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?

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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.