The comicon ended on Sunday, and I got home in the wee hours of Monday morning. The drive from Toronto to London gave me some time to mull things over and in the end I’d say that it was a fun weekend, and a mostly successful one at that. I got to meet some artists whom I’d always wanted to meet (Matt Wagner, Michael Avon Oeming), had a cool chat with one of my childhood heroes (Marv Wolfman), got to hang out with friends whom I haven’t seen in months, met a few of our customers, and had a good time every night of the convention.
Rather than a day by day blow-by-blow, here’s what happened in a nutshell.
Thursday night pre-convention met up with Liam and Kate for some eats and drinks. It was nice to see a couple of my former compatriots, as I really miss the folks I used to work with (not that I’d trade my current gig for the old one though).
Friday: 10am – 3pm set-up for the show.
Friday 3pm – 8pm show day one. There was a monsterous rain storm that I think kept people away because it was unusually dead.
Friday 8pm – 1am, party at Club Lucky. Had some food (not great), and some drinks (great)
Saturday 10am – 6pm show day two. Busy, but not as busy as I expected.
Saturday 8pm – 10:30pm Dinner with friends and then
Saturday 11:00pm – 1:00am EVIL DEAD THE FREAKIN’ MUSICAL!!! – Awesome, hilarious, and a blast.
Sunday 9am – 11am Breakfast with Char and then a drive by the ROM where we found out 1/2 of the west end was closed due to a combination of construction, parades, film shoots, street festivals, and a charity walk. Toronto may want to consider hiring someone who can, oh I dunno, READ A FRIGGING CALENDAR!!!
Sunday 11am – 5pm show day three.
After that it was unloading, eating, and accounting. We did roughly the same as last year, which is a little disappointing, as it seems like that’s the threshold for the show. The show has also become a bit of a dump thing where people take their overstock to get rid of. We had a lot of TPB’s and HC’s that we got during a big sale recently that we moved for good prices, and we went through a good number of variant editions, but some of the stuff I thought we would blow through just sat.
The big surprises for me were that we went through about 10 copies of the Marvel Zombies HC, and a similar number of Spider-Man Reign hardcovers.
I was also shocked by how many dealers were selling stuff for below our cost. One guy had Absolute edition hardcovers for $5.00 below cost. It makes no sense because they’re evergreen books that sell steadily because the Amazon’s don’t carry them after the initial shipments.
On Sunday I went and bought a few things like some prints, a couple of pages of original art, and got a few signatures done. My three big purchases for the show were;
An original page from Powers by Michael Avon Oeming
The cover prelims for the new Grendel Devil By The Deed hardcover from Matt Wagner
…and this absolutely silly 13″ Batman action figure with a cloth costume and 23 points of articulation.
In addition to meeting up with Donnie, Larry, Curtis, Don and Liam at the show, a few of our customers came by, which was an awesome experience. The thing about owning an online store is that you don’t have much face time with your customers, so putting faces to names is a real treat.
Thanks goes out to our crew who helped us. Dave, Gus, Erin, Heather, the other Erin, Larry, Curtis, Freak Daddy Donnie, the unofficial 3rd member of All New Comics Alex. Also thanks to everyone who worked with us this year for bringing 100% less of the crazy that we had to deal with last year.
Pete deserves mad props for the whole Women of Comics and the Comics for Kids things (not to mention bringing in Trish Stratus on Saturday) and the way he treats the guests. The man does so much for the show that he deserves a cut of the gate! It’s very cool to see the make-up of the convention floor change from middle aged nerds to families, and that’s largely due to the stuff that Pete worked so hard to make happen. I’m not sure he gets the appreciation he deserves, but I certainly think he is a terrific ambassador.
If only we could figure out a way to make money off of ambassadorship.