San Diego memories (in Greek)

With the 2010 convention season approaching for me, I went looking for an article I wrote for the website Comicdom Online after the 2006 San Diego Comicon.  My buddy Artboy_X and I, wide-eyed and still wet behind the ears (as opposed to now where I am old and bitter), brought Mr. Massive to the con - and immediately got overwhelmed by the grandeur of it all.  I'm expecting more of it when we take Teddy and the Yeti to the New York Comic Con this year, though hopefully we'll all be a bit more prepared.

Comicdom Online is primarily a Greek website, so I have no idea why I got to publish an article there - really, the artist of the book just e-mailed me shortly after and said "write something for these guys", and I did.  I wonder if the site's regular readers went to my article and had no idea what it said.  I realize that it's more likely for people from Greece to speak English than it is for Americans to speak Greek (we're kind of jerks like that), but still...I have no idea what most everything else on the site is saying.

The picture links are down on the article, but I've reposted most of them in any case, and you can see some here and here, if you click the links.  You can read the actual article here, with my tips on convention-ing for those sitting behind a table.  Yes, sigh, I called it "An Explosive Point of View" because the name we gave the 'company' was "Explosive Comics".  Don't judge.  I'll paste the first paragraph or two here; be proactive and read the rest on your own.  Do it.  Do it!

To put San Diego's 2006 Comic-Con International into perspective would be a difficult task from any standpoint, but seeing as this was my first encounter "behind the table", so to speak, the undertaking seems an even greater challenge. Growing up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my initial experiences with comic book conventions were limited to yearly visits to the Pittsburgh Comicon, the name being fairly self explanatory. The Pittsburgh convention continues to be a well coordinated and enjoyable show, but my perceptions of what a convention could be were shattered the first time I ventured to the other side of my state for Wizard World's Philadelphia convention, as the fanfare and sheer size of the venue left me feeling lost in wave after wave of exhibitors and both established and burgeoning companies.

San Diego's show, then, is the next step upward from that experience. It is wonderful and it is overwhelming. It is incredibly taxing but it is supremely worthwhile.