nostalgicTen comics professionals I've met at comic book conventions:
- Colleen Doran
- Bill Willingham
- Jack Kirby
- Don Rosa
- Judd Winnick
- Jerry Ordway
- Karen Berger
- Murphy Anderson
- Julius Schwartz
- Scott McCloud
Most of these meetings were, as meetings at conventions tend to be, fleeting and unmemorable. The most memorable was the one with Jack Kirby. It was at my very first comics convention; I don't remember what year it was, but I was in high school. The convention was, even then, the second largest comics convention (after San Diego, natch), but at the time it was still modest enough to be held at the Americana-Congress Hotel downtown. Nowadays, it's held at the convention center in Rosemont and is called WizardWorld Chicago, he added irrelevantly. Anyway, my parents had dropped me off at the hotel that morning, and late in the day I met up with them in the lobby. And as we were standing there, who should come strolling across the lobby but Jack Kirby and his wife Roz. I said something along the lines of, "Holy cow, it's Jack Kirby!" I shook his hand and told him how much I admired his work and his contributions to the field, and, being a polite young man, introduced my parents to him, as if they knew Jack Kirby from a pile of beans.
The least fleeting was with Scott McCloud, with whom I had a nice chat about his under-rated and deeply weird OGN The New Adventures of Arbaham Lincoln. It was also a memorably expensive conversation, since I ended up buying a page of original art from Zot! while I was at his table.
