The thing that most surprised me was the almost uniformly fun, convivial nature of the crowd. People were having a good time and in a good mood - an especially good mood given that we were crammed into a massive convention hall with a concrete floor, not a lot of bathrooms, few seats and zero cell service. The little irritations of daily life - the person with the stroller who's clogged the escalator, the person standing dumbly in the middle of the intersection of two heavily trafficked footpaths, the person who realizes too late that their massive backpack is an impediment to everyone around them - were being handled with sincere little apologies and good spirits by everyone involved. I'm sure someone had their toes trod on one time too many, probably by me, but I only rarely saw someone openly exhibit anything other than pleasantness. It was the diametric opposite of every harrowing trip through a discount big box store or the mall on a Saturday afternoon that I've ever experienced.

This wasn't the very first con I've attended, I should note; there used to be a local science fiction con to which I went a couple of times over the years to catch panels by RPG and sci-fi writers I liked, but those were at best very casual visits and I have never been a part of - or really understood - the convention culture. I get intellectually that it's not that far removed from the circuit party scene: there is a geographically non-local social structure that assembles itself at events like this, disassembles when it's over and then reassembles itself the next time some critical mass of its participants are again in the same place; I hadn't realized how much of a sense of community could be had. This was a lot like a good pride parade and I had not expected it. I'm probably the seven millionth person to make that realization but it was what kept surprising me throughout the day - well, those and the absolute omnipresence of Green Lantern t-shirts. What, did a truck of them overturn on the highway? That was not what I expected to see as everyone's faaaaaavorite mythos.

At any rate, things specific to HeroesCon 2010:

Bill Willingham's session on Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall was really great. Hearing him discuss some of the creative process behind his repurposing and reimagining of existing fairy tale tropes was good fodder for one's own creativity. The organic process he described by which he realized that Cinderella should be a secret agent was genuinely fascinating, as was his explanation of who the Adversary was originally meant to be: Peter Pan. Willingham reframed the story for us as one of an immortal and eternally immature villain who steals children away from their parents to create a creepy pseudo-family and his brave if roguish enemy, a Captain Hook who occasionally tries to rescue some of the stolen children to take them back to their families. It was a fascinating take on that character - whom Willingham couldn't use due to special copyright circumstances in the UK, where Peter Pan isn't yet in the public domain - and led into Willingham telling some fascinating stories about trips he's taken to Hamlin to research another character he kept wanting to use, the Pied Piper, and the real history on which the fairy tale is based. It was a fantastic talk and worth the extremely reasonable price of admission all on its own.

After that I wandered around the dealer floor for a while, running into a surprising number of friends of mine from home before I happened upon the section called "indie Island" and about half of my favorite web cartoonists: David Malki of Wondermark, rstevens of Diesel Sweeties, Chris Hastings and Kent Archer of Dr. McNinja and Brian Clevinger of Atomic Robo and 8-Bit Theater.

David Malki - incredibly, incomprehensibly, heart-flutteringly hot David Malki - told me he loved me, right out of the gate, and I'm afraid after that I was kind of useless. I ended up buying a book and making some gurgling noises and then leaving, coming back, buying some posters and taking his picture. I tried to go back a third time but snapped out of it long enough to realize there was no way I could say, "I'd also like some greeting cards," realistically, without adding, "...and to lick you." So, I skipped the third visit to his booth.

R Stevens was an incredibly gracious and vivacious person, highly social and perfectly happy to stand there and shoot the breeze with me and anyone else on topics from what he doesn't like about Achewood to what I don't like about Scott Pilgrim to the Lantern Corps and the weird sex people in the convention hotel were hearing all night on Friday. Here's a tip, folks: if you shout, "By the power of Grayskull!" in the moment, at a con, bloggers and artists will gossip about you the next day. He also claimed to know about this very blog, which I took as blatant flattery I was only too happy to accept. Chatting with him felt like an honest-to-goodness visit and he was so incredibly approachable that even someone as painfully shy as myself could laugh and smile in seconds of being within conversational radius of him.

I'm afraid I was kind of a dumbass to Brian Clevinger. I had no idea it was him behind the table until I mentioned that I had loved 8-Bit Theater and he said he had loved writing it and then I stumbled all over something and practically ran away; same with Chris Hastings. I told him that he should be printing the "WW(batman)D?" t-shirts on American Apparel shirts so that I could buy one. (I am super-fussy about t-shirts.) I'm sure that's exactly the sort of unhelpful fan interaction he came to Charlotte to experience. My exact words were that I "would kill for this on American Apparel," followed hastily by, "Um... not literally, of course," to which he replied without hesitation, "No? You won't kill for it? Fine, then I'm not doing it!"

I also had the opportunity to talk to Johanna Stokes of BOOM! Studios and hear a little about their upcoming title The Calling. She described it to me as more in the style of Lovecraft himself, in that it's about disbelieving human beings encountering the cosmic and being changed forever by it. She completely sold me on that book and as someone who loved Cthulhu Tales (they'd love to do more, she said, but they don't know if or when) and did not particularly enjoy Fall of Cthulhu, I am very excited about The Calling.

The last writer/artist with whom I chatted was Dan Parent of Archie Comics. I thanked him for creating Kevin Keller and told him that, in all honesty, Veronica #202 would mark the first time I had bought an Archie comic of my own volition and that the new character is absolutely what brought me on as a reader. He told me that they have all been extremely pleasantly surprised by reader reaction: 99% positive and the positive has definitely been heard.

All that said, going to a con had its down side. At one point I was trapped in line at the ATM in front of a family of mother, father, teenage son and young child. The youngest was waaaaaay over-stimulated and was ready to go home. Sadly, so was the mom. At one point she was shouting up the line that if the person at the machine needed assistance to go faster, she'd come up there and help them herself. Then she announced to her family that if anyone tried to dress up as anything next year she wasn't coming with them which earned an immediate response from the teen that next year he was going to dress up as something, he had just decided; it was a response that produced long moments of blessed silence. I also had the misfortune of encountering a veritable army of sloppily-done Heath Ledger Joker faces. I was left as breathless as anybody by that performance but it loses some of its street value when three of them are ahead of one in line at the Bojangles; a Bojangles, I might add, that exists inside the convention center. The other sad news flash of the day was that no matter how detailed one's Scarecrow cosplay might be - and it was immaculately detailed - at peak effectiveness all it really does is render the wearer indistinguishable from a hobo.

All of that was more than made up for by the incredible Green Lantern who was walking around like he owned the place in a skin-tight suit. I took a picture but I'm not sure it's even safe to post it on the Internet. Let's just say I'm pretty sure I know where he keeps his power ring. Whew. It was enough to give a boy a fainting spell. It was all I could do not to ask if he was selling tickets, too, or if staring were free. I'll ask the Sarge of we've got a Pink Kryptonite Flickr feed and, if so, maybe I'll post a picture up there.