After a morning of lazing about watching Premiere League soccer, Paul and I took the train to Penn Station and grabbed lunch at the Tick Tock Diner, far away from the super-inflated prices of Javitz Center vendors. After rolling into the convention hall and finding the crush of people too intense to let us seek out friends and colleagues, we killed time looking at original art and old comics until just before my signing at 6:00.
My first MARVEL signing, which was unlike any signing I’ve done before, except perhaps the time I sat next to Dan Clowes at the Fantagraphics booth at APE right after the Ghost World movie came out–almost no one knew who I was. I sat between Abby Denson, the writer of the “Spider Ma’am” Aunt May stories I’ve done for Amazing Spider-Man Family, and artist Mike McKone (who was super nice to me), while further down the table were Dan Slott, Joe Kelly, and Phil Jimenez, all of whom are way more famous than me!!! Phil is of course the man of the hour, because he’s awesome, and also because he drew the Obama Spider-Man. So a lot of the people in line were there specifically for him, but all of us spent the hour happily drawing sketches (mostly of Spidey) and signing program guides. I did sign a copy of X-Men First Class and a nice young lady brought her sketchbook up and asked me to tell Paul and Parker how much she enjoyed their work. (I did, later.) While I sketched, Abby was telling people about our Spider-Ma’am stories, and I blurted out, “We’re pimping Aunt May!”– which sounds totally wrong when you say it out loud.
After the show, we went out for a FANTASTIC italian dinner with Parker, editors Mark Paniccia and Lauren Sankovitch, Mysterius artist Tom Fowler, and Mark’s adorable little girl. And then on to the second Marvel party, where people kept trying to give me drinks but I was firm in my resolve to limit myself to one, having drunk enough for the whole weekend on Friday. I met Michael Choi and his girlfriend and colorist Sonia Oback, who live just over in Beaverton, but I never met them before, or even knew that they lived in the Portland area! (This sort of thing is always happening in Portland.)
Tired and hoarse from talking to so many people, we cabbed it home again and found that the Soccer Channel was rebroadcasting the Liverpool/Portsmouth match that had been on when we left for the con, and it had reached almost exactly the point at which we had stopped watching. Ahhhh.
