Column: San Diego Comic-Con gets the superhero treatment in a new SiriusXM podcast

Every superhero has an origin story, and in keeping with its Hulk-sized cultural footprint, Comic-Con has a history that can only be described as epic.

It is a massive, global event now, but San Diego Comic-Con had a modest hometown start. Instead of 135,000 people converging on the San Diego Convention Center, the 1970 San Diego Golden State Comic Con was a small gathering of comic book collectors, sci-fi friends and movie fans wandering around the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel.

And before it was 300 or so geeks at the U.S. Grant, Comic-Con was an even smaller group of science-fiction-loving, comic-book-collecting, cult-movie-watching kids who joined a few like-minded adults in an Ocean Beach bookstore for a group hang that became a fan-fueled revolution.

The story of Comic-Con is the story of underdogs who would not let the fact that they had no idea what they were doing stop them from doing something amazing. It is the story of a small band of friends who were able to turn their obsessions into careers.

It is the story of the high school nerds and counterculture iconoclasts who helped shape the entertainment landscape we are all living in now.

It is the story being told by “Comic-Con Begins,” a new original podcast series from SiriusXM Podcasts, the group behind “Marvel’s Wastelanders: Old Man Star-Lord” and “Huuuge Fan.” The series debuted this week on the SiriusXM app, Pandora, Stitcher and other podcast platforms, and like the event that inspired it, “Comic-Con Begins” is about the humans behind the phenomenon.

“At the very early stages, we were thinking of calling (the series) ‘First Geeks,’ because a lot of it is more about the community than the Con itself,” said podcast creator and producer Mathew Klickstein, who also wrote the series with Rob Schulte and Christopher Tyler.

“This isn’t about Comic-Con as a static entity. It is about a group of people and how they built this community. They were the people who who helped geeks, nerds and outsiders take over mainstream entertainment. There is no geek culture anymore. It is all pop culture now. The geeks we spoke to inherited the Earth.”

Inspired by narration-free documentary films like “Amy,” director Asif Kapadia’s immersive look at the short life of singer Amy Winehouse, Klickstein tells the Comic-Con origin story almost exclusively through excerpts from the 70 hours of interviews he conducted during the COVID-19 shutdown with some 50 subjects.

More than 30 of those interviewees — including original teen organizers Mike Towry, Barry Alfonso, John Pound and Scott Shaw! — come from Comic-Con’s formative years, when it was just a bunch of crazy kids hanging out at Ocean Beach’s Alert Books. The bookstore was owned by sci-fi fanatic Ken Krueger, and it was the temporary home of comic book collector and fanatic Sheldon “Shel” Dorf. The two men became co-founders of Comic-Con.

Wendy All attended her first Comic-Con meeting in 1972, when she was still a student at Patrick Henry High School. Within a few years, she became the Con’s art-show coordinator and guest coordinator.

Almost 50 years after that first meeting in Krueger’s slightly seedy Ocean Beach bookstore, Wendy All is now the historical consultant for the “Comic-Con Begins” podcast.

Despite her love of science and science fiction back then, All could not have seen the podcast format coming. But she knew that her Comic-Con initiation was something she was never going to forget.

“It was a very memorable meeting. I just kept rolling it around in my mind and thinking that these people were so amazing,” said All, a creative director, product designer and scientific illustrator who has designed toys for Mattel and Hasbro.

“My parents were real old-school, so I just said I was going to a meeting in a bookstore with all of these people who like science fiction, like me. Then everyone started streaming in, and they all looked like people my parents would never want me to know. I don’t meant that in a bad way, but more like, ‘Oh my God, I have hit the mother lode.”

And so she had.

By celebrating the genres that the establishment refused to take seriously and bringing giants like author Ray Bradbury and comic book artist Jack Kirby to commune with their fans, those early Con confabs changed the pop-culture universe for good. Which is why the SiriusXM podcast devotes the first four of its six episodes to a deep dive into the Comic-Con origin story.

The first three installments look at the determined geeks and obsessive outsiders who made Comic-Con happen. The fourth episode explores the impact of the magnetic and polarizing Shel Dorf, who walked away from the Con in the mid-1980s, leaving drama in his wake.

These episodes also pay tribute to the Con pioneers who are no longer with us. Dorf and fellow co-founder Ken Krueger both passed away in 2009. Richard Alf, the Kearny High teen whose comic book business helped finance the earliest Cons, died in 2012.

The fifth episode takes listeners into the heart of the mid-’80s Hollywood takeover, and the final installment features celebrity testimonies on the power of Comic Con, along with updates on where the pioneering “First Geeks” are now. Like Wendy All, many of them — including award-winning cartoonist Shaw!, author and songwriter Alfonso, artist Pound, and acclaimed sci-fi author Greg Bear — were able to turn their early Con experiences into careers.

Creator Klickstein hopes that between the personal insights, the historical sweep and the big-name shoutouts, “Comic-Con Begins” will get to the heart of Comic-Con and the multitudes it can contain.

“What’s great about the Con through the years is that it has become a series of subcultures and niches,” said Klickstein, an author, screenwriter and theater director. “When you go to the Con today, it is big and loud and crowded and expensive, but you can still find a group of people in a room reading aloud from a ‘Little Lulu’ comic strip or people who are there because they are really big fans of ‘Pogo’ or ‘The Twilight Zone.’

“It’s like this old bazaar, where you can get anything. Kevin Smith said it best when he said that walking into Comic-Con is like walking into the Internet. The little guys are still there, too.”

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Comic-Con 2020 was held online. This year, there will be a virtual Comic-Con@Home convention in July and a scaled-down Comic-Con Special Edition in-person event in November. The full-scale Con isn’t scheduled to return until July 2022, but the spirit of Comic-Con is happening right here, right now. Right on schedule.

“What I hope people take away from the podcast is that things are possible if you apply yourself,” said All, whose Comic-Con experiences gave her the confidence she needed to pursue the art career she’d always wanted. “Through Comic-Con, I found people who had that kind of drive, and I hope people can identify with that. If you have a dream, you can’t just close your eyes and wish. But if you work and focus, it is possible.”