This was my fourth year of attending the annual Emerald City Comicon (ECCC) in Seattle, and this year was an even bigger event than the previous shows. This time the show ran for three days, Friday, March 4th through Sunday, March 6th and the crowds seemed even bigger than I remembered from my visits to it on previous years.
I over the last two years I have been trying to discipline myself to bring less and less comics and graphic novels to be signed by the creators attending. As well, I have been trying to limit myself to mostly graphic novels so that I am getting more collected material signed while not having to carry as many single issues around (which can get pretty cumbersome). This year I found myself with only 35 single issues and trades to get signed over a three day show so that seemed like a very decent number when you divide it through by the whole weekend.
ECCC Day One
One thing I had noticed was that a number of the media guests were only going to be present for the Saturday and Sunday, so I figured that the Friday would not be as busy; on the other hand I was not quite sure just how many of the comic people were actualy going to be there on the Friday either, so I limited my number of books for the first day to even less than one third. Well it turned out that I right about the lower turnout for the Friday but was wrong about the comic creators turn out: the room was nicely filled (instead of overcrowded) but almost all of the comic people were there signing stuff, so I could have brought more that day. Live and learn, I guess. On the first day I got autographs from the likes of John Arcudi (The Mask), Jacen Burrows (Crossed, Necronomicon), Gabriel Hardman (Agents of Atlas, Hulk), Matt Kindt(Three Story, Super Spy) and J.G. Jones(Wanted). That may seem like a fair number of people to meet the first day but really I could have fit in one or two more quite easily because it wasn’t too busy. Instead, I also spent a lot of time getting the lay of the land with regards to dealers selling graphic novels since that was what I was interested in buying while at the show, no single issues or toys or models or busts for me this time around, just graphic novels, trades and hard covers. Many of the dealers were already selling at half of cover on the first day and a few even had $5 and $10 stacks of books available for sale. The retail craziness had definitely started early. Still, getting more done on Friday would have left me with less to get done on the Saturday, a day with crowd levels from Hell. Oh well, like I said, live and learn…
Friday odds and ends…
* When I met Matt Kindt at his table on friday, it was pretty quiet and that gave Matt the time to do a real bang up job of personalizing a copy of Super spy for me, complete with a pen and ink sketch of the main character of the book(whose name I am not aware of since I have not yet had the time to read it). Very very nice.
* John Arcudi seems to harbour some frustrations about the way things went with the Mask series of mini-series; he did not want to elaborate on it and I took the hint and let it go.
* Jacen Burrows quipped to me that at some points he actually felt the need to get stoned to better handle the art chores on the original Courtyard one shot graphic novel. As a follow up to this statement, he showed me an example page of the script that he had to work with while doing the book: it was quite a dense collection of prose on a page, to be certain.
On my next post I will give a recap of my ECCC experiences from the Saturday…