The 2009 Heroes Con comic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina has been and gone. This was our second year after a wonderful and uplifting experience at the 2008 show. In our first year at Heroes Con we became friends with both the After School Agent and Perhapanauts gang. Between then and now we went to Baltimote Comic Con 2008 and New York Comic Con 2009. This year we spent time with friends both old and new.

Leanne bit off a bit too much in the way of commission work and didn’t get as much time to walk around and meet people as I did, but we’ve learned from the experience and will do better at Baltimore Comic Con in October. Jimmy Aquino and Joe Gonzalez of Comic News Insider interviewed Leanne about her current work and we plugged Blue Milk Special and our friend Kevin Conn’s Lava-Roid comic project. We became good friends with Bryan J.L. Glass and his wife Judy, we got to know Comfort Love and Adam Withers a bit better, AND I met and spoke briefly to the legend Don Rosa… It was a great weekend and far too short.

The last few weeks (well, the last few months!) have been hectic as Leanne and I rushed around in preparation for Heroes Con. She had her After School Agent 8 page webcomic to complete so that printed copies could be available in time for the Heroes Con. Her backup story with Scott Weinstein also came out today in Perhapanauts #6 (Todd and Craig had advance copies at their table over the weekend). She also had a sketchbook to prepare, and we both had a tonne of Blue Milk Special material to take care of as well. At the same time I’ve been hard at work getting my first ever comic book project underway which unfortunately would not even be ready for preview form in time for the Heroes Con… however, I have to say it is looking good so far thanks to John Amor’s amazing work.

As far as Heroes Con is concerned we were cutting things pretty close. We had two 7 foot tall scroll banners with display stands being made and shipped directly to the Westin Charlotte hotel to guarantee we would get them in time due to our having to put the majority of a day aside just to drive down there from Maryland. The banners were there waiting for us on Thursday so we tried them out in the hotel room. Leanne almost cried. They DID look amazing. Heroes once again proved to be a great show for her.

For me, Comic Conventions have always been ‘Leanne shows’. There’s no jealousy there, but there is a sense of feeling a little perfunctory to what’s going on. I have worked on my writing over the years, initially dabbling with animation scripting and journalism, but it has been children’s novelization that has really pulled the strongest. However, comics provide another avenue for me to share my imagination with others so being married to an artist seemed like the perfect team just waiting to happen.

The catch was that Leanne has been tied up with a 9-5 ‘office job from hell’ for the past few years. The only time she has to work on her art is an hour or so each evening, and then a few hours (if she’s lucky) on the weekend. Trying to complete a large or even a small comic book project with such little time to spare can quickly fill her schedule for an entire year. Then there’s the self doubt that affects us both when it comes to our arguable talent. Okay, I’m being modest and self depreciating, but that’s better than being an arrogant delusional prick.

Mainstream comics for me have always felt stifling and a creative dead end. I can see it being a lot of fun to write a famous comic hero but just how satisfying can it be when the character is bogged down into a statis quo by the weight of its history? Leanne has taken more interest in independent comics of late (DC’s canceling Robin did not help) and started a slow shift away from the mainstream as a reader. Now the only thing keeping our creative pairing apart is time.

We have a bit of a dilemma… Working full time at home would allow Leanne to commit to projects with tighter deadlines, to complete more projects in a year, and hopefully work together as husband and wife like our heroes Adam Whiters and Comfort Love. As it stands, I will always step back in favor of Leanne getting greater exposure through working with an established creator. Already, Leanne has drips and drabs of work and promised work that has her booked for the rest of this year and all of this keeps us from being able to work together. Which is why we agreed that I would fund my own project and hire an artist.

After several scripts for different comic book ideas, I had to put each aside because Leanne loved all of them and wanted to be the artist. Hell, I want her to be the artist for all of them! But if we keep postponing things then it could be another two or three years before the stars align. Finally we settled on Sovena Red as the project that she would graciously pass on and allow me to hire another artist. You can read more about Sovena Red here on the site.

That’s when I ran into all that fluff with Davy Screwball (see previous blog entries), as well as the scam artist Josh Hoopes who was using the new alias Ron Runstrom at the time. ‘Ron’ was using Robbi Rodriguez’s superb sequential pages to get a 50-75% upfront fee from aspiring wide-eyed writers and then drop out of contact, keeping the money and never to be heard from again. I came close to being one of his victims.

It was at Heroes Con last weekend that I found Robbi Rodriguez (coincidentally, he was at a table not far from out own) and we talked about what had been going on with our friend Ron. We had both seen Rich Johnston’s excellent article exposing Josh’s latest alias “Ron Runstrom” the previous week and quickly bonded over the matter. And this is one of the coolest things about the show for me. Although Robbi’s work was being used fraudulently by Josh Hoopes, and although I nearly lost $700 bucks, it let both myself and Robbi get to know a bit about each other’s character and subsequently become fast friends. The irony is that I heaped praise upon the ears of ‘Ron Runstrom’ when I spoke to him over the phone, telling this slime ball about how wonderful his artwork was and how his liberating style reminded me of Michael Golden and Don Bluth, only to later learn that I had been worshiping an impostor. Robbi, I hope I made up for this at the show.

Robbi generously, and quite without prompting, offered to draw me a cover for Sovena Red after hearing my other crappy story about Davy Screwball. Robbi is now my new hero! Oh, and Leanne and I realized later at the reception for the Auction that Robbi started out with Hero Camp –a title we picked up at a Chicago Con back in 2005! It’s a smaller world than we realized. So, there may have been some positives to come out of what was otherwise a shitty experience for me as a newcomer / wannabe creator in comics.

This time last year, Leanne and I were driving back up to Maryland from Heroes Con and we were talking about how we would have the first issue of our own comic book project ready in a years time for the next show in 2009. However, thanks to Scott Weinstein, Leanne had the opportunity to illustrate a back up story for Perhapanauts, and shortly afterwards Scott paid her to illustrate his After School Agent webcomic. There’s no sarcasm here, as I really owe Scott so much. Both Leanne and myself do. Scott has helped encourage Leanne and given her projects that have helped her refine her sequential storytelling and character work, all of which has seen publication. Working on these projects chewed up most of the year, and in the rest of that time she managed a few pinups and sketches but there certainly was no time for our own project which would have been in the husband and wife vein of Comfort Love’s and Adam Wither’s comic project the Uniques.

After New York Comic Con in February 2009, I decided that I wanted to do whatever I could to try and break out into full time writing. So to bring this all back around to where I was heading with this little write up, I’m now looking at these upcoming cons as ways to meet other writers and artists as one of them myself. So now, rather than flatter myself as Leanne’s arm dressing (I’m usually more her bus boy), I’m now at the cons with a purpose too.

Well, my recollections of the Heroes Con 2009 seem a bit disjointed and whimsical upon re-reading, but there’s one last thing I’d like to mention in closing. A big thank you to Jon Kallis, without whom, Leanne and myself would have had only half the fun and peace of mind. Jon kept Leanne company at the table, helped keep the table stocked, and generally kept our backs covered whenever we needed it during a very busy three days. Thanks Jon!