My First Comic-Con

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm WAAAAAY behind. I haven't felt like writing much lately, but things are still happening. Things are still going on that should be written about. And since I'm feeling inspired right now, I'm going to put as much of it to 'paper' as possible before it leeches out of my brain. There will be posts about things that happened in September, October, and November, mostly out of order, too, but it's high time for me to catch up.

Back in the beginning of November, I was able to cross one of my New Year's resolutions from last year off my list: go to my first Comic-Con.

Tucson Comic-Con isn't on the scale of most cons across the country, but it was probably the perfect size for my first one. I heard attendance was roughly 8,000 people, but that was up almost 50% from last year.

I talked Dan into it at the last minute and we had no plan whatsoever. In hindsight, we should have had a plan. We should have coordinated with our friends we knew were going, but we procrastinated and just winged it.

At first, it looked like it was going to be a complete bust. After walking the entire convention center floor and finding very little that struck our fancy, we were beginning to think that we had wasted our money. We went back to a booth selling CNC-milled brass jewelry then we were going to head to the exit.

Apparently the brass jeweler (check out some of her awesome stuff here) used to work at the company I do and we got to talking for a while. That gave two of our best friends, Shannon and Jeremy, plenty of time to sneak up and ambush us.

Let me tell you, it's so much more fun doing a Comic-Con when you're walking around with the King and the Queen of the Con. After we hooked up with them, we had a fun afternoon. It was great getting to watch all the people taking photos of each other and determining which booths were full of hidden treasures. I ended up with a brass necklace and this shirt:

Image Source

We didn't see any panels or get to meet any famous people, but that's ok. Fun fact I learned: a lot of the vendors at these Cons are artists. They bring a lot of prints and pictures of their work, but if you bring a sketchbook, you can commission most of them on the spot to draw whatever you like. I didn't even know that was a thing. How awesome is that? I think I'll do that next time. Now to think up things worth commissioning...