Pastries

Following on from the great Eastercon sandwich debate I can bring you the great CAPTION pastry debate. I tried to bring it to you yesterday, via the magic of text-to-lj, but it seems the question was lost in the ether. What I wanted to ask was this:

Is a croissant a type of pastry? If not, (a) what is it and (b) what is a pastry?

At the con, Tom thoughtfully provided a taxonomy of baked products to clarify his position. If anyone wishes to offer a competing taxonomy, now would be the time.

Caption

So, Caption is history ... is history.

Every so often I'm a little surprised that I keep going to Caption. I'm not really what I think of as the target audience; I read comics, but I read them irregularly, and I rarely stray outside the mainstream. I'm not in the habit of seeking out the small-press items that Caption promotes so well. But this was my fifth Caption, so there must be something more than just a feeling of gofer obligation drawing me back.

This year the con changed venues, moving from the city-centre brick of the Oxford Union to the north Oxford concrete of Wolfson College. For the most part, I thought the new venue worked well. The speakers in the main hall could probably have done with amplification, and finding a less remote source of food for the Saturday evening would be a plus ... but the surroundings were nice, and the facilities were good.

Personal highlights: Gideon's talk on 'comics that scroll' was fascinating, not only for the idea of comics thousands of years old but for the insight into how archaeologists and classicists reconstruct the past from scraps of papyrus. jinty's two-part history of Caption was apposite and (speaking as someone who wasn't around for the first n years) informative, and should definitely be recorded somewhere. The National Theatre of Earth Prime's combination of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Adaptation was possibly their finest moment. And I picked up a couple of good sfnal comics by Benjamin Dickson. I find science fiction comics a hit-and-miss affair (I read Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life whilst at the con, but I'm saving my comments for when the discussion starts on instant_fanzine), and these were perhaps a little old-fashioned, but the artwork is striking enough to make them more than worthwhile. At the auction, Constable Dredd was a work of genius. And any convention that gives us melancholy Batman has to be counted a success. There was much else that I missed due to gofering duties, but I can't complain.

In general I was more struck by the similarities and differences with pure sf conventions than I was in previous years, and a little by the differences between comics fandom and sf fandom as well. I don't think any sf convention has an equivalent of the Caption stall, for instance; my impression is that self-published work is discouraged, or at the very least uncommon, whereas at Caption the inverse is true. The role of the small-presses themselves is perhaps slightly different, as well. For instance, prose-sf places like PS Publishing, Golden Gryphon and Nightshade books have become almost the only outlets for short fiction collections. They do publish unknown authors, but equally commonly they publish well-known authors in a shorter form than the mainstream market will bear.

All in all, a good weekend, topped and tailed by good conversation (though less than good food) at the Royal Oak. Sign me up for next year, please.