Lily Renée, Escape Artist by Margaret Oh

Following her was the Revolution & Reaction panel, kicked off by the always amazing Trina Robbins ( Lily Renée, Escape Artist) talking about her recent research on the art and life of Holocaust survivor Lily Renée Wilheim, one of the most successful women cartoonists during World War II and Fiction House's only woman cartoonist to draw covers as well as interior stories. I caught a number of great presentations on Friday, beginning with a humorous and provocative look at US comics from the Canadian perspective (it’s not all about you, USA) called “So that’s what an angry Canadian sounds like!” Fan Responses to Alpha Flight by Amanda Murphyao (Carleton University). This last one, with her discussion of the “bad girl” punk version of Storm, really set me up for the next panel I was going to, CBLDF’s forum on women’s issues in comics. These included Crisis on Indigenous Earth: Comic Art Indigene Mateo Romero and Antonio Chavarria (Museum of the Indian Arts & Culture) Mexico City as the Field of Signification: Creating a Subaltern Hero in Daniel Munoz’s El Pantera Sam Cannon (U of Texas, Austin) Cyber-Blackness and the Ethics of De-Racialized Characters Kane Anderson (UC Santa Barbara) and Rebel Yell: The Physical and Racial Identity of Storm Ayanna Dozier (Chapman University). The first CAC panel kicked things off with Subaltern Counterculture and Strengths of the Underdog, a group that opened my eyes to all kinds of viewpoints I hadn’t thought of. You never know who you will see comics professionals, independent scholars you never see anywhere else, professors from around the world, students & young scholars presenting for the first time … it’s a great experience. The CAC room is like a sea of tranquility in the midst of a hurricane of craziness, and I am constantly slipping in & out of the room while the festivities are going on. The instigators, Peter Coogan and Randy Duncan (still co-chairs and active participants) were awarded the Inkpot this year in commemoration of this feat.

It was so cool! And great costumes!Īnyway, not so many costumes at the Comic Arts Conference, the comics scholarship conference that celebrated its 20th anniversary at this year’s convention.

I’ll never forget the year that I went into a room early to catch a spotlight on J J Sedelmaier, and found myself in the middle of the Klingon Lifestyle Presentation, an annual drama featuring the crew of the IKV Stranglehold. There are so many different communities getting together that it would be just about impossible to touch on all of them. One of the most amazing things about San Diego Comic-Con is that it contains more universes than that bag of marbles at the end of Men in Black.

Lily Renée, Escape Artist by Margaret Oh