San Diego

[deckerd@agcs.com]

So there I was at the San Diego Comics Convention, when David Gerstein
finds me. "I've just been offered Walt Disney's Comics & Stories #26
for $20!" he exclaims breathlessly. "Is it a good deal?"
     "You bet!" sez me. And off David scampers to buy it.
     Er...did I do the right thing? I didn't give the poor guy bad
advice, I hope...?
     Other San Diego tidbits:
     *Pat Block's wife Shelley spent much of the time at the con
dressed as Catwoman (Batman TV show version), complete with cat-suit,
tail, mask, cat-ears, and...er, a whip. As I understand it, Adam West
and Julie Newmar (Batman and Catwoman from the TV series) were at the
con signing autographs, and Shelley had her picture taken with them
by a photographer from People magazine.
     *David's Disney panel went off as scheduled. I sat between David
and Don Rosa. Don was mellow, David was stressing out as the audience
diminished. I think some people came expecting to hear about recent
Disney movies and were disappointed to hear us talk about Disney
comic books. I hope David had a better time than it looked like he
was having. I'd estimate at least half of the Gladstone letter column
regulars were in the audience.
     *And of course Don copped an Eisner Award. A more deserving
winner there never was.
     *Thursday night found me hanging out with a gang of Disney fans,
including Dana Gabbard, Joe Torcivia, Kim McFarland, and others. We had
dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory, then retired to somebody's hotel
room where a projector was set up to show 16mm films. One of the films
was a sequence deleted from Fantasia: Clair de Lune. The footage was
later used in Melody Time (I think) but with Blue Bayou on the soundtrack
(an amazing fit, considering it apparently wasn't planned that way: it
was set in a swamp and the dominant color was blue). Don't ask me how,
but our movie-showing friend had obtained a reel of the sequence with
the original Clair de Lune soundtrack.
     *One of the fans collects overseas Disney comics. He had picked up
Icelandic, Egyptian, Hungarian, Latvian, Estonian, Czech, and even Thai 
editions of Duck books. The Thai edition was more than a little strange
(Thai word balloons with English text below the panels). One of the Baltic
editions (the Latvian, I think) was actually in Russian, but nobody knew
whether it was intended for the general Russian market or for ethnic
Russians living in Latvia (of which there are a great many).
     *Saturday night saw the Egmont dinner, where a bunch of us working
for or otherwise associated with Egmont congregated for a repast of
European Spanish cuisine. (Somebody must like sampling exotic food. The
last Egmont dinner at the San Diego con I went to, two or three years
ago, was at a Greek restaurant.) David Gerstein brought Fabio G. of this
very ML as his guest. It was a little frustrating. I was sitting across
from the human Junior Woodchuck handbook of knowledge about Italian
Disney comics and I couldn't think of any of the hundreds of questions
to ask that came so easily during the six-hour drive home the next day!

--Dwight Decker