I’ve been a creator at New York Comic Con since 2005.  From first fateful NYCC, during which I dealt vodka shots and launched my sequential art career, to last week’s Javitz Center insanity, I’ve seen the sweaty highs and lows of The Second Greatest Comic Con.  Here are the lessons I’ve learned.

1.) Comic Con happens at Afterparties

Every year I go to the Javitz Center, I marvel at the solid crush of humanity. Cross-dressing Hit Girls, aged Lolitas, the omnipresent storm troopers.  The convention floor is a perfect theatre of geek awesome.  But, for a creator sans table, its not where the con is at.  Comic-Con for us has more to do with the 72 hours of drunkenness that start at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s legendary Thursday night bash, progress through Friday and Saturday’s boozing (often sponsored by DC, MTV, or Darkhorse), and end with us pouring our woes to raconteur and alcohol connoisseur Jimmy d’Aquino of Comic News Insider.

While free top-shelf liquor is a potent lure, afterparties are the best chance to get an honest appraisal of the industry one works in.  You find out which imprints are being gutted, which writer got his book optioned.  Sometimes parties even give you the only proper food you’ll eat all weekend.  Which brings us to point #2

2.) The Javitz Center Wants You To Die

While it is inevitable that New York Comic Con will happen in the Javitz Center, it is also not very fun.  The glass box by the Hudson is all concrete floors, bad smells, brutalist architecture, inedible sandwiches, and strapping setup guys dying to cheat exhibitors out of a bit of money.  The Javitz Center is the squatting toad perched on the edge of the city I love.  Three days in it will leave you wrecked, germy, malnourished and fat.

3.) Having Your Own Table is A Dark Hell-Circle Indeed

Gentle fanboy, have you noticed the lean and hungry look in the creator’s eye as you shove your way through artists alley?  It’s because we’re desperate.  We spend months prepping for Comic Con- drawing new art, shelling out for the perfect meme referancing merch, getting racks and shelves and other retail things we do not understand.  We schlep the whole mess over on the subway Thursday morning, arrange it prettily on our $700 card table, and wait.  Wait for editors to notice our brilliance, for podcasts to interview us, but most of all for you.  Yes, you!  Why are you not buying?  Why are you hurrying past us to get the free nose pickers Marvel is giving out?  CAN’T YOU SEE HOW MUCH WE NEED YOU???  When we, semi-demented from sleep depravation and spending our entire bank accounts to be here, snap at you after you rub your filthy fingers over our mini comic without buying, just pity us.

4.) Comics increasingly have no place at Comic Con

Pity us especially because we, as artists, are really the people Comic Con is least concerned with.  Comics, for big publishers, are increasingly seen as lossleaders and idea farms for movies.  And for big convention organizers, movie studios seem like much better bets than comic publishers.  At every NYCC, the first C seems increasingly extraneous.

Despite the four immutable laws above, I still love New York Comic Con- for the parties, for getting me my first gig with Marvel, or for livepainting for MTV alongside Camilla d’Errico.  I love the air of possibility that hangs over professionals’ hour- the expectant tension that that you just might be someone who will change everything.  More than anything, I dig meeting my fans.

Expect me next year, grousing the whole time.

Words by Molly Crabapple.  Lead photo by Seth Kushner