We have met the geek, and he is us...

Our hero, Ethan, flanked by a couple of huge Uglydolls

So if you'd told me back in college that I would spend a day ten years later (OK, you got me, 20 years later) heading to a comic convention, I'd have sworn

1 - that you were mistaken

2 - you to secrecy and 

3 - just sworn

Nonetheless, my son Ethan and I headed up to New York today for the New York Comic Con and it was a lot of fun. 

It only occurred to me to head up there several weeks ago when I kept seeing Comic Con mentioned - first it was at Uglydoll creator David Horvath's Uglybog. Then, I saw that author of the wildly popular 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' author Jeff Kinney was planning on being there. Finally, I saw that Mo Willems, who is one of our favorite young child authors, was appearing at Comic Con. I talked to Ethan and asked if he might have interest in heading up, and he was game. 

After reading about how some people waited in line for upwards of four hours to enter the show on Saturday, we decided to leave early. We left at 6 am and met little or no traffic on the way up, getting from our house to New York in less than two hours. 

We found out when we got there that, due to our registration as a 'professional' (store owner), we didn't have to go in the line that the general public entered (aka 'The Cattle Call') - we had our own entrance - which had little or no line. We totally could have slept another hour or so. We stood in line behind Marvin Law - a comic book artist from Toronto, who was awesomely nice. He showed Ethan his portfolio. 

We got in and were inundated by schwag. Free books at one booth, free trinkets at the next, posters here, piles of it. Plus, there were tons of people dressed as their favorite characters as well as the walk around characters. Ethan got his picture taken with a Stormtrooper, with a couple mondo Ugly Dolls and several unidentified super heroes. We also got books signed by Jeff Kinney (see his pic with Ethan)
and Mo Willems. Both Kinney and Willems were kind enough to sign a book for YoYo Joe's. We decided not to wait around for David Horvath, as we figured I might be able to catch up to him at Toy Fair. We did notice the table where he signed autographs on Saturday. We noticed a little nick out of the corner of the table, and saw that David had added his own artistic license to how it appeared.

It was a lot of fun.

On the way home, Ethan said "boy, we saw a lot of geeks today, " to which I replied, "what are you talking about? WE were geeks today!"