“I’m not funny — I’m freakishly obsessed!” I burst out laughing when I heard this (thoroughly embarrassing the girl who’d said it, I think), but it seemed as oddly appropriate as it was amusing while I wandered around the Emerald City ComiCon this morning.
I’d heard about the con just a couple of days ago, and decided to go more or less on a whim this morning when I had nothing else planned for the day. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, as I’ve never been a major comic collector, and my only prior experience of any sort with comic conventions was watching Chasing Amy. As it turns out, though, that wasn’t bad mental image to have going in: lots of people wandering around in everything from street clothing to full Stormtrooper regalia
, lots of booths with various merchandise and wares for sale, and lots of authors and artists available to meet.
Since I didn’t have any particular agenda or people I wanted to see — to be honest, I only recognized a select few of the names I saw on the placards on each booth — I just spent a couple hours wandering around the show floor, seeing what there was to see, and doing a lot of peoplewatching.
A few random highlights:
Michael Gagné’s Insanely Twisted Rabbits: Hilarious drawings of rabbits viewed through either a seriously twisted imagination or a lot of illegal pharmaceuticals. Or both. When it comes to rabbits with big, sharp, nasty, pointy teeth, I’m afraid that Monty Python has nothing on these bunnies.
-
Catalyst Studios’ masks and book bindings: Some absolutely incredible work in these. Books that had been re-bound with skulls and faces emerging from their covers (some of which were actual books with new covers, others were blank notebooks suitable for journaling or sketching), masks that strongly reminded me of the ballroom scene in Labyrinth, and lots of smaller sculpture work. Beautiful stuff.
-
While I was wandering around Bumbershoot last year, I ran into a girl who got a good laugh out of my “I’m just here to get laid” messenger bag. She ran into me again today and recognized me, and we ended up chatting for a few minutes. I gave her my e-mail and website address so that she could track down the right page and order a book or shirt for herself. I knew there had to be a few more people out there that thought it was funny!
-
As I was walking along at one point, I noticed a girl talking with her friends shooting a look in my direction. Suddenly, all three of her friends suddenly swiveled around to look in my direction, and I cracked up. As I figured, they’d noticed and were admiring my Utilikilt. We chatted for a few minutes, then they took a picture of me and I took one of them. So, somewhere out there on some guy’s digital camera is a shot of me from today — if by any random chance he happens to see this, I’d love a copy of the shot!
-
From what I could see, the biggest draw to this year’s ComiCon was the chance to get an autograph from Jhonen Vasquez, creator of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Invader Zim. I didn’t bother taking the time to stand in line, but I did get to get a quick shot of him between a few fans as he was signing merchandise. Turns out he looked more or less exactly as you’d expect he would from his work — which in an odd way, was a minor bummer. I was kind of hoping he’d be some pudgy, poorly shaven, badly dressed forty-something white guy that looked more like a redneck or a trucker. Just because in my world, that would be really funny.
All in all, not a bad way to spend the morning. As usual, there’s a few more shots from the day in a Flickr photoset.
“Edge of Wisdom, The (2002)” by Beborn Beton from the album Tales From Another World (1993, 4:21).
First was coming across what appeared to be a mint condition, still in the box version of Jetfire, my all-time favorite Transformer toy. Probably only as good as it was because it was a pretty direct rip-off of the Robotech Valkyrie, but I never cared. I’d have loved to have grabbed this, but at $225, it was a bit out of my reach.
The second find was a copy of Shel Silverstein‘s ‘Different Dances‘, which I’d never heard of before. It’s definitely not one of the kids’ books that Shel is most famous for, as I quickly discovered when I started flipping through it and immediately found a four-page spread titled “The Deadly Weapon” (pages one and two, pages three and four, both Not Safe For Work if cartoon drawings of naked people fall into that category). While I couldn’t afford the $125 that the book was priced at, it turns out that Xebeth might have a copy that she could send my way. Neat!