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Earlier this week, Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter spoke with Ted Adams, president of IDW Publishing, about his recent announcement that this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego might be his company’s last. The interview created a lot of chatter around the comics industry, reigniting the whole “has Comic-Con forgotten about comics” debate, as well as various other discussions related to conventions, publishers and the best form of cooperation between the two.

Spurgeon emailed me yesterday to ask if I’d like to contribute some thoughts to a reaction piece he planned to post. Since I like nothing more than to read my own name and ramble on incessantly about things I know far less about than I let on, I sent him my reaction to the interview and the points it raised. He posted the reactions today.

Here’s what I had to say:

First off, my frame of reference for conventions and convention history is relatively small compared to people like yourself who’ve been attending them long before I began covering the comics industry — so I can’t claim to have the sort of long-term familiarity with the changing face of conventions that you and other reporters can draw upon. However, I can tell you what I’ve seen from the news side the last few years and how the efforts of publishers like IDW are being received by the outlets they’re hoping to reach.

I think Adams has a great point about publishers’ announcements drowning in the flood of news coming out of San Diego — and how he wants to rethink the decision to “go big” on Comic-Con. It always amazes me that any publishers feel they should save major announcements for San Diego, as I think that 90 percent of those announcements would be viewed as much bigger events if they occurred at any other time throughout the year, or during smaller shows like Heroes Con, Emerald City or, as much as I hate to say it, any of the Wizard World shows. While you’re a bit more likely to get some mainstream attention for the announcements you make during Comic-Con, that’s a big gamble you’re taking with your most important projects, and more often than not, I feel like publishers tend to waste their “best stuff” at Comic-Con just because they’re trying to compete for attention with the movie studios and television networks. And nine times out of ten, that’s not a fight they’re going to win.

Adams also seems to recognize the fact that, with Comic-Con as big as it is (and with the type of programming it now provides), the mainstream news outlets with the big news teams will always put the movie/tv side of the show first and the comics second, while at the same time, the smaller, more comics-focused outlets and their news teams end up having to choose between covering the movie/tv news and publishing news — creating a situation in which publishers’ announcements and mass media news often become mutually exclusive content for comics-focused news outlets. In this environment, publishers already have the odds of receiving coverage against them going into the show — yet for some reason, they keep betting their biggest announcements against the spread.

However, I really respect Adams’ resistance to faulting news outlets for making these types of decisions and acknowledging that it’s really a free market system at work. If comics news websites didn’t receive so much more traffic for movie news than they did for publishing news, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Comics sites would focus on the publishing news, movie sites would focus on movies news, and so on…

In the end, I think the best option for publishers is something hinted at by yourself and Adams in the interview. For publishers, the time for reorganizing your presence at a show like Comic-Con to focus on your creators and the projects connected with them, as well as rethinking the way you approach announcements, is way past due. Comic-Con International is a unique beast, and instead of treating it like a bigger version of all the other conventions (as most publishers seem to do), I think publishers would be wise to start recognizing it as something altogether different from any other event in the comics industry and rethink their strategy accordingly. It seems like Adams is doing exactly that — and I’m glad to see it. The more thought publishers put into their Comic-Con presence, the better of a job we (as comics-focused media outlets) will be able to do in covering it.

There were some interesting points raised in many of the posted reactions, so be sure to head over to The Comics Reporter for the full article.

One thing I observed in the reactions, however, is that a lot of the people who responded seemed to equate IDW’s announcement with the publisher deciding to have no presence whatsoever at the 2009 show. My understanding of Adams’ comments is that he’d like to rethink their presence at the show and their approach to the event as far as announcements and programming – not that they would disappear from it entirely. I think it’s entirely feasible for IDW to reduce and reallocate the resources they devote to Comic-Con and still have a noticeable and more efficient (albeit very different than in past years) presence at Comic-Con.