Another year, another Edmonton Collectible Toy and Comic Show. This year’s show was, as always, a ton of fun. I spent the day hanging out with Dan, Rudi, and Brad at our table doing sketches and shilling books. The sketches were kind of an impromptu thing, but ended up being pretty fun and relatively profitable. I got to draw Sergio Aragones’ Groo for the first time ever, which was a lot of fun. Deceptively tough to draw, that Groo. His design is so simple that it’s really easy to overthink it and mess it up. I also did Darth Vader and a girl as an office superhero. Dan got to draw two separate skanky roller derby girls, a much more interesting office superhero (the guy’s job was “death inspector”), and something else that I can’t remember. He also started on a piece of HEAT fan art that I should get on him to finish, because what I saw of it was pretty awesome.
Dan and I also joined Bob Prodor and James Davidge, creators of The Duchess Ranch of Old John Ware for a panel discussion about creating independent comics. The panel was a lot of fun, despite an early scare that there would be more people on the panel than in the audience. With about three minutes to start time, there were two people in the audience. Shortly after we finished discussing cattle (well, James and Dan did. Bob and I just nodded along), people started filing in. Then we attempted to start by introducing ourselves, which led to a discussion on how we should do that. Introduce ourselves? Have each person introduce somebody else? Have the audience introduce us? Yes, that one was really suggested and yes, we realized that, while probably entertaining to us, it would make no sense. Once we actually got into talking about comics things went more smoothly. Whether or not we offered any sort of insight into independent comic creation is up to the audience, but nobody crapped their pants so I consider it a success.
