Wizard World St. Louis: Local Con Makes Good

People often ask me, “Jim, we are planning to take a vacation this summer in your hometown of St. Louis; what are the ‘don’t miss’ sights and events in the area?” As an unofficial ambassador to the Gateway City, I always give them the same answer without hesitation: “What? Oh, no. Do not do that.”

I’m kidding, of course. People rarely ask me that.

Loop, and also Hoodie.

I have no problem with St. Louis– I’m free to leave at any time– but this town has collective low self esteem. Maybe everyone is this way about where they grew up, but very few things seem interesting after you’re exposed to them every day. It gets hard to believe anything amazing might happen. There is a gigantic silver arch looming over the city, visible for miles around, and when I see it I think, “Okay, so east is that way.”

That is why I took in the news that Wizard World was coming to St. Louis for the first time with excitement and dread in equal measure. This was a real organization, booking a real venue, and bringing some real guests with them. Artists and writers I would expect in Chicago or Seattle, to say nothing of the Stan Lees and Lou Ferrignos (Ferrignoes?) and Walking Dead cast members. And when they get here, they’ll be greeted by a line of eight guys wearing Big Bang Theory t-shirts and six guys who thought they were in line for Rams tickets. Please, city, try not to embarrass me in front of Stan Lee.

I needn’t have worried.

I should have known: St. Louis was hungering for a party like this. We are quietly a Mecca of comic book fandom. Other people complain about having trouble finding a shop in their town; I pass at least three on my way to work and can think of several more. Jim Lee, Steve Gerber, Denny O’Neil, Roy Thomas, Lee Falk, Chris Samnee, Cullen Bunn, and Matt Kindt are all either from here or ended up here, and that’s just off the top of my head. Despite all that, we have never had a convention with the scope of Wizard World, and when it finally arrived it was like a Slurpee machine in the Sahara. It was a huge, joyous, elbow-to-elbow success.

While the show had its share of people who were just there to see Randy Orton or get Tom Felton’s autograph, I was impressed by how much love the smaller, local guys got as well. I talked to Adron Buske and Travis Nuckolls, writer and colorist of the weekly webcomic Loop & Hoodie, and they seemed to be handing out ashcans as quickly as they could stock the booth. (Artist Dan Cassity was also there, but I didn’t talk to him as much because he, a relatively unknown artist, had already gotten so many sketch requests on day one that he would have to do/deliver some of them digitally after the con. He barely looked up from his pencils the whole time.) Maybe I was projecting, but I assumed the creators who weren’t “famous” spent the whole convention trying to catch people’s eyes and hawking their wares to skeptics. That was not at all the case for the Loop & Hoodie crew; according to Buske, they had a steady stream of people insanely curious about their process and workflow, especially kids, who not only liked the work they were doing but wanted to do the work they were doing. I hope it felt as great for them to experience as it felt for me to witness.

(I really like the look of this Loop & Hoodie, in case you can’t tell, and not just because it takes place in my old neighborhood. Cassity’s art has a less shroomed-out Humberto Ramos thing going on that is right in my bullseye.)

If I was impressed by the traffic at the Loop & Hoodie booth, I was blown away by what was going on at the Rocketbot booth. Rocketbot is a homegrown community of up-and-coming comic creators who host their webcomics on the site. They share, critique, and generally inspire one another to up their game. While Loop & Hoodie were peddling ashcans and sketches, Rocketbot was selling a full trade paperback anthology from a wide variety of the site’s creators. This $20 volume, an anthology with no unifying theme to the stories by wildly different creators who have little to no name recognition, appeared to be moving as steadily as Scott Pilgrim the whole time I was there. If by some miracle that book even came out from a publisher you’d heard of, they would name it Immediately Cancelled Comics, and these gents were moving units. I was proud of my people.

And I wasn’t the only one. As I meandered on Saturday, I came across a booth devoted to shooting a documentary about the St. Louis comic book scene. Now, since hi def cameras started coming in boxes of Lucky Charms, it has seemed like everyone is making a documentary that they’re about to lose interest in (I saw more than a few would-be iFanboys this weekend) so I greeted this booth with some skepticism. Then they caught me sneaking a picture of them, and the next thing I knew I was miked and sitting under a lighting rig. They turned out to be really nice, enthusiastic kids who knew what they were doing and were having a blast doing it, and before I knew it I was enjoying what they were doing, too. The experience seemed to capture the spirit of the weekend perfectly.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, some of them with a blizzard that is somehow happening during the first week of spring and making us feel like we are about to go full end-of-The-Shining if this winter does not end soon for the love of God and all that is holy. Happily, though, the weekend ended without St. Louis embarrassing me in front of Stan. Wizard World St. Louis could have easily been mistaken for one of the bigger, more established cons, with all of the features of an annual fixture and all the creator facetime, short lines, and other perks of a smaller event. Wizard World 2014 had already been announced by Saturday night, and I already can’t wait. You did me proud, Gateway City.

Jim Mroczkowski posted a bunch of pictures from the weekend. As did many others, surely.