Comic Art Convention - Legacy

Legacy

The Comic Art Conventions provided the primary nexus for fans and the largely New York City-based industry during the Silver Age and the Bronze Age of comic books. As well, many of the Golden Age creators were still alive and in attendance at panels and for interviews, which helped lay the groundwork for the medium's historical scholarship.

The reputation of the Convention spread throughout fandom via an annual write-up published in The Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom by columnist Murray Bishoff. Besides reporting on convention events, Bishoff also provided fans around the country with a benchmark market report by surveying attending dealers regarding what was selling and whether prices realized were above or below those quoted in the de facto standard, The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide.

Will Eisner, creator of the The Spirit in 1940, credited the 1971 Comic Art Con for his return to comics. In a 1983 interview with Seuling, he said, "I came back into the field because of you. I remember you calling me in New London, where I was sitting there as chairman of the board of Croft Publishing Co. My secretary said, 'There's a Mr. Seuling on the phone and he's talking about a comics convention. What is that?' She said, 'I didn't know you were a cartoonist, Mr. Eisner.' 'Oh, yes,' I said, 'secretly; I'm a closet cartoonist.' I came down and was stunned at the existence of the whole world. ... That was a world that I had left, and I found it very exciting, very stimulating".

Eisner later elaborated about meeting underground comics creators and publishers, including Denis Kitchen: "I went down to the convention, which was being held in one of the hotels in New York, and there was a group of guys with long hair and scraggly beards, who had been turning out what spun as literature, really popular 'gutter' literature if you will, but pure literature. And they were taking on illegal subject matter that no comics had ever dealt with before. ... I came away from that recognizing that a revolution had occurred then, a turning point in the history of this medium. ... I reasoned that the 13-year-old kids that I'd been writing to back in the 1940s were no longer 13-year-old kids, they were now 30, 40 years old. They would want something more than two heroes, two supermen, crashing against each other. I began working on a book that dealt with a subject that I felt had never been tried by comics before, and that was man's relationship with God. That was the book A Contract with God...."

In 1973, Seuling persuaded Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of the industry-changing 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, to attend what would be Wertham's only panel with an audience of comics fans.

The final two years of the 1961-1969 Alley Awards, sponsored by Alter Ego magazine, were presented at the Comic Art Convention. After the demise of the Alley, later years featured awards named after the Comic Art Convention itself.

As his comic-book distribution business occupied more time, and as other comics conventions, most notably in San Diego and Chicago, became larger, more prominent, and more commercially rather than fan-driven, Seuling segued his Independence Day-centered Comic Art Convention into the smaller, generally mid-June "Manhattan Con".