August 2, 2006

I was dead set about NOT going to the San Diego Comic-Con this year. I had determined that I would absolutely, positively would not go no matter how much fun it sounded like. Fortunately, Kazu and Amy (in addition to all the peer pressure from everyone else) managed to talk me into coming out for just the weekend, so I could stick around in Los Angeles for the week afterwards to work on my comic, in a sort of working vacation. With logic like that, how could I possibly say no? Did it work out in the end? Read on, and you can decide for yourselves.

Friday

I was booked on a flight scheduled to leave Toronto Pearson airport at 6am, which was definitely not a good idea. I am definitely not a morning person. Regardless, I hopped on to the plane and was off for yet another Comic-Con adventure.

The first of several obligatory “I’m bored sitting in this airplane photo”, although it was pretty neat when we were taking off and were chasing the rising sun at the same time. I tried to capture that in these photos, but I doubt I actually managed to capture that.

Look, ma! Comics! I was seated in the exit aisle of the plane, which meant more leg room for me.

I was barely in the air for more than an hour before we put down at the Detroit airport, where I transferred over to my plane to Los Angeles. I’d never been to the Detroit airport before, but holy cow, is it ever long. The terminal stretched on to infinity.

They even have a monorail for getting to the other end of the terminal. Crazy.

The funky fountain by my departure gate.

I eventually arrived in Los Angeles, where I met up with Shadi Muklashy and his roommate Jamie, who were kind enough to give me a ride down to San Diego.

I hadn’t intended to hit In-N-Out so soon in my trip, but it was destined that I would have a double double (animal style) as my first meal in California before we hit the road to San Diego. We ended up getting caught in some pretty bad traffic though, and it took almost 5 hours before we finally made it to the convention centre. For some reason, I thought I could survive if I just took 15-minute power naps every couple of hours, but sadly that didn’t last too long.

At last! Comic-Con! I arrived only an hour before the con floor shut down for the day, so it was mostly a blur of chatting and saying hello to everyone again (I hadn’t seen some people in two whole years!). A group of people were planning to hit a restaurant for dinner, but some of us decided to bail and head to the Eisner Awards, as we were up for a couple of awards this year. Our little group didn’t win anything, but it was great to see Scott Kurtz winning the award for ‘Best Digital Comic’ and his eloquent acceptance speech that followed. He truly was deserving of the award. Flight got shut out by its comic anthology counterparts — losing out to Solo and Paul Pope doesn’t seem so bad, and we all kind of expected it, really.

Aaron Reiner (who I met for the first time after the awards, and is the only non-blurry dude in this photo, carrying his Eisner in that little box) and Andy Runton won awards, which was great to see. After almost 15 hours in transit, I was completely exhausted, so we ended up heading back to the hotel to crash.

Saturday

Up bright and early, I dragged Emotion Eric along with me to wander the con floor before it got ridiculously crowded.

Eric was almost eaten by the Snakes on a Plane booth!

Who is famouser, Eric or Brian? So many people recognized Eric over the weekend, it was ridiculous.

Eric and I were scared off by all the people starting to flood onto the con floor, so we retreated back to the Flight booth. That’s Neil Babra getting ready to sign a book! Behind Neil and Eric is Jen Wang…

…doing some ridiculously amazing sketches for people.

Meanwhile, Amy Kim Ganter and Eric take each other on at Mario Kart. Did anyone do any real work at this booth?

Cue the Flight panel. A bunch of us were scheduled to appear on this panel, and the number of people kept growing as we made our way to the room that the panel was to be held in. Heading up on the escalator, we have (from left to right): Steve Hamaker, Reagan Lodge, Kazu Kibuishi, and Bill Plympton.

Killing time before our panel began. From left to right: Jeff Smith, Scott McCloud’s back, Steve, Phil Craven and Kazu.

Me and Neil…

…who was too shy to join us on the Flight panel, so he was our plant in the audience, along with Eric. Actually, right behind them in this photo is Alfred Moscola, who was instrumental in helping us to get Flight off the ground in its early infancy. We all owe a lot to that man right there.

My view from the Flight panel. I was sitting next to Jeff Smith and was so nervous before the panel actually started that I managed to spill water all over the table and almost on Jeff. Public speaking is definitely not my forte.

If you’re interested in hearing the full audio from the Flight panel, you should go here and download the MP3 and give it a listen. It’s pretty informative and packed full of good stuff (I even talk briefly about how I came up with the concept of Jellaby). Kazu managed to only say ‘organic’ a couple of times during the panel.

A slightly blurry photograph of the Flight crew after the panel. From left to right: Eric, Kazu, Jen, Neil, Reagan, Scott, surprise guest Derek Kirk Kim (who said he wasn’t going to come to SDCC either!), Steve, Jeff and Azad. I also took this photo with Jen’s camera, which turned out much nicer than mine.

After sweating it out in the Gaslamp district to get several pizzas for the rest of the hard workers at the Flight booth, we all managed to make it back in time for Jeff’s signing at our booth. Despite us not really advertising his presence at our booth all that well, there was still quite a lineup of people there to get their books signed by Jeff.

Jeff and an amazing Bone puppet created and operated by a fan of his! It really was an amazing sight to see.

The creator of the Bone puppet with Jeff. Bone even had a copy of Moby Dick in his little backpack!

There was no end to the number of books we had to sign, and they were piling up fast. That’s Joey Weiser sitting in the bottom right of the photo, looking stunned.

The crush of people and insanity of signing so many books became a little too much for me, so I ducked out of the booth for a little while…

…and took the opportunity to have a little talk with Andy Runton and take a few ‘glamour photos’ of his Eisner.

The globe actually rotates! It’s pretty sweet.

As the day finally drew to a close, everyone was looking pretty exhausted. I think in this photo, Kazu is trying to tell me to stop taking photos and actually help with the clean-up, but I guess I wasn’t listening to him?

In the washroom, was this perhaps an advance promotion for the sequel to Snakes on a Plane?. I would probably pay good money to see Snakes in a Urinal. But enough of the potty humour, it was off to dinner:

The McClouds had organized a huge, last-minute dinner at Buca Di Beppo’s again, in a repeat of the giant Flight dinner in 2003. It wasn’t quite as big as that last time, but there were at least 40 or so of us milling around outside the restaurant as they attempted to make room for us.

Feel the love. That’s Khang Le in the foreground on the right, looking… hungry?

Here was an astonishing discovery: Scott McCloud had never once played a game of Tetris before. We couldn’t believe it! So Kazu and Derek proceeded to explain the rules to him.

Scott looked pretty mesmerized by it all.

More people! In the back is Rad Sechrist and Frank Stockton. Andy Runton wanders into the frame as well.

Dave Roman and Johane Matte waiting outside of the restaurant. Sitting on the ground is Raina Telgemeier and Winter McCloud, who were clearly talking about Raina’s totally awesome Babysitter’s Club adaptation.

At last! Our tables are finally ready.

We were split into two large tables. Good times were had by all, I would venture to say.

Amy and Phil look through Johane’s amazing sketchbook.

Phil, Azad and Johane. I-I think Azad is trying to put the moves on me?

And you’d think that’d be the end of the night for us, right? Well, it turned out that it was actually Nucleus owner Ben Zhu’s birthday just as it rolled past midnight, so we celebrated with a round on Limoncello shots for a whole lot of people, followed by us hitting up a nearby cigar shop and buying ourselves some stogies. That’s Ben in between me and Azad.

It turned out that Derek had never smoked a cigar before in his life, so Azad and I took it upon ourselves to corrupt the poor boy. Derek took to it pretty darn quickly, especially with his JJ Jameson impersonation.

Man, lookit Derek go!

We hung around outside the Marriott for a little while, so we could finish smoking our cigars before going inside for the Sketchbook Sessions that was being held at the bar. Scott hung out with us as well, regaling us with stories from his misspent, chess-playing youth.

Once we were inside the Marriott, the sketchbooks and Nintendo DSes were broken out. We started a round of Pictochat going on the DSes, and Scott took to that pretty quickly. Ain’t technology grand?

Sticking to more traditional means, Ben went to town in my sketchbook.

After an hour or so of that, most everyone was collapsing from exhaustion, so we headed back to our respective hotels.

Messing around in the back seat of the car. I don’t think that’s Eric’s finger.

Sunday

Sunday at the con brought more of the same. Lots of talking to readers of Flight, lots of signing in books.

Once again, a short excursion was made to forage for food for the Flight booth. This time round, it was just Jen and Neil and I. We stopped to have some ice cream, and it was pretty dang perfect.

Here was the surprise of the day: Stan Sakai! Johane and I were whispering excitedly to each other when Stan came by our booth and started flipping through a copy of Flight 3. Rad had quietly sidled up to us and asked who he was, and when I told him it was Stan Sakai, his entire face lit up. It totally cracked me up. I wish I had taken a photo of that instead. Anyway, as soon as we all found out that he was at our booth, everyone was quick to hand him their own comics and let him know how much of an inspiration he was to all of us. His longevity in the comics industry and the sheer craftsmanship in each and every one of his pages really does speak volumes for us all.

And before we knew it, the con was almost over. All weekend long, we were engaged with The Those Guys in a pitched rubber band battle, which came to a head in the final hours of the con. I attempted to take a couple of videos of that, which you can view here and here.

And before we knew it, the con was over. All that was left to capture a few more photographic memories — here is Rodolphe Guenoden with his wife Benedicte.

Johane and Benedicte really deserve a lot of credit for all the work they put in at this year’s con. They were absolutely Flight’s “booth warriors”, taking charge and helping out immensely in running the booth and making sure everything ran smoothly.

The yin to the other’s yang: Phil and Rodolphe.

We returned to the Marriott briefly to unwind and for some snackies and drinks before going back to the convention centre for the inevitable tear-down.

And then it was time for Eric to leave for his flight home. We were all sad.

After our tearful farewell, it was back to the convention centre for the tear down. We still somehow managed to find time to goof around, though. Reagan started it all off with his hilarious Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation.

Run, Neil, run!

Finally, it was the end of the night, everything was packed into the back of the van, and Steve said his goodbyes. Man, what a goof.

It was back to the hotel for us to decompress and unwind. We later ended up hanging out with the Dumbrella gang for a little while, which was a lot of fun, which including a giant monster jam and Rich blurting out seemingly random sentences in his various states of sleep (”I can’t believe I’m not buttered!”), but I didn’t think to take any photos of that, unfortunately.

And that was that. I know for sure I’ve forgotten to mention all the awesome people I chatted and hung out with, but I had an great time with you all, I can assure you. I’ll see you all at next year’s Comic-Con, I suppose. I’ll leave you all with this little doodle I did to kill time on my return flight home (which involved a layover in Detroit again):

Other awesome con reports:

- Kazu Kibuishi’s report
- Jen Wang’s report
- Amy Kim Ganter’s report
- Jeff Smith’s report
- Steve Hamaker’s report
- Dave Roman’s report
- Joey Weiser’s report
- The Dumbrella webcam archive
- Rich Stevens’ photos
- Johane Matte’s photos
- Sonny Liew’s photos (who I had the pleasure of meeting for the very first time at the con!)