Friday started great with autograph signings by Rena Mero and Garth Ennis. Many artists appeared for all three days, including Bob Layton, Dick Giordano, Dick Ayres, Harry Lampert, Martin Nodell, Don Perlin, Rick Magyar, and John Romita. Rick, a truely nice man, was sporting the "Michael Jordan haircut" look. Rick told me that Alex Saviuk would be there Saturday. John put up a sign saying "John Romita's Father" - joking - as others refer to him as John, Sr, he figures he's John Romita's father.
Bob Layton refers to Dick Giordano as his mentor. The Bob credits Dick with teaching him everything he knows about drawing comics.
Dick Ayres did a beautiful pencil drawing of the Hulk (original look) gently carrying the invisible girl. He said that he had done it Friday morning. Nothing like MegaCon to provide a little inspiration.
Later in the dasy Bob Layton and Dick Giordano gave a session on the state of the comic book industry and how to run a comic company. Both said that in running a company (Bob at Valiant, Dick at DC), the most difficult task was representing the creative people and dealing with the financial people. The single biggest stumbling block to comic costs today is still the cost of paper. When the EPA mandated that paper companies clean up the last 10% of the pollutants they dumped into waterways, it cost as much or more than cleaning up the first 90% of the polluntants. Also they stopped producing "pulp" paper. This was the paper that most comics were printed on. The costs are added to the product sold to comic companies. The comic companies margins are squeezed, and the price of the comic goes up. So if you pay more for the comic, it's to pay for the paper companiies' water polluntion upgrades. Bob and Dick also noted that no comic artist they know of has taken a rate (pay) cut to help offset company costs. Rates are same as they were five plus years ago. If time permits, I will have more on this discussion in a later article.
