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The Alkaline Trio, Wizard World Chicago, and Wall-E

June 30th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in blog, comics, info, random |

bmb This weekend was pretty much 100% bad ass: I attended an Alkaline Trio concert, had the privilege of going to Wizard World Chicago and meeting Brian Michael Bendis (the whole reason for going to the ordeal) along with doing some other awesome stuff throughout the whole convention, and I saw Wall-E with Dallas.

Sweet right? Well, let me elaborate:

Friday:
I worked my normal schedule until 5pm and met a friend of mine to head to Yesterdog. One hot dog was all I needed from that landmark place in Grand Rapids to be ready to go see The Alkaline Trio. Come 7pm, we were let in the doors of the show and stood around for about a half an hour just goofing around until The Fashion made their way to the stage. They were a psudo-pop-punk band with a strange techno feel that was neither good nor bad, but still a listen. They played a 35-minute set and took off leading straight into the band Bayside. They too had an iffy sound, something along the lines of pop-punk, but a tad slower. My friend Tori was very into them, yet they didn’t really hit for me (like a lot of pop-punk bands usually do, if only for a moment). They finished their 45-minute set and after a very boring 35 minute wait, The Alkaline Trio made their way to the stage. Let me tell you, it was fucking incredible. Song after song of perfection and amazing Alkaline Trio-goodness ensued for a little over an hour. They played songs from their last two albums, Crimson, Good Mourning (more notably: “This Could Be Love”, “Mercy Me”, “Time To Waste” and “This Could Be Love”), a few new songs from their album and finished their encore with “Radio” from their album Maybe I’ll Catch Fire. For any Alkaline Trio, such as myself, it was seriously amazing (especially “This Could Be Love.” Boy do I love that song).

Despite being tired, I ended up staying up until 2:30am talking about comics with my buddy Jeff Lanning once I got back from the concert.

Saturday:
Woke up at 4:30am and packed up my laptop and headed out to Chicago with Nick Nelson and Jeff. Coming from Allendale, MI, it was a 3 and a quarter hour drive. Nothing too bad. Luckily for me Nick was ready and awake to drive. We packed up our stuff in his car and began the voyage. We spent about 45 minutes talking about comics and such, until Jeff and I passed out. Nick decided to get Burger King and woke us up somewhere in Indiana (I really am not sure where we were at all really). We walked in and ordered our food, when suddenly I remembered one near-fatal thing: Michigan and Chicago (and Indiana, for that matter) are in different time zones, meaning that 4:30am was 3:30am in Chicago meaning we were going to be an effing our early to our destination. Of course, there was nothing we could do, so we ended up taking our sweet ass time talking and leaving Burger King (I tweeted this at 6:37am EDT). We ended up driving through Gary, IN, and when we finally got to the convention center, there was already a line.

We waited until 9AM CDT to get into the actual convention center, which seemed like forever given that once we got in line it was about 8:30AM CDT. Nevertheless, we got in and immediately got in line for events tickets (mainly to see Batman: Gotham Knight). After about 25 minutes of waiting (around (9:30am) we got 3/4 of the way to the end of the line and were passing the Marvel booth for the convention when we asked people what they were in line for. A few replied, “Brian Michael Bendis signing” to which we three, after about 5 minutes of weighing our options, decided to get in line for too. We ended up finding out that the official, designated “end of line” was a guy about 6 or 7 people in front of us, which meant that we may not be able to get Brian Michael Bendis to sign anything of ours. In case you didn’t know, I am HUGE Brian Michael Bendis fan, as are Jeff and Nick, and really, he was the reason we came to this damn convention, so we were going to be damned if we couldn’t get him to sign something of ours or at least shake his hand. We were stationary in line for about 45 minutes to which BMB started signing people’s stuff. The clock ticked and we were still in line… The official times for signing were from 10:30-11:30am. If your keeping track of time, the signing began at about 10:15am and were sure we’d be able to get stuff signed. At 11:15am, some guy from Marvel came and pulled the “end of line” sign from the guy who was holding it. Nick, Jeff and I were effing ecstatic because this meant we were going to meet BMB! And yes, we did meet him and yes, we did get our comics signed (I got House Of M #1-8, Ultimate Spiderman #1 and Ultimate Origins #1 signed!). It was soooo fucking worth the wait, and definitely worth missing out on Batman: Gotham Knight tickets.

It was about 11:45am when we finished things up, and knowing that there was a panel for Marvel’s Secret Invasion at 1pm, we decided to take a look at some of the vendors and some artist’s booths for a bit before heading to the panel. A few cool things caught our eyes, but nothing fantastic, so we headed to the panel. We got there for the last half of the previous panel–something about the DC Universe–and got some sweet seats once people left. As expected, the panel was fucking amazing. Brian Michael Bendis’ Secret Invasion is going to finish amazingly and you can read more about the panel at the new comic book site I write for with Nick once he finishes his post on the panel. Some stuff I dug were the disses on DC, the hints at tons of new comics from the post-Secret Invasion, and Brian Reed’s hilariousness. We also found out that Michael Turner passed away. A sad day in comics.

Following the panel (2pm) we walked around some more and decided on getting some pizza… what a rip off. $3.50 for a slice and $3.00 for a 12oz bottle of water… whatever.

For about 2 hours we ended up looking at Trade Paper Backs at a few vendors ($5 for a $13.99 TPB!? Hell yes!) and I actually bought 4 TPBs myself. We walked some more, saw a few artists and a few T-Shirt vendors–the latter being complete rip-offs with $20-$25 a shirt–and happened to come across a vendor selling comic book bags/boards on the cheap–$8 for 100 bags/boards. I was super excited given that last week I bought bags & boards that weren’t the right size… But really it was cool to see a bunch of the artist booths and such. Boy oh boy there were a ton of vendors selling old comics on the cheap… Tons of vendors selling single issues of comics for $0.25 and all sorts of cool deals on things (not just comics).

Anyways, 5 o’clock rolled around and we three sat in on the “Cup O’ Bendis” panel (normally it would be called “Cup O’ Joe” but Joe Quesada wasn’t able to make it to the convention and Brian Michael Bendis ended up “hosting” it. Some cool stuff was revealed and a lot of good questions were asked. Marvel basically told everyone that they plan on doing some sweet stuff in the future (ie. a new Dr. Strange comics). I dug the more disses on DC (six minutes in haha), more of Brian Reed’s hilarity, the “ask a good question and get a sandwhich” ongoing joke and Brian Michael Bendis’ ability to be fucking amazing. It was an awesome panel. Again, Nick will be blogging about it very soon on our new comic book site, so check there for more details.

We came out of that panel and were exhausted. I picked up one more TPB and we walked back over to a booth headed by an artist named Marc Wolfe. We had seen some of his art earlier in the day and were really blown away by it (especially his Wolverine and Gambit) so the three of us ended up buying prints from him ($40 for 3). I got Gambit, of course, Nick got Wolverine, and Jeff got Nightcrawler. They were pretty damn sweet, especially since Marc Wolfe is an amazing artist and because he signed our prints. I picked up a Sin City T-shirt and we decided to leave after that. It was, by far, one the most fun days I have ever had.

The drive back felt a bit longer, but we talked a lot about comics and, stangely, some politics. We got back at about 11 EDT and and a few of my friends came over… despite being tired out of my mind and feeling sore as fuck from carrying my backpack around all day (which I will definitely not do for any other all-day convention ever again) and from carrying my boards & bags along with 4 TPBs in a bag for most of the day we decided to just hang around my apartment until about 2:30am. I ended up in bed at about 3:30am– wall-e Gunther wasn’t feeling to good, so I was half-watching after him and I took a shower.

Sunday:
Didn’t wake up until 4:30pm. So bad, I know, but holy shit I was tired. Dallas woke me up and I got dressed. After about 30 minutes of just lounging around and stuff we headed out to celebrate something (:-D).. hehe. We got dinner at Logan’s. Let me just say, I was completely deceived as to what an 11oz Sirloin is on their menu. I thought I was getting a steak, but fuck, I got 11oz of grilled ground beef with a tangy sauce and some onions on top. It was tasty for a bit, but I couldn’t finish it. It was too greasy and blah.

We finished dinner and decided suddenly to see Wall-E. Let me just say this movie was the cutest and coolest movies I have seen in a very long time. The whole movie is just stunning visually (especially since the local theatre has HD projectors). The whole movie Dallas was just laughing and saying “Aww. That is so fucking cute.” And it really was. I don’t want to write a whole review, but I had no problems with it at all, especially it being a kids movie, and the story had a great flow and was amazing for having the main characters have no real dialogue. Kudos to you Pixar and Disney, another well done film. My recommendation for this film is to just go see it. Period. (Also, I laughed out loud at the Apple ‘gong’ when Wall-E was fully charged. Way to go Steve Jobs and your influence at Pixar. haha)

So, overall, a great weekend. I loved it all. Although next year, maybe I’ll be better prepared for a full comic book convention and plan my sleep-schedule/inventory more carefully (haha).