In case you didn't know, ConnectiCon is a once yearly event held at the Hartford (CT) Convention Center. The event itself centers around the notion of bring multi-genre geeks together. That is to say when you walk the halls of the ConnectiCon you will encounter a largely Anime crowd peppered with those who follow webcomics, fantasy, StarWars, gaming, comic books, Magic, tabletop gaming, etc.

Now, for the sake of unity and cohesion, we will consider the beginning of ConnectiCon 2007 to be the moment we started planning for it. As alway I asked to be put on as many panels as possible. That is where I am most comfortable, and because GU has such a relatively small following at the ConnectiCon I'm not left sitting at a table doing nothing. Well, this year, I was assigned to one panel and I would be sharing it with Hawk from AppleGeeks, and Garth from Comedity. So, I quickly requested booth space and began collecting those items I figured I'd need for the event. I wasn't overly interested in the idea of having a lot of merchandise as I consider such a small booth (8'x8') to be useful for little more than meeting/greeting fans. So, the original concept was to remove the table and chairs entirely, leaving a small area through which vistors could flow, shake a hand, or laugh at some ridiculous "Con" remark.

I began the booth design with a 7' tall 8' wide, black, velcro-faced popup. Initially the plan was to have a 7x4' banner of the "dead bodies" at the bottom the Ding! Panel wrapped into the concave front and topped with an 8x2' "GUComics.Com" banner. But, the company that produced these banners for us dropped the ball and the quality was terrible. So, we had to return them and make last minute changes to fill the space. What we ended up with was a lot of printed materials, some velcro tabs for placement, and a good deal of merchandise (posters, postcards, stickers) to fill the table that now had to be returned to the design. We had a handful of the new black GU shirts that ZeStuff produced for us and had shipped to the convention in less than a week. Kudos to Pierre and Simon for getting that squared away for us in such short order. Finally, my favorite piece, a 6' tall corrugate plastic Ted standup. He was supposed to only be 5'10" but what's 2 inches amongst friends?

For the most part everything fit into a rolling case that doubled as a podium. But Ted, becoming the real world pain in my ass that until now he'd only been in the comics, had to be carried onto each plane and stowed in the attendants' closet. Meaning... Ted rode in first class while Taks and I flew coach. And where I'm not 100% certain, I'm fairly positive we flew into Connecticut sitting beside Caitlin Glass (The voice of Winry in the Full Metal Alchemist anime series) another guest of the convention.

When we arrived at the hotel (Thanks Larom for picking us up at Bradley), we went immediately to the UPS store in the hotel lobby to check on the state of our popup. We had to pay extra money beyond what we'd been quoted for the store to "handle" the large package. And we found that the entire case had been tweaked to the point that several of the locks/latches had to be untwisted before we could actually open it. The booth went up quickly, without much of a hitch. And where traffic was (expectedly) slow, we still had a good time... despite being molested endlessly by Hawk w/ rubberbands and Brain (8-bit Theatre) turning everything at our table upsidedown, backwards, etc.

After the first real night of the Con, Taks, my pal Richard, and I went out for some late dinner with Steve from Dueling Analogs, and a smattering of guys from the artist alley. They will have to forgive me, I'm terrible with names... and urls apparently. (Send me an email, I'll get you in the link list here.) With that in mind let me pass out some further Con Linkage. Please hit each of the links and dig through their respective archives:

In the booth to our left was one of my favorite Con attendees, Mookie of Dominic Deegan. He's a walking ball of Vegan charisma and deserves any compliment we can lay upon him. Beside him was Brian Clevinger of 8-bit Theatre. He's currently working with Scott Wegener on Atomic Robo (from Red 5 Comics) which will be hitting shelves next month. Tell your local comic shop to order them or suffer the consequences. Just beyond them was Hawk and Ananth of Applegeeks, two of our favorite webcomic-ers. Behind them was Brian Wilson of Hookie Dookie Panic. To his left was Chris Malone of Blue and Blond who reminds us every year that GU helped start him down the path of webcomic production. And out somewhere in the dealer's room was Garth Graham from Comedity, who, as far as I can tell, could use some help with basic Mac use.

Nothing personal anyone that's left out, this spot is just reserved for those I got to speak with.

Attendance at the Con seemed to be up again this year. Which, as you probably know, makes me very happy. Matt, Brianna, and their staff treat us very well. (Thanks Chris for getting us back to the airport safely.) It's the primary reason we return every year. And hope that GU will continue to be invited for years to come. And hopefully more of you will come out to meet and hang out with us next year. Mark it on your calendars, schedule the time off, and start saving up now.

By the way, the one panel (Advanced Photoshop Techniques) I did with Hawk and Garth, except for a dime throwing incident, went over pretty well. The room was full and attentive. I apologize to the gentleman who won the 6x8 Intuos giveaway (donated by Wacom).

Brian piqued my interest

Originally Posted by Brian Clevinger:

Thanks to Woody's tireless efforts, the world now knows the horrible goat-related secret of my college days.

Sounds like it was a fun trip. I'd like to go someday and meet my favorite artists.

I would love to have gone to Conneticon. I will have to try to go in the future.