Batman’s nemesis The Joker on the hood. Very cool. Inside the convention center, we signed
in, got our all-important laminated passes and hit our first panel. Stepping into one of the meeting rooms, we watched as the speak- ers prepared for the program, Behind the Cape, all about Spawn and his creator, Phoenix resident Todd McFarlane. While Todd wasn’t there, three of his closest em- ployees were. They presented an interesting program that provided a lot of insight into the creative mind of McFarlane. Among the fac- toids revealed about Todd were the fact that Todd loves movies, but reads very little other than comic books, and in regard to his writing and drawing Spawn, he uses a lot of colons. There’s a joke there, somewhere. The slide show verified that Todd’s office is wall to wall with collectibles, including baseball memora- bilia.
The panel took questions, and I had to
ask, I mean, Todd has created several differ- ent Kiss statues/action figures, along with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and other rockers, so I asked if they would consider a Ronnie Van Zant figure or a Duane Allman figure. The lady on the panel kind of looked at me like I had two heads and matter-of -factly told me that those were not likely because they were “small, niche artists” that “might sell well in the South” but didn’t have a broad enough appeal. As you can imagine, that didn’t set well with me, but what can you do? Near the end of the program they announced that they had a limited number of McFarlane merch to give away. All of us moved forward to the front as they randomly passed out a few action figures and a bunch of signed comics. I managed to snag an issue of Spawn for my- self, signed by the man himself. We attended the next panel as well. It
was a panel on Podcasting, and one of the panelists was Eric’s friend I spoke of earlier, Ken Brown, proprietor of Drawn to Comics. It
was fun and the panelists were quite funny. One of my favorite things about comicon is meeting the various comic artists and pur- chasing prints of their excellent work, which they will happily autograph. Two years ago, I obtained some amazing prints and last year when I couldn’t make it, my buddy Eric came through and purchased several more for me, including an original pencil drawing of Eleonore used in the animated film Wizards (a favorite of mine from the ‘70s), signed by the aerator/artist Ralph Bakshi. This year, I found myself going from
table to table in the artists section. Among the artists we spoke with were the amazing Jae Lee, who works on such comics as The Inhu- mans, Fantastic Four and Batman/Super- man. Of course, I purchased a print of a particularly fun portrait of Harley Quinn and asked him to sign it. Jae is a very personable and friendly guy. I like that. Another very friendly artist was Randy Emberlin, illustra- tor of such books as Spiderman, Dr. Strange and GI Joe. Randy had a special deal of three
44
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92
