After Pitch art director Zachary Trover's experience at B-Bop Comics last week, Justin Kendall and I went to Saturday's comic convention at the Doubletree Hotel in Overland Park. We hoped this would provide us with an opportunity to write about the more intelligent side of the comic world. We were wrong.
A small conference room at the back of the hotel housed the convention. The larger space had been rented out for some sports conference. Walking to the comic convention, we poked our heads into the sports room and saw a t-ball expert explaining the proper way to train your athletes to hit a softball. The demonstration was being watched by roughly 200 people.
Our destination, on the other hand, was about 15 people crammed in a tiny room, and some of the strangest comics I've ever seen. Like the life of Pope John Paul II, and an issue of Megadeth I might've bought if it wasn't $15.
I had also never seen so many grown men wearing novelty T-shirts in one room.
"What's the coolest thing you've got back there?" I asked a vendor wearing a T-shirt identifying him as an alumni of Springfield Elementary.
He grabbed a Spider-Man comic off the rack behind him and flung it at me. I almost didn't catch it. The date on the cover said 1962.
"$250 for that one. You want to pay cash or charge?" If this was the best thing he had, I wondered why he'd throw it. But I didn't ask questions. I just handed it back.
A guy wearing a Darth Vader tee bragged that he made enough to buy the entire top two-rows of the Springfield vendor's most expensive stuff. Meanwhile, Justin flipped through a stack of Master's of the Universe comics, the most prominent showed Prince Adam held down by his genitals under a bath of evil slime as Hordak cackled. All I could find were some Zorro vs. Dracula comics. I'm betting on Dracula in that fight.
Later, a man who pulled off the impressive feat of displaying the top half of his ass without ever bending over chastised me for mocking a comic book titled Checkmate. "His powers aren't chess," he scolded. "It's the organization the hero works for. I collected the first issues, so I know."
As bad as the economy is, someone's making money if they can pay hundreds of dollars for old Batman comics -- or even $15 for Barack Obama meets Spider-Man. A lot of the bins had signs on them saying "Impress cute girls and buy more comics" and "Your wife called and said to buy more comics," which I'm guessing worked as wish fulfillment for these guys on a couple of levels.
As we left, Justin looked at the collector's issue of the Push movie comic he'd gotten for free just for attending. "Ah, I already bent it," he said. "Guess I'm not going to be able to retire on that when I'm 60."
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