Bob Greenberger

From what I can tell, I stand with the majority that the hotel was not the place to hold Lunacon or any other convention. For those who do not possess a car, it’s not easy to reach. And for this desiring variety in their dining, the single restaurant is not sufficient and you need said car to find any of the other dining choices.

And trust me, you want a car to find those choices. The food is barely above college dining hall standards and the menu fairly pedestrian. The buffets were an okay alternative but the food is so mass produced French toast is not toasted and the rigatoni dry.

Structurally, consolidating everything onto two floors had some advantages to the Rye, a.k.a. the Escher Hotel. However, there is no main escalator or staircase to get from the second to the third floor, which resulted in overcrowded elevators or cramped fire stairwells. Which meant getting to your panel on time could prove a challenge.

The dealer’s room was adequately sized although the variety of items for sale was fairly lackluster. I never did make it to the Art Show but that too seemed to have a properly sized space.

However, the rooms set aside for Gaming and Filking were woefully inadequate. The Game Room, where Robbie spent most of the weekend, was packed and crowded and…hot. The small programming room for filking was so tiny you needed need a microphone but when full, also grew uncomfortably warm pretty quickly. And being a meeting room, it also didn’t allow for acoustic issues.

I’m keenly aware of this because the Boogie Knights made their Lunacon debut. Ostensibly they were Filk GOH but you couldn’t tell from signage or notes in the program. Anyway, they performed Saturday night at 7 (a pretty poor slot for a GOH, but that’s just me) and to just about everyone they were new. And the audience loved them. Saturday night’s show was funny and the five performers were in high spirits and their playfulness quickly won over the crowd. I’m told the room was even fuller for Sunday’s performance so I presume that’s a good sign, word of mouth was spreading.

The panels rooms seemed uniformly sized and were pretty adequate for the discussions. On Saturday, I participated in The Year in Comics. One of the nice things about these sorts of panels is that they force you to give some attention to the subject. Taking a step back and evaluating my industry was a good exercise and we had a spirited discussion. In short, it wasn’t the best of years or the worst of years. If anything, the biggest problem for most publishers is getting readers to sample new projects if they do not spin from existing titles.

Saturday night, after the Boogie Knights’s fine performance, we attended the Masquerade which was small but packed with goodness. I did my movie trailers as the halftime show and had a rapt audience. Once again, though, the hotel’s inadequacies came to light. They did not have a good space for people to snap pictures of the contestants so before I could show videos, each contestant took the stage for a few minutes. Well, halfway through showing the videos, the judges were done, forcing me to divide my show in half, the last previews to be shown after the Masquerade was over.

We had a small, low key room party to celebrate Kate’s birthday and we were gratified so many of our friends and colleagues stopped by even though there were bigger, louder parties beckoning to them.

Sunday, I moderated a memorial to Will Eisner which had all of five people attend. While I’m grateful that the con thought enough of Will’s contributions to schedule the discussion, it was most likely the wrong audience. My final panel, though, was a joy. I moderated a discussion on Guilty Pleasures in reading and all five of us weren’t show how to fill an hour but we managed quite well. My final hour was spent in frustration as I appeared, available for autographs and no one came by. Ah, well.

As enjoyable as Lunacons generally are, the entire experience was marred by the wrong facility and some rude fans and some committee folk who should know better.