We’ll be off to BookExpo America for the next few days so don’t expect too much posting here. (Follow us on Twitter!)

Yesterday’s show kicked off with a full day of programming. We caught only the “African Americans in Graphic Novels and Comics” with Kyle Baker, Carol Burrell, Shawn Martinbrough and Alex Simmons, moderated by Calvin Reid. Part of the yearly “African American Book Industry Professionals Education Program & Networking Reception,” the panel thankfully eluded all those “What’s it like to be a black comics creator” questions in favor of just general talk about the industry from five smart people. Baker and Burrell talked about upcoming projects: Baker’s biography of Obama for HarperCollins, which sounds highly readable, and Burrell’s adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. (Announcement of the latter drew applause from the attendees.) Martinbrough mentioned his upcoming Luke Cage mini and his past How to Draw Noir Comics and his current work with Verge Entertainment. Simmons recounted the history of his successful Kids Comic Book Convention and after the panel mentioned that the concept is probably gong to move to some other venues.

After that, we scarfed down a lot of very, very tasty turkey with spicy cranberry orange relish at the reception to power us for the night ahead and sped off to the CBLDF party at the very swanky Hudson Terrace. It was a really upscale venue for a comics confab, which made for a very relaxed vibe, even if a soda was $6. (We took the above photo at the beginning of the night.) Attendees included DC topper Paul Levitz and VP of sales and marketing Steve Rotterdam; writers Ivory Madison, Martha Thomases , Peter Sanderson, and Marc Bernadin; artists Nikki Cooke and Dennis Calero; editor/agent Denis Kitchen,, Marvel’s Alejandro Arbona, Dark Horse’s Michael Martens, and a sizable West Coast contingent, including Archaia’s Mark Smylie, Mel Caylo, and Stephen Christie, Top Cow’s Filip Sablik, and Image’s Joe Keatinge. There were a lot of folks talking about iPhones and downloadable comics and whipping them out and demonstrating their software, which was cool, and talk of 3.0. As someone pointed out, although people won’t pay for things on the Internet, they will pay for them on their phone.

The schmooze level at this party was incredibly high, and afterward, it turned out almost everyone ended up at the same Irish pub for yet another big comics summit, with talk of James Bond songs and so on.

Anyway we know we forgot some people in the above list, so apologies.

ComicMix’s Glenn Hauman, Image’s Joe Keatinge, Comixology’s David Steinberger and Billboard’s Evie Nagy all whip out their mobile devices and talk about apps.

MTV Splash Page’s Rick Marshall, Stacy, whose last name we don’t know, and Nikki Cooke.

This entry was posted on 05/29/09 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Events, Photos, Benefits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.