Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

We arrived at the convention center at the lazy noonish hour and hit the exhibit hall right away. It only took 5 minutes for Ben to tire of my distracted walking pattern and run off on his own. I enjoyed strolling around at my own pace, stopping to look at everything that interested me. Aside from the big booths (Marvel, DC, Hasbro, Lucasfilm, LEGO, Gentle Giant, etc.), here are a few that I liked and had snaggable websites (that are all safe for work):

gwinarmy.com Little vinyl Tux penguin shapes with fun paint jobs. Ben likes “Bunny” the best.

mistertoast.com I love the little original watercolor cards the creator and his wife (?) were selling. I’m going back to see if they found any with Inky the ink well that they could sell me tomorrow. Because, you know, I’m a writer and stuff. So it makes sense.

comicimages.com I snapped a great photo of employee Ken wearing his company’s Yoda backpack. It really felt like I was in Dagobah! (photo to follow)

mimobot.com Designer USB flash drives. Cool as shit and just as expensive. I want C3P0. It would also be cool if an audio clip of Threepio saying “Oh, hello” played upon the computer recognizing the drive.

chessex.com Dice, dice, dice! Lots of lovely dice! All shapes, sides, and sizes. Ben and I picked up a couple 30-sided dice (“Those will be great for playing Magic [the Gathering],” said my husband who didn’t think there’d be anything of much interest to him at Comic Con).

After walking around for a while and seeing some amazing costumes (I kept running into a very tall Ghost Rider (sans motorcycle) on the floor), I caught two interesting panels: “Science Fiction That Will Change Your Life,” sponsored by io9.com and “Spotlight on Bill Willingham” with Mark “Bucky” Buckingham.

The Sci-Fi panel was interesting and I hope that my new voice recorder caught all the titles that I’ve never heard of and need to read now. There were some interesting perspectives on the genre and people’s personal experiences with it. Also, I about died for Graeme McMillan’s Scottish accent. I mostly attended the panel so that I could squat a seat for the Willingham panel in the same room, but I’m very glad I went.

Fables was the first comic to really pull me into the genre of comics, and that’s because I have a thing for folklore and fairy tales. I love new takes on old tales, so Fables was thematically my cup of tea and I was pleasantly surprised to discover the wonderful writing and beautiful artwork in the comics. It turns out that one of my early loves, the Fractured Fairy Tales shorts from Rocky & Bullwinkle was also an inspiration to Bill Willingham and he’s a huge connoisseur of folklore and fairy tales, too. He talked about his start in comics writing/drawing and assured the crowd that Fables will not end at the conclusion of the big war story arc. I asked a question about in what format Bill provides his story to Mark, and Bill commented that it was a good question (squee!). Everyone in the audience received a one-page Fables comic on glossy cardstock with the tiny woodland creatures of Fabletown and it’s quite cute.

After the panel, I jetted to the DC/Vertigo booth to stand in line to have Bill and Mark sign my newly acquired one-page comic, as well as Bill’s old comic reprinted in graphic novel format, Pantheon. Haven’t checked it out yet. Special thanks to Catherine, a Batman-loving senior English major from SF State who was in line behind me and held my place while I ran to the hard-to-find booth that was selling those graphic novels. We had a very nice geek girl chat during our wait time, and she recommended the best Batman graphic novels that she’s read.  (I wonder if I choose the correct spelling of Catherine?)

Then I met up again with Ben and almost didn’t get into the “Comics Experience: How to Write a Pitch!” panel. Ben waited on the beautiful veranda while I got some good tips, and then we met up with Liz and Josh and had dinner at Karl Strauss Microbrewery. I’m not a huge beer drinker, but I highly recommend their signature Amber Ale. Liz and Josh do not recommend their Melon Martini.

That about sums up today. We came back to the hotel to relax and get to bed early… which turned into Ben zonking out quickly and me blogging into the almost-wee hours. Crap. I need to get some sleep because tomorrow will be a long day. Not sure if I’ll be able to blog about it but I’ll try.

We decided to take a slightly laid-back approach to Comic Con today in order to be better rested after a hellish travel day. On the trolley ride down to the convention center, we sat across from a nice (but a little odd) middle-aged man who was missing a front incisor (tooth #6; residual knowledge from working at a dental office).

His first question when we sat down was “What do you read?” though he wasn’t familiar with anything until I mentioned X-Men. He’s writing a screenplay with the title “Flapjacks: The Movie” about life in San Diego and when I told him I was a writer, he offered me a comic idea that had been floating around in his head and said that I should write it.

He pitched a story about a worm who wiggles around and recognizes places in the earth he’s been before, then discovers the surface of the ground where he is plucked up by a boy who puts him on a fishing hook and introduces him to the water.

“How does it end?” I asked. “Is he eaten by a fish?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied. “I leave that up to you, the writer. It’s your story now.”

Then conversation turned and he asked where we were from, and never just wanting to say “Utah” I responded “Originally from Ohio.”

“Not from Cleveland, I hope,” he said. Ben and I glanced at each other.

“Yeah, actually…”

He apparently knows a guy who is a security guard at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and opened up a binder filled with looseleaf notebook paper to write down his name for us.

“Next time you’re there, we’ll have to work out a practical joke for you to play on him, to really freak him out.” He had a huge grin on his face s he mulled it over. “Maybe you can pretend to have ESP. Yeah, that would be great.”

He handed me the paper with just the guy’s name on it and slowly shared more ideas and talked about his friend’s good sense of humor. We just sat there wide-eyed, listening and nodding our heads, alert to the bizarre nature of the moment.

I asked him to write “security guard at R&R Hall of Fame” on the paper, which he took back from me and happily did. He also wrote down his email address so that we could contact him to discuss the details of our plan.

Then the trolley stopped and he looked up and told us he had to get off – that his stop was a long time ago and he’d have to take the next train back to his destination.

We said goodbye and I folded up the paper and put it in my purse. I don’t think that I’ll contact him to plan a practical joke on his friend, but if I ever write his worm comic, I think I will drop him a line. He’ll want to know how it ended, I’m sure.