Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

We went to a ComicCon a week ago!

About two weeks ago we went up to Longmont, CO, to visit our friends Kris and Dave. Kris is having a very rough time of it, she's going through radiation therapy for the umpteenth time. She caught a news blurb that Denver, about an hour south of Longmont, was having a ComicCon our first weekend there! So off we trooped....

I honestly can't say that we did a lot. We all agreed that we wanted to see the Felicia Day panel which included Erin Grey, Zaboo, and Claira. And we really didn't see anything else. We spent a couple of hours in the dealer room, and I managed to achieve an objective that really rather thrills me. When we began making our plans, I was surfing their web site and found that comic creator Matt Wagner was going to be there. Most recently he's been doing the covers of The Shadow while his son does the interior art(!), but historically he's best known for creating the series(es?) Mage and Grendel around 1983, when I first started buying comics. Mage's Kevin Matchstick is perhaps the first, and pretty much only, comic action figure that I've ever bought, it came complete with a glowing enchanted baseball bat.

I liked Mage because it interwove a lot of different fantasy mythos tropes in an excellent story. Grendel, I'm honestly not as much a fan of because Grendel is an evil person/force in pretty much all the stories.

Well, I decided I wanted to get Wagner to sign copies of his books. It took quite a bit of exploration, but I managed to find the first two volumes (of three planned) of Mage and caught him just before he went to lunch. So happy camper +1.

We also found a nice t-shirt that said 'the couple that games together, stays together', so my wife and I now have complimentary shirts. And I found someone selling an awesome adult card game called Cards Against Humanity. It's not adult as in sexually-explicit, it's adult in that some of the cards have some moderately disgusting themes. It plays just like Apples To Apples, and you need a group of 4+ people to play, three people would just be boring. And warped senses of humor are a definite plus. The player whose turn it is reveals a black card, which will have one or two blanks. It might read something like "When I become a billionaire, I'll erect a monument to ______". The other players choose a white card from their hand of ten and play it face-down, you might end up with things like "Michelle Obama's forearms", "snot", "a space/time paradox", "Adderol". The player who played the black card selects the one that they liked best, for whatever reason, and the person who played that card gets the black card as, I kid you not, an "Awesome point". You can do things with Awesome points, but I won't get in to that here.

Anyway, awesome game. Highly recommended, assuming you have the requisite twisted sense of humor.

I pulled it out while Dave was in the bathroom, explained it to Kris, and she was initially a little dubious. Russet hadn't played Apple To Apples before, but she had played a game that I made called Karaoke Screams, which uses the same mechanic. Once Dave returned from his pilgrimage, we played for probably an hour and had lots of fun.


The Felicia Day panel was lots of fun, we had good seats even though we had to stand in line for over an hour. Afterwards, we were thoroughly shot and departed for dinner. It was quite a convention: George Takei was a GoH, Stan Lee was scheduled to appear but had to cancel to film a cameo in the next Marvel movie (I think probably the Captain America that's due next year) and they got William Shatner to come in Sunday only. One thing that I would highly recommend is that if you're going to attend an event like this for every day of the convention, and they offer VIP wrist bands for an additional charge, go for it. The only way we could have seen the Wil Wheaton panel, which was back-to-back with the Felicia Day panel, would have been to have VIP bands. And Takei's panel required wrist bands, which first went to VIPs and then the public, and the public bands were gone within half an hour Saturday AM.


So lots of fun!

Considering what Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with, he may not be attending conventions for much longer. I'm definitely going. Other GoH's include Esther Freisner, Diane Duane and Peter Morwood. Membership is listed as $60 through the end of March, they haven't updated since.

I've been reading Pratchett since, IIRC, the fifth book (Weird Sisters?) which I got through the Science Fiction Book Club. He is one of the few authors, perhaps the only one, that I'll buy on sight when he has a new book out. Yes, Thud! was a little weak, but I think the body of his work is very strong.

http://www.nadwcon.org/