this is dumb. Yes, given that my seat's up at the very front, getting up and dashing to the restroom will be disruptive as hell, but there's nothing I can do. And anyway look — there's another latecomer sneaking over to his seat at the next table. It's a thing that happens. People will understand. I nod at the guy, a gesture of guilt-ridden kinship: We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Skulkers.
It's then I realize that the skulker in question is Neil Gaiman.
And he looks sheepish and apologetic — more than baseline, anyway — about arriving late. Neil Gaiman — who would be within his rights, given the room, to make an entrance like Gaga, riding in on a gryphon, tossing gold dubloons and Tori Amos albums into the crowd — looks guilty about interrupting the proceedings.
But there's nothing for it. I hold out as long as I can — 13 more awards — before physiological imperative trumps politesse, and I duck out. The fact that I am doubled over in pain as I go makes it easier for people to see over me. So, you know: Bonus.
Monkey See
A Comic-Con Diary, Day 2: Man Of Steel, Man Of Urgency