Heat: The Space Age of Pro Wrestling

It took a while, but I’m finally getting around to continuing the tale of my epic journey… to a city three hours away that I was only in for like, a day and a half.

– After leaving the first day of the convention, Dan, his cousin, and I headed back to Dan’s cousin’s cousins’ house, where we would be staying while we were in Cowtown (which is actually Calgary’s nickname, by the way). They were apparently off somewhere, so we would have the place to ourselves. We had to drop off Dan’s cousin because he wasn’t old enough to come out drinking with us, which we felt kind of bad about… until we saw the house, then we were jealous. The house was a mansion in something like a gated community (it was basically a conglomeration of rich people, but there wasn’t a physical gate). This was the kind of house that was so huge and fancy that you could pick any room in it, and it would probably be worth more than the average person’s entire house. There was a man-made lake in the backyard that was so big that there were islands in it… and they owned one of them. My favourite room in their house was the TV room, which also had it’s own kitchen built into it and an air hockey table. Their TV was one of those projection ones, with a gigantic screen that descended from the ceiling (I’d guess it was a good 70-some inches). The walls were decorated with autographed photos and paintings of Wayne Gretzky, and the carpeting was complemented with a very classy dog turd. Which wouldn’t have been overly surprising, were it not for the fact that the family took their dog with them wherever they had gone, which meant that the dog had crapped on the floor before they left and nobody had bothered to clean it up. Which was… ew.

– Dan and I eventually (and somewhat reluctantly, because oh god that house was awesome) headed out to the bar for the drink ‘n’ draw after Dan scrawled the route to the place on a sticky note. By this point, the rain that had started just after we left the Roundup Centre had turned into a fully fledged storm. At one point on the trip we began to swear extensively at whoever Calgary’s urban planner was because we turned from one 1st street… onto a different 1st street. We eventually parked a block away from the bar, but at the time we weren’t aware of that, so Dan phoned our friend Nick (of Vicious Ambitious fame) and left a long, rambling message asking for directions, and only ended when we had already gotten inside of the bar.

– The drink ‘n’ draw took place in the Unicorn Pub, which had a fantastically named house beer… which I couldn’t even remember long enough to verbalize it to the waitress. It was something like “The Unicorn’s Twisted Magical Horn Potion”. I ordered it because it was a buck cheaper than everything else on the menu, and because it’s name was awesome. Mostly the first part.

– The first bit of the drink ‘n’ draw was spent hanging out with Bob Prodor (artist of The Duchess Ranch of Old John Ware, written by James Davidge), his girlfriend, and other Edmonton comickers, because most of the other drink ‘n’ draw folks were at another table with no room left. Awesome.

– Later on, drinking and drawing actually happened, and then people started coming over to socialize with us. Fiona Staples, Stephanie Chan, Dean Welsh, Andrew Foley, some of the guys from VA, Julie (of Free Comic Book Day blog fame), Robin and Catherine, and Bob were all there. And probably other people that I’ve forgotten. Sorry other people (who probably aren’t even reading this, and thus won’t be offended to begin with). Fun was had, the specifics of which I don’t really recall, aside from the fact that Bob came up with a character called Dragon Man. Which which I think was a parody of Nemesis, the protagonist of Mark Millar’s new book who sports a godawful design that’s basically Batman without any of the elements that make Batman look cool. So Dragon Man has a dragon logo on his chest, and pointy dragon horns on his mask, and dragon spines on his gloves, and a dragon-like cape… also, he’s a black dragon. Did I mention that? Yeah, he’s a black dragon with pointy ears and spikey gloves and a dragon cape and a logo on his chest. He’s super rad looking.