Comicon Roundup

Aaaand back home from New York Comicon.  I’m writing this from the US, but by the time this goes online I should be landing at London Heathrow.

Comicon was pretty amazing.  I’ve been to a few UK sci-fi/fantasy conventions, and generally speaking they’re considered big if they hit a few thousand people.  Comicon had somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000.  I was there for four days but there was still more stuff than I could possibly see.  A few of the highlights:

• Meeting my US editor, Anne Sowards, for the first time in person.  She’s been editing my books for a good three years and yet we’ve never spoken face to face until now.  She’s really, really nice.
• Watching the cosplayers.  There were literally thousands and lots of them were amazing.  Standouts that I remember:  a giant Bad Robot, an excellent Gandalf (with Frodo following), dozens of Batmans, Black Cats, Poison Ivys and Harley Quins (all competing to have the biggest hammer), Cap’n Crunch, guys in full suits of Spartan/N7 armour, a really good Kaylee, and two dead ringers for Wolverine and X-23.
• Getting to meet one of my beta readers for the first time (along with his friends).
• My US publishers, Penguin (notably Colleen Lindsay) giving away just shy of 500 copies of Fated on Friday.  I signed the first hundred, but they thankfully gave me a break after that!
• Having lunch with two authors I’d never had the chance to meet before, ML Brennan and Django Wexler, and hearing how they got into writing.
• Watching a pro Starcraft II tourney, the Intel Extreme Masters.  (The final was Zerg vs Protoss, and yes, about two-thirds of the players were Korean.)
• Having dinner with all the other Penguin authors on the Friday night.  My memories are a little hazy but I remember talking about arm-bars and takedowns with Diana Rowland and the feasibility of large-scale armies in D&D 3rd edition with Django.
• Wandering around Artist Alley – I’ve heard so many webcomic artists talking about it in the various US conventions that they go to, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one.  It took me most of an hour just to walk a full circuit around all the stalls.

And one final thing that stuck in my mind was the queue on Thursday for badges.  It’s one of the few times in my life I’ve seen a queue whose length could most conveniently be measured in miles.  It also moved quite amazingly fast for its size, and I got from the back to the front in less than half an hour.

I could keep going, but I’ll leave it at that.  I do want to post up my favourite picture from the con, though:  this was taken just after the signing on Friday!

The one drawing on my face is Myke Cole, the laughing one is ML Brennan, Djanjo Wexler is in the top left with the bemused expression, and Richard Shealy’s looking on from behind me!

Last but not least, there’s also some writing news on Alex Verus #5 and beyond, but I’ll save it for next week.  🙂