Baltimore Comic Con Sept 8th – 10th 2023

Baltimore Comic Con is one of my favorite conventions. It’s purely comics (or at least 95%) and filled with professionals I’ve followed since childhood. And it’s incredibly humbling still that after the many years I’ve done this con to shake the hands of people like Jose Luis Garcia Lopez and Steve Rude and they know who you are. Also making new friends like Scott Snyder and Bob Hall is what makes this crazy industry worthwhile. 

And speaking of Bob Hall (West Coast Avengers, Shadowman, etc), he was staying at the same hotel as me. Each morning at the complimentary breakfast, we kept running into each other & would chat. Unfortunately he had some bad luck on Friday evening by getting locked out of his room due to the faulty lock mechanism of his door. Since the Hulk wasn’t available to knock his door down (LOL!), the hotel had to move him to a new room. I really hope they refunded his entire stay. Avoid the Sleep Inn on Fallsway St, people!

My new books THE BABY WHO FELL FROM SPACE and GOLDENGIRL AND THE PARTY #2 debuted at the con to rave reviews from pros & attendees. Both with art by Antonio Brandao and colors from me, the first is a kid friendly tale about a baby alien dropped off on a planet for day care but forced to deal with giant Cthuloid monsters! The second is my tribute to the late hip-hop artist MF Doom. Aliens are trying to abduct rapper Kaiju Boy and only GoldenGirl can find out why and protect him. 

I tried to avoid a spending spree this weekend but I had to pick up this BCC exclusive pint glass – AMERICAN FLAGG! In the 80s, indie publishers dragged me back into collecting comics. My holy trinity back then were Matt Wagner’s MAGE, Baron & Rude’s NEXUS, and Howard Chaykin’s FLAGG. Now if you gazed at my living room, you’d see my collection of superhero & Godzilla pint glasses mounted onto shelves around my place. FLAGG is going front and center!

 Of course, the cosplayers were out in force. My fav had to be Warlord, Mike Grell’s creation for DC. An odd observation that while the film BARBIE is wildly popular & generated a billion dollars at the box office, I had only seen one woman cosplay Barbie but there were multiple men wearing KENOUGH t-shirts which was a term used in the film. Weird! Make whatever psychological judgement you want.  A complete gallery is on my Facebook page - /jamesbabbo/

 

Saturday night was for partying as well as the Ringo awards. Congrats to Matt Miner who won for the anthology YOUNG MEN IN LOVE. Izzy Laureno, host of the IzzyVerse web channel, was holding court in the lounge. Later in the evening we ran into Bob Ingersoll whose column about legal issues in story plots ran in Comics Buyers Guide, a publication I had followed for years. We had a fun laugh discussing Daredevil’s legal woes amongst other silliness.

 Lastly I had the strangest commission on Sunday. A new friend, Billy Gee, has an unique collection – a portfolio of trading cards made up of creator self-portraits. And for some reason he asked me to make one! This is going up as my profile pic in social media. 

-jb 9/13/23