The plan was to drive down to Anaheim on Wednesday evening, spend Thursday doing Disneylandic things at Disneyland, then attend the adjoining WonderCon on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Or at least, that was the plan before Mother Nature decided to dump the largest storm of the season on California from Tuesday night to early Friday morn. I know there are those who love the Magic Kingdom in the rain because you can get into all the indoor attractions without a wait. But watching dwarfs tread water and helping bail out Eeyore's thicket didn't sound like a fun time to me so Amber and I waited out the rain and only drove down here during a break in the precipitation Thursday evening. Late Friday when my feet began aching from walking around WonderCon, I thought "I'm sure glad we didn't spend yesterday hiking through Frontierland."
Foot pain aside, the first day of WonderCon here in Anaheim was very pleasant, in part because the hall wasn't jammed elbow-to-elbow with people. And even though Saturday was sold out, that was still the case. The convention center expansion here probably had something to do with that as did the new RFID badges which are nearly-impossible to counterfeit. So the number of attendees they want to let inside is now closer to the number they do.
Amber and I have spent our time here wandering the room and talking with people, and each day, I do two panels. Friday's were "The Sergio, Mark and Tom Show" and "Writing for Animation." On the former, Sergio Aragonés, Tom Luth and I brought folks up to date on what's up with our bumbling barbarian buddy, Groo the Wanderer. What's up was reported upon here.
50 minutes wasn't nearly enough to say all that can be said about "Writing for Animation" but Shelly Goldstein, Marv Wolfman and I gave it a try. The best advice I think we were able to dispense is that Writing for Animation is not a very good career choice but Writing for Many Fields, One of Which is Animation can be fun and sometimes even lucrative and/or creatively satisfying.
Mostly, Friday was a lot of running into old friends and talking, whereas Saturday was a lot of running into old friends and talking. Friday night, we had a great dinner at the local Benihaha: Amber, me, Shelly Goldstein, Tom and Anna Richmond, Bill Morrison and Sergio Aragonés. Unlike a long-ago Benihana dinner I shared with Sergio at a comic convention, he did not get up, nudge the chef aside and take over the preparation of our dinners. I'll tell you more about the con in the next part of this report.