Apparently I am an elephant, because an elephant never forgets.

As I dropped off to sleep on Friday I remembered that in the same hotel in 2007, I’d overslept thanks to an alarm call that never came. That lingering knowledge probably kept me half-awake through the night, and I woke a little groggy on Saturday – but on time.

Still. Show to get done. No rest for the wicked…

Show mechanics

Lots of things to like about Bristol Comic Expo as a show. One is the fact that we can walk to it from our hotel, instead of piling in a van; that meant we just had to grab all of our valuables (laptop, camera, video camera, cash float) and amble down the road a bit.

Another is that the show organisers are exceedingly laid back about the whole event, so there’s no-one coming to audit exactly how many chairs and tables you’re using (had that), or charge you money for every person you have helping you set up (ditto) or giving you lectures on Health & Safety even as you’re covering cables with carpet. It’s a small show, like I said, so we were left to our own devices on Saturday morning as we put together the rest of the stand.

We’re getting to the point when we have just about every contingency covered for stand creation now, so we had very few issues as we put things together. Flags went up, tablecloths went down, monitors and PCs were plugged in and powered up – we even had Internet access on the first try. All we had left to do was minor tweakage. Again, I reflected on how different it was from last year, when I’d been hand-writing signs at the last minute while worrying about how to sell things.

The show officially opened at 10am and as we got closer, the usual array of small-press vendors turned up opposite and around us. I think it takes a lot of guts to do what they do – sit behind a table for a couple of days trying to sell self-produced comics. I know they don’t have to spend a lot on said table, but I’m not sure I could flog something I’d made myself with a near-zero budget to complete strangers. Give me a company’s rep and backing.

It can be hard to tell the difference between punters and vendors at these sorts of shows though, so after a while I started to wonder if the people wandering the aisles around me were ‘real’ or not. Then our first players turned up, and I knew we were off and running.

Making lots of money (for charity)

I’m fully aware that most our our ‘regulars’ come to our shows for two things; Draw the World Together and, erm, us. (I hope they also turn up to see each other, but only they know for sure.)

While we can’t do a whole lot about ‘us’ (Except maybe wear deodorant and smile occasionally) we do spend a lot of time tweaking and improving our Draw the World Together experience, and coming up with new ways to make people happy.

Just in case you’re new to the idea or concept of DTWT, it’s pretty simple. Play an NCsoft game? We’ll draw that character for you. (Well I say ‘we’, I of course mean professional comic artists… believe me, you wouldn’t want me to touch pencil to paper in an attempt to render anything.) In exchange, we ask for a charity donation – 100% of which goes to EveryChild. It’s that simple.

Well, the concept’s that simple. The execution is an ever-shifting thing, made gradually easier (over the last year in particular) with hard work and lots of testing. We now have the business of taking your sketch order and getting it drawn down to an art. Or perhaps a science.

We’re also always looking for ways to ways to make more charity cash without over-taxing our artists, which is starting to mean products. We dipped our toe in 2007 with limited edition signed comics and the occasional sketch card; in 2008 we’re moving up a gear with actual products, and Bristol Comic Expo saw the debut of one particular item: the sketchbook that I’ve talked about so much since this blog started.

We made 500 of ‘em, and while I never expected to sell all of them during Comic Expo, I hoped to shift quite a few. On Saturday morning, as the players gathered and we got them into our ‘sketch queue’, I started to push the sketchbook on them as well. It wasn’t that hard – most of them were grabbing for copies. We encouraged them to get the pages signed by the individual artists, considering most of ‘em were in the same building.

Of course being Comic Expo, we expected a few of the artists who’d drawn for the book to turn up – hopefully to sign a few at least, and perhaps if we were lucky, to generously donate the original art they’d created so that we could auction that too. This happened first thing on Saturday with Bryan Talbot, who arrived suddenly brandishing his drawing of Back Alley Brawler. As usual, I was busy with something else, so didn’t get a chance to thank him for his art – or tell him how much I like Luther Arkwright. Still, it was a good start to the day.

As was seeing so many familiar faces. Before too long the stand was surrounded, mostly by players we all knew well, and we were stacking up free food. It’s becoming something of a tradition now – after starting at Birmingham International Comics Show last year – for certain players to make food and bring it to us on the stand. I say this without encouraging you! We already have far too much sweet, tasty, delicious food… most of which we probably shouldn’t be eating. I tell you though, nothing beats a biscuity treat when you’ve been on your feet most of the morning.

Our ‘official catering dept’ AKA Crimson Archer, AKA Paul, had of course come through for us with another selection of Gingerbread Men and a lovely sponge cake, although sadly the ‘Statesman star’ that had adorned the top wasn’t too visible when it came out of the tin. Still tasted great though. Right Mat?

Coming up on the outside as a challenger to his dominance, however, was Pix AKA Rebecca, wife of Shadowe AKA Mark Ben (Ta for the correction Ben!). She turned up with some delicious chocolate chip cookies that were quickly dug into, and were the cause of a number of chocolate fingerprints on sketches and sketchbooks over the weekend. But dang, were they good.

With food being eaten and sketches being drawn, we were on our way, with a straight and steady course… through the Caribbean, it would appear, because good God almighty it was hot.

Little crotch-pot cookin’

We’ve been lucky to have some heat around here recently, and whether or not it’s naturally summer or some freakish global warming spike I’ll leave for others to argue. All I know is a few days before we came to the show, I suddenly remembered how warm it had been in the hall last year and said knowingly to Mat and Chris “Pack shorts”.

Mat never needs much of an excuse to show off his legs, but for me I had to dig into the summer clothing that we had stored away to come up with my attire. I was damn glad I did though, as true to form, the Expo hall gradually turned into a sauna over the course of Saturday.

It didn’t help that the beginning of the day involved shifting boxes and re-arranging the stand, but even after that I found myself continually hot and bothered. We managed to get a decent supply of water going (thanks, Catering Dept.!) but even with fluids flowing it was still damn warm. Having five monitors, three PCs, three laptops and a printer running at once probably didn’t lower the ambient temperature much either. We found ourselves wishing desperately for some sort of relief. But who would bring it to us? Who, indeed.

Hello, hello

So it went, onwards into the afternoon, with more and more players apparently turning up all around us. I saw more and more faces that I recognised, and mostly I could put names to them – or board handles, at least, which seems to suit most. I do have a pretty good memory for faces but sometimes names escape me, and that feat of memory gets a little harder when there’s an alias involved, but I did my best.

I said “Hello” to Callista; hello to Shadowe and Pix, Plasmarch, the Elflings, Sidekick Pete (and his wife and fam), ‘Caterer’ Paul, Xemulas (I preferred ‘Sam’), Dave and his girlfriend, and Zoser and Ebon Hawk – an inseparable duo. There were many more than this of course, many whose names I didn’t get but faces I recognised (Even if they had shaved, or cut their hair, or grown a beard since I last saw them).

I appreciate – no, that’s not good enough; I’m really happy, actually – that you all took the time to come to the show, and even better, that you came and said ‘hi’. To those who may have not spoken to me, I know I may have looked busy, but I always, always want to talk to you – about whatever. Even if sometimes when you get very excited about the finer points of your particular character, I lose track a bit. I still want to share the enthusiasm. It’s what keeps us going.

You’re only after me for me sketches

I know the truth though. You only talk to me to pass the time as you wait for the real reason you came – sketches! And who can blame you, with things like this being produced:

On the left is Kew, as drawn by Neil Edwards; and on the right is another Neil Edwards special, that being Xemulas. Click either of them to make ‘em bigger on Flickr.

Kew was a character of Pix’s, who deserved to have such a fantastic piece of work done considering her chocolate cookie baking expertise. I was really impressed by the pencils here, but was even more impressed by what came next: colours.

We’d kept the fact that we were going to do sketch colouring pretty quiet before the show, because frankly, we weren’t sure it was going to work. Technically we knew it’d be easy enough; set up a PC with the right software and away we go. However in the traditional comics production process an artist’s pencils are usually inked before they’re coloured, and we don’t have time (or manpower!) to do that during a show. While some of our artists usually do ‘some’ inking (Andrew Wildman and Mike Collins in particular) Neil, for example, just does pencils… although they are very ‘tight’ pencils, to be fair.

Therefore the show floor was a bit of a baptism of fire for our two colour wizards, Kat Nicholson and Jason Cardy. Both got really thrown in at the deep end, but came out swimming, and on Saturday they put digital pen to virtual paper on both of these sketches, as you can see.

Click and you’ll see this clearly, or take my word for it; Jason’s colouring Kew, and Kat is working on Xemulas. I knew right away as I glanced over that both sketches were going to be special when finished, but I was really knocked out by these results:

Impressive, huh? Do them justice and click on ‘em to make bigger… it’s worth it. Yes, you too (Yes you!) can own a print like this for just £30, and every penny goes to charity… sorry, can never stop huckstering.

As you can see, we had at least one very satisfied customer that day – in fact she was so satisfied that she came back again, and again, and again (along with Shadowe!) to take the prize (I think) of ‘most sketches ordered in the weekend’. For which we thank you, Pix… and thanks again for the cookies.

On and on it went, Neil and Mike sketching like crazy, Jason and Kat colouring whatever they were asked to. Time passed, as it likes to do, and apart from a brief wander around the hall, I had not much to do apart from sell people games, make sure they got sketches, and talk about whatever people wanted to talk about. My job, in other words.

Near the end of the day we did the usual – figure out where we were going to eat. Unlike in Birmingham, where the decision of ‘what’ is always pre-decided (Curry) here in Bristol we were wide open with choice. Until Mike Collins said “Are we going for curry later?” Never one to disappoint my artists, I duly booked a curry house for all of us on Dave’s recommendation (ta Dave!).

Never leave the stand

Then before too long, things started to die down. Players drifted away, exhausted by the heat no doubt, and it became a little cooler in the hall as the place started to empty out. Without a whole lot to do, I wandered around the corner and found myself looking at some lovely, big prints of comic art… with very reasonable price tags on them.

My eye was drawn to a massive rendering of the current Justice League line-up by Alex Ross. I’m a bit of a sucker for a Ross painting. Even though I tend to think he makes Wonder Woman look like a WWF reject (I can see why, but still) he is the only ‘realistic’ artist out there who I think can make the inherently daft costumes of characters like Green Lantern and the Flash look plausible. I love his stuff. So of course I ran away.

“Mat – you’ve got to come see this stall,” I told him when I came back, and he duly scampered off to take a look, coming back with exactly the same look on his face as I had; the “Oh, it’s so nice, but yet I don’t know if I can really buy this without incurring the wrath of the wife” look.

It took about twenty minutes for us to convince each other, and with Day One of the show in its dying moments, we found ourselves around the corner again, each picking up some art. In Mat’s case it was a massive Transformers image, as well as another Alex Ross (Battle of the Planets!) but in mine it was of course, this baby:

I couldn’t resist. Now the question was, where the hell was I going to put the damn thing.

Saturday night’s alright for.. eating

That was it! Suddenly the show was closed and we were being hustled out of the hall, so we grabbed all we needed and headed back to the hotel. I spent my brief free time counting the charity cash (over £900 on Day One!) and taking the briefest of showers, before we headed out into the Bristol evening.

Dinner was provided by The Raj, who were very friendly and welcoming, and served us great food. The only problem was that eight of us were jammed into one corner of the place (which is in the basement!) so while Mike, Neil and I got our geek on as we talked about current and future comics and movies, the rest of the table got a little hot under the collar. So we left, hitting the Ramada Plaza hotel bar briefly before realising that frankly, we couldn’t stand up any longer.

Back to our hotel and our bar, where we relaxed and slowly passed out. Day One over.

Show ain’t over yet though.

Read the third and final part!