I enjoyed the Clowes exhibit. I've never seen his originals before, and I always find looking at original art fascinating to see how each creator builds a page, and what decisions s/he makes in the process. Changing figures or text or whathaveyou. Clowes worked was impressively clean overall. Several pages that had no obvious corrections at the inking stage. Interestingly, many of the changes he did make were done with paste-ups; his corrections weren't so much errors in linework, but changes in how something was rendered. I find that very interesting, and I'm going to process that for a while. His color guage pieces were stunning.
I was a little less than impressed with what I saw of Saturday Strip. It ranged over three floors of the Museum, and didn't seem to have space allocated particularly well. The animations running in the theater were obvious enough, but the comic fair portion seemed crammed into a large hallway... on a different floor than where most of the comic talks were being held. The brochure they handed you when you went told you where things were, but there wasn't much else to guide you if you didn't already know your way around the building itself. It seemed like the interactive portions were really interesting -- making your own comics and animations, or chalk drawing on the exterior entryway -- but, again, they seemed a bit removed from things, and there didn't seem to be a cohesiveness to the whole event.
I only sat in on one talk about comic journalism with Darryl Holliday and E.N. Rodriguez. That was interesting, and I'm looking forward to looking up more of their work. They were trying to put together a comic about their experiences today while they were there, so I'll be really interested to see how that turns out.
I did get some interesting ideas and suggestions from some of the folks I talked with there, and the S.O. picked up a copy of Smut Peddler from Spike Trotman, who was there. I would've liked to have stayed long enough to see The Ladydrawers Comics bit, too, but that was scheduled late enough in the day and I didn't want to keep feeding the parking meter every two hours for the whole day.
I was glad to have gone; I am glad that they have this kind of thing. Had the Clowes exhibit not been there, I wonder if I would've walked away with as positive an attitude though. (Photo borrowed from Gene Kanneberg.)
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