San Diego Comic Con 1997 [This is more of a travel log that happens to have a comic convention as one of the stops. You have been warned. :) ] It's been well over 10 days since I left San Diego, so my memory of the SDCC97 experience may be not as keen as I'd like. This year I decided to make a vacation of it while out on the west coast. That included a stop in Seattle, WA for the weekend before SDCC. From what I can conclude, I was able to experience 2 of the 10 days of sunshine that Seattle gets every year. I'd recommend visiting this city if you get the chance. It's an easy going place. From Seattle, I hop over to Los Angeles, where Z-Man (actually Derek Spencer, but I'll use Z since it's easier to type) picked me up from LAX. I haven't been back to LA since I was born there there so many moons ago. Z and I planned on going to the retailer portion of SDCC, so that meant getting there on the Tuesday before the normal opening day on Thursday. While in LA, we went out to the valley, where Z resides, and we did the touristy things, like drive around the canyons and take in the cool pacific coast highways. We drove through Hollywood and Beverly Hills on the way to San Diego on Tuesday morning. I love the weather out on the west coast. [Tuesday] We make it to San Diego. We check into the Westin hotel, it's right next to the famed Horton Plaza with the wacky international food court. We drop off our bags and walk the 6 blocks down toward the convention center for the retailer portion of the comic convention. We get our badge holders from a nice lady in the lobby. We also get the prerequisite goodies, which included this signed/numbered Uncle Sam print by Alex Ross. We also got one that wasn't signed/number, which I kept and have on my wall now. We enter the convention area, and there are lots of the publishers and other comic-related vendors there. All trying to woo dealers into checking out their wares. Not too many freebies were given out at this year's retailer shindig. I'd heard that last year featured lots of freebies. Another sign that publishers are getting more frugal in their marketing efforts. It's always fun to play "Joe Retailer" at these thing, but I was just a lackey for Z's online comic business at Area51 Comix (http://area51comix.com), so I deferred all the hard questions to him. We got to talk with all sorts of creators, and boy were the autograph lines short for just the retailers. Another plus for being a retailer I suppose. I found it ironic that the SDCC organizers put the Heavy Metal booth (featuring Julie Strain) right across from the Carnal Comics booth (featuring porn queens) for this retailer portion of the show. Now, I'm not really that big on taking photos while out and about, but I managed to take 9 rolls of film while on vacation. Among those photos, Julie was nice enough to pose for a few shots with me. She's really down to earth and not at all what I had expected. She is married to Kevin Eastman of TMNT fame, whom she met at a signing at the Golden Apple in LA. Yep, it's a true story. If I can remember Julie's tagline, it was "She's 6 foot 1, and worth the climb...if you get tired, you can stop half way". I got to see the Trilogy Tour setup just one more time (I'd seen it at Dragon Con and Chicago Con already). If no one knows by now, the Trilogy Tour is composed of Jeff Smith (Bone), Charles Vess, and Linda Medley. It was a nifty convention booth setup, as it imparted a lasting impression of what these creators's style and sensibilities were all about in their work. James Owen had this impressive Starchild house/barn display which featured 3 scenes from his Starchild stories. If I get off my butt, I'll get around to doing a SDCC web page, and I'll be sure to include the photos I took of the house/barn. DC had their big ol' booth with the big ol' video setup, as they do at all their other con appearances. They gave away tons of previews of upcoming comics. DC still believes in hyping their books with the actual product, i.e.the books. I hope other companies catch a clue here. Puzzle Zoo had a massive setup as well, and also had a model that was pushing the new Hellina toy figure. From the looks of the model, they may have just used her for the toy figure mold and scaled it accordingly. If you like getting sketches from artists, tag along with a retailer friend some time, and you'd be amazed at how receptive the artists are in doing sketches for retailers. Plus the wait for the artists are so much shorter at these venues for retailers. Well, after taking about a couple of hours to peruse the joint, Z and I decided to head back to find something to eat. We, of course, eat at Horton Plaza. Once we were done eating, we looked around the plaza for a bit and called it a day. [Wednesday] We thought about going to the Retailer breakfast, but one of us just wasn't getting up in time, so HE slept in. :) I got up and went for a jog. If you have to inclination, go for a morning jog near the convention center, and head out toward the Hyatt. It's great! I always like to jog around the waterfront if I can, nothing like brisk ocean air to get the morning started. While I know I'm not svelte, I do what I can to get some form of exercise in, and I couldn't think of any excuses not to exercise this morning. :) Plus the dip in the hotel pool was wonderful. Later in the morning, our 3rd roommate shows up, Patrick Hulman (PH), a lurker for the most parts, he and I live in the same city and know each other. Z, PH and I decided to get some lunch since it seemed the thing to do around noon time. So back we went to Horton Plaza... After lunch, we decided to go back to the retailer venue and PH uses Z's badge to gain entry. PH and I go around and browse some more. We took in all the hype and marketing that is humanly possible. I got lucky and got a cool Spidey head shot from the one and only Jazzy John Romita, a class act. I managed to squeeze out a sketch from J. G. Jones (will be doing the upcoming Shi series, formerly penciller of Fatale) and Jason Orfales, another one of the artist in the Shi stables. Once 3 o'clock rolled around, the retailer venue came to a close, so we headed back to the room. A couple of hours later, Zombie knocked on our door. As anyone who's met on-line aquaintances in the flesh, it's always an interesting experience. I'm happy to report that Zombie was as cantankerous as he seems on-line...only if you talk about splitting up the rac.* hierarchy. :) Zombie (ZB aka Erik Veit if you must know) was staying in his own room at the Westin. I convinced him that he must at least make the trip to comics mecca once in his life. And before I knew, he was heading to SDCC this year. We vegged at the room, and decided to get our normal SDCC badge holders, which is possible the Wednesday night before the show open on Thursday. Z, PH and I had pre-registered, but ZB had to do the on-site registration, which was horribly inefficient. I mean, how hard is to to take someone's money? After jawing with some clueless security personnel, we got ZB into the line for on-site registration and waited, and waited, and waited. Finally ZB was registered. It was time to get some chow, cuz we was really hungry by now. We walked back up to the hotel, and looked at the offerings. We settled on an Italian restaurant and ate outdoors. We got to watch the bums work their shtick on the tourists while eating outdoors. Dinner was very enjoyable, but I ate a bit too much. :) We walked around Horton Plaza, and then headed up to the room. I was still stuffed from dinner, but managed to go to see "Contact", the Jodie Foster flick with Z that night at Horton's, and I didn't even fall asleep at the 10 p.m. movie! [Thursday] Hey, it's the start of SDCC! We all decided to have breakfast at McDonald's, which is near the Westin. We then head toward the convention center and I stop by Ralph's supermarket to snag some more disposable cameras with flash. Since we didn't get there at 10 a.m., we missed the mass of humanity crushing their way into the main exhibit hall that housed the biggest comic convention in the US. We wandered about, looking for artist alley first. We spot Jeff Piterelli, who does really nice airbrush work (whoever saw the giant Gillian Anderson or the Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl airbrush paintings knows whom I am talking about). He had to drive out here with a dealer friend because he can't get sufficient insurance coverage for his artwork from the airlines. He lives near me on the outskirts of Atlanta. Then we find Steve Lieber and Jeff Parker. To fulfill my destiny, I again assumed the guise of "Roadie" and helped Parker get his Interman display upright on the convention floor. PH got in on the action and helped out as well, so I think Lieber has a nice shot, a la Iwo Jima, of us getting the Interman display propped up. Just a few tables from them are Jeff and Phil Moy and W.C. Carani, Legion artists. While chatting with them and looking at their sketch books, Sidne comes by to chat and so does Troyesq. We tell them that we are on for the Legion dinner Friday night. As they leave, they put in their request for sketches. In their absence Phil points out who Sidne and Troyesq are (mainly huge Legion fans) and says that he'll have to do a kick-ass job on their sketches. I thought that was a nice sentiment. Artists do care if the fans are into their work. If you haven't been to SDCC, be prepared to be overwhelmed by the whole experience, it's not for the faint of heart. It's best to roll up your sleeves and jump in and get to work. While hanging out in Artist Alley, we overhear from W.C.Carani that Kevin Smith was in the house at his booth, so Z, PH, ZB and I head in that direction. We saw Carani waiting in line like the rest of fanboys to see Kevin Smith and Jasons Mewes (Silent Bob and Jay of "Clerks", "Mallrats" and "Chasing Amy") were at a booth signing stuff. Z and PH are big fans of Smith's movies, and so am I, so we 3 get in line. ZB had never seen their movies, and thus had no knowledge of their movies. We'll have to remedy that soon. They cut the line off after us, so we got to tell all others that came after us to take a hike. While at the booth, I picked up the book that contained the screenplays to "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy". Smith autographed it and included something like "Pat, I was going to name the movie "Chasing Pat" honest! Kevin Smith" Yeah, sure. :) There's going to be a Clerks comic coming out later. I don't know any more details than that. I did pick up a cool "Snootchie Bootchies!" sticker at the booth. Z, ZB, PH and I continue to make our way around the exhibit rooms and take in the sights. After that, we started to spread apart. I went to see the Mark Waid panel, and that was a fun 1.5 hours of Q&A. I was amazed it filled up the entire allotted time. I met up with the guys and we roamed the exhibit hall, and stopped at the Sirius Booth. For a measly $5 Teri Woods did an awesome pencil skletch of Cassandra (Wandering Star) for me. You can see it on my art gallery web page. I meandered around some more. Z and I stopped by Julie Strain's booth, and she was nice enough to pose with me in her Betty Page get-up, but only if she didn't have to stand up, since she was tired. That was acceptable to me and Z took the photo. After that, she said that she was going to crawl under the table and eat lunch. I thought she was kidding. She was not. Strange but true. For the rest of the day, I looked at mostly the publisher booths, foregoing the dealers for the most part. I had Sunday booked for the dealers. We bumped into tyg, I intro'd ZB to him. tyg was very proud of the Sabu toy action figure he just picked up. He reminded us of the trivia contest on Friday night. Finally, Thursday ended, and it was time to go home. We dropped our our stuff at the hotel room, and went to find a place to eat. We thought about eating at Planet Hollywood, which is also near the Westin, but the wait was too long, so we continued our quest for food. We settled on a nearby Japanese restaurant, and it was pretty good. After dinner, we tried to see if anything was going on at the Hyatt bar. No one told us about the bar on the 40th floor, so we didn't see anyone at the bar on the ground floor. We checked the Mariotte, but nothing was going on there either, so we headed homeward. [Friday] Here's what Z and I did: We went and played golf on Coronado Island. Highly recommended since it's cheap ($20 to walk the course, $32 to ride) and very scenic. After chasing lots of golf balls all over the course, we managed to complete all 18 holes without killing any of the natives, but a few houses may have seen be scarred by one of us... Then on the way back, we decided to go to the San Diego Zoo. It's $15 for adults, unless you go for the whole package which includes a bus tours of the zoo. I didn't realize how hilly the zoo would be. We got to see all sorts of animals and birds. We didn't get to see the pandas since the line waiting on seeing them was really ridiculously long and we had to make the Legion dinner anyway. If you plan on seeing the pandas, showtimes are ~10 a.m.-12 p.m. and 6 p.m.-8 p.m., get in line early. I took lots of pictures at the zoo, you can't help it. Then Z and I make it back to SDCC and find out that the rac team outpointed the pros in the trivia contest. We bumped into Michael Grabois there and followed some others to the Legion dinner since I'd forgotten which restaurant it was being held at. At it turned out, we ate at Buffalo Joe's. I don't remember everyone who was at my table, here's who I recall: Jim Drew and his friend, David Goldfarb, Z, PH, ZB, Phil Moy, Steve Muhmundo?, Troy McNemar, and moi. The dinner was fun, and one of the funnier moment was when Jim Drew put down "Trivia Queen" for his code name in response to tyg's "Trivia King". A collection was taken up to pay for Sidne and Troy's dinner for their unselfish efforts to organize the dinner. The look of horror in Jeff Moy's eyes as he leafed through a copy of Liefled's Captain America was priceless. The Legion prize raffle give-aways were really spiffy. Our table had quite a few raffle winners, they had to disqualify Phil Moy from winning a prize, though they did draw his name too. At the dinner, Troy and I talk about on-line identities. For the longest time I knew him by his nick, "troyesq", and that's what he uses when meeting fellow on-line folks in person. I told him that I feel funny telling people my on-line nick, but my real name garners no recognition at all among most rac'ers, so I tell them my nick, and they go, "Oh yeah, you're THAT guy." I guess I have too much invested in my on-line nick, though I still feel funny when I tell people that they might know me when I say "I'm Patman". After dinner, we go back to Horton Plaza to try and use our free passes to go see "Mimic". We were given these passes on Thursday and the lady told us that the preview was on Friday, but the date had Saturday's date on it. Well, the printed word won out. This was fortunate since we all wanted to see the newest Jackie Chan movie, "Operation Condor", anyway. Now I did manage to fall asleep at this movie near the end, even with the great action and stunts. After this, we went back to the hotel and decide to see if the bar's pool tables were open. We had to wait for a couple of games, and PH cut out early. So ZB, Z and I finally got to play some pool for the rest of the night. Finally, it was time to call it an night. Mental Note, ZB's a pool shark. [Saturday] It's already the weekend? We take our time getting up and about. Z and I Made another pitstop at Mc Donald's for breakfast. The only early thing that interested us panel-wise was the Star Wars panel, which wound up being in the main room with lots of seats and A/V equipment. The highlight of the the panel was seeing the scene between Biggs and Luke that was cut out of the original and the restored editions of Star Wars. They showed lots of cool Star Wars-related video, many were SNL skits and also toy commercials. After that panel Z and I go to the Kevin Smith panel. As luck would have it, it was standing room only, but PH had gotten there way early and saved some seats for us. I was amazed at all the people that wanted to attend this panel. Also on the panel were Jason Mewes, the merchandising dude, and Scott - the producer. After figuring out how the laser disc player was hooked up to the big screen TV, the audience was shown a scene from "Chasing Amy" that was cut from the movie because it went overboard on the comic references and was a bit long, but it hit home with the audience who could laughed uncomfortably at the nerdy Magic card-playing clerks at comic stores. Smith went on to give his side of the Superman movie treatment that he did. Ultimately, when Tim Burton signed on to do the movie, Smith's treatment was dead. Burton wanted to go with his own vision. I have a bad feeling about this movie, it's bad enough that Nicholas "Academy Award winning" Cage was cast as Superman, But I Digress... Smith said that there were bootlegged copies of his Superman movie treatment out there for sale, but the audience chimed in with the familiar "the dealers are all sold out of their copies". If anyone knows of a web site that has the Superman treatment that Smith wrote, please let me know, I'd like to read it. This was also a fun-filled panel, and it ended with all the members of the panel admitting to "spanking the monkey" to varying degrees, which is TOO MUCH INFORMATION. :) Z had decided to head back to the valley this afternoon, so he and I headed back and grabbed some lunch at Horton Plaza. After lunch, we said our goodbyes, and I thanked him for putting up with me for the week. I headed back to the convention and roamed around. I spotted Travis "I take my time" Charest doing sketches at the WildStorm booth. For the lucky ones, who got a sketch from Charest, I'm very envious. Surprisingly, he was awfully fast with a sharpie when doing the sketches. The amount of detail he put in the sketches was simply amazing. No pencil guides, just used a sharpie all the way. I got to meet Sarah Becker, editor at WildStorm and member of the Real World - Miami cast. She was my favorite on that one and one rad babe. :) I found out what Warren Ellie looked like, and no, he didn't have horns sticking out of his forehead as I had once imagined. I walked by the Marvel booth, and was surprised to see a guy in the Wolverine costume who had the arms/body to fill out the costume. He didn't have any of the cheesy foam muscles built into the suit. Spider-Man looked pretty buff too. I went back through artist alley, and did more eavesdropping than actual conversing with the Studiosaurous members (Matt Haley, Tom Simmons, Aaron Lopresti, Terry Dodson, Gary Martin, Ron Randall, etc). Lopresti was relating to Al gordon the story of the progressively increasing bust size of Caitlin Fairchild in the Gen13 Bootleg story that he was drawing for issue #12 and #13 IIRC. He started them out with a modest size, but at the beckoning of his studio mates, he was encouraged to make them bigger and bigger until they took a life of their own... I finally run into ZB and PH. It's near dinner time, and we were wondering what to do for dinner. As it turned out, we bumped into tyg and company. After waiting for some rac.stragglers, we all walk back to Horton Plaza for eats. It's a pretty big group, and it was tough to find a place for all of us to sit down and eat. The Compuserve folks happened to be there too. After moving some tables and chairs around, we got all of us seated and situated. I know I'll leave some names out, but I remember the following at the table: ZB, PH, tyg, Sidne, Troy, Hohn Cho, David Goldfarb, Michael Grabois, moi, and maybe 2 others that I wasn't familiar with. Hohn Cho definitely opened up a can of worms when he started asking about current Legion happenings. tyg and Goldfarb were up for the task of getting him up to date. There was talk about the revamping of Marvel heroes return. I can't get too excited about the Marvel stuff anymore, even with the list of exceptional creator talent working on the books. I splurged and got desert from Ben & Jerry's. Yum! The dinner broke up with most of the folks going to the Star Wars bash at the outside deck of the convention center. ZB, PH and I decide to skip it, we were pretty tired at this point. I heard we didn't miss much of a party. On the way past the movie theatre, I gave away my pass to see Mimic. We were that tired. [Sunday] The last day of as the con and I feel fine. I spend most of the day hunting down just a select list of comics since I have minimal room to pack the comics in my luggage. I wasn't too successful in finding the Zot!s I am missing, but I do get all of the Maze Agency's I am missing, unless someone can confirm that there were issues #24 and #25 of that series. I pick up some Young Heroes in Love and other books. I spot Lou Ferrigno hawking photos and books of himself. I also see James Hong selling photos too. He's the designated older Asian actor it seems in Hollywood. I remember him in a hilarious bit in "Wayne's World II" as Cassandra's father. I spot a few more celeb's, but can's recalled their names at the moment. I actually went through each dealer's booth, but did not dig through all their bins. I saw Julie Strain once again and she posed with a shot with me...again. Near the end of the show, I go through artist alley once more, and find Steve Lieber and Jeff Parker there. PH and I helped Parker take down his Interman display. Hey, we are the roadies! Parker was nice enough to gives us a page of his original art, and I picked out a JLA Annual page which had a funky Boom Tube effect on it. Lieber was generous enough to do a cool Wonder Woman sketch for my sketch book. ZB shows me a nice Gene Gonzales sketch he commissioned. He really got into the sketch gathering spirit while at SDCC. I may have awakened a monster here. Finally 5 p.m. rolled around, and it was time for us to vacate the premises. PH, ZB and I walked back to the hotel and decide not to eat at Horton Plaza. We landed at Planet Hollywood. While the food wasn't terribly enticing, that awful background noise had to go. I'll try to remember not to eat there again. We walked around some and since I had a redeye flight to catch at 10:25 that evening, I start getting ready to leave. ZB and I say our goodbyes. Next time, we'll have to do Vegas, ZB. The airport charter van, Cloud 9, shows up and picks me up for the airport. On the van was Charles Vess's niece, who was attending her first SDCC, and suffice it to say, she was pretty overwhelmed by the experience. She was very bubbly. It must have been nice to be schmoozing in those circles with a famous uncle. I got on the plane and said goodbye to San Diego once again. P.S. I hate redeye flights. P.P.S. See y'all next year...maybe. P.P.S.S I do hope so scan in my SDCC photos and create a web page of the experience. I'll post a pointer if/when I finish the page.