Back in 2005, the Independent Film Channel gave cameras to a few folks heading to Comic-Con International to document their convention-going experiences. (Those folks included, by the way, Tim Leong and Amber Mitchell, who were trying to promote their new web site ComicFoundry.com -- you may have caught that name in industry news this past week.) Last night, I saw their 2007 edition of Comic Con Chronicles and just found the 2006 edition online. The 2005 version I thought was clever. They pretty flatly said that they were only going to be looking at three aspects of the convention from three sets of people. It wasn't trying to cover the full scope of the convention, but just a small portion as seen by a few people. I found that quite interesting.
The 2006 version was more of a general overview. They did give one camera out to a cosplayer, and used a few minutes of her footage (which included some fascinating backstage-during-the-show shots) but it was mostly one host, Matt Singer, trying to show the full breadth of CCI in a half-hour. There were snippets with Nicholas Cage and Samuel L. Jackson and James Kochalka and Melinda Gebbie and Henry Rollins... All things considered, it was a pretty reasonable shot at documenting CCI 2006 overall.
The 2007 edition struck me more of a mixed bag. There were no cameras given out this year (or, at least, none that were used) so the whole show was from the perspective of the host (again, Matt Singer) as he this time hit on some very specific aspects of the con. The more interesting aspect of the show, this year, was that they enlisted the help of artist Robin Enrico to help create an eight-page mini-comic written by Singer to be given away during the show. It was interesting from the aspect of seeing a mini-comic created start to finish, but the faux-ego-schtick from Singer wore a bit thin, I thought. The rest of the show struck me as an attempt at covering the news of the show, rather than snippetting the news in an attempt to show everything that goes on.
I'm always pleased to see positive representations of the comic book industry in more maintsream outlets (although one could argue about how mainstream IFC is) but I can get the here's-all-the-news-from-CCI from any number of places, many in video format, many in a more immediate environment. But the smaller, man-on-the-street type stories that were presented in the 2005 show aren't as common. At least, not in a well-edited, documentary story fashion. I'd much rather see CCI from that perspective again in the future, rather than the same thing that's being done by every other network that tries to cover the convention.
Ah, but what do I know? I'm not exactly a mainstream audience demographic anyway.
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