Chuck Rozanski, who has been coming to Comic-Con for 36 years, says his relationship to San Diego's annual pop culture blowout is like a marriage.
A bad marriage.
“I'm still in love,” Rozanski, the ponytailed proprietor of Colorado's Mile High Comics, said yesterday. “But things aren't working anymore, and I feel like I'm being abandoned.”
When Comic-Con began in 1970, it was a modest gathering of comic book fans and dealers. These days, there's nothing modest about the four-day show, including the grousing of vendors who were once at the Con's center.
They complain about rising fees for exhibit hall booths. “We are being priced out of existence,” said Richard Muchin of Tomorrow's Treasures, a Long Island, N.Y., dealer.
They complain about the cost of traveling to, and staying in, San Diego. “It's too expensive to be here,” said Lee Hester, owner of Lee's Comics in San Mateo.
Most of all, they complain that they've been shoved aside by the Hollywood studios, whose enormous displays dominate the exhibition hall. “If we're that important,” asked Jamie Graham, who runs nine comic shops in the Chicago area, “why aren't we in the middle of the room, where more people can see us?”
Hester and Al Stoltz, of Maryland's Basement Comics, said they will not return to the Con next year. Rozanski, one of the biggest vendors here with 25,000 books, said he may join them. “There's actually a movement afoot to pull all the comic-book dealers out of Comic-Con and move to a separate venue,” he said.
David Glanzer, Comic-Con's director of marketing and public relations, denied that the convention has sold out to the film and TV studios. “The reality is Hollywood has deep pockets and Hollywood spends a lot of money. But they don't always spend it with us.”
However, there's no question that the show's phenomenal growth, from several hundred attendees in 1970 to 125,000 last year, has lowered the comic book sellers' profile.
“The show brings a lot of people in for a variety of things,” Glanzer said, “and one of those is comics.”
Rozanski, though, argues that his industry has lost control of its own show. He noted that the banners hanging from street posts on downtown and Gaslamp thoroughfares say “Comic-Con International: Celebrating the Popular Arts.”
“Does that make you think right from the get-go about comic books?” he asked. “Comic-Con, at least in terms of the comic-book collecting aspect, is disintegrating.”
