Auckland Geekery 2010

The major sci-fi convention for the year took place this weekend. 3 days, some 45,000 attendees, and a bunch of tv, movie, comic, and animation guests that pretty much make it essential for me to fly up for it and give people all my money. Without going in to too much boring detail, a rough breakdown of my weekend:

The comic guests
My major achievement for the weekend was managing to ask writer Daniel Way if he did sketches. Haha, ooops. (for the record he does, but "they're $400 and they're terrible") In my defence, he arrived 20 minutes late and I was in the swing of hitting up the other artists for sketches so it was kindof a reflex action. I think he was a little irked though *blush*

This is what $200 will get you from Darrick Robertson:

He basically lets you name your price and he'll spend the appropriate amount of time on it. From his appearance a couple of years ago I knew he was a Firestorm fan, and I had always been kicking myself for not getting a commission back then. It's big too, love it.

Georges Jeanty came out with this nifty headshot:

I've already got a bunch of sketches from past appearances by Nicola Scott, so I just picked up this page from Blackest Night Wonder Woman #2

As always it was a majorly tough decision to pick something out, and I came so close to dropping a small fortune on a new Teen Titans page.

James Tucker was over with animation guests since his forte is design for the likes of the Batman and Justice League cartoons, but he was still doing sketches. Additional characters were only an extra $10 on top of the base fee, so I got Firehawk added in to my usual Firestorm request:


The acting guests

Main drawcard for me this year was Michael Shanks and Torri Higginson from Stargate. Last year I had the brainwave of getting action figures signed by SG guests, so I carried on with that. Torri loves signing figures, so that was cool. Also printed out my own photo of Shanks as Hawkman, which is unusually organised for me.

Michael Beihn from Terminator & Aliens was there- I wasn't planning on getting his autograph, but I really enjoyed both his panels so figured that was worth $30.

The main highlight for me was brunch with Michael Shanks. Was a good chance to hear some things I wouldn't have otherwise. Obviously he's well versed in doing this kind of thing, but he seemed really cool, even sticking around at the end to take photos with everyone even though it messed with his schedule for the rest of the day

He requested no flashes and my camera's kinda crap, but a big thankyou to the person I got to take the shot, as she managed to get a pretty decent result.

Assorted coolness
Tron is coming, and it had a strong presence there

Lifesize (or thereabouts) cardboard model, which rocked. Got a bunch of free posters too. Damn I hope it turns out to be good.

Weta Workshop had it's usual stand, now with District 9 models


There was an (I think) American artist selling prints of his work. He had a few large posters (70" high) as backdrops for his stand. I picked up the Farscape piece:

Had to wait until the end of the show to pick it up, but I pounced on it as soon as I saw it on the first morning.

Comic purchases

My main achievement was knocking off my Invisibles, Hawkman, and Vigilante collections so now I can bind them. Yay.

VIP panels

Noone seems to know who was gracing the front of the Silver Pass heh

As with last year, spending a bit extra to see a 2nd panel with some of the guests (combined with a smaller audience) proved to be the way to go. Former Dr Who Sylvester McCoy playing the spoons on the entire front row of the audience was a highlight, as was Michael Shanks' amusement at all of us being stuck at the con until 6pm on the final day just to see him, and then struggling to come up with any questions.

Very cool 3 days. Next April sees the con return to my home town, with Darrick Robertson, David Hewlett, and Katee Sackhoff already booked.