Geek Syndicate
It’ll be worth it. …Right? Landing in Los Angeles airport on the Saturday night – a few days before the show – I meet my partner in crime, Yomi, who has a Jeep full of Clockwork Watch and Magic of Myths copies delivered from our Nashville based printer. Jennie, unfortunately, had to back out of our trip, so the three of us who worked on our steampunk transmedia story Clockwork Watch (Yomi the creator, Jennie the artist/letterer and myself the adapting writer and editor) was sadly reduced to two for Comic-Con. To reduce costs – hotels usually jack up the prices of their rooms to take advantage of Comic-Con attendees – we decide to use ‘Gladys’ as our base.
Home for the convention - Gladys.
Gladys is a 47 year old, 26ft Airstream trailer complete with sink, bathroom, stove and three beds. Yomi, who travelled to the USA several days ahead of me, had to drive Gladys down from Los Banos (mid California) to Los Angeles to pick me up, then drive us down to San Clemente before we make our final stop to San Diego. And Gladys, bless her, is not a dainty lady. With the Jeep towing her, she takes up around two and a half full parking spaces. So after quick pit stop at a Japanese karaoke restaurant/ bar (for food, sake and beer, not singing) we have to find somewhere big enough to park her for the night. This happens to be a nearby supermarket car park. If I wasn’t so tired, I probably would have had visions of the police filing a report about how they discovered two black guys from the UK, holed up in “a lady called Gladys”, buried alive by a mountain of steampunk and fantasy comic books. Any press is good press, as they say. Surprisingly, we don’t get turfed out of our temporary home before breakfast. Instead, we woke up to friendly people doing their early morning shopping, who think Gladys is “so cool”, while others take a genuine interest in our books and the fact we’ve travelled so far to attend Comic-Con. And despite our trip to the first camp site accidently detouring to a military base (where a befuddled but smiling serviceman gets us back on track), and an alarming warning sign at our camp site telling us to ‘beware of rattlesnakes” (ugh… why does it always have to be snakes?) our trip has started off well. To top it all off, given time to inspect the freshly printed books, all fears of them being damaged or unusable during transit melt away in a wash of four colour goodness on well produced pages. And while my plastic book stands have broken from the flight, my secret weapon has survived, intact. He didn’t even lose a single claw. You’ll see him later… So far, so… cool? Well, we’re about to see if the costumed crowd of Comic-Con think so. If not, I guess we can always drag a twenty-six foot lady into the convention centre to turn heads…
Snakes. It had to be snakes ...
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