Sharing My Story

(I began writing this shortly after getting home from the Tucson Comic Con November 6, 2010)

Today is the day of the third annual Tucson Comic Con. Got last minute preparations done and packed up the books and table stuff for the Con. Then went over to Brent Hofstra's home and picked him up and we then drove to the Hotel Arizona in Tucson. We parked in the garage across from the hotel and packed our stuff into the exhibit hall. We found our table which was on the near the entrance we came in on. We unloaded our stuff and set up the table and were ready to go by the time the convention opened at 10 AM. I encouraged Brent to take his jacket (which he did) and needed it as we in an A.C. draft area (not as bad as Phoenix). The crowds were large and consistent through much of the day---ebbing and flowing as groups of people came and went. It is hard to gauge the crowd size--but it was as large or larger than last year.This is overall kid friendly convention as there were a lot of grade school children in attendance. Our table was next to Howard Salmon (the Siddur book) which I purchase at the Phoenix Comic Con in May. Brent subbed at his table on several occasions when he needed to be away. We did meet a number of Christians and gave away a good number of tracts (especially Jack Chick) and ran out of the Action Bible Sampler.

Our sales weren't as good as last year. My sense was that the convention attendees were not in a big buying mode. We didn't see a lot of people with purchased good. We sold sold some stuff but not a lot. Which was too bad as we had a lot of very good new comics and graphic novels. We did our drawings for the Action Bible (12:30 PM and 3:30 PM) but the people didn't show up. So after 5 PM we still had the two copies to give away. I prayed about it and and felt impressed to give one of the Bibles to Howard Salmon and later the other to a young tween girl who was our last customer of the afternoon. We learned that the drawings need to be more frequent and within a fairly short time of the person who puts their name in the basket. Most people are not going to hang around several hours at a smaller convention like Tucson.

Tucson Comic Con is growing as this was was the first one with programming. I attended briefly several of the panel discussions. They were held in two small conference rooms. One of the rooms held about 30 chairs (with 15-20 attendees) and 4-5 on the panels. One of the panel organizers/moderators also does the same thing for the Phoenix Con so there is overlap and cooperation between the two. One panel featured comics writers and another comic book artists. The writers and artists had pro experiences (several from WildStorm) but I wasn't familiar with their work. These were very basic panels where the panelists shared why they do what they do and how they came to be located in Arizona. There was a need for microphones. Another was a demonstration on how to use Apple I-Pads for reading comics. I-Pads have amazing selective zoom and search capacities. This was lightly attended but it gave the audience the ability do do some hands on and ask questions.

Another thing I ran into this weekend was people who were blown away that there is such a thing as Christian Comics. It is almost as if the two words didn't go together. It seems as if Christian comics is a concept some people find it difficult to wrap their minds around. There are still a lot of people (I assume mostly Christians-though not entirely) who are ignorant of current Christian comics. We also had some folks that shared that they had a complete collection of Jack Chick comic books and remembered the Archie Christian comics from years ago (hey, folks there is a lot happening now in Christian comics!!!) This is different response than "I thought i was the only one" which was less than previous years.

This year was similar to previous years in terms of crowds and interest in being at the Con. I heard rumors that next year the Tucson Con would be moving to the Tucson Convention Center which would open up a lot more venue space.

I is good for CCAS to have a continuing presence at this growing regional Con. While it is still as dealer's convention (with a large artist section) it is expanding in other directions.