d_morris

It was a very well attended show and possibly the biggest year for the convention.  Even bigger than 2006 which was huge.

From my perspective this was probably the best show I've attended for many reasons.  The biggest reason was for me was the guest list.  It was hard to complain when the majority of small press and alternative publishers came out to the show.  The phrase that kept coming through my head was SPX south.  Many of the people that I got to meet at SPX last year were in full force at Heroes Con.

Bodega (with Kaz and Brian Ralph manning the table)


Buenaventura Press (featuring Sammy Harkham and owner Alvin Buenaventura)


and even Picturebox was there (from the right; Tim Hodler, Dan Nadel, and Frank Santoro at the Cage Match panel)



It was even better that some of the older alternative guys like Evan Dorkin and Jaime Hernandez were in attendance.


It was great to see all of these guys at this show.  I was glad to meet back up with Frank Santoro who I had met at SPX and who throughout the weekend offered fantastic insight on all of his panels.  However the secret of Heroes Con has always been that it celebrates all things about comics.  So while you get all these alternative/art comics people there you also get people like Guy Davis and Darwyn Cooke doing their thing at the convention.


(Guy Davis drawing in the Godzilla sketchbook)

That's what the con is about comics and I'm glad I was there to celebrate it.

What I love about the convention is this level of intimacy that you probably don't get at other shows.  It's great being able to have a conversation with alternative comics giants Kevin Huizenga (Curses, Or Else) and Frank Santoro (Storeyville, Cold Heat) about labels used in comics and then the next day having Kevin remember who you are.  You can do this at SPX too but there's sort of an intimidation factor there that for me isn't quite as present at Heroes Con.  This even goes for most of the mainstream people out there too who are really approachable at this show.  I recommend attending this convention to anyone who wants to go to a comics show that is about Comics and not media tie ins.

Anyways some of the things that I remember most about the con
- Jaime Hernandez reading the second issue of my mini-comic series gremlin and telling me that he liked a two page sequence in it.  For me this was a huge moment.  As many of you know, Jaime Hernandez (as well as his brothers Gilbert and Mario) are behind my favorite comic of all time Love and Rockets.  Hearing him tell me that he liked those two pages was a huge thing for me.  It's not every day that you get validation from one of your artistic heroes.

- The Rip Hunter-Cave Carson debate of 2008.  This was a conversation that sort of came out of the blue and is notable mostly for the fact that it was about Cave Carson and Rip Hunter, two really obscure characters in the DC universe (Cave Carson is a super hero spelunker while Rip Hunter was described by my friend uptightallnight as the time traveling equivalent of a drunken frat boy).  Saturday night at the Westin Bar, I was talking to my friend Sean Knickerbocker (aka ereindal) were talking about the people we had run into over the weekend and Patrick Dean (patrickdean) came up.  I told Sean that he was probably one of the few people I could have a conversation about Rip Hunter and Cave Carson and he would probably not look at me funny.  So I see Patrick Dean and tell Sean "I'm gonna ask him who's going to win in a fight between Cave Carson and Rip Hunter".  To save people time, the conversation ended quickly when I disproved my initial support of Cave Carson with the reminder that Rip Hunter is a time traveler who would probably go back in time and kill Cave Carson's mom.

- Was reviewed by Chris Duffy at Nick Magazine.  He didn't say I was terrible and liked some of my piece involving robots however he said what Lyle and Duncan have more or less told me about being hesitant.  He wanted me to be less hesitant before I started to really submit things.  However, he wanted me to keep in touch and to keep sending him things. It's left me very encouraged.  In ironic bit of news, he wanted me to draw more robots which everyone who knows me has said the opposite.

- The nuggets of advice from pros who I admire.  The pros who I met gave me lots of advice that I think was practical (don't rely photo reference was the big one on Sunday) along with stuff that's just common sense (just gotta draw pages).  If anything made my want to draw comics and reinforce that this was what I wanted to do. During the con and coming out o it have made me feel really energized to get things done and make sure that by the end of the summer I have a lot of comics done.