Pen-Elayne on the Web

Home Again, Home Again - Mid-Ohio Con '03 Wrap-Up

White Rabbits! Before I get to my overview of the weekend in Ohio, I wanted to again thank the wonderful Laura Gjovaag for her guest-blogging stint during my computer-less absence - I've just gone through her entries and can hardly wait to start clicking on all those cool links from Saturday! Laura, I don't have your thank-you gift yet, as it was a fairly busy working weekend, we'll be seeing the Davises again in NY this week, and Alan wants to make sure his work is worthy of posting in your Saturday Night Sketch series. :) Please feel free to drop in any time with whatever entries you'd care to make to the blog!

Now then, on to my convention report, such as it is, including the official confirmation of Alan Davis' next project for Marvel Comics, which he broke at the panel I moderated yesterday. But I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, so let's start at the beginning...

Friday, November 28 - Not really a con day, although the annual Laughing Ogre welcome party (which we didn't attend) was held in the evening. The plane we took from Newark to Columbus was, I believe, an ERJ-135, which seats 37, and if you've ever flown in a smaller plane you know you're more likely to feel full-force turbulence than in a larger one. The weather being cloudy and crappy for the entire journey, this naturally meant fairly frequent turbulence, so I was a bit shaken by the time we arrived in a city easily 15° colder than the one we'd left, not including the wind chill factor which made for a fairly chilly 45-minute heel-cooling (okay, heel freezing) at the outdoor Non-Airport Hotel shuttle area. The protracted wait for a shuttle which was supposed to arrive every half hour should have clued us in to the kind of weekend we were likely to have insofar as hotel amenities, but at the time we thought it a fluke.

We arrived at the hotel around 3 and proceeded to thaw, ringing up Alan's room to see if he and his wife Heather were around, which they weren't. My only definite plan for the evening was to go food-shopping with Heather and Stacie Ponder for my planned Saturday night room party, as Stacie's a local and has a car. She called to tell me she was picking up a friend at the airport at 4, so I suggested she call when they were on their way to the hotel and we'd take off from there, and if I found Heather in the meantime so be it. As luck would have it, we ran into Alan and Heather as we were in the lobby waiting for Stacie, who arrived with two friends unexpectedly in tow. So, leaving "the boys" behind, Heather and I squeezed into the back seat for catch-up chatting during what seemed like a half-hour journey to the supermarket, where I naturally proceeded to over-buy like crazy. (Not to worry, Stacie took home all the extra food and drink yesterday.) Fortunately, one of Stacie's friends was also a local and had a store card so I guess I saved a lot of money...

Aside from the shuttle situation and our hotel room not having a mini-bar or fridge (apparently none of them did, not even on the "prestigious" 7th floor where Alan and Heather were), my other big disappointment that day was finding out that the lovely Easton Town Center, which began across the street from the hotel, was a mostly outdoor area. I guess I should have checked out the maps more carefully. Maybe a third of it consisted of an indoor 2-level mall, but the rest consisted of about a half dozen charming and decorated shop-lined streets. Which would have been great had it not been raining and snowing all day so, after having a few drinks in the hotel bar area (where Alan introduced us to Mike Barr and got to talking with Adam Hughes and his girlfriend Allison Sohn), we opted to stay inside for the evening and partake of the hotel restaurant's Friday Night Seafood Buffet, featuring all-you-can-eat sushi, a nice lox-whitefish platter, clam chowder, hot seafood dishes, and a lovely dessert bar. It was weird how they set up the buffet itself in the hallway outside the restaurant, anyone could have walked by and swiped food if they'd wanted to, but I will say in the hotel's favor that the buffet was absolutely wonderful. That's kind of the only thing I'll say in the hotel's favor.

Saturday, November 29 - It had stopped snowing but was still pretty windy and frigid, and I hadn't really brought any winter clothes with me, thinking the Town Center would be mostly indoors. So, after leaving Alan and Robin to sort out convention stuff, Heather's and my first stop was a place to buy me a warm sweater ("jumper" to you Brits) so I could deal with the rest of the walk. The bad news is, we went out at 9 and almost all the stores didn't open till 10. The good news is, the Gap seemed to be the exception to the rule and I was able to find a nice hooded black sweater with a big snowflake icon on the front (which looks more like a target), so I was all set. (It's very toasty, I'm wearing it as I type.) We retreated to the indoor portion to have some hot chocolate and talk romantically about our husbands, and who should come along but Robin and Alan, looking for us (as the con hadn't opened yet)? Men just know these things, don't they?

Oh, the con. Well, I missed the morning's activities, as our shopping excursion didn't end until after noon; I finally found a department store which had large-sized clothing and bought a nice silk blouse for work and a shiny shirt for the party (with lots of money off because I opened a store charge account, what the heck), then we met the guys as they'd just finished lunch, walked back to the hotel, grabbed a couple $5 box lunches from the hotel bar area for ourselves, then joined them again back at their table. The con organizers had put Alan and Robin all the way back in a very secluded area, where you had to turn right twice from the con entrance and walk the length of two long corridors to even get to them. And there were no con staffers assigned to Alan; I think at one point someone came by and asked if he needed anything, and when I suggested water the guy responded to the effect that he wasn't sure he'd be able to secure any (he did, but still, to sound that dubious about being able to get your touted "special guest" water?). But other than that, there was nobody assigned to Alan at all to help with the queue or cut people off or do anything involving crowd control or giving Alan breaks, and I had to repeatedly run the corridors to find con staffers and explain to them what needed to be done, falling back on my con staffing duties from Comicfest '93 when I should have been sitting there enjoying myself and watching Alan and Robin work and greet fans. I just found that kind of strange, not to assign at least one staffer to stick with your special guest and take care of the queue (the longest at the con, bar none) and so forth. Another guest shouldn't have to do it.

Alan and Robin had decided beforehand to do head-shot sketches to raise money for the con's designated charity, the American Diabetes Association (hi Natalie!) - Alan would pencil the sketches for a $10 donation and Robin would ink them for an additional $10. So while it was exhausting (made more so by the aforementioned con staffer situation) it was also a lot of fun and very exciting for this Davis-and-Riggs fangirl to watch. And of course I always love talking to fans; on Saturday a lot of the folks from the Comicart Yahoo group were hanging out, and the not-at-all pathetic and lonely Mike Fogg bought us drinks afterwards. I'd managed a quick sweep of the artist alley area, handing out party invites to folks I knew, and actually introducing myself to Allison - as mentioned, she and Adam had stopped by our klatsch the day before but I think Alan and/or Mike probably assumed we already knew them so we just sort of sat there outside of the conversation sphere for that period of time. By Saturday afternoon that was remedied, at least from the female angle - I'm not sure Robin and Adam ever got to talking, but Allison and I hit it off immediately, neither of us believing we hadn't yet met!

Because of the con staff situation being so disorganized, by the time Heather and I went to see if we could get a dinner reservation at the Cheesecake Factory we were told the wait was up to 2 hours. Instead of reserving us at a place of equivalent price range, I guess the hotel concierge had been advised to suggest the most expensive restaurant in the area, so we wound up at Smith & Wollensky, where the menus are placed in heavy wooden frames from which Robin immediately got a splinter (I find it hard to believe, as the waiter insisted, that it was "the first time this has ever happened"), topped off a bit later by the waiter spilling water on his back. At least we were glad that Alan and Heather enjoyed dinner and a show!

I left the others at S&W and hurried back to the room to start laying out food for the party. Leonard Kirk, Roger Stern and Carmela Merlo were the first guests, and among the others who showed up later (besides Robin and Alan) were Dan Mishkin, Mike Barr, Scott Roberts, Bob Ingersoll, Tony Isabella, Andrew Pepoy, Mike Fogg, Mike Rice, Stacie and friends, and a special party-crashing by some CBLDF folks wanting the pros present to sign a couple SpongeBob SquarePants pillows to auction off. As Scott had done some SpongeBob comics this was pretty fortuitous. I shall refrain from passing on what Leonard wrote on the pillows; suffice to say it was probably the rowdiest point of a pretty sedate affair. Which made it all the weirder when a hotel security person came up about 10 or so to ask us to close the door (we complied immediately), and downright surreal when his apparent boss came up at 11:45 to kick everyone out of the room, claiming we had been visited thrice (untrue) and asked to keep the noise down (um, what noise? conversation? nobody was even drinking!) by another unnamed guest. The security guy said something about how they had no choice but to believe their guests, whereupon Robin reminded him that we were guests as well so our word should be just as good as that of the anonymous ones. Now folks, I'm sitting here wearing earplugs because of the noise from the upstairs neighbors, can you really picture me creating that kind of ruckus if I'm this sensitive to it? Just one more reason (collect the series!) never to go back to this hotel and certainly never to knock myself out again to give a con room party. But hey, it's kind of amusing - almost, dare I say it, cool - to have the rep of hosting rowdy affairs even if it's not true...

Sunday, November 30 - We received a "wake-up call" at 10:30 from Alan care of Mike Rice, informing us that Alan was already hard at work at his table, as the con day had started at 10 AM rather than 11 as we'd all assumed. Again, if we'd had an assigned staffer this wouldn't have happened, he or she would have kept Alan apprised of the schedule! Naturally, because of this amazing oversight, Alan had to have Roger Price announce that he would no longer be able to do sketches due to high demand (which translated into too many people on a queue that, for at least the fourth time that weekend, nobody from the con had bothered to organize). More of the same - lots of nice people, including Phoenix from Alan's ThyTe message board (aka Jaye; here's her site), a promising artist who hung out by the table for much of the day. Only one real creep, a guy who whined to me (gah, why not complain to a con staffer!?) with his claims of having been booted from the queue three times, and I felt kinda bad when I lost patience with him until I saw what he actually was - some sleazoid dealer with a box of about 200 of Alan's comics, including about a dozen copies of Marvel's HEROES that he paid some mark to get Alan to sign - and the mark was a mentally challenged guy! I mean, this whole scenario was wrong on so many levels that I was immediately sorry I hadn't been gruffer with the asshole and told him to get stuffed. Fortunately, there were no others like him and his utter chutzpah was certainly grist for enough group derision and amusement later. I just wish he hadn't been the last on the queue before Alan packed up for the day. He and Robin raised about $575 for the ADA, by the way. I don't know how much Alan's sketch for the ACTOR raffle raised, and the sketch on which he and Robin collaborated won't be auctioned of by ACTOR until Mega-Con next year. Nobody from the convention itself, either before or during the con period, ever mentioned to Alan or Robin that apparently they (the Mid-Ohio Con people) had an auction too, or they would have contributed (see my con staff-related rants above).

Oh, I also moderated my panel, which I'd outlined here, and it went pretty well, about as planned. David Mack had laryngitis and couldn't make it, and I knew Alan would be fairly quiet, but not only did Mark Waid rise to the occasion as expected (he's practically a professional panelist by now, and has done his share of quality moderation, so I knew I needn't worry) but so did Pam Bliss and Scott Roberts, all contributing to a great discussion about characterization and constraints. Before the panel started Alan leaned over and whispered, "Ask me what I'll be doing for Marvel." It took me a few beats to realize that this meant he wanted to make an Official Announcement of news that he hadn't previously shared with anyone either publicly or privately. So I was privileged to be the conduit of the Official Announcement that Alan will be pencilling Uncanny X-Men, to be written by Chris Claremont. Guess I've added another X-book to my pull list! Alan and Chris had a great run together on the X-book they co-created, Excalibur, as well as having done a few issues of UXM a number of years back, and I know how much Alan enjoys working with Chris so it should be a lot of fun.

After the panel Robin and Andrew had a knife fight.

I suppose I should explain. Leonard's going to be pencilling a new book for DC shortly, for which the inker has yet to be decided. The editor said that Robin and Andrew should "fight it out." So Andrew decided to make it a staged event. He got a bunch of fake blood, smeared it over himself and Robin and a couple of rubber knives, and had Sean McKeever and Paul Storrie holding up signs in the background laying odds on one or the other, with Leonard standing next to them greedily fingering money. The camera shots we took consisted of (1) Andrew having the upper hand, (2) Robin then gaining the upper hand, (3) and (4) Robin and Andrew then realizing that Leonard's placing bets, and (5) them both ganging up on Leonard. Nobody knows who will get the assignment (and whoever does, the book will be well-inked!), but it was a fun event anyway.

A few regrets as the con wound down - Mark Waid had to leave that night so we never did get to sit and chat about CrossGen, but I got a hug and a kiss and for people who know me by one of my previous nicknames of "Waidgirl" you know how special that was to me. Mark has been my favorite comics writer for over a decade (still is), and being friends with him, with anyone who makes this magic, is something I'll never take for granted. But I've talked about this all before, so onward... I didn't spend as much time as hoped with people who didn't show up to the party, like Paul Jenkins and Sean McK and Paul S and Dave Roman and Steve Lieber and Matt Feazall (who apparently also missed a dinner date with Dave and Scott at yon yummy cheesecakey place), but at least I said hi. I never touched base at all with Chris Sprouse, Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Oeming, Steve Conley and probably at least a dozen others. I didn't have the courage to approach any of the media celebs like June Lockhart or Yvonne Craig or Walter Koenig, but they all looked gorgeous.

Robin and I went upstairs to wait for Stacie to get the party leftovers and receive an expert portfolio review, which Robin hadn't time to do at the table, after which we tried the Cheesecake Factory again. This time we arrived early enough to be seated fairly quickly, and I highly recommend the place to anyone who comes upon it, very yummy! We ran into Leonard after that and took a last walk around the Town Center. Rob and Leonard went into all the usual Guy places, and I went back to Godiva (where Heather had bought me some truffles on Saturday) to pick up some hot chocolate to soothe the scratchy throat the pumped-in hotel air had given me. By the time we returned the stores had all closed and my feet were too blistery to go join everyone at Fadó for après-con drinks.

Today - Which was just as well, as Alan and Heather informed us over breakfast that there had been a lot of cigar-smoking at the bar, which would probably have made me sicker than I already felt. The four of us rode to the airport together, and sat around with plenty of time before our flights discussing everything from Alan Moore to family matters to holiday plans to the sleazoid dealer. Our plane was a 737, but despite my being engrossed in the British paperback of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that Heather had found for me (I'd read the American HC when it came out before giving it to my brother, but much prefer it in the original language, even though I have to keep asking Robin to translate phrases) there was still enough turbulence on the descent to give me major stomach pains, which haven't completely subsided as of this writing. We took NJ Transit and the subway back and made it to our apartment in under two hours. I thought it was hysterical that there was a guy playing I Can't Help Falling in Love With You on kettle drums in the subway station, as that's the tune the Lulu folks always sang when closing up our booth at cons. (Robin thought it was funny that we went down to the con yesterday in the middle of Holiday Inn on the TV, and came back to the room in the middle of White Christmas.) Robin spent much of the afternoon trying to get his Cintiq to work properly (it's operational at last), and me? After four hours and probably lots of stuff still left out, I've finally finished my con report.

All in all, apart from aspects of the con organization and hotel people, it was a fun weekend. We got to interact with fans and pros from all levels of the industry, we made new friends and renewed old friendships, we spent hours with probably Robin's closest friend, we walked around a lot in beautiful surroundings and, despite various physical ailments (note to self: bring Eno's next time as well!), we had a great time.

So, anything happen while I was gone?