What follows after the jump may include some inside baseball, and if you’re not into comic books you might not catch all of it. What is important though is that today was the first day of this year’s Emerald City Comic Convention. Comic creators, fans and press gathered in the Washington State Convention & Trade Center to celebrate this thing we call comics books.

The first thing that a non-comics person would notice when stepping onto the convention floor is the complete range of totally inappropriate style choices for facial hair. We are not as a people a fashionable lot, and while I think most everyone can agree that a t-shirt and jeans is a fine casual clothing option when you start replacing that with a pair of too small shorts and shirt that barely covers the belly button then there are issues, at least when that’s on a guy.

This is not for the faint of heart, I’m glad that I left my fiancee at home, she can deal with me enjoying comics as a hobby, but I don’t know if she could deal with the full force of comic fandom. Can you?

As soon as I arrived I got into line to shake the hand of Wil Wheaton. I enjoyed him as Wesley Crusher back on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but its been his blogging work that had really made me want to shake his hand and get an autograph. Both on his own site [wwdn] and on Metroblogging LA [mbla] he’s been both entertaining and honest, which is hard to do as a writer.

Of course after forty minutes in line I manage to get myself nervous, and when buying his book [mp] and getting him to sign it I end up coming off as unimpressed with the entire thing as if I was buying the book from Barnes & Noble. I’m sure I’ll kick myself about it for days, but when it comes to being a fanboy I hate a great deal of self-conscious self-loathing.

Having learned the last two years that unless you’re wanting to commission a drawing from an artist, it’s generally best to avoid lining up for them, I quickly managed to go from table to table hitting the creators I wanted to get autographs from. My goal was, having finally finished with Wheaton’s line, to not wait in line again today.

My first stop was unplanned, but I noticed Colleen Coover’s [ca] art and having enjoyed it in backup stories in Marvel’s X-Men First Class, I decided to buy a few small prints from her. She was incredibly friendly, and it helped brighten my spirits after feeling an initial bout of feeling completely overwhelmed by the size of the event. She’s done some work for The Stranger, so even if you’re not a Marvel reader you might recognize her art work. In fact everyone I finally did end up meeting was incredibly friendly. Jeff Parker, Gail Simone were both fun to talk to. It’s always nice to know that the comic book you’re reading isn’t being written by a complete asshole.

I finally retreated to one of the presentation rooms for the Spotlight on Tim Sale [ts]. Tim Sale grew up locally, so a number of the people in the audience were either family members or longtime friends. If you’re not familiar with his name you might recognize it from the hit NBC show Heroes where his work is used for the paintings that predict the future, he’s also had successful runs on such comic characters as Batman, Superman and Spider-Man.

Next was the Mondo Marvel Panel (pictured above), which brought together (from left to right) Ed Brubaker, Robert Kirkman, Skottie Young and Jeff Parker all of whom write for Marvel. Brubaker, who lives in Seattle, fielded the most questions since he’s currently writing some of the most popular comics today including Captain America and Uncanny X-Men.

After the panel I left for lunch, realizing it was three and I had yet to eat anything all day. I ended up not going back, since I think I can probably see everything I need to with one day to go.

Anyone else go to the show? Any good stories?

After much delay at the border I arrived in Seattle just as the last of the rush hour traffic was dying off. Driving via memorized Google guidance, I leave the I5 in search of my hotel The Roosevelt. As I’m checking in I get upgraded from a single room to a queen, which upon inspection seems to simply mean that my bed is larger because the room itself is tiny.

I debate phoning down to the front desk to inquire as to which Roosevelt the hotel is named after, I need to know these things if I’m going to dress appropriately for the evening since Franklin and Theodore are very different styles. A Google search lets me know that it is Theodore, so I don’t bother unpacking my monocle.

My friend, also named Jeff, meets me about an hour later. We’re friends from high school, and he’s one of the few of my friends who’ve made a move to the United States and managed to make it stick. He works in Redmond, but lives in Seattle so I trust him with our evening plans.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have, we end up at Von’s a fake New York style bar that’s attached to the hotel. Yes, my local Seattle Sherpa had guided me to the hotel bar.

It’s not that Von’s in and of itself is bad just that it’s over priced, beer costing a great deal more there than at even the sort of Vancouver bars were they have the classy prostitutes. Hungry I look at the menu, but after spotting deep friend brie I put it aside. I might not be a thin man by any accounts, but the fact that everything on the menu involves a deep fryer scares me. More so after a stop at Jack in the Box in Bellingham reminded me that a large meal at a fast food joint in Canada is about the same as a small or medium here.

The beer is good, and after a frustratingly long wait to be grilled by a suspicious border guard who could not seem to understand why I would be driving to Seattle for a comics convention unless I worked in the industry, it was nice to relax with an old friend. A few tables down someone was talking animatedly about the Messiah Complex storyline in the X-Men comics this year, and I had to grin. It was the sort of nerd talk that one could only find in a hotel bar a few blocks away from where they were holding the comic convention.

ESPN was on the television showing highlights from the Red Wings / Stars series. I felt a little lost when Canadian cultural icon Don Cherry came on the television and began discussing the series for ESPN. There are certain parts of Canada where Cherry is revered as a god, but mostly after years of public gaffs and near racism mostly he’s just the comedic relief on the CBC’s Hockey Night In Canada. Seeing him on ESPN is like having Rush Limbaugh do a weekly thirty minute show live from Ottawa about the day’s events in Parliament.

Finished with my beer and his wine we spend some time trying to flag down a waitress. Since we’d moved from the outside seating area to the bar due to the declining temperature we’re orphan customers. Neither our outside server or the barmaid are particularly interested in us, and it’s not until an elderly couple comes up to the bar next to us and tries to order the most expensive liquor on display that we get anyone to notice us.

In Seattle with a few drinks in us what are two young and vital men to do? Clearly they go across the street and spend the next forty minutes browsing Barnes and Noble. I look for one of Wil Wheaton’s books, since he’s at the convention and I want to have something to get autographed. I have a copy of his first book Just A Geek [am] but it got left in Kelowna during my move to Vancouver. They don’t have a copy, and the ordering option is no option at all. I eventually settle on a discounted Nick Hornby novel, which I did not even realize had been released, and Friday Night Lights (the book not the movie or TV show). Books are shockingly cheaper in the US, more so now that our dollars are basically at par and so I spend less than I would have at a used book store back in Canada.

We exit and make plans for the next day after the convention, and he heads off. I travel up back to the small room, with a Queen bed, and try to find a free source for Wi-Fi so I won’t have to pay the $9.50 a day the hotel charges for their internet access. It’s just a bit past 11, but already the street outside my hotel window is barren. I worry that maybe the hotel front desk staff have not told me about something, like that at midnight is when the werewolves feed, but then I remember where I’m staying.

If there are werewolves here the staff at a hotel named after Theodore Roosevelt will know how to kill them. Had it been Franklin then I’d have reason to worry.

I mean the term “geeks” lovingly of course, especially since I’m one of them. That’s right I’m heading down south from my home in (currently) sunny Vancouver [mbv] to attend the Emerald City Comic Convention [eccc] this weekend at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center.  For the next few days I’ll be a guest blogger on the site, and one of the several of Metblog types at the convention.

If you’ve not yet considered going to the convention this weekend I’d certainly have another think on that one. It promises to be a really cool show, with lots of top name comic book creators there such as Ed Brubaker (he killed Captain America), Dan Didio, Gail Simone and Scott Kurtz.

If you don’t like reading, or looking at colour picture pages, then there’s television stars there to including Julie Benz (Buffy/Angel), Wil Wheaton [wwdn] (from Stand By Me & Star Trek: The Next Generation) and whatever science fiction actors could be coaxed down from Vancouver for the weekend.

All in all it should be a great time. This is the third year in a row I’ll have come down for the show, so that’s just not idle speculation.