{"id":12400,"date":"2015-04-11T09:21:31","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T13:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=12400"},"modified":"2021-05-22T09:44:53","modified_gmt":"2021-05-22T13:44:53","slug":"megacon-2015-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=12400","title":{"rendered":"MegaCon 2015 Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/stallonezone.com\/zone\/2015\/z041115megacon2015.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Yesterday was a good day.\u00a0 I spent it hanging out at <strong>MegaCon<\/strong> with my best bud, <strong>John Beatty<\/strong>.\u00a0 That&#8217;s<strong> John<\/strong> in the photo above trying out some <em><strong>Star Man<\/strong><\/em> shades.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>MegaCon<\/strong> started out as a comic book convention but has morphed into a comic book \/ celebrity \/ cosplay convention that gets bigger and bigger with each new year.\u00a0 Reportedly 30,000 people came through the doors yesterday.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">My goals for the show were to get <strong>Darwyn Cooke<\/strong> to sign two <strong>Parker<\/strong> novels, pick up <strong>Chuck Dixon&#8217;s<\/strong> <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Winter<\/span> <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">World<\/span><\/strong> novel, try to get sketches from a few artists, meet <strong>Lee Weeks<\/strong> and hang out with <strong>Big Beatty<\/strong>.\u00a0 I had Friday and Saturday budgeted to get everything done.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The drive to Orlando went smoothly.\u00a0 <strong>Big J<\/strong> and I loaded up and headed to the convention.\u00a0 We had a couple of hours before the show opened which gave us additional time to catch up.\u00a0 I walked the convention floor (which was HUGE) to get the lay of the land.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Justin Orr<\/strong> was there, but hadn&#8217;t brought sketchbooks &#8212; he&#8217;s doing a <strong>Kickstarter<\/strong> for a new huge sketchbook later this year &#8212; and he wasn&#8217;t able to take sketch requests.\u00a0 <strong>Jason Walker<\/strong> was just getting to his table.\u00a0 I set up a sketch with <strong>Elliott Fernandez<\/strong>. I got to speak with <strong>Gene Gonzales, Joe Pekar<\/strong> and <strong>Frank<\/strong> aka <em><strong>The Voice of MegaCon<\/strong><\/em> briefly.\u00a0 <strong>Mitch Hyman<\/strong> gave me a couple DVDs (one for <strong>Beatty<\/strong>) of his movie, <em><strong>Bubba the Redneck Werewolf<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 I got <strong>Darwyn Cooke<\/strong> to sign my two <strong>Stark<\/strong> novels and picked up\u00a0<strong>Chuck Dixon&#8217;s<\/strong> <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Winter<\/span> <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">World<\/span><\/strong> novel.\u00a0 Everything I planned to do over the course of two days was done in one!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I then spent the rest of the day hanging with <strong>Big John<\/strong> and <strong>Lee Weeks<\/strong> (who is such an amazing talent and cool guy who even does magic tricks).\u00a0<strong> John Higashi<\/strong> invited <strong>Beatty<\/strong> and I to join him, <strong>Jason Walker<\/strong> and <strong>James Howell<\/strong> for dinner at <strong>Logan Steak House<\/strong> after the show and we did.\u00a0 It was a great meal with friends I don&#8217;t get to see near enough.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I drove <strong>Beatty<\/strong> back to his motel and decided to avoid the morning traffic and head home.\u00a0 <strong>MegaCon 2015<\/strong> goes into the books as the year I was able to get everything done in one good day.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday was a good day.\u00a0 I spent it hanging out at MegaCon with my best bud, John Beatty.\u00a0 That&#8217;s John<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[58,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-comics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12401,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12400\/revisions\/12401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}