Toronto Comic Con 2014–Day 1

I just got to spend the entire weekend at Toronto Comic-Con!  It was my first Comic Convention experience, but thankfully not my first experience of this type of event since I went to Fan Expo last August, but that was just for one day.

It was pretty amazing over all and I got a whole whack of cool stuff and had some great chats with a ton of creators who were there selling and giving away their art.  I even got asked some pretty cool questions, but I’ll come back to that later.

I’ll space out the experiences for you over the next few days so that it’s not too much at once.

Amber and I headed down to Toronto on Friday taking the GO Train to avoid traffic and having to drive in downtown Toronto which right around the hotel and convention centre is all torn up with construction.

I had a few specific goals with the trip, especially once I learned that Francis Manapul was going to be there.  So basically my only solid goals were to get some original art of Batman from Francis since he is the new artist on Detective Comics and a Flash figure of some sort.

The line up on Friday was much shorter than the Fan Expo one was on a Saturday Morning which was great! We pretty much walked right into the show aside from the lead time of about 30 minutes we had arriving at the venue.  First things first we headed to Francis’ table, but he was not there.  Later once I was able to check my Twitter (@chrispy47) I learned that he was only going to be there on the Saturday and Sunday.  Amber and I Trawled Artist Alley and she actually bought a print of Batman and Catwoman!  I was very surprised at that!

I bought a little Catwoman sketch for $5 right away too, something to break the spending ice.

I was struck again just by the overwhelmingness of everything there is to see, I always find it fascinating to gawk at other people’s art and see what they are passionate about.  At the booth for 1,000,000 Comics we finally found the expansion to our DC comics deck building game and so we picked that up as well.  From there it was on to the first sketch duel of the Con.

It was cool to be there for that.  The host just polled the audience for ideas and asked the artists what tickled their fancy.  Vampire Batman was suggested and that is what was chosen.  Unfortunately they only had one ELMO an so we couldn’t see what the drawings where like as they were created, but just periodic updates throughout.  At the end of the duel there is a draw for the art and I didn’t win. Boo.

Following that was Comic Book Trivia, and while most of the questions were out of my range it was asked Which Toronto Based creator worked on the New 52 run of  The Flash, which I knew instantly was Francis Manapul and I got myself a signed Alex Ross San Diego Comic Con sketchbook.  Vey cool!

That was pretty much it for Friday night.

Come back tomorrow and read about the much more exciting Day 2!

And Now Day 3 as well!

Don’t miss a chance tomorrow to WIN a piece of the Con that you can’t get anywhere else!  How?  Just check back tomorrow and see!!