Inspired by missing a couple of recent sci-fi and gaming conventions, I starting researching what cons would be coming up throughout the summer. Turns out, Super-Con 2007 was going on this weekend in San Jose and I had nearly missed it. I had more work to do (the theme of the weekend), but I decided to put it off four a couple of hours, grab my camera and head down to the convention.

Super-Con is a pretty small convention, and it turns out there wasn’t much to shoot. (There were a few costumed folk, but Saturday was probably a better day for that.) I took quite a few pictures still, since I decided it was a decent time to experiment with some of the more complex setting for my camera. Consequently, I deleted more photos than I kept. Oh well, nothing important.

The best thing about comic conventions has to be meeting indie folk who are putting out their own work. I really enjoyed talking to Martin Robaszewski, who’s writing a new comic called Zecta. It’s a sci-fi story based off a video game he was designing, but apparently shelved. Valentine by Dan Cooney at Red Eye Press (not to be confused with RedEyePress.com) looked interesting.

Another highlight is meeting and chatting with the fine folks at two of my favorite charitable organizations: The Hero Initiative and the CBLDF.

The Hero Initiative is a not-for-profit organization set up to financially aid comic book artists and writers in need. Creators from the Golden and Silver Ages of comics were fairly screwed by the big companies they worked for. (To be fair, Marvel and DC are now involved with the group. (On the other hand, still: Fuck the both of you for trying to trademark “super-hero”.)

CBLDF is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. It’s a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community. It’s been around since the mid-Eighties and it’s almost surprising how necessary this anti-censorship organization is. I’ve been a fan since the beginning.

As always, mixed in with the big names like Jim Lee and Frank Cho, are a bunch of odd semi-celebrities. The two that jumped out at me the most were Herb Jefferson Jr. (Boomer from the original Battlestar Galactica) and the Soup Nazi. Now that’s exciting, eh?

That is, until I came across what seemed to be the biggest non sequitur… Jane Wiedlin (official site) of The Go Go’s. While not a comic book fan, she is a big sci-fi geek, and got asked to attend. They had a Q&A with her that I attended. It was billed as a “Truth or Dare” but nobody came up with any questions she wouldn’t answer and that angle quickly faded. She’s delightfully cute in person.

Oh, and John Dolmayan (drummer for System of a Down) has the coolest drum kit I have seen in a while.

Anyways, now I’m ready for Comic-Con. :)

Edit: TheGreatWhiteSnark has a bunch of fun Super-Con photos.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 4:57 pm and is filed under comics, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.