I was a vendor at Silicon Valley Comic Con this past weekend, where my niece was one of the celebrity handlers. She told horror stories about how Stan was “handled” by his own people during the event. SVCC had capped autographs and photo ops for Stan, scheduling them carefully, but when his entourage arrived they announced that they would NOT cap those sales and that they would allow anyone who got in line to buy an autograph, regardless of previous scheduling. As a result, people who had scheduled those opportunities stood in line for hours on the first day, only to be told that they would have to come back the next day. (And in some cases they had to come back the THIRD day.) In one case, a collector had paid $15,000 for Stan to sign 100 comic books, and it took about three hours. For some of the photo ops, Stan was wearing sunglasses, seated in a chair, because he was ASLEEP. By the end of each day, his handlers sometimes had to guide his hand in signing autographs, because he was so exhausted.
I’ve seen Stan at previous events, and I know he can be very lucid and “all there”. But this wasn’t a one-hour panel, this was a matter of working a sick old man to death, for the profit of his underlings.
