My Day One Recap
My Day Two Recap
The third day of New York Comic Con 2016 was an interesting one, as are all days where thousands of like-minded geeks crowd the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. For the past few years, my wife has worked the booth my local comic shop has at the show, arriving well before I do. I arrived at the show early because I wanted to be sure I was able to get books signed by the Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the author construct known as James S.A. Corey. I had some time to kill, so I went to say hello to my wife, but first however, I took a photo with Bobbie Draper from The Expanse at the Orbit Books booth. OK, a cardboard cutout of Bobbie. Between that icy look and that armor, I want to remain on her good side.
Soon enough, I heard a voice and realize it was fellow geek writer Andrew Liptak. We both wrote for a SF Signal for a while and have been online acquaintances/friends for a while. He was there covering a few things for his current writing gig, The Verge. We chatted for a bit then it was time to head over to the Orbit Booth. When I arrived, I bumped in to SFF Copyeditor extraordinaire, the man known as Shecky.
We made our way through the line and when I presented Daniel Abraham with my ARC of Leviathan Wakes to be signed, he said “Wow, haven’t seen one of these in a while.” Not too dissimilar to the reaction Patrick Rothfuss gave when I presented him an ARC of Wise Man’s Fear back at NYCC 2014. I thanked both Ty and Daniel for their time and their great stories.
Immediately following the Corey signing was the John Scalzi signing at the Tor booth. I’d missed John at the past NY Comic Cons he attended and I wasn’t going to allow that to happen again. On the way over to the Tor booth, Shecky and I stopped to see my wife once again where Shecky revealed that he brought fancy cookies for his author friends. The line for the John Scalzi signing was long, but I was one of the first on line, so lucky me. When I gave over my books (Old Man’s War and Fuzzy Nation) to John, we had a brief discussion on the power and importance of naps.
I had plenty of time to kill so I stopped back over at the Blue Juice Comics booth which I visited on Thursday. One of their titles, really caught my eye – Æther and Empire, a steampunk series that reminded me quite a bit, at least from the visuals, of Jim Butcher’s Aeronaut’s Windlass. I haven’t read it yet, but the art looks great, which is partially what drew me to the title.
I roamed the floor some more until the Geek Geek Revolution Panel at 2:45PM. This is an annual thing at New York Comic Con where a few writers get together and play a geeky trivia game. The “host” of the game show this year was Myke Cole, who yelled at the people waiting on the line about orderliness or some such thing.
I’d been trying to connect with writer Ed Lazellari for the first couple of days of the convention. Ed spent some time working in the comic book industry and is an accomplished writer (I enjoyed/reviewed his first two books Awakenings and The Lost Prince) and we wound up sitting next to each other during the panel. This year’s contestants included Connie Willis, Bob Proehl, Will Panzo, Peter V. Brett, Kathleen Smith, and Sara Kuhn. There were quite a few questions about Harry Potter, even more about Star Wars, but the most challenging questions were those submitted by audience members. Before the game started, Peter uttered some prophetic words about always finishing in second place at this game panel, which is exactly what he did this year. The winner was Bob, but the “honor” of last place went to Sara. Every year, the last place finisher has to don something rather silly, in the past it was a Jar Jar Binks mask, this year, it was a unicorn head.
By the time the panel concluded, my time for the day at NY Comic Con came to its end.
Hey Rob, I’m not sure if you’ll see this but do you still have that Leviathan Wakes copy and if so, are you interested in selling it?