adventure personal science fiction superheroes

I Survived DragonCon

The good news is that I survived DragonCon.  The bad news is that I’m having trouble re-acclimatizing to regular life.  After being completely immersed in geekdom for four straight days, it’s a little hard to suddenly be transported from the wild to “civilized” society.

Shag & Iron Man - Check out the Shirt!

I had a fantastic time!  This was definitely one of the best years I’ve had at this convention!  Over the next few days I’ll try to cover my madcap adventures at DragonCon 2008.  Of the 500 pictures I took, a little over 400 were worth keeping.  I should have them uploaded to my Flickr account soon.  I also have a couple videos I plan to upload for your viewing enjoyment.  A few of my friends that typically attend DragonCon didn’t come this year.  Hopefully these blogs will help fill them in and possibly encourage them to attend next year.

With the convention over, I gotta say that if I see one more lame Joker/Joker Nurse costume I’m going to freak out.  Apparently dressing like the Joker is the new black.  Sheesh.

FRIDAY

The flight from Tallahassee to Atlanta went great.  I caught up with Serv and we immediately went to Moe’s in the airport.  I know, airport Moe’s?  Can’t possibly be as good as a regular Moe’s, right?  Well, they don’t have Moe’s where Serv lives and he was jonesing for it pretty badly. I’m confident that if he didn’t eat Moe’s within 20 minutes of touching ground in Atlanta he would have suffered some kind of seizure.  An alternative may have been to mainline some Chick-Fil-A (which they also don’t have in the great white north), but Moe’s did the trick.

Serv finally gets his Moe's

After lunch, we caught up with another friend from THE UNIQUE GEEK, Jon, then we all rode the MARTA from the airport to Peachtree Center.  Next we checked into our hotel, room 2222; we referred to it as “Harvey Dent’s room”.  Turns out the Executive Lounge we were counting on for meals was closed starting Saturday for renovations.  Major suckage.  That just resulted in more Chick-Fil-A for Serv, so I guess it all worked out.  After rendezvousing with a long-misplaced friend, Race, we headed to registration to pick up our badges.  I was thrilled for my friends as I watched them zip through the line and pick up their badges within mere moments.  I, however, was lucky enough to wait 45 minutes to get mine!  Yay!  For some ridiculous reason, every person whose last name starts with “M” showed up at the same time.  The slowness of the “M” line was aided by the DragonCon staff member running the line with a broken arm.  My friends were kind enough to wait for me, laugh at me, and take pictures.

Shag finally gets his badge!

After a brief visit with Ravenface & his brother Shockwave, I made my way to a comic book related track.  This session was an examination of various “don’ts” for comic writers featuring Peter David, Mike Baron, and others.  There were some great recommendations as well as anecdotes.  Heard a great suggestion to embed Google Image links into your comic scripts to provide the artist with photo reference examples of what you are trying to explain.  Neat idea!

Comics Panel with Peter David & Mike Baron

After the comics panel, I went hunting for photo opportunities and trolled the dealer’s rooms.  During the course of the first day, I took about 175 pictures.  Michael Bailey, Race, and I wandered the dealer’s room together looking for ways to spend obscene amounts of money.  Then from an unknown artist, I commissioned a sketch of Blue Devil battling Doctor Fate.  The sketch isn’t complete yet, but I should get it within a week or so.  The pencils he showed me looked awesome!  I’ll be sure to post an image of that drawing here when I get it.

I swung by the NeedCoffee.com panel, “They Did WHAT to My Favorite Book/Fandom?”  Fun panel with good crowd interaction.  I was lucky enough to win a Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker action figure “Father’s Day 2-pack”.  Too funny! Around this time we connected with Ron & Holly from THE UNIQUE GEEK and their other siblings.

Finally, after a late-evening run to Chick-Fil-A, we settled in for a night of Chez Geek, booze, and chatting.  We don’t get to hang out very often as a group, so we had a fantastic time ripping on each other and enjoying each others company.  Sweet, sweet slumber finally overtook us around 3:00am.

Chez Geek session

Great first day!  Wonderful to see friends again and have so much fun!  I’m sure I’m forgetting things, so there may be addendums throughout the week.  More tomorrow…

4 thoughts on “I Survived DragonCon

  1. Your 45 minute wait was much better than the 2 hour wait for me last year. The longest I had ever had to wait for my ticket, in which my wrath has yet to settle from. So, sorry, no sympathy from me.
    Sounds like a good time all around though.

  2. Ed – I hear ya. The frustrating part for me was that there was literally no line for any other letter – only for the “M”‘s. You’d think another staff member would have come over to help this poor broken armed guy since he had a line of 50+ people.

Leave a Reply