It was Day One for Sergio and me but Day Two for Heroes Con, a fun-crammed gathering here in Charlotte, N.C., the city I may have to call home for my remaining days on this planet. That's if the airlines of America continue to conspire to keep me off their planes. Seems like a nice place but I do have that cat to feed back in Southern California. She might mind.
(Don't worry. Someone is feeding her in my absence. They just might not be willing to do it forever.)
Heroes Con is different from a lot of comic conventions in that it's about comics…and nothing else. The featured guests are not movie stars or TV stars. They're folks who do comic books. That means that to be there is to be surrounded by people who love and/or create comic books, which always makes for a happy crowd…and boy, was it a big one today.
I was scheduled to host panels all day but I passed one over to someone else so I could tend to some of the things I was unable to do yesterday. On the first one I did do, I got to interview three of the best inkers of comic books of all time. They are, left to right in the above photo, John Beatty, Mike Royer and Klaus Janson. The fourth guy is Your Obedient Blogger. I'll write more about this panel when I'm not on the laptop here but it was nice to chat with three fellows who not only do what they do well but are able to explain why they do it the way they do.
The rest of the day? Signing stuff, seeing old friends and making some new ones…three other panels…and a nice man brought me a lunch of Bojangles fried chicken which you can't find in states where you can usually find me. The Bojangles website says North Carolina has 315 stores which strikes me as damned selfish. You'd think they could spare one for Los Angeles, preferably within walking distance of my house.
I'll write more tomorrow.