Wizard World

I went with Jordan, his cousin Neil, and Lora to the Wizard World - Chicago convention this past weekend. For the most part, I went mostly out of curiousity because, for whatever reason, my geek gene for comic books has remained stunted over the years. When I was fourteen, I tried to embrace the geek arena of comic books, but it wasn't to be. I didn't care one iota for super heroes. I didn't care about the art or the writing. I really only cared about the collectability of the available product. In my own childish way, I was investing in the future by searching for any issue marked with '#1' on the cover.

That was how I started collecting DuckTales comic books. I really liked the cartoon and since Disney had just started their own publishing company, there were DuckTales comics on the rack with the precious '#1' printed in the corner. Not surprisingly, I did not find any DuckTales comics at the convention, which was stuffed to the brim with colorfully spandexed, tightly packed wads of mighty-muscled meat, dark, noir-like anti-heroes drenched in trenchcoats, and blonde, spikey-haired cherubs with huge, squarish eyes, dagger noses, and swords that would weigh 4000 pounds if they were real. If I had revealed that I was searching for something as cutesy and childish as DuckTales, I might have been thrown out of the convention center by a nerd throng. Anyway, after perusing that link, if I remember the covers well enough, I think I have fifteen of the eighteen issues that were printed. To be honest, I've never been able to find out what they were worth these days until I found that link and I'm plesantly surprised to discover that they have increased in value somewhat. In the end, I guess my investment of about $40 has increased to maybe $80 depending on the condition of the books, but that's better than I had assumed it to be.

Besides DuckTales, the only comics I collected faithfully, were reprints of old EC horror comics like Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror. Those comics were the ones that imprssed me because despite the fact that they were reprints and would probably never increase in value, I still bought them. I liked the stories. I liked the art. Without really knowing it, I was looking at some of the comics that helped usher in the comic industry's banishment to the sterilized realms of children's entertainment. What happened to comics then is trying to happen to video games now. For the sake of the hobby, I hope history is a good teacher because it took comic books forty years to crawl out from under their oppressive legislation and back into adult mainstream entertainment.

On a final note, Jordan purchased starter packs for a few variations of a game entitled HeroClix so we got together last night to play it at his place. It's actually a pretty fun game. The major hurdle for the game is the color coded powers that are marked on various character attributes (speed, attack, defense, etc.). All of the special abilities/powers are sometimes interrelated so for quick gameplay to take place, rote memorization of what each color means for each attribute is a necessity. The root gameplay of attacking and defending is actaully quite simple, but it's these powers that quickly become a tangled web of rules for novices like us. We managed to play through one full game with four characters per side however, and it only took us about an hour and half, most of which was spent with the reference cards and manuals cracked open so that we could deduce what was going on. Once we get faster at remembering the intricacies of the special power rules, we could probably play a full game in about an hour, which is much better than the huge committment that is running a D&D campaign, something that always seems romantically attractive but usually becomes drudgery when trying to balance the schedules of busy adults.