Longbox Review

Our second day at the Emerald City Comicon was getting places and buying stuff. Saturday is always packed with people (my god, SO MANY PEOPLE!), so getting anywhere is a slow process (it didn’t used to be—just four years ago it was actually fine), but it’s great to see so many fans celebrating what they love. I spent much of my day searching for more comics to buy to fill in those gaps in my collection, so a few Benjamins left my wallet. But I now own most of Hellblazer! The retailer from whom I bought a good chunk of those issues even gave me a short box, but I don’t recommend carrying a box around comicon for too long (or maybe I’m just a wimp).

On my way out of the con to take the box back to my hotel, I stopped at Jenny Frison’s table and bought one of her art books and a print of the Revival cover that I chose as my favorite cover of the year (see the Best of 2013 podcast episode). I also asked her why she does covers and not interior art, and she said she likes doing covers and that doing interior art would prevent her from doing many covers. She was very nice and gracious.

Next we stood in the loooooong line at Subway to get some lunch, and while there a very nice woman (I don’t remember her name, sorry!) came up to thank me for mentioning her Kickstarter on the podcast. Since I know I had not talked about her Shadow of Oz tarot deck project, I said that it was probably another podcast with Longbox in the name (I did search the Internet before I chose my name), and in this case, it was the Infinite Longbox podcast who mentioned the nice woman’s Kickstarter, so go check out the tarot deck and that podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, I went to a podcasting panel just to see what they had to say and found out that gaming podcasting is dying, that you really need a niche in whatever topic you’re podcasting about (I’ve known that one and stubbornly refuse to comply), and interactive is the way of the future (they mentioned YouTube and Twitch, specifically).

Then it was more shopping, meeting with Matt from the comic book shop in Spokane that I go to (his first time at ECCC), and then, because I was tired (I’m getting too old for this!), I met up with my wife and grand kids to sit for a while and was entertained by John De Lancie and Karl Urban.

Finally, dinner at Elephant and Castle (which was much better than Cheesecake Factory the night before) and then collapsing in the hotel room.

On to the final day!