We had a blast at Wizard World Anaheim! It was a busy, but productive weekend. We met a lot of great people and made some good contacts. Everytime we do a convention we learn something new. This time around we learned that buttons sell! We hand made a large variety of buttons, mostly of our characters, but we also had a few with just text. To our surprise the biggest seller that weekend was button that simply said " I Farted". Who knew.
Ray and Neil making buttons.
Besides peoples interest in proclaiming their flatulence, there was a solid response to our comic. We proudly displayed our newly printed books, which arrived just in time saturday morning. Previous to the new prints, we were hand making our comics, which we probably won't do again. Those of you who got one of the hand made books, should feel special.
We had a steady flow of people stoping by our table all weekend. We had some great conversations with many different people of all age groups. It's really hard to tell who is gonna be into our book. We found that people are drawn to different things. The most obvious are the fellow band nerds, we met a few of them. As soon as they heard us say "A story about two band geeks", they immediately responded "I was in band too. What instrument did you play." Then we totally nerd out about our band experiences. We had a few young kids stop by who were sold on the fun cartoony art style alone. I'm not sure if they enjoyed the story, since it's not exactly Nick Jr. material. A few people were interested in the skateboard decks, some liked the sketch cards. It was all over the board.
Friends Edgar Pasten and John Ottinger had a booth in a prime spot. Their booth was amazing. It was interactive, colorful and covered top to bottom with merchandise. Sculpted figures, Plush Dolls, Paintings, and Comic Books were just a few of the items for sale. You could not miss the giant bright green YO! figure.
Nathaniel Osollo was our neighbor. He has an interesting comic called 140. All the dialog in his book come from tweets. If you were to read it without knowing the concept, it could get very confusing, but once you understand the concept you realize how genius it is. Nathaniel does a great job of telling the story through his drawings which are very expressive and surreal. The theme for this book is the number 3, and it reoccurs throughout the story. There is an awesome triclops with a gun! What more do you need.
I picked up another really cool comic by Gabe Swarr who is the creative mind behind a web comic called " Life in The Anolog Age". I was first drawn to his table by the overwhelming amount of ORANGE. Gabe's comic has great drawings, 80's nostalgia and autobiographical subject matter. I was immediately hooked. I bought the comic and a print. His animations are really cool too.
We ran into our old pals Chris and Shane Houghton of Reed Gunther. It's always a pleasure to talk to these guys. We congratulated them on their new partnership with Image Comics. They are taking the comic world by storm, you really gotta pick up a copy of their books. Ray picked up a cuddly Sterling Bear, since we already own all the comics.
Ray also picked up a print from the very talented Terry Huddleston. This guy is so awesome, even after a guy in a green lantern costume puked right in front of his table, people were still coming over and buying prints. Freakin amazing!
We got a lot of compliments about our wonderful Fleece backdrop created by Forever Freshman pal Mitzi Olea. She did a great job with the banner, but did an even greater job making little fleece characters at the show Saturday. We hope to commission her to make some more for San Diego.
All in all good times. Just totally burned out. As much as we love talking about ourselves we were happy to say farewell to Anaheim and enjoy a great big BBQ dinner afterwards!
A great big thanks to everyone who came out. We are so grateful for all the support.
