In case you didn’t realize it, convention season is upon
us! We just had the first Denver Comic
Con a couple weeks ago and all the press has
been pretty much amazing.
Everyone had a great time. Over
20,000 tickets were sold! That doesn’t
include kids [who were free], press, volunteers, staff, or any vendors,
artists, guests or the like. So that is
thousands more who were there! I hear
the numbers were that about 1.3% of Denver’s population attended the convention.
[of course, many people were not from Denver.] But, think of it this way. That means that more than 1 out of every 100
people in the city and county of Denver went to a convention about comic
books! For comic books? What!?! Just think about that for a moment…
Okay. back again...
One complaint I heard second hand and am probably
mis-interpreting, was of a person who was not a comic book fan, who went to the
show and said there was nothing for him to do.
Okay. I get that. If you’re not a comic book fan and you also don’t
get into meeting or going to panels with pretty big names in movies,
television, and animation, playing or seeing rock band competitions, stylish
cars, gaming, people in costumes, a non-profit convention that gives its
proceeds to work with individual kids in free after school programs to support
their literacy, or meeting and supporting local art and people in general,
there probably wouldn’t be anything for you at the convention. I kind of see it like me going to a Bronco’s
game and being like, “There’s no comic book stuff here! There’s nothing for me to enjoy!” Or, going to
the grocery store and being like, “There’s no comics here? Forget King Soopers!... Oh wait… there’s Mad Magazine with Noah Van Sciver in
it. Scratch that…” Either way, it was a great time, I could describe
how awesome it was for a while, but you’ve probably seen all of that on my
other social media outlets.
Best occurrence, however, was getting in contact with Allen
Bellman. I was one of a couple people
who actually had one of his original comics to get signed. He is credited [which was unique since lots of artists went uncredited at the time] in one of my favorite comic
books that I own,
Boy Meets Girl #4
from 1950. This was already one of the
prized pieces in my collection. Now, not
only do I have it signed on the title page of his story and the cover, but an
amazing memory of the experiennce. We’ve kept in pretty
good contact on Facebook, too. If you go
to the new Heaven Forbid “fan” page, you’ll
see how he described HF as “Work of a real pro.” And this was by an actual professional who’s
been in the industry for 70 years!
What!?! I would call this a “dream
come true,” but I would never have dreamed of this… Guess what quote’s going on
the back of my next book? There’s a good
video of Allen looking through my copy of
BMG #4 on youtube that’s really well
put together by my friend Rio Herrera.
The Comic Book Classroom Corral was amazing. Period.
I was very blessed to be a part of it.
Also, the Religion and Spirituality in Comics panel was top notch! I have video of it, too, but I need to format
it for the web. I think I may just post
the audio as like a podcast or something.
We got to have Mike Allred, Bob Luedke, Scorpio Steele, and me together
for it. This was awesome since I’m a big
fan of Mike, have known Bob for a little while, and am pretty good friends with
Scorpio. It was pretty great!
The preview night at Mile High Comics before the show was amazing, too! And throughout the weekend sales for Heaven Forbid 2: Awkward for Everyone were great. Best book debut ever! At MHC, the row of artists was: Neal Adams, Me [and Riki], James O'Barr, Michael Uslan. Which one of these does not fit in? The artists continued with my friends Jaysen and Jessi from the Class and I believe Angi Mauri was there, too. What a weekend! Thanks to everyone!
