Convention time again

Armageddon has been and gone for another year. Since I'll be busy during the upcoming Wellington event, I travelled from Wellington to Christchurch. Just a brief post this time, I wasn't really in the mood for mass photo-taking or other fan-ish things, so don't have much to say. My hotel room sucked and I got entirely too little sleep :\

The comic guest this year was Darrick Robertson (Transmetropolitan, The Boys). Very cool guy, really chatty and easy to talk to. I hit him up for a sketch, requesting a Firestorm pic as always . Turns out he's a big Firestorm fan too, we had an enjoyable discussion about missed opportunities with Ronnie Raymond. Someone at DC needs to let him loose on this, because he totally said he'd like to do it, and I'd like to see that. So, the pic:

Love it.

Also attending was manga writer/artist Queenie Chan. I asked her for a Firestorm sketch too, ha. She was a bit reluctant, having not drawn any superhero stuff before, but I had come armed with reference material, and said she could do it however she wanted. I went in expecting a head shot, and she came up with this:

Way beyond the call of duty for a free sketch. Making it doubly awesome, when she had finished it (in pencil) Darrick grabbed it and asked me if he could ink it. Like I'm going to say no to that. Really interesting to see the way he embellished it, while following what Queenie had done. I LOVE the head, it has a real character about it.

The comic stalls were better than they've been in Wellington the last couple of years, helped in particular by the local store (Comics Compulsion) bringing in a bunch of their $1 bins. I got to browse them in relative peace for about the first half-hour on Saturday morning, then it was pretty much all go. Lots of young kids pulling out X-men and Spider-man comics (among others), always good to see. I wound up with 66 comics total, costing $140. The buy pile:

I ended up posting this back to myself, as it weighed just under 5kg and there was no way I was getting that all in my carry-on luggage on the flight back.

As with every year, I went in with a budget of $500. Last year I blew that by a fair bit, thanks mostly to Nicola Scott. This year I only spent $150, the only non-comic purchase being a photo print of Beast Boy (Teen Titans) for Greg Cipes to sign. Probably a good result for me though, given the added expense of having to travel.