bg/ag publishing

agIsh: Comic-Con 2009
a.k.a., "Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con: Be there and be square."

Comic-Con was insane this year! This was my first year I've done a 2-day run (Friday, Saturday) of the event and you can probably imagine how much walking I did. My calves are in the best shape they've been in years because of Comic-Con! *thumbs up*

This was also the first year I've seen Comic-Con sold out. You'd think this would help contain some of the insanity but it seemed as though the event coordinators anticipated half of the registrants would be in the convention center while the other half would be in running rampant in the streets of San Diego. Well, they correctly assessed the situation.

This picture doesn't come close to depicting how crowded it was just walking in an out of the convention center. People were absolutely everywhere, literally shoulder to shoulder at or around the convention center and only got better as the crowds dissipated to their respective parking lots.



It wasn't much better inside...



Oddly enough, Friday seemed more crowded on Saturday even though there were more celebrities flooding the grounds on my second day. Who I grabbed a glimpse of on Saturday:

Seth Green - Family Guy, Robot chicken
Tyrese Gibson - Tranformers
Mark Hamill - Star Wars, Batman voice actor
Margot Kidder - Lois Lane from Superman
Zachary Levi - Chuck
Lindsay Price - Eastwick, Lipstick Jungle
Rebecca Romijn - Easwick, X-Men
Brande Roderick - Playboy Playmate
Kevin Sorbo - Hercules, Andromeda
Tiffany Taylor - Playboy Playmate

I knew who Seth, Mark, Rebecca, and Brande were right away - I had to look everyone else up. It was one of those situations where you think, "I've seen this person, I know they're famous, I just don't know their name."

I managed to take a (blurry) picture of Lindsay Price and Rebecca Romijn.



I also managed to take a picture of Tiffany Taylor's table. I think she was charging for pictures so I decided to come back later and sneak one. Turns out she was the sneaky one and bounced.



I asked our multimedia department to whip up what I feel is an accurate representation of what her booth would've looked like with her there:



Who else am I forgetting? Hm... Oh yeah! Your boy and mine: Lou Ferrigno!



I gotta tell you, Lou's buffer than ever. I guess it's true what they say: if you lose one sense, you gain more muscle.

Anyway, all this talk about celebrities has me thinking about Comic-Con hotties. And here they are!






As always, Comic-Con was overwhelming for me. It always takes a minute for me to gain some composure and come up with a plan of attack. I came upon the weekend with no real goals or a shopping list - it really was about just being there for me. The best way I've figured out to get the full effect is just to hit every isle and maybe something will catch my eye.

That's easy to do when you have costumed weirdos...



The dude in the guitar and fro was actually pretty funny. I asked for a picture and the first thing he did was drop to one knee and play a riff. After the shot he hands me his card with a guitar pick glued to it. Tight presentation man. *dap*

Darth Maul! *unh!*



...sick displays...





...and crazy stuff to buy!






I'm getting overwhelmed right now! And Comic-Con's been over for 3 days! *faint*

After settling in, I felt that I could do the most damage in Artist's Alley. In past years, it was pretty easy to score a full sketch for free. These days, everyone's charging $5, $10, $80 for full sketches. So for cheap bastards like me, we have to settle for head sketches (which some artists still charge for...not that there's anything wrong with that).

There were two dudes I wanted to get some schwag off of. The first was Tony Daniel. He's been doing some incredible work on Batman and the recent Battle for the Cowl series. He was debating on his blog whether or not to go and ended up not going, unfortunately.

The second guy I wanted to meet was Dustin Nguyen. He too has been doing some spank ass work on Detective Comics (now on Streets of Gotham). Like all asians, he works hard for his money and he was there. I scored a head sketch from him and also bought some tight posters off him.

Here is the man himself after the fact:



You can check out Dustin's blog here as well as his artwork here.

Of course you gotta venture out a bit and give other artists some love too, right? I mean, where would Jim Lee, Tim Sale, and Joe Quesada be if every fanboy just went for the big names back in the day? *shudder* Perish the thought...

So, continuing on, I met Chris Batista. Really cool dude with tight pencils. I can't recall his current project, but he drew me up an Adam Strange head sketch. "Who?" Exactly. I don't know who Adam Strange is either, but the pencils were tight nonetheless.



I also met up with bg's brother, Jonboy Meyers. He too was throwing out some cool stylistics so I figured I'd bite. Chegg the end result.



Not bad, eh? You can check out Jonboy's page here.

So it was a long two days with lots of walking. Our initial plan was to have one day dedicated the panels and previews and another day for walking for floor. Let me tell you, the panels tend to be shit. You have fanboys doing some intense suckling and asking "what's gonna happen next" and after an hour you learn nothing about something that's already over your head. Previews, on the otherhand, I'm sure are cool but good luck trying to get up in one. I wasn't willing to wait an hour in line just to see a trailer two days before it's posted on YouTube.

That's that - another Comic-Con in the bag. I just need bg to get on the passes early next year so that this can be a real event!