Fan Expo 2011: Recapitulation

The Fan Expo is kind of a big deal. If you don't know what it is, look it up. It's sort of Nerd Christmas and Nerd New Years rolled into one weekend for all the basement dwellers in the area, in that it's super exciting and awesome and also frustrating and terrible. Or not, as the case may be?

Last year was legendary in its awfulness. The thing was moved to a smaller hall due to bad scheduling, which combined with the unexpected astronomical growth of attendance, and the generally mishandled entry/re-entry system, made it a festival of waiting in line more than anything else. And people bitched. Oh... did they bitch. But even at the best of times, people at this thing are gonna bitch. It's the Bitch Expo. Waiting in line, you can sorta tell who's a veteran and who isn't by the relative amount of bitching they're doing.

Regardless, this year's entry system was vastly superior to last year's. Yeah, there were lines. Of course there's gonna be, but hey, sometimes if you're in the line at the right time you get this happening to you:

Freddy is easily distracted, and Bishop is easily confused.

Yeah, there's me and my brother in line behind the ribbon-cutting ceremony. So that's sorta rad. It might also be the only official photo we have with celebrities. On account of, you know, our general overall cheapness.

Wanna read a good comic book? Me too, sometimes.

So the whole process of creating a comic out of pictures of LEGO is proving to be far more work than I planned [especially when I haven't had the time to, you know, actually try to even start]. I still want to do it, don't you know. It just... may be on indefinite hiatus. So, yeah.

Anywho, Dree and I started watching Freaks and Geeks again, and it makes me sad and happy and sad, because it's such a good show that, with each joyful minute, is one minute closer to being over, again. Only 18 episodes is a travesty, man. But hey! Speaking of stuff that never got a chance to develop, I've decided to go ahead and post the colouring book edition of the first book of my epic,  loved-by-few and known-by-fewer graphic opus, ALMA: Jumbo the Elephant. Click to see nicer, bigger versions. If you have the inclination, try your hand at colouring, but I'm only allowing the use of crayon.

 

So hey, remember that comic I wrote?

"Nah, there's nothing back there."

Yeah, I wrote a comic a while ago, and was thinking about it lately. It was published through Zeros2Heroes.com, which was an exciting little think-tank sorta deal, that in the heady winter of 2007 ran a sequence of contests [if you can call them that], whereby those pitches vetted by the community got produced as real life [cyber]comics. Above is a pin-up, I guess you'd call it, by the artist assigned to the project, Miguel Lopez.

It was all pretty rad, really. Only the first part of the four-part story was made, but it was made better than I thought it could have been made, so that's cool. If you can navigate the viewer and haven't been badgered by me into reading the finished book already at some point in the last 3 years, you can see it here:

ALMA: Jumbo the Elephant, Chapter One