Had a blast Saturday at Heroes Con. Though I was there for just the day, our own Eric Nolen-Weathington was there the full three days (Friday-Sunday) manning our booth, doing his usual superb job of answering people’s many questions about our products. Highlights for me:
• Seeing Erik Larsen walk up to the booth to chat. Get this; the guy wasn’t there manning an Image Comics table, or hawking copies of his latest Savage Dragon releases. He was just wandering the floor, incognito, scoring cool old (and I mean OLD) comics. The joke was he had purchased a copy of CRACK, then a copy of SPEED… what’s next, LSD? He’s got interesting plans for them, which I’ll leave to him to divulge.
• The TwoMorrows Panel was well attended, featuring Roy Thomas, Chris Irving, Eric N-W, Michael Eury, and yours truly. It was a lively hour (actually, we went a little over that, cause we had so much fun stuff to talk about), with Roy Thomas stealing the show, telling how he walked into Marvel one day and got handed a $40,000 check for royalties on SECRET DEFENDERS #1 (a title which no one in the crowd remembered; Roy barely did). But it was the biggest royalty check he ever got in comics; such were the speculator days of the early 1990s. We also dished about what was in our new Catalog Update, which’ll be inserted in all our July magazine issues, and be available for downloading (and free copies mailed upon request) in a couple of weeks; it spotlights all our new releases from now until early 2008 (including my top secret plans for Jack Kirby Collector #50).
• Meeting Rough Stuff editor Bob McLeod for the first time face-to-face. (Actually, I met him over 20 years ago at a convention in Atlanta, when I was still in high school—not that he’d remember a snot-nosed kid like me that long ago.) We’ve been working together on the mag long-distance via phone and email, but never got to meet in person until this weekend. Great guy, who was doing the most amazing sketches (he had just a long list of people wanting them, he had to beg off being on our panel, to save time to get all his art done).
• Hanging with Michael Eury and his lovely wife Rose. Their big news is that they’re planning to move back to North Carolina later this year, which is welcome news to me that he’ll be so close. Coincidentally, Michael Kronenberg (Mr. Eury’s co-writer on the upcoming Batcave Companion) is also moving to NC within the next month, so it’s looking like our little state is getting to be more and more a hub of comics activity (Newsarama is also headquartered here, as are a lot of top artists).
• A fan (whose name I can’t place, but they’re supposed to be emailing a photo soon, which I’ll post) brought over his handmade box of “Kirby Krackle Cereal” which you’ve gotta see to believe. Stay tuned for the photo. Somebody oughtta market an actual line of cereal with that name.
If you missed the con, I really encourage you to go next year. There’s a reason why last year, when Wizard tried to elbow Heroes Con out by planning an Atlanta show for the same weekend, hordes of comics pros boycotted Wizard (to the point where they cancelled their planned show) to support Heroes. Organizer Shelton Drum is a fantastic guy, who knows how to put on one of the friendliest, most fun conventions in the country. (And if Erik Larsen would travel all the way from California just to hunt down old comics, you know it’s a show you don’t want to miss.)
