AHmazing

This weekend, I threw caution (and cash) to the wind and travelled up to Leeds for the Thought Balloon comic convention. I didn't know what to expect but was pleasantly surprised, it was a comfortable venue with a range of small press and pro comics, as well as a number of big name creators.

Of course, the main reason for me going was to see Adam Hughes, long since my favourite artist. He has given up doing convention sketches as too many people were flipping the art straight on to eBay, screwing both Adam and his fans over in regards to money charged.

We got there as the con opened, made it in surprisingly quickly and I picked up the schedule/layout thing and darted straight over to where Adam was sitting. There was a queue already forming but it moved fairly quickly and Adam was not only signing but doing free quick head sketches on card slightly smaller than US comic size. Of course, I took my copy of Cover Run (one of my favourite books) and got a Wonder Woman sketch inside (I saw some nice Catwomen and Batgirls that Adam drew, and would have liked Power Girl really but felt it might be a bit generic in black and white so defaulted to WW).

As well as picking up his latest sketchbook, I also got the following items signed:

Eagle #6 (Adam's first published work)
Comics Greatest World: Ghost (first appearance of Ghost by Adam)
Star Trek Debt of Honour HC (early full-length project)
Justice League #31 (Adam's first issue)
Dark Horse Presents #50 (fun one-off strip by Adam and Karl Story)
Gen 13 Ordinary Heroes #1 and 2 (last major interiors done by Adam)
Comic Book Artist #21 (great cover and interview, plus I( get a credit!)
as well as a bootleg foreign sketchbook (that's pretty shonky as it's full of art cribbed from the net) that I pointed out that Adam may not want to sign but he did so before realising it wasn't official (so that's rare but I'll never part with it anyway).

The rest of the con could be a washout as far as I was concerned as I had what I wanted and was well pleased, but the day continued being pretty cool. Definitely do it again, though will have to think about the travel (train was so overcrowded, a girl passed out and the railway still don't even know as it was so ram-packed, they weren't even checking tickets...)