The attendance this year was over the top.  I’ve been going out to this show since 1992, when I shared a table in Artist’s Alley with Charles Vess. The attendance that year was probably 25,  maybe 30,000.  This year people are saying 125,000!  This is a picture of 125,000 people crossing the street.  I spent most of Saturday with the Flight Crew, although I had a very good meeting with the DC team (many exciting things were proposed for SHAZAM! MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL now that it is getting closer to completion), and bumped into many old friends like Terry and Robin Moore, Lee Hester, Jenny Robb, David Silverman, Mike Carlin, Frank Miller, Jim Lee, Rachel Lovinger, Joe & Dottie Ferrera, Charles Vess, Rory Root, Sergio Aragones, Jimmy Palmioti & Amanda Conners, Batton Lash & Jackie Estrada and more besides!

The Flight Panel was standing room only. That’s Kazu Kibuishi, Flight’s editor at the podium. A very interesting discussion about the future of graphic novels and the sustainability of the long form comic. I think Kazu and the rest of the relatively young, but accomplished artists are coming to grips with the huge commitment in time, money and emotional energy that the field requires. Despite that, I only sensed optimism and fearlessness from every single member.  Don’t worry, guys, it’s nothing Alan Moore, Art Spiegleman, Ernest Hemmingway or Mark Twain didn’t deal with.

Kazu, Jen Wang, and Scott McCloud laughing with Reagan Lodge.

Amy Kim Ganter and Bill Plympton.

Kean Soo, me, and Steve Hamaker.

Kean Soo and Derek Kirk Kim.

After lunch we returned to the Flight booth for a signing and found a mob that we could barely get through.  It was a monster signing and I want to publicly thank the Flight Crew and especially Johanne Matte for inviting me to appear at their booth and making the whole experience fun for me and more importantly, the fans.

I did get the names of the Fone Bone and Thorn that visited me on Friday: Thorn was Tiana Krohn-Ching, and Fone’s puppeteer was Christopher Maslanka.My flight back to Columbus is at 8pm.  For someone who normally spends a week at this show, two days seems short.  Still it was one of the richest San Diegos I can remember. What did I learn?  I learned that Terry Moore won’t tell me the secret ending of Strangers in Paradise,  and that Scott McCloud – - about everything – - was right after all. And when I spotted Jonesy from Reno 911, I also learned that it’s still fun to see a celebrity.

Before heading out to the airport, I met John J. Muth and David Saylor, my editor at Scholastic, for a cool-down drink at the Omni bar.  While we were chatting, a squadron of Storm Troopers came in from the heat, and lined up their helmets on the bar, resulting in my single favorite image of San Diego Comic-Con International 2006:

And with that, I think I’ll sleep for a day or so!

Where to begin?  My 45 minute flight from Columbus to Chicago was put into a holding pattern for six hours because of thunderstorms. We ran out of gas and had to land in Peoria, Illinois to refuel, just so we could go back into the holding pattern!  But all was well when I went straight from the airport to Dick’s Last Resort and the shouting, happy crew of Telltale Games greeted me with shots of Tequila. Let the Comic-Con begin!

Raina Telgemeir and Dave Roman at the Scholastic/Graphics party. It’s a terrible shot of me (Am I blinking or are those Tequila shots kicking in?) and Douglas Wolk from Publisher’s Weekly (who does not normally look crazed, and who gave me one of my first good mainstream reviews), but it’s such a good, sweet picture of Raina and Dave that I had to go with it.

Scott McCloud at the Scholastic bash. To the extreme left (and almost cut off) is Scott’s daughter Sky, and in the background you can see Amy Kim Ganter (Sorcerers & Secretaries) and Frank Cammuso (Max Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective).

Janna Morishima, one of the wonderful, hardworking editors at Scholastic.

Benedicte & Rodolphe Guenoden manning the Flight booth on Friday.

2:30 signing at the Diamond Comics booth. This picture was taken by Emily Morganti. Emily works on the Bone and Sam & Max downloadable games, and during the Con she's done a little blogging at the Telltale site.  There's even a picture of Telltale founder Dan Conners drinking from a Bone milk carton the morning they arrived in San Diego! 

Fone Bone and Thorn stopped by my signing at the Diamond booth!  The Fone Bone puppet was perfectly scaled and moved freakishly well.

The Thorn costume was accurate down to the finest detail:  the small pouch around Thorn’s neck even contained a river rock from the real Old Man’s Cave!  Regretfully, in the excitement, I didn’t write down their names, but if I see them again on Saturday, I’ll post them when I blog next! All in all, it was a fun day, I bought a few good books,including the massive slip cased edition of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls; and ended the evening at the Eisner Awards – - the highlight of which was Scott Kurtz's funny and touching acceptance speech for best digital comic. Okay, we're off and running!

I’m going to San Diego, California next week along with the rest of the cartooning tribe for the annual rite of passage we call Comic-Con International.  I won’t have my booth this year, but I can be found at a couple of spots on Friday and Saturday:

Friday, July 21 @ The Diamond Comics booth from 2:30 to 3:30

Saturday, July 22 @ The FLIGHT PANEL from 12:30 to 1:30 in ROOM 9

Saturday, July 22 @ The FLIGHT Booth (No.1131) from 3 to 4

We made up an 11”x 17” poster of the new BONE: One Volume Edition cover to give away at the show.  Stop by the FLIGHT booth or Comic Book Legal Defense Fund booth (No. 1930) to pick one up! 

While you are at the CBLDF booth, peruse all the signed comic book goodies from Jim Lee, Frank Miller, Terry Moore, James Kochalka and lots of other good Americans. New this year are CBLDF Bone membership cards (a few hundred that I pre-signed), and a CBLDF Bone t-shirt. 

Can’t wait to see you all there!

If you are around a TV tonight, watch PBS for a documentary on TINTIN!   Tom Spurgeon over on The Comics Reporter pointed this out.  He also has some links to other TinTin sites. It runs tonight at 10 pm Eastern. TinTin is one of my favorite comics, and Herge is a master.  I'm looking forward to this!

Bone 4: The Dragonslayer, the new color BONE book ships to most bookstores today.  Steve Hamaker stopped by the Barnes & Noble on the way to work and saw they had 15 copies! Graphix (the graphic novel imprint of Scholastic) is releasing two newly colored BONE books a year until they complete all nine volumes. I'm checking with Scholastic to see if copies will be available for San Diego Comic-Con, where I plan to sign books at the FLIGHT booth (more on San Diego tomorrow).

The Dragonslayer is my favorite Bone story and this is by far the best coloring job Steve has done (and that's saying something)!  If you want to see more color images from the new book, scroll down to the June 12 blog entry…