Thursday night I had to meet Alex at a club in St. Louis. To kill time until he arrived, I hit a couple of stores in the area on back issue hunts. At one I grabbed the Mystique by Sean McKeever collection I'd seen there in November, to go with the Mystique by BKV collection I bought last month. At my next stop, I grabbed the last 3 issues of Bedard's R.E.B.E.L.S. run I needed, and the last two-thirds of Engelhart's Silver Surfer run. You know, I like Ron Lim's art, generally speaking, and it's probably his Surfer I think of when someone says "Silver Surfer", just based on the level and timing of exposure, but I was kind of sad when Marshall Rogers left the book as artist.
Friday had nothing comic related, other than various errands run in preparation for the trip (oil changes, getting money, so on).
As far as the convention itself, I didn't find too many things I was looking for, back issue wise. Most of the last third of Spider-Man 2099, a handful of post-issue #200 Uncanny X-Men, a couple of Suicide Squad comics. I did buy the Daughters of the Dragon trade Palmiotti, Gray, and Khari Evans did, and I found the Infinity Gauntlet single issues collected for 6 bucks. Had to grab that. I bought more Heroclix than I should have, and a complete set of X-Men Series 1 trading cards, but that was only $7.50. No regrets there. Jack also brought in my comics from the last two weeks, so I'll get to those later this week, such as they are. Alex limited his spending at those tables to mostly Magic cards for his friends and a couple of silk screens he intends to add some designs to. For decoration during his shows, I assume.
From the creators' alley, Alex was picking stuff up left and right. He bought 2 large prints from Robert James Luedke, including one of Bill Murray as Peter Venkman mirroring Murray's pose from the poster for Stripes!, which isn't a combination I'd have thought of, but it makes sense. We also had to stop at Brian Rhodes' table so he could pick up volume 2 of Mike and the Ninja. I was a little disappointed there was no ninja standing at his table this year, as in 2010, but them's the breaks. We learned volume 3 will be ready by next year's con, which is good, but it's the last volume, which is sad. I enjoy Mike and Stu's madcap adventures. Alex also asked Chris Ebert for a sketch of a unicorn, for some lady friend of his. I forget which, hopefully he doesn't.
We left to get lunch while we waited for that, and by the time we returned, two of my coworkers had arrived. One had already commissioned a Nightcrawler from Ebert, but mentioned she had to wait until he finished a unicorn, which caused me to bust out laughing. Both my coworkers purchased some prints from Brian Borders at 7 x 70 Studios, including Gambit. I can't help it if all my friends and coworkers are weird. Alex did get his unicorn, and my coworker got her Nightcrawler, though she said Ebert happened to see them outside, wasn't sure if the unicorn had been for them, but when they said they knew who it had been for, asked if they thought it looked OK. He was worried he hadn't drawn a lot of horses. I thought it looked fine, and it clearly looked good enough to get my coworkers thinking about asking someone to sketch a Dresden unicorn in the future. Apparently unicorns are very strange looking in the Harry Dresden books?
As for me, my Saturday Creator's Alley spending was concentrated on Nathan Bonner, since I enjoyed the first volume of his InDavo work that Alex bought back in 2010. Unfortunately, because I'm an idiot, I bought volumes 2 and 4, instead of doing the sensible thing and buying consecutive volumes. Fortunately, I think Bonner breaks down the volumes so they can mostly be self-contained. All you really need to know will be explained as you go along. I also picked up the 4 issues of the Shamus Stone comic he had. I thought it was pretty cool he was working on a future sci-fi story, and a 1940s detective noir comic concurrently. be interesting to see if there are style overlaps as they go along. Other than that, I bought Brian Koschak's Back Alley Hero. I read through it last night and really enjoyed it, though it's really more of a teaser/trailer, according to him. Worked on me. He was apologetic about it costing 5 dollars, so clearly he didn't realize how many times I've spent 3 or 4 dollars on comics that I wound up regretting purchasing. I'm not going to mind paying extra for something I like.
After we collected Alex's sketch, we hung around long enough to see the costume contest. Disappointingly few people on the adult division. There was a good Barf (Spaceballs), and a couple showed up as a Simon Pegg/Zombie Nick Frost from Shaun of the Dead, which was pretty clever. After we left, the only notable occurrences were Alex complaining about the quality of vodka the hotel used in his free screwdriver, which prompted us to trek to the gas station so he could buy something better to make his own, and my getting to watch actual television for the first time since roughly Christmas. Naturally, there was nothing on.
Sunday, Alex couldn't afford to spend much, so I did most of the buying. Three pictures from Bryan Ward, two of which were for Alex. Well I sure wasn't buying Bumblebee or Sookie for myself. Now Indiana Jones, that was for me. Alex couldn't stop staring at the "Wandering Astronaut" print, which you can see if you scroll down to the March 13, 2011 post on Koschak's blog, and it was only 5 dollars, so I bought that for him. I grabbed 4 prints from Mr. Borders, 2 for Alex (Joker and the Predator), 2 for me, 10 dollars total. I went with Spider-Man and an Injustice Society picture. The latter made Mr. Borders pretty happy, because apparently I was either the first person to choose it, or at least the first to show I knew who they were. What do you say in response to that. I went with, 'Well, that's Gentleman Ghost. Joe Kubert design.' He pointed out Solomon Grundy in the background, which is true, but who wants to notice the scraggly monster thing when there's a floating top hat and monocle in the center of the picture?
We were doing all this to pass time while Chris Ebert worked on a Firestar sketch for me. Yes, it was time to add another New Warrior to the collection, alongside Terry Huddleston's Nova from 2010, and Brandon Rout's Speedball from 2009. It only took him about an hour (he said it just came out well right from the start), and it looks great. Check that out, and for only 10 dollars people! That's good value! He also had a Deadpool picture I really wanted to buy (Wade standing on a mountain of dead ninjas), but he was out of prints for it. Dang.
After that, we were ready to go, but I got waylaid talking to Ken at the entry desk for about 10 minutes. Which was nice, I hadn't talked to him since the 2010 con. We didn't talk about anything of significance, just how he felt the con was going, what I'd been up to. I was glad I got the chance to do that before we left, and I got to see a fair number of people come in for early Sunday afternoon, which is always encouraging. The rest of the day, once we arrived at Alex', was spent throwing junk out, and packing up other stuff in preparation for his move. Not how I wanted to spend Sunday night, but to be fair, he really needed to wash dishes. There were smells emanating from that sink I'd rather not contemplate. Plus, we knocked off by midnight, so I probably got close to 6.5 hours sleep, which might be the best I managed all weekend.
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