I spent two days at Comic-con in San Diego this past weekend, and witnessed one of most intense people-crushes I’ve ever seen. Ticket sales were actually halted on Saturday, with attendance estimates ranging from 125,000 to 150,000, up from 104,000 last year. As you can see in the photo below, the concept of a ‘personal space bubble’ was hard to come by.

I was hunting down as many Flash animation names as I could, and using this event as a barometer, I can safely say Flash animation is a healthy industry. I met:

- One of the founders of independent animation company Net Hat Co
- the two chiefs of Titmouse Studio, Chris and Shannon Prynoski who premiered Metalocalypse
- Bob Boyle, who showed an episode of upcoming Jetix show ‘Yin Yang Yo!’
- George Elliott, founder of Elliott Animation, who are animating ‘Yin Yang Yo!’
- Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua, the creators of Nickelodeon’s ‘El Tigre’
- Tom Fulp (photo) of Newgrounds and The Behemoth, who was showing of his new 2D platform game ‘Castle Crashers’
- Brooke Burgess, whose ‘Broken Saints’ series is out on DVD August 1st
- The guys behind ‘College University’ and ‘Dr. Shroud’

I’ve also posted about 20 photos from my San Diego adventure over in the Message Boards.

A small New Hampshire newspaper called ‘The Wire’ recently ran a cover article titled ‘Flash Nation: How a new generation of animators are changing cartoons.’ It’s a fantastic read, starting with an overview of how Flash came to be, then running through the dot-com era and on up to the current slate of on-air and web-based animation. There’s a handful of revealing quotes, and the author, Larry Clow, offers up a bevy of great links and references to recent Flash projects, including Jib Jab’s ‘This Land,’ Fat Pie’s ‘Salad Fingers,’ and the internet series ‘College University.’ This man has obviously done his homework, and his 3,000 ode to the Flash animated revolution is an inspiring read.

Below are a few of my favorite quotes from the article:

Long a staple of college kids and bored cubical dwellers who pass links to Flash sites around in e-mails, Flash animation is starting to hit the big time.Legions of amateur auteurs are using Flash to drive the animation revolution. Like a tiny digital snowflake, each Flash short is unique.

The inhabitants of Flash Nation are a strange lot, but it’s a story as old as the Web–put the means of production in the hands of the people, and they will make weird, weird stuff.

Flash is the future, they say, an emerging medium that, already enjoying a ubiquitous presence on the Web, is poised to take over TV, DVD and everything else.

“Flash has made it to the mainstream,” said Nicholas Da Silva.

“With Flash, you’re able to produce something at half the cost,” Da Silva said. “The cost of the software isn’t as expensive as high end software for animation. One or two people can have a studio at home and crank out their own stories.”

“You can do everything in Flash, without the overhead,” he said. “One person could be a studio, two people can develop a great concept.” (Jeremy Clough)

“Flash is just another animation tool. It’s what you make of it. I don’t think hand-drawn art of any kind will ever die. There will always be new toys, but there’s no substitute for the fundamentals,” (Kirk) Millett said.

Though there’s no agreement on the future of traditional animation, there is an almost unanimous opinion that Flash is democratizing cartoons.