Sean Neprud

I spent the last week in San Diego for Comic-Con.

It was a fantastic time. Here’s the full story.

Tuesday

I got in about noon Tuesday, and walked to our place. My friend Scott found an awesome place. It was a huge open loft, three beds, a pull out bed, and some couches. It was 2 blocks from the convention center, and just incredible. It had a full kitchen, and Ralph’s super market was two blocks away. I went for a jog to check out the convention center, and got to see the massive trucks unloading huge crates of stuff at the back of the convention center.

Scott showed up that afternoon, and was equally wowed by the place. We threw back a couple beers, then headed over to the Padres stadium, met up with Pants (Brian C from Comic Geek Speak), and headed in to the game. We had great seats on the field level back up above the home dugout.

That ballpark in San Diego is a great park. It feels new and a nice place to sit for an evening. One corner of the stadium at the left field is built into an old historic building of some sort, very cool. I think pretty much any stadium seems great when compared to Oakland coliseum though.

I didn’t watch that much of the game though, since I was talking with Scott and Pants most of the time about comics and whatnot. Ralph joined us after a few innings as well, which made a great group to hang out with.

After the game Scott and I headed back to our apartment, sat around a bit and threw back some beers. Drinking beer was a prominent activity throughout the entire weekend.

The weather in San Diego was fantastic. I realized this when I was sitting outside on our patio at night, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and wasn’t cold at all. Some of the best times of the convention happened late at night, sitting around talking comics with my apartment mates.

Wednesday

Wednesday is Preview Night at SDCC, but it is really just another day of the convention. There is really nothing “preview” about it. I got to the convention center about half an hour after badge pickup started. The line was long, and it took a while to get through. The funny thing was that the line for pros and press was much longer than for attendees. They had hundreds of folks working the line for regular attendees, but only a dozen or so working the line for press and professionals. I was attending the show as press for my Only The Valiant Podcast.

Wednesday was all about convention exclusives for me. I went around to a few booths and bought exclusive toys and statues only available at SDCC. My plan was to work Wednesday night to get stuff I could sell on ebay, and help pay for my trip down. Mission accomplished. There was a fiasco getting the Green Lantern Blackest Night figure, but I eventually got the first of the five figures. I wouldn’t be so lucky with the rest, as I figured out Thursday.

The best part of Preview Night was meeting up with everyone afterwards. We had a nice meet up at the Tilted Kilt for food and beer. About 15 or so folks showed up, we got our drink on, talked about preview night, and what we were looking forward to. I recorded the first OTV Comic-Con Episode, which was great fun.

The meet up at the Tilted Kilt was a beginning of a theme throughout the convention, the best times are not the convention, not the panels, not the dealers, but spending time with people and friends. Conventions are a chance to get together with friends, meet new people, strengthen those ties, and hang out. The convention itself plays a small role in the overall experience, and is just the thing that brings us all to the same place at the same time.

Thursday

Thursday started out as a very frustrating day.

I woke up at 6am, and this was after staying at the Tilted Kilt till midnight the night before, and headed to the convention center to get in line. I wanted to get the exclusive Blackest Night Green Lantern figures, since I could make a few hundred dollars – at least – by buying them at the show and selling them on ebay. There were no more than 200 people in line in front of me, and I waited about three hours to get in. Went straight to the booth, and no luck.

The line was already wrapped around the booth twice, and was starting along a walkway. They gave out tickets to the first part of the line, and then announced that there would be a raffle for tickets later in the day in a large pavilion. After not getting a ticket that morning, I went back to the apartment, got cleaned up, had some breakfast, then headed to the pavilion to enter the drawing. No luck. I gave up. My capitalistic plan to rake in a considerable profit was shattered.

In a way this was nice, because I was able to just not worry about lines for the rest of the show. I wandered around the small press areas that afternoon, met Steve Bryant of Athena Voltaire fame, and checked stuff out. After the morning of ridiculous lines, I wasn’t up for much.

I did walk around a few dealer booths and browse, and got one pretty darn cool book. My buddy Dave got me a book, The Ten Cent Plague, for my birthday. It is about the comic book scare of the late 40s and 50s, which revolved around the fact that people, mostly people who didn’t read any comics, thought that comic books were contributing to juvenile delinquency, and were a stain on our society.

I brought that book with me to San Diego to be my reading material for the week, and it inspired me to look for some old crime and horror comics from that era. I found a copy of Crime SuspenStories #23 at one particular dealer booth, and had to get it.

This comic was one of the pieces of evidence in the Senate hearings on comics as a cause of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s. The cover of this is quite out there. Yes, he is choking her to death with a tire iron. I like this comic because it has historical importance.

The fallout from those senate hearings, and from the hysteria over comics in general caused the American comic book industry to make a drastic turn, and the result is that comic books are considered by most people to be silly stories about super heroes in spandex. Comics have only recently been viewed differently, not as a genre of entertainment, but as a medium of entertainment, which can contain many different genres, for people of all ages.

So anyhow, this comic is very cool. I’m glad I picked it up.

Thursday evening was the All-Stars of Comics Podcasting panel. There was a panelist each from iFanboy, Comic Geek Speak, Indie Spinner Rack, Comics News Insider, The Comic Book Page, and Comic Timing. The panel itself wasn’t too fantastic, there wasn’t too much information that came out, but it was a great chance for everybody in the podcasting arena to get together and congregate.

After the panel a group of us went to Rock Bottom Brewery, and took over a little area of the upstairs bar. Dinner was good, and I got a chance to meet Bob from the Comic Book Page, and Ian from Comic Timing. We got to discuss podcasting in general, and the specifics of comic book podcasting. Other podcasters had interesting points of view, and I got a few ideas about how to make my show better, just through the conversations I had.

When we got home from the brewery, I set up my recording equipment, and Jay and I recorded an episode with our apartment mate, Scott. We talked about the convention, and we then talked about Resolution Comics, which is a small comic publisher that Scott has started with his business partner, Brian (who couldn’t make it to San Diego). It was fun to talk about what it takes to start publishing books, and hear about the challenges and the rewards involved.

Friday

Friday was the day I set aside for going through dealer boxes and buying some back issues for my collection. I found some good Green Lantern books at a decent price, and picked them up.

I wasn’t planning on making any big purchases this year, but as I walked by the Metropolis Comics booth, I noticed a few copies of Showcase #22.

Showcase #22 is the first appearance of Green Lantern in the Silver Age. There was an earlier character named Green Lantern in the 40’s, but he was an entirely different character. The Green Lantern that most people know, and who will be the character in the upcoming Green Lantern movie, is the character that was first introduced in Showcase #22.

This book has been pretty hot, because Green Lantern has been gaining in popularity. The upcoming movie is also pushing the value of this book up as more and more people are looking for it, me included.

I started buying silver age Green Lantern books a couple years ago [The silver age refers to comics published in the very late 50s and throughout the 60s]. My goal is to get all of the Green Lantern books between his first appearance up through Green Lantern #75. Before this weekend, the earliest issue I had was Green Lantern #2. Issue #2 is his fifth appearance, since was in Showcase #22, 23, and 24 before he got his own title.

So I was walking along, and saw a couple copies of this book at the Metropolis booth. I hadn’t seen any other dealers with this book at the convention, and had heard that it was selling for dealers very quickly. I asked to see them, and centered in on one that looked nice, and was within my price range. It took some thought, because this would blow through my entire spending budget for this one book, but I finally decided to get it.

This book is what I have most wanted since I started buying Green Lantern books, and is the highlight of my collection.

Only Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash are more important DC characters, and I am very happy I finally got a copy of this book.

After the show, a bunch of folks I know from the Valiant Fans forum got together for a couple poker games. Money was made, money was lost, and a good time was had. After the games we recorded a podcast episode, but it came out not so great. It’s up, but I won’t link to it. It was late, we were tired, it happens.

Saturday

I slept in Saturday, and didn’t rush off to the show. After Wednesday night, Thursday and Friday, I had already had a very full convention. It didn’t feel like I had two more days of convention to go to.

Eventually I headed over, and decided to walk around the artists and illustrator’s tables. I found a sketchbook by Terry Dodson, who I saw earlier in the day signing at his booth. I bought the sketchbook, and decided to talk to Terry. I asked him to sign the sketch book, which was from his French book Songes. He signed the book, and as we were talking, drew a small sketch on the inside cover.

The artwork for this book is amazing. His illustrations look like modern art nouveau. He has drawn a lot of mainstream superhero comics, like Wonder Woman and X-Men, but the work he does for the less mainstream and foreign books blows his mainstream work away.

It was even more exciting to talk to him about his art career. He was in engineering school, and took art classes on the side. He was planning going into industrial design, but instead left school to work in comics full time during his senior year, and never finished his engineering degree.

His story was similar – but opposite – of my own. I was in art school, and eventually got into engineering. I let engineering kill my pursuit of art, and I have lately been working to course correct and find my artistic soul again. I was able to tell him that he made the right decision to pursue art instead of engineering.

Meeting and talking to Terry Dodson made me want to sit down with a sketch book and do nothing but draw and draw and draw until I am as good, or better, than him. I have been struggling to find the time to dedicate to art, because I am finding that I need to create art and illustrations, just to make the world make more sense (as strange as that sounds). Though I only had the time for a quick 10-minute conversation with him, it was very inspiring.

Later in the day I met up with a friend who had introduced me to a guy working in the comics industry earlier in the weekend. We had set up lunch for Saturday, and I met up with them. We had a great discussion about comics, and talked about what fan sites and podcasts (like my OTV site) can do for the industry.

It was motivational, and gave me a lot of ideas of what I would like to do with my Only The Valiant website. I have ideas of how I can make it more than just a website for the podcast, but more of a community hub for comic book fans.

I walked away from that meeting ready to go to work to make OTV bigger and better.

After lunch, I rushed to get my recording equipment from the apartment. I wasn’t expecting lunch to go so long. I’m not complaining, since the conversations I had were great, I feel fortunate that I got to talk and network with folks for as long as I did.

Back to recording though, we were scheduled to record our big “live from the show” episode Saturday afternoon. I got home, packed up the equipment, and headed to the convention. I got a great space to set everything up in one of the lounge areas, and got to work plugging everything in.

A good bunch of people came to record with us, with people from the valiantfans board, thecomicforums, and a fan who found us on iTunes and started listening from there. We talked about the convention, people watching, and argued about which Valiant books were the best to give a new reader to try out. It was a fun episode to record, and it is up on the site now.

A couple of us headed back to the Tilted Kilt for dinner, and later in the night Scott and I went over to the Hyatt.

The Hyatt is where the after-hours action takes place in San Diego, at least as far as the convention goes. The bar is huge, and spilled out onto the patio out front of the hotel. Myself, Trevor, and Scott found Steve, Chris, and Jim with some other folks at the bar. I met a lot of people, and got to hang out with a lot of folks.

I ran into James Sime, the owner of Isotope comics here in San Francisco, quite possibly the greatest comic shop in the country. We said a quick hello.

I ran into some of the Geek Savant/Super Real crew, and got to hang out with them for a bit. Dave Dwonch and I brainstormed an idea for a comic book: How To Pick Up Chicks At Comic Book Conventions. Dave was a wingman extraordinaire for me at Wondercon earlier this year. He pulled some epic wingman duty while I was meeting a lovely lady at Kate O’Briens until late into the evening. Like most ideas from 1am at the bar, I have no idea if it will materialize, but Dave is a very talented comic creator, check out Space Time Condominium.

As Dave and I were talking, some poor kid comes up to us and started a conversation with us. He walked up and asked us, “so what do you do?” Dave jumped right in with his pitch about Pickup comics, and asked if this guy would buy it. This poor kid said he didn’t really read comics, and that’s whent eh situation erupted. Dave railed on this kid about why he was even here, and we poked at him about his direction in life, and what he wanted to accomplish.

I really don’t think he knew what he was getting in to when he walked up to us.

The bar eventually closed, and Scott and I went home. We had just gotten home when we both had the same thought at the same time: “want to drink a beer?” We stayed up an extra half-hour or hour or so, chatting about comics, the convention, and whatever else.

Saturday was a great day. I accomplished an incredible amount, from networking, to meeting people, to getting inspired to pour my energy into different work and projects. I wish every day of my life were as rich and satisfying as Saturday was.

Sunday

By the time Sunday rolled around, I had accomplished everything I needed to at the convention. I slept in again, and headed over to the convention in the late morning. I went to a panel, only my second of the weekend. It was How to Draw Star Wars with Katie Cook. Katie draws the Clone Wars online comic for the Star Wars site, and I have been a fan of hers for a few years. The panel was geared towards kids, and pencil and paper was handed out to everyone.

Katie would demonstrate how to draw different Star Wars characters, and the drawings were projected on a big screen, so everyone could follow along. The standout: Boba Fett in the Sarlac’s stomach juices, with a cute pet kitty floating next to him in an intertube. Every character she drew got a cute pet, even Darth Vader.

I walked around the convention floor for a while after that, made some final purchases. I found my friend John from New York, and got to hang out with him for a bit. I then finally made it back home.

Scott and I had invited folks over to our place for a post-convention cool down party. As far as I can remember, Pants, Trevor, Dave, Grant, Steve, Jim, and Chris showed up, plus another one of Dave’s friends whose name escapes me. Scott, Steve, Chris, Jim and I were talking about renting both units in the apartment building we rented for next year, so we could have one apartment to rule them all.

Our location and set up was really fantastic this year, and having the same thing, but even more so next year would be great. It would be this incredible congregation of creativity, ahanging out, and partying.

The location was great, the people were great, and I had a blast.

Back Home

I spent Monday packing up, figuring out how to transport all the stuff I purchased, and cleaning up the apartment a little. I’m glad I gave myself that extra day after the convention to wrap everything up.

My experience of comic book conventions is changing the more I go to them. I used to go to comic book conventions to walk around the dealer booth, buy some comics, and maybe get a book or two signed by a writer or artist. Comic book conventions were a chance to buy a lot of stuff, and that was about it.

The actual convention is now such a small part of my overall experience. The best times at this show were when I got to see old friends, make new friends, make new contacts, network with folks, shake hands, play poker, and raise beer glasses with folks.

This show was inspiring. It renewed my excitement about existing projects like Only The Valiant and my 101 Artwork, and got my me thinking about new projects. I am left ready to plow into everything and start creating. I have a few things in mind that resonate with me.

To everyone I met this weekend, thanks for making this convention great.