OK, so this post is going to be my actual “day one” end-of-day report. I got to the con at around 10:30, an hour before the exhibit floor opened. I kind of came in the back way, from the north, instead of from the “grand plaza.” That worked out well, since there wasn’t much of a crowd, and I badged in through an entrance with no line at all. That got me onto the grounds, basically. I was going to just hang around outside until they opened the main doors to the exhibit floor, then just walk in, but instead I wound up getting into the giant line in the basement. I probably would have been better off staying outside, but I didn’t mind hanging out in line. (Except for the guy near me who clearly hadn’t showered today, but that’s always a risk at any con.)
Anyway, the show floor wasn’t crowded at all. I expect it’ll be more crowded tomorrow. There wasn’t much that really interested me on the floor, to be honest. DC had a nice booth. There was no presence at all from Marvel. There were a fair number of back issue dealers. I didn’t buy any books today though. I might not buy any at all this weekend, since I don’t want to have to drag too much paper back to NJ with me.
I went to the Mark & Sergio panel that I previously mentioned. It was a nice low-key panel, with Mark & Sergio gently ribbing each other and telling funny stories. After that, I went to DC’s “80 years of Batman” panel. They had a bunch of the current Batman creators on the panel, including Tom King, Scott Snyder, and Greg Capullo. Right after that, in the same room, was the “Spotlight on Jim Lee” panel. That was another fairly low-key panel. It was just Jim Lee on stage, taking questions and doing a couple of sketches, which he gave away at the end of the panel. After that, I thought about staying for the “DC Universe” panel in the same room, but I wanted to get up and move around a bit, and I had a feeling that the panel might be too much of a hard sell on the DC Universe service, which I’m still resisting. I might have to give in though, since they announced that they’re expanding the number of digital comics available on the service to, I guess, pretty much everything they’ve got. I ended the day at the “Greatest Cartoons Ever” presentation, featuring a bunch of great old cartoons selected by Jerry Beck and Frank Gladstone. They picked some great ones, including Bimbo’s Initiation, which is quite a doozy. After that, I left the con and headed back to my hotel. I grabbed a nice burrito on the way back for dinner.
I didn’t spend much money at all today, except to give CBLDF some money to renew my membership, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, but never got around to. Breakfast was a $5 sandwich from Subway, lunch was a $10 rice bowl from a food truck at the con, and dinner was a $6 burrito. And there were a few $3 coffees in there too. So I guess I’m upholding the stereotype of the cheap-ass comic book fan.
Looking at the schedule for tomorrow, my must-see panels are Mark Evanier’s “Quick Draw” and “Cartoon Voices” panels, which are back-to-back in the same room near the end of the day (4:30 and 5:30). There’s also a DC “Meet the Publishers” panel and a “Happy Birthday Batman” panel in that room earlier, so I could conceivably plop down in that room at 2:30 and just stay there for 4 hours. There are a bunch of other interesting panels on Saturday, including spotlight panels on Andy Kubert, Tim Sale, Peter Tomasi, and Scott Snyder, all of which will probably be interesting. I might get to one or two of those.
I think I should be able to sleep reasonably well tonight, though I may have had a bit too much coffee today. We’ll see.
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