HeroesCon 2009 - Day The Second

The first thing I did upon entering the convention hall today, was to go see Adam and Comfort about my sketch. I have to confess, I was particularly excited about leaving the book in their hands for it's inaugural sketch, and I'm thrilled with the result. I give you, thanks to Adam Withers and Comfort Love, Jason-as-Hercules! I'm completely in love with this sketch.

After meeting with them, My friend Phillip, who occasionally comments on my blog as 'p' and I decided to try Claremont's line. The line itself presented no difficulty, but the lack of Claremont made things a little trickier. We waited here for about forty minutes before giving up. It was disheartening, but Phillip had a limited amount of time. And I wasted a good bit of it, trying to navigate the convention. Booths I thought I new how to find eluded me. After a small amount of shopping, we retired for an early lunch, which allowed Hilary to rejoin us.

Returning to the convention, we first stopped in to see Matt Fraction. Matt's probably one of the nicest and wittiest folks you'll meet at a convention. And while HeroesCon recognized that, providing him a queue similar to those given to Brubaker, Epting and Bendis, he didn't have much of a line. He chatted with us as he signed our books, but we didn't want to monopolize his attention.

We made another attempt to get Chris Claremont's signature on some of our books. Once again we were stymied. While Claremont was there at this point, we were forced to learn something very important about signing lines at comic book conventions. The length of these lines is not determined by the number of people in the line... it's determined by the number of books they're carrying. Another twenty minutes with no movement prompted us to abandon our place once again.

We'd separated from Hilary, so we largely bounced around. We found our way to PKD Media, where Phillip got his copy of Mercury And The Murd signed. We also made some more purchases from twenty-five and fifty cent bins, until Hilary finally caught up with us. I was growing a bit tired, so Hilary and I bid Phillip adieu and returned to our room for awhile to soak up some air conditioning and some water. Hilary had gone through her own odyssey after our separation, catching pictures of storm-troopers, super-heroes and ghostbusters.

After resting in our room, we decided to make one more pass at the convention floor to try and get a few more signatures. And we struck gold. We were in and out of Bendis' line in ten minutes... if that long. In relatively short order, we also hit Claremont's table, got my copies of Pax Romana signed by Jonathan Hickman, picked up my sketch book (where Thom Zahler of Love and Capes drew me as a Green Lantern) and returned to Jonathan Hickman's booth, where he sketched me as Nick Fury. For free. Have I mentioned that Jonathan Hickman is awesome? Next year I'll have to remember that the last hour of the con can be truly magical.

Unfortunately, that was about the point where I ran completely out of gas. Due to my vampire lifestyle, I had trouble getting to, and back to, sleep Saturday morning. Despite my wishes, I completely turned into a pumpkin Saturday night.

Now it's Sunday morning. Our hotel bill arrived in the wee hours of the morning, signalling the beginning of the end of our stay. We're not sure what our departure plans are, but I want to make at least one more run at the show. I've still got a few books I'd like to get signed, and I think I've got cash for one last sketch for the year.

It's 8:21 AM local time, and Hilary's still sleeping. When the alarm goes off, we'll start packing up and finalizing our plans. But for now, it's been my best HeroesCon yet. I've met a few of the CGS guys, I got to chat with most of my favorite creators. I've spent a fair bit of my con budget in support of independent creators , and these sketches are the best memento I could ask for.