Please have a moment of silence for comics

He is a monitor a weekly column dedicated to everything that happens in the year Cable the world of culture, from movies to memes, from TV to Twitter.

Adequate is new Dune the trailer came out this week. Not because it’s summer and because the huge trailers are always glued to the giant movies playing in multiplexes — even if it’s part of it — rather Comic-Con International is this weekend, and where Covid-19 it never happened, that trailer would gather more than 6,000 people in Room H of the San Diego Convention Center. Easy. Fans would shout at director Denis Villeneuve and actors Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. I’m sure someone would wear it in a home suit. Or sand as a worm. They would be bonkers.

Plus it never will be. Comic-Con is dead.

Okay, not literally. For the second year in a row, San Diego’s annual convention is hosting a pre-event and organizing some online panels instead. From a public health perspective, that’s more than wise. Comic-Con was a contagious Petri dish, even before the world found itself in the midst of a global pandemic. But from a fandom point of view and from a cultural impact point of view, the online event will not be the same mojo. He doesn’t expect Twitter to overflow or open the box office numbers for next weekend. There will be no IRL cosplay. There will be some nice conversations-A little bit Trek, a Walking Death on the panel, Zack Snyder is talking about zombies, but little else. The 130,000 people who normally make their way to San Diego will not be there; the blood of the event will disappear. (Maybe it’s appropriate then to talk to a lot of people about the dead).

Last year, in this column, I asked him “Can Comic-Con work from home?”It was mostly a rhetorical question, because of course you can’t. It’s a Comic-Con event, not a TV show. And, unlike the Olympics, that too started today and it will not have a live audience, one of the best moments is the kind of event that doesn’t happen on the main stage. About the conversations you have on the Comic-Con dashboard line, in out-of-hours hangouts, on C-list CW star observations, on a journey to earth to search for collections. There are certainly joys that happen on the playing field at the Olympics, but that’s not why people attend. There are few sports fans who go to the summer games dressed as their favorite swimmers.

The result, in a word, is sad. For the most part, Comic-Con is a rather frivolous event, and moving online hardly hurts anyone in any way. Not having it in person certainly saves a lot of lives. But there is an inherent sadness in losing cultural touches. No one needs Comic-Con, or another Marvel movie, or fireworks, or even the Olympics. But these events connect humanity. Loss, at a time when so much has already been lost — and, in the case of Comic-Con, the event already losing steam“It’s just a reminder of what needs to be rebuilt.”

But perhaps that hope is the clear side, if any. No details are known, but Comic-Con has ordered a live event for the Thanksgiving weekend. It may seem like a mediocre time to organize comic book deals, but maybe it could be a dry run. It could be a way to test what could have been done personally in 2022. Maybe it could be translated in better shape. . Comic-Con pre-Covid was unlikely and expensive for fans. There was a lot of splashing and not so much substance. Maybe a new basic scam could focus more on comics – Star Wars movies and (theoretically) Duneit’s a follow-up, but it hasn’t been so crowded that fans can’t start taking it all in stride. It could be different; it could be the way it was before. Comic-Con is dead. Long live Comic-Con.