To be honest, I could’ve spent the entire weekend at New York Comic-Con doing nothing but taking pictures of Darth Vader and the assorted stormtroopers wandering around the Javits; they’re just such awesome photogrpahic icons. But my Flickr set from the weekend has lots more to it, from college co-eds dressed up as their favorite characters from Japanese animation to men who helped create the Silver Age of comics back in the 1960s (including one guy who was 12 when he started writing for DC Comics!).
As a quick reminder of why all this matters to those of us in “traditional” book publishing, Calvin Reid writes for PW Daily about the $330 million in graphic novel sales last year, two-thirds of which came from the general bookstore market. Not that the major publishers really need reminding, as plenty of them had staked out space on the convention floor, aiming to get fans interested in their own graphic novels or, in some cases, their fantasy and science fiction lines.