My Weekend at HeroesCon

Or, Why I Missed AthFest for a Comic Book Convention

originally published July 2, 2008

“Kong & Narnia Statue Liquidation,” read the banner in proud letters. “What in the everloving hell have I gotten myself into?” I wondered, as nerds paraded past me holding huge boxes containing dinosaur figurines. This was Heroes Convention, HeroesCon for short, founded in 1982 in Charlotte, NC by Shelton Drum, owner of the Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find comic shop there. It was also my very first real comic book convention, not to mention the reason I skipped AthFest this year.

That’s not strictly true. I’ve been to Fluke, held in Athens in the early spring, but Fluke is a very different and much cuddlier animal. It’s held in a bar, and even a weakling such as myself would have no trouble throwing a ball from one end of it to the other. The only costume present is the standard one of jeans, t-shirt and Chuck Taylors. HeroesCon, on the other hand, is held in the Charlotte Convention Center, and its Indie Island section alone - the area of the hall in which the organizers cluster the kinds of artists and authors published by presses like Marietta’s Top Shelf or Oni Press - runs to 10,000 square feet. You get a map as part of your program, and you’ll need it.

So was it worth missing AthFest? It actually turned out to be surprisingly similar. It may have been held indoors, but it was still hot and fairly sweaty. Physical exhaustion was a factor that needed to be accounted for. No matter how well you think you’ve planned your route, there’s a fair amount of zig-zagging across the floor, leading to aching feet by the end of each day, and even if you didn’t mean to keep getting out your wallet, your shoulders will be killing you from dragging around the ever-larger, ever-heavier bag of stuff you’ve bought. (Note: The guys with rolling suitcases might not look very cool, but at the end of three days they don’t have shoulder bruises.)

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But the thing that made HeroesCon seem the most like AthFest is exactly the thing that makes them both great: the coexistence of various factions in the aid of a shared greater goal. AthFest might feature The Buddy System alongside We Versus the Shark, Kyshona Armstrong and Son1, but HeroesCon had Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley (poised for stardom when the movie adaptation hits theaters next year), EC Comics legend Al Feldstein, new classicist Darwyn Cooke, indie hero Jaime Hernandez and The Fart Party’s Julia Wertz, who likes to make jokes about blowjobs, all in one room and all for the love of comics.

One thing I learned is that the bigger conventions, like Comic-Con International in San Diego, tend to focus less and less on comics and more and more on movies, TV shows, video games and toys. It’s not that those things aren’t great, but you might not need everything you’re interested in to be in one place, and the glamour of Robert Downey, Jr. kind of outshines that of current Iron Man writer Matt Fraction, at least to some people. Browsing through one of many five-dollar trade bins, I overheard a customer and a vendor in conversation about just this. “I’ve been to San Diego, but that’s all multimedia. I don’t know what that has to do with comics,” the vendor said. Athens’ own Patrick Dean, who happened to be walking the aisles as well, independently reiterated the point, adding that Comic-Con also draws 140,000 people by this point, making it unmanageably large.

HeroesCon may have the occasional booth with some imported DVDs, and there was, of course, a dude in an Iron Man costume posing for photos, but the focus really stayed on comics - from booth after booth of retailers selling both individual issues and trades to the back half of the hall, which was filled with tables for creators big and small, to the small presses dotted throughout - most of which also had people signing and sketching. Sure, there were a couple of Klingons running a booth to raise money for charity, but the media on display was almost entirely print.

One of the most interesting parts of the weekend was cataloguing the ways in which people sign/sketch in a book you’ve handed them. Hope Larson, for example, pulled out a brush and a bottle of ink to paint a s’more with painstaking care on the cover of her new book Chiggers. Jeremy Tinder, author of Cry Yourself to Sleep, uses a brush-pen and makes lines nearly indistinguishable from those already printed on the page. Mike Dawson, creator of the brand-new Freddie and Me, a memoir about his love of Queen, holds his pen practically at its point while drawing a great little picture of Freddie Mercury, while Jaime Hernandez writes almost upside-down. Some guests care deeply about their choice of writing instrument, frowning at their selection in thought when presented with a page, while others, like the prolific Jeffrey Brown, seem happy to use any old pen.

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And despite the potential for excruciating awkwardness, the interactions tended to go sans hitches, although smiling and holding out a $20 bill while saying “I would like to purchase your book” probably facilitates that kind of smoothness. Liz Prince, author of Will You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed?, was drawn to my Je Suis France shirt designed by Lauren Gregg, as was many another indie islander, leading to easy conversation and the usual proselytizing on my part about the greatness of Athens and the need for those who’ve never experienced it to come here. Expressing enthusiasm at someone will often result in a mirror effect, as it did with Josh Cotter, author of the recently compiled Skyscrapers of the Midwest, who not only chatted for a good while and signed multiple things, but waved nearly every time I passed by the booth. Matt Sturges, co-writer of Jack of Fables and House of Mystery with Bill Willingham, seemed lonely and positively thrilled to hear nice things, and Alex Robinson spent quite a while on a drawing in his Too Cool to Be Forgotten, as well as throwing in a promo pack of candy cigarettes that mimic the design of the book’s cover. While much on artist Derek M. Ballard’s table was (appropriately) highly priced, the purchase of a tiny $5 drawing of the He-Man character Moss Man led to a discussion of how North Carolina doesn’t really count as the South in many ways (Pepsi, people who walk fast, a strange number of Chicago-style hot dog places).

What I’m saying is that it kind of turns into a love-fest. You want to give these people money for making art that makes you happy and, in turn, they want to keep making you happy by making that art, sometimes right in front of you. It’s a widening spiral of mutual appreciation, in which many attendees are creators and almost all creators are fans, and it leads to the ATM in the building having to be refilled often. So did I miss AthFest? I kind of just got it in translation: sweaty, tired, empty of wallet, desperate to get back home to my couch and, in the end, totally happy to have been.

Hillary Brown