COMIC-CON 2016

For the first time since 2006 and only the second time since 1999, I won't be attending the San Diego Comic-Con this year! No, I wasn't unable to secure a badge; in fact my friends were very lucky with the online lottery this year and we could've grabbed tickets for all of us with no hassle for a nice change of pace. But I'm voluntarily skipping this one due to the birth of my son. If all goes according to plan, by the time this post goes up, he's on his way into the world, if not here already. So no reminiscences this year about SDCCs past, and no recaps a week after I return. I'll be way too busy!

But, that said, I planned for this. Just last night I finished John Byrne's FANTASTIC FOUR and wrote the last post in that series, and I'm a few months ahead of schedule on Friday posts as well, while my monthly X-Men Collected Edition reviews are written and ready to go up through the end of the year -- so Blogger will continue publishing 'em even as I'm far too busy to keep writing 'em (though I may not have much time to respond to comments the next week or two).

Next year I hope to be back at Comic-Con with the bundle of joy along for the ride (not at the con, but on the trip at least), but for 2016, I'm sitting it out.

COMIC-CON 2014 RECAP

Free lunch on Thursday,
courtesy of the Ninja Turtles.

I had hoped to have this up last weekend, but a week of catching up on work after a week-plus vacation kind of sucks the desire to write anything out of you. So, here I am -- a Comic-Con post-mortem, two weeks after it ended.

You know that sad, sort of "let down" feeling you get after something you looked forward to for a long time has come to an end? That's how I feel around this time pretty much every year. As I noted previously, Comic-Con has changed a lot since I started attending. This has been my big vacation every year, and while I did have a longer trip a few months ago in the form of a honeymoon, that didn't stop Comic-Con from being as huge a part of my summer as it's ever been.

THE SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON

Living in the Bay Area, San Diego is only about an eight-hour drive south. And in between my sophomore and junior years of college, I made that pilgrimage for the first time with a couple friends -- Chris, with whom I had attended both middle and high school, and Brian, a friend of Chris's from his college. It was 1999, and it was a simpler time. We bought our con tickets online, but we needn't have bothered -- badges were still on sale at the door when we arrived. The whole affair only took up part of the convention center, which seemed enormous at the time.

That year was my first SDCC, and though it remained relatively small for a few more years, that was the last time it really felt like a comic book convention, in the traditional sense, to me. I bought a ton of back issues while I was there; I was going through a Mark Gruenwald CAPTAIN AMERICA phase and plugged some big holes in that run. I got head sketches from several artists during signings at the Marvel booth, including two of my favorites, Alan Davis (at the time the regular artist and plotter of X-MEN) and Terry Dodson (then the artist on GENERATION X). I also paid for a full-figure commission of Moon Knight from Ron Lim, who has, for as long as I can remember, had the most consistently reasonable convention commission prices of any artist I'm regularly interested in.