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My Weekend * ’¥ HeroesCon
OR, WHY I MISSED ATHFEST FOR A COMIC BOOK CONVENTION
ong & Narnia Statue Liquidation,"
read the banner in proud letters.
"What in the everloving hell have
I gotten myself into?" I wondered,
as nerds paraded past me holding huge boxes
containing dinosaur figurines. This was Heroes
Convention, HeroesCon for short, founded in
1982 in Charlotte, NC by Shelton Drum,
owner of the Heroes Aren't Hard to Find
comic shop there. It was also my very
first real comic book convention, not to
mention the reason I skipped AthFest
this year.
That's not strictly true. I've been to
Fluke, held in Athens in the early spring,
but Fluke is a very different and much
cuddlier animal. It's held in a bar, and
even a weakling such as myself would
have no trouble throwing a ball from one
end of it to the other. The only costume
present is the standard one of jeans,
t-shirt and Chuck Taylors. HeroesCon, on
the other hand, is held in the Charlotte
Convention Center, and its Indie Island
section alone—the area of the hall in
which the organizers cluster the kinds
of artists and authors published by
presses like Marietta's Top Shelf or Oni
Press—runs to 10,000 square feet. You
get a map as part of your program, and
you'll need it.
So was it worth missing AthFest? It
actually turned out to be surprisingly
similar. It may have been held indoors,
but it was still hot and fairly sweaty. The
Physical exhaustion was a factor that The
needed to be accounted for. No matter
how well you think you've planned your route,
there's a fair amount of zig-zagging across
the floor, leading to aching feet by the end
of each day, and even if you didn't mean to
keep getting out your wallet, your shoulders
will be killing you from dragging around the
ever-larger, ever-heavier bag of stuff you've
bought. (Note: The guys with
rolling suitcases might not §
look very cool, but at the 5
end of three days they don't 3
have shoulder bruises.) z
B ut the thing that made
HeroesCon seem-the
most like AthFest is
exactly the thing that makes
them both great: the coexis
tence of various factions in
the aid of a shared greater
goal. AthFest might feature
The Buddy System alongside
We Versus the Shark, Kyshona
Armstrong and Sonl, but
HeroesCon had Scott Pilgrim
creator Bryan Lee O'Malley
(poised for stardom when the
movie adaptation hits the
aters next year), EC Comics
legend Al Feldstein, new
classicist Darwyn Cooke, indie
hero Jaime Hernandez and
The Fart Party's Julia Wertz, who likes to make
jokes about blowjobs, all in one room and all
for the love of comics.
One thing I learned is that the bigger
conventions, like Comic-Con International in
San Diego, tend to focus less and less on com
ics and more and more on movies, TV shows,
video games and toys. It's not that those
things aren't great, but you might not need
everything you're interested in to be in one
place, and the glamour of Robert Downey, Jr.
kind of outshines that of current Iron Man
writer Matt Fraction, at least to some people.
Browsing through one of many five-dollar
trade bins, I overheard a customer and a ven
dor in conversation about just this. "I've been
to San Diego, but that's all multimedia. I don't
know what that has to do with comics," the
guy in the Iron Man costume was about as hi-fi as it got.
focus, rather, was on the comics themselves.
vendor said. Athens' own Patrick Dean, who
happened to be walking the aisles as well,
independently reiterated the point, adding
that Comic-Con also draws 140,000 people by
this point, making it unmanageably targe.
HeroesCon may have the occasional booth
with some imparted DVDs, and there was, of
Artist Hope Larson personalized a copy of her new book Chiggers with a brush and a bottle of
ink, which was a really nice touch.
course, a dude in an Iron Man costume pos
ing for photos, but the focus realty stayed on
comics—from booth after booth of retailers
selling both individual issues and trades to
the back half of the hall, which was filled
with tables for creators big and small, to the
small presses dotted throughout—most of
which also had people signing and sketching.
Sure, there were a couple of Klingons running
a booth to raise money for charity, but the
media on display was almost entirely print.
One of the most interesting parts of the
weekend was cataloguing the ways in which
people sign/sketch in a book you've handed
them. Hope Larson, for example, pulled out
a brush and a bottle of ink to paint a s'more
with painstaking care on the cover of her
new book Chiggers. Jeremy Tinder, author of
Cry Yourself to Sleep, uses a brush-pen
and makes lines nearly indistinguishable
from those already printed on the page.
Mike Dawson, creator of the brand-new
Freddie and Me, a memoir about his love
of Queen, holds his pen practically at
its point while drawing a great little
picture of Freddie Mercury. Some guests
care deeply about their choice of writing
instrument, frowning at their selection
in thought when presented with a page,
while others, like the prolific Jeffrey
Brown, seem happy to use any old pen.
A nd despite the potential for
excruciating awkwardness, the
interactions tended to go sans
hitches, although smiling and holding
out a $20 bill while saying "I would
like to purchase your book" probably
facilitates that kind of smoothness. Liz
Prince, author of Will You Still Love Me If
I Wet the Bed?, was drawn to my Je Suis
France shirt designed by Lauren Gregg,
as was many another indie islander, lead
ing to easy conversation and the usual
proselytizing on my part about the great
ness of Athens. Expressing enthusiasm
at someone will often result in a mirror
effect, as it did with Josh Cotter, author
of the recently compiled Skyscrapers of the
Midwest, who not only chatted for a good
while and signed multiple things, but waved
nearly every time I passed by the booth. Matt
Sturges, co-writer of Jack of Fables and House
of Mystery with Bill Willingham, seemed lonely
and positively thrilled to hear nice things, and
Alex Robinson spent quite
a while on a drawing in his
Too Cool to Be Forgotten, as
well as throwing in a promo
pack of candy cigarettes
that mimic the design of the
book's cover. While much on
artist Derek M. Ballard's table
was (appropriately) highly
priced, the purchase of a tiny
$5 drawing of the He-Man
character Moss Man led to
a discussion of how North
Carolina doesn't really count
as the South in many ways
(Pepsi, people who walk fast,
a strange number of Chicago-
style hot dog places).
What I'm saying is that
it kind of turns into a love-
fest. You want to give these
people money for making art
that makes you happy and,
in turn, they want to keep
making you happy by mak
ing that art. It's a widening spiral of mutual
appreciation, in which many attendees are
creators and almost all creators are fans, and
it leads to the ATM in the building having to
be refilled often. So did I miss AthFest? I kind
of just got it in translation: sweaty, tired,
empty of wallet, desperate to get back home
to my couch and, in the end, totally happy to
have been.
Hillary Brown
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