Doppel's Dementia

Probably my favorite part of Comic-Con is meeting the writers and artists in person. The best place to do that is the Small Press area and one of my first stops every year is to see Keith Knight, creator of The K Chronicles, (Th)ink and The Knight Life. If you aren’t familiar with his work do yourself a huge favor and pick up one of his books, I don’t know how to describe his art style except to say that it’s entertaining. His writing is always funny and every once in a while he touches on current social issues and will really make you think. Check out his official site at http://www.kchronicles.com/ to see the daily (Th)ink single-panel comics as well as the weekly K Chronicles; if you enjoy it then go all out and get the The Complete K Chronicles.

I again saw Keith at a spotlight panel about him & his work but this year was special: he was awarded an Ink Pot award which was a complete surprise to him. It surprised me as well since I thought they only gave those out at a special banquet. Even though Keith will re-use certain strips in his panels I always enjoy attending since I am guaranteed to laugh the whole time.

This year I picked up the latest K Chronicles book, I Left My Arse in San Francisco as well as the first Knight Life book, “Chivalry Ain’t Dead“.

This year I also met Stan Yan, creator of The Wang. He was great fun to talk to so I bought his latest book, Erection Year and he did a neat drawing inside for me. My wife gets migraines from MSG which I mentioned to him since the front cover says “NOW WITH MSG!” so the character he drew inside (Wang’s mother) is saying “MSG is good for you!”

I was only able to attend Comic-Con on Thursday this year, hopefully I’ll go back to all four days next year. There’s so much to see and one has to be selective and ignore some areas completely in order to see the really interesting stuff in one day. It seemed to me like there was even more space dedicated to video games and this year, I really wish they would cut back on that and use the space for more genre related stuff. The toys were just out of control this year, huge Hasbro area for Star Wars/G.I. Joe/Transformers and there was a constant line at the Mattel area the whole day (for what I have no idea).

The wait to pick up badges didn’t take too long (only 20 minutes or so) but the line stretched all the way north along the front of the convention center, then wrapped around to the back of the building to the south. We got there at about 9am and had badges in hand by about 9:25am. For some reason even though the show opened at 9:30am the security guys (I hesitate to call them guards) weren’t letting people down the main stairs & escalators where everybody was coming out from registration. Luckily I am familar enough with the venue that we backtracked and went around to the Bayside area and went down those stairs to get in.

Steampunk was out in force this year, lots of people dressed up and more vendors than in past years. One booth had a giant selection of goggles and other paraphenalia; another vendor had a really neat steampunk mechanical arm. Lots of zombie comics this year, more than I remember from the last time I went in 2008 (I am not too sad I missed 2009 since Twilight was really huge that year).

I only picked up two of the convention exclusives this year (it took forever to read through the entire list on the web site): Devil Bacon from Mr. Toast and Neonomicon #1 written by Alan Moore, art by Jacen Burrows (and I even got Jacen’s autograph on it); fun fact: this was a limited edition cover for Comic-Con with only 1500 printed.

Devil Bacon from Mr. Toast (limited to 1000 produced for SDCC)

Neonomicon #1 (special Comic-Con cover)

While we were at the Mr. Toast booth we also picked up a vampire candy corn for the dogs to play with.

Vampire Candy Corn from Mr. toast

Next update I’ll list out the books that I got and the people I met (in all honesty as much for myself as a journal to look back on as for my readers’ benefit).