posted 07-26-2003 05:49 AM               

Wednesday

We flew in Wednesday morning, getting to our hotel at about 2 PM Pacific Time. We were quite tired, having left our house at around 6 AM Eastern Time and changing planes in Los Angeles. I discovered almost by accident that my terrible earaches while descending were due to clogged sinuses and that I could eliminate them by blowing my nose and taking allergy medication, which was a real relief. But when we tried to check in, we got out first hint as to how huge the Con would be. The travel planners had apparently underestimated the number of people that would be coming in for Wednesday’s Preview Night – a three hour window where those who had pre-registered for all four days of the Con could get a sneak peek of the booths – and our hotel was staring a severe overbooking problem in the face. They offered to put us up at a sister hotel a few blocks down the street for Wednesday night for free. Since both hotels were absolutely beautiful, this was really not much of a problem.

We dropped our gear off at the new hotel, the U.S. Grant, and headed out for a quick dinner in the Gaslamp District before heading to the convention center. I love the Gaslamp District – so much good food in such a small space, it’s almost unfair. Speaking of ‘small space’ – the convention center is not anything of the sort. The center itself had doubled in size since we were there last, and the line of people waiting to get in stretched around the building and onto Harbor Drive behind it. The line finally started moving some time around 5 PM, we picked up our badges, and we were in.

I promised myself I wouldn’t spend money on Preview Night – my budget could really only handle four days of purchasing. So this was a recon trip for me. I said hello to the folks at Archangel Studios, home of The Red Star, and to Larry Young of AiT/Planet Lar, then headed to the CrossGen and DC booths to try and get a hint of the signing/sketching schedules. I got a chance to get my copy of A Distant Soil Vol. 1 signed by Colleen Doran, who had pages from her hardcover graphic novel Orbiter that have me anxiously awaiting the softcover release. And I stopped by the Avalon Studios table, where I chatted with colorist Brian Haberlin about his series Aria and a set of CD-ROM art tutorials he’s marketing. The rest of the evening was just spent walking the floor, which was huge. In addition to the comics creators, movie studios, video game companies, toy manufacturers and plenty of retailers had a presence at the Con. I couldn’t wait for the official start of the shopping season.

Thursday

We made a quick trip to Ralph’s grocery to buy our lunches for the day and have breakfast at the tables outside. I love this part of the morning, watching people head to the Con or otherwise going about their business. This morning I was hoping to get another sketch from George Perez, so I wore my CrossGen T-shirt whose art had been drawn by Perez. So who else should we pass walking down the block but George Perez – wearing the same T-shirt. We each pointed to our shirts and gave each other approving gestures. I wish I could have come up with something witty to say there, but the silent approach was probably better.

We made our hotel switch, to the Wyndham Emerald Plaza, and then headed down to the center. Another long line had formed, this time of people who hadn’t yet bought their membership badges. We managed to walk right in and head to the door of the exhibit halls, which were a little late in opening. Once inside, I headed straight to the CrossGen booth – where George Perez’s line for sketches was already closed for the day. (Curse those volunteers and exhibitors getting into the con early!) So I headed down to Artists’ Alley to see Jeff Moy – who had already filled his list of commissions for the day.

Time to switch gears and start buying, I thought. So I headed to the AiT booth, where Larry Young encouraged me to try out Last of the Independents and Mimi Rosenheim made her pitch for the first volume of Electric Girl. I picked them up, along with two other volumes I needed no urging to try: Switchblade Honey, with art by Brandon McKinney, and the third volume of The Foot Soldiers. From there it was over to the Mack-Oeming-Bendis (MOB) booth to finally pick up the latest volume of Powers. I had switched from buying Powers in monthly form in the middle of the Supergroup arc, so it had been a long wait for the trades to catch up. Thankfully, that’s now over.

As I was getting the book signed, I introduced myself to Bendis as the guy who interviewed him for Not News. He remembered the site and asked how we were doing, at which point I mentioned Alexandra’s birth. As it turned out, Bendis and his wife had recently had a baby, and he grabbed his wallet to show us a picture. (Very cute kid.) Pattie had a small album of Alex’s Greatest Photos with her, which she then got to show off. We walked away from the booth smiling at each other and saying “We just swapped baby pictures with Brian Michael Bendis! How cool is that!”

From there it was back to Artists’ Alley, where my sketch-getting luck quickly changed. At Brent Anderson’s table, I talked with another fan about the extremely reasonable prices Anderson was charging for the original art from Astro City and other stories – said fan was in the process of buying four pages’ worth, including the wonderful last page of Local Heroes #1.Reasonable prices or no, original art is still out of my price range at the moment, so I got my copy of Life in the Big City signed along with a beautiful sketch of Samaritan that Anderson did with a hotel pen and a regular No. 2 pencil. I never cease to be amazed by these artists’ talent. While in the Alley, we got a sketch from Chris Giarrusso, whose Mini-Marvels I’ve found to be a lot of fun. Giarrusso was a really nice guy, who was also selling copies of a friend’s minicomic, The Mighty Skullboy Army. I picked up one of those for the heck of it – it turned out to be pretty amusing.

I made one more purchase, from letterers extraordinaire Comicraft. I picked up the first issue of their Hip Flask series, along with a guide to comic book lettering and design that I haven’t had a chance to crack open yet. Hip Flask had an interesting SF story with some absolutely stunning art by Ladronn – I’ll definitely be going back for more. Two more sketches rounded out the day – Todd Nauck drew one of the characters from his upcoming American Idol-meets-superheroes miniseries Wildguard: Casting Call, while John Cassaday drew Elijah Snow from Planetary, which has finally returned to the stands with the gorgeous Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth one shot.

Friday

Another fun morning at Ralph’s – this time we saw Lou Ferrigno of the old Incredible Hulk TV series get into what appeared to be a brief argument with a police or security officer, at least judging by the officer’s swearing at Ferrigno as he walked away. I don’t know how old the guy is, but he’s still in amazingly good shape.

We tried to employ a little strategy to get the sketches that eluded me yesterday. We stationed ourselves outside the door to Exhibit Hall G, the closest door to Artist’s Alley. When the doors opened, I headed straight to Moy’s table – and still found myself third on that day’s list. At least I was on it, though. That accomplished, I checked the schedules at the DC and CrossGen booths; Perez was scheduled to start sketching at noon, and it was not quite 10:30. Still just a bit too early to lurk, so I walked the floor for a bit and made my way back to CrossGen around 11, then started walking around the booth. I was reading just about every scrap of paper there, which isn’t that much of a burden since CrossGen’s stuff is usually pretty good. Around ten after, I found myself standing with two other Perez fans; as we talked to one of the CrossGen employees, I spotted Perez making his way into the booth and sitting down at a table. “There’s the man himself,” I said, and the three of us fell in behind the four or five others who were just a little faster than we were. Time we got in line: 11:15. Time the line was so big that CrossGen had to cap it: 11:17. I had a good time chatting with the guys in the line with me, saw Perez draw a terrific Superman, and got my sketch of Wonder Girl from the New Teen Titans by around noon. At this rate, I’ll meet my goal of getting Perez sketches of the seven original members of that team at the 2013 Con. Hmm. May have to ratchet that up a bit.

From there, Pattie and I headed over to the Small Press area, where we met Tom Beland and Lily Garcia. Tom’s True Story Swear to God is one of my favorite comics discoveries of the year so far, and he and Lily are both tremendously nice people. I picked up the latest issue of True Story along with one of the mini-comics that collects Tom’s comic strips. Tom was doing sketches for fans, customizing each one with different wardrobes and dialogues. Seeing I was from Philly, he started talking about how much of a Warriors fan he is – the Golden State Warriors were once the Philadelphia Warriors – and sketched Lily wearing a 76ers jersey. We had a great time talking to them, and pretty soon it was time for us to start hitting some panel discussions.

I stopped by the Farscape cast panel, where many cast members were met with a substantial ovation from a large contingent of fans. Not being as up to date with the series as many of the people present, I decided to go check out a smaller panel devoted to legendary Superman artist Curt Swan. I’m glad I did, because the slide show with the panel included a lot of commissioned artwork Swan did in the last decade before his death, when assignments were less frequent. I realized that the man was a tremendous artist to the end, much more than I had given him credit for. It was interesting, and somewhat disheartening, to hear contemporary Superman editors and artists talk about how much they personally loved and admired Swan’s work while simultaneously finding it more and more difficult to sell that work in the modern marketplace. On the one hand, I don’t see why Swan’s work couldn’t sell today; on the other hand, the relatively sparse turnout for the panel and the older age of most of the attendees showed that they probably had a point.

At 3, Kurt Busiek was at the Dark Horse Comics booth promoting his upcoming Conan book; I got his signature to go with Brent Anderson’s. I forgot however, to get his signature on my brother’s copy of Power Company #1, which I did not realize until later that day. I managed to correct that error and even make up for it a little bit later, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

After seeing Busiek, we went upstairs where a considerable line was already forming for a premiere screening of the upcoming direct-to-video animated Batman movie, Mystery of the Batwoman. This was a real Hollywood test screening – a number of studio people were handing out marketing surveys and inviting people to join a focus group after the screening. Pattie was interested in doing the focus group, but I knew I wouldn’t have time. As it happened, they didn’t need Pattie for the group anyway. But the important thing is that the movie was pretty darned good. Great dialogue and voice acting, and some terrific animated action. I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the plot, but it was serviceable. I definitely hope to see more Batman DTV stuff in the future.

From there, the final event of the evening was a panel devoted to Cartoon Network’s upcoming Clone Wars animated shorts. Genndy Tartakovsky and several of the other artists were there, and we saw the first three-minute episode, with a temporary music track and no sound effects. I’ll save further discussion of the shorts for the Clone Wars thread over in Culture and Media, but suffice to say – this ought to be good.

After the panel, we decided to go get dinner rather than attend Mark Hamill’s panel about the mockumentary he filmed at last year’s con, Comic Book: The Movie. In retrospect, this may have been a huge mistake, as I will explain in a few paragraphs.

Saturday

Saturday is a mixed blessing at the Con. It’s by far the biggest day, when a lot of bigger names who can only attend for a day show up. For example, this year Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman were all there to promote various projects. At the same time, these big names draw big crowds. Big crowds. The line of people with badges was at least a couple hundred people long. The line of people who needed to buy badges . . . well, let’s just say that was a lot longer. Once again, I thanked the heavens for preregistration.

While in the line, we chatted with a guy who was at the con buying animation cels, and hoping to meet Kevin Conroy, Arlene Sorkin and Hamill at a special autograph session set up by an animation art seller at the con. One humorous point – for whatever legal and/or personal reason, every signing appearance by Hamill had a disclaimer with it: “Regretfully, Mark Hamill can not sign Star Wars items.” If only I could afford a cel, I’d have no problem getting a nice Joker image signed instead, but that’ll have to wait until after I hit the lottery. The guy in the line had been going to the con for years, so he had some good stories about how much the con has grown. He also gave a hearty recommendation to Mike Kunkel’s Herobear and the Kid, a comic I had heard a lot over the years. So I resolved that once we got in, I’d pick up a copy.

First, though, it was time for my own personal Straczynski Fest. Babylon 5 creator and Midnight Nation writer J. Michael Straczynski was speaking at three panels that day, including one with Bendis. That one was entertaining, although a bit derailed by folks who wanted to hash out whatever beefs they had with Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, who was moderating the panel. I had said I would skip the second panel, since it focused on the Showtime series Jeremiah, and I haven’t seen any of that. But after I did my morning shopping – which included a Giarrusso sketch for my sister, the aforementioned Herobear, and the first issue of Assassin from the folks at Archangel – I found myself losing interest in the panel I was at, and headed to the Jeremiah session anyway. I now know a bunch of spoilers for the second season that make little sense to me, but what the heck, it was still a good time.

The real fun was the third panel, a spotlight on Straczynski. He answered questions from fans of B5, Jeremiah, and his comics work, and he is clearly a veteran of the con circuit at this point. He kept the flow of questions running smoothly, bantered with the questioners, and was funny and serious as the mood called for it. A lot of the info wasn’t really new to me, since I read Straczynski’s Usenet postings regularly. But hearing him actually speak live gave a new dimension to things I had only read online before. Afterward, Straczynski signed autographs upstairs while producers from Warner Bros. Home Video interviewed some of the fans for a documentary that will appear on the DVD set of Babylon 5’s fifth season. The autograph line moved briskly, and I got autographs for Andrew and Earl – two posters here who are responsible for introducing me to B5 in the first place. I picked up a copy of the script for the final B5 episode, “Sleeping in Light,” and Jeremiah producer Samm Barnes took my picture with Straczynski. So that was a good time.

After I got my autograph I headed to a far-too-brief panel on Cartoon Voice Actors, which included Hamill and many of his friends in the industry – many of whom had made appearances in his movie and been at his panel the night before. Hamill showed a clip, shared some stories about doing the Joker’s voice, then turned the stage over to the others. It was neat to hear so many different characters come out of the actors’ mouth in such a short time frame. But the highlight was a read-through of a Pinky and the Brain script, including Rob Paulsen (Pinky) and Maurice LaMarche (the Brain). The script was full of tongue twisters, and the actors were reading it cold, which meant that there were occasional slip-ups. But by God, it was hilarious. If this panel were longer, it would be the Can’t Miss Event of any convention.

Some time at the Archangel booth netted me not one but two sketches from Red Star mastermind Chris Gossett. Goss is one of the nicest guys in the business, so I was happy to steal a few minutes of his time to catch up. As I mentioned, they’re launching a new series called Assassin, with pencil art by a newcomer named Jet Henderson. Henderson is also an incredibly nice guy and ridiculously talented – Assassin is a beautiful book that really shows the potential of black and white art to set mood and tone. Archangel was also showing off a collected edition of the first volume of The Red Star, which is an very nice package that should really do well for them in bookstores and with comics readers who may have been hesitant to pay for the oversized paperbacks they’ve published so far.

Sunday