Sheldon Dorf, the co-founder of the San Diego Comic Convention, has died. NPR reports:
As The San Diego Union-Tribune says, “Dick Tracy, Charlie Brown and the entire comic strip pantheon lost a friend” this week.
Sheldon Dorf, who founded the hugely successful Comic-Con International comic book convention, died Tuesday at the age of 76. A friend, Greg Koudoulian, tells the Associated Press that Dorf succumbed to kidney failure. The wire service adds that Dorf “had diabetes and had been hospitalized for about a year.”
NPR’s Ina Jaffe reminds us that Dorf founded the convention in 1970. The four-day event, which pulls in about 125,000 people, is held in San Diego each year. The next is scheduled for July 22-25, 2010.
Dorf ran Comic-Con for 15 years. He told the Union-Tribune that over time, “it’s just become an ordeal. ... It’s become too much of a success.”
Having attended the San Diego Comic Con aka Nerd Prom over 9000 times, I give highest props possible to Mr. Dorf for helping create an institution which not only began as a support group for fandom but later went on to warp the fabric of American life as we know it. Anybody who has attended the convention has witnessed that, once outsiders to the entertainment industry, fandom is now the altar at which Hollywood grovels for its ideas and the collective voice which can make or break many a film or TV show. Nice work!