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Thanksgiving Weekend Conventions - Convention Scene - 2007 Page 2 of 3 Previous Page Next Page We found some interesting booths at Mid-Ohio Con, including one that took us back a few years to our meeting with writer Max Allan Collins at AnimeIowa. Collins was once the writer for the Dick Tracy daily newspaper comic strip, and it was fun to see this display celebrating Chester Gould, the strip's originator. Around halfway between Chicago and Rockford, Illinois is a Gould museum where you can learn more about the artist and the strip, which was considered dangerously violent in its day. Most people visit this site for its costuming pictures. We missed the costume contest at Starbase Indy but found plenty of costumers at Mid-Ohio on Sunday. Give some credit to this costume commissioning group we found in Columbus, which had some exceptional outfits. A smaller convention gives you the chance to meet and chat with noted artists. Here's Matt Feazell, the creator of the minimalist, absurdist Cynicalman series. Feazell said he gets his best jokes and stories when he goes to parties. We think he was serious about that. Here's a man whis is responsible for more 1960's literacy than most writers and teachers, the legendary Sergio Aragones. This writer learned how to read through issues of Mad Magazine, for which Aragones has been a contributing artist for decades. Aragones said he learned how to read and write English through reading Mad in the 1960's. This site has a link to Aragones through one of his collaborators, artist Stan Sakai, who letters Groo the Wanderer, Aragones' great non-Mad adventure series. Sakai has often attended anime conventions... ..as did another Stan, who brought some of his anime video store inventory southeast from Toledo. Stan's DVD's, along with those from another anime dealer, were legit. We're not certain about the sci-fi DVD's sold by other dealers, but that would a long practice. If something's called "old school" at an anime convention, it came from the 1980's. An "old school" series at a comic convention can go back nearly 100 years. At these events, a series can come from the first half of the 20th century and be considered middle-aged. This was a panel discussion on the Pogo newspaper strip started by the late Walt Kelly in 1948, his life's grand opus that won him a Reuben, the highest honor of the National Cartoonists Society, in 1951. Members of Kelly's family and writer Mark Evanier were on hand for this panel. Page 2 of 3 Previous Page Next Page Thanksgiving Weekend Main Page