The Haul: Day 2
Waking up bright and early on Thursday, we had a horribly serviced breakfast at Buster's Beach House and Longboard Cafe at the Seaport Village next to the Hyatt.
After that, I hustled over to the StrangeCo booth for the Touma signing. I just missed the first part of the line, and began to fret that I wouldn't get to meet Touma. Luckily, about a half hour later, I finally reached the head of the line and had a shiny black Goon (toy dragon) for Touma to sign. He did an awesome green sketch of the Goon on its belly and drew in its eyes. I watched some more of Touma's customizations for the other fans and was really impressed with how much attention he paid to each toy. (Touma and MAD are my favorite toy designers, hands down.)
Randomly, we passed by the Dark Horse booth and saw them passing out foam Hellfinger hands. After digesting that piece of information, it was then clear that the man passing them out (or at least nearby) was Mike Mignola. We quickly jumped in line and forced Mignola to struggle with signing a piece of oversized foam (I think it's pretty awesome).
After that, I went to say hi to Chris after the "Writing for the Computer Game Industry" panel before checking out the tail end of Geek Monthly's summer movie preview panel. The movies were pretty bad by then, and I would be hard pressed to recall any of them. A few minutes of aimless wandering later, I headed over to the "100 Years of Robert E. Howard" panel. It was pretty disappointing.
With some panels under my belt, I headed down to the ToyQube signing appearance by... TOUMA! He was selling a new toy which was really very cool, but out of my price range. I picked up a book catalog of all of his toys, and he did a cute sketch of a Knuckle Bear for me. At this point, I felt like I should avoid Touma for the rest of the con, lest he think he had gained a stalker. Passing by the Oni Press booth, I got to snag a copy of Wasteland #1 by Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten. They seemed like a pair of super nice comic book creators, and after chatting with them, they signed my pristine comic.
We then failed to get into the Pinky and the Brain/Animaniacs panel before heading to the Royal Thai for dinner.
Then it was off to the Kung-fu Superhero Extravaganza which was really less enjoyable than most years. We ducked out early to head over to the Star Wars Fan Film Awards. There were some good ones, and some not so good ones (no more Pink Five, please). I was tickled to see that Sith'd (which one of my coworkers worked on) won an award and cheered like a loon.