COMIC-CON 2015 RECAP

Some may recall that last year, I was a little underwhelmed by my Comic-Con experience. The trip was fun, but it was more in spite of the convention rather than because of it. This year, thankfully, things returned to form. Here's a recap of the trip by way of some of the tweets I sent out from the convention.

And now I wait for admittance into Comic-Con #SDCC #SDCC2015 #PreviewNight

— Matt Re (@MC_RE) July 8, 2015

Preview Night: every year I'm unsure whether I want to do it. It costs extra and it's become practically as crowded as any other day of the show. But, given the amount of time spent standing in lines and attending panels throughout the con, Preview Night really is, as it always was, the best opportunity to tour the exhibit hall. And this year it was actually productive for me, as I came across a Japanese Transformer I wanted at a very reasonable price ("Combiner Wars" Superion, for those curious), which might have been scooped up by someone else if I hadn't been there. Nonetheless, I still wonder if it's worth it. Technically, for the price I paid for the Preview Night badge, I could've just had the toy shipped to me from overseas for the same ultimate price.

RETURN TO COMIC-CON

Just a quick note to mention that today I'm bound for sunny San Diego with plans to attend Comic-Con this Wednesday through Saturday (we will be driving home on Sunday). And this year, I'm thinking I might tweet a bit from the convention, just for fun. So if you haven't noticed the little "Follow" button off to the left, now might be the time to jump on it. In fact, here's a bigger one for you:

Follow @MC_RE

That said, I make no promises as to the quality or quantity of my tweets! I'm still new to actively tweeting, and I often forget to do it until the moment has long passed.

As always, the regularly scheduled IRON FIST and STREET FIGHTER posts will go up while I'm away, and I will once again try to compose a summary post a week or two after my return.

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.