nixsight

I’ve read a couple of write-ups about the Bristol Comic Expo 2009, & I’m sure that between them, & the various podcasts around covering the event, they’ll give a better reckoning of the event than I could, but the con each year is a big deal for me so it seems odd not to mention it.

The convention was reduced from previous years, from two and a bit days to two, and from the previous quite large railway station hall & Ramada Hotel to just the hotel.

I think people were expecting the event to be disappointing, especially with the limited amount of space and subsequent small number of available tickets, but with the Small Press Expo (SPExpo) taking place at the Mercure hotel just around the corner on the Saturday, and hastily affiliated with the main event, I was cautiously optimistic.

(This is of course all bullshit. The fact is I knew that people I enjoyed drinking with would be there, and a late night hotel bar, so it was always going to be groovy.)

It was an early start for me, especially for a Saturday, and I arrived before checking-in time at the Ramada to complete chaos, as small crowds gathered in clusters and went nowhere very much. I got the crowd-fear (note: not really) and decided to go find my de facto con-padres, Tim Keable and Andrew Cheverton, who I knew had a table at the small press thing. I stowed my bag with the very nice hotel reception fellow, and went looking.

This proved to be the one real sticking point of the weekend – There was no obvious signage at the main con for the Mercure event at that point in the day, and for all I know for the rest of the day, and I had to ask a slightly bewildered member of convention staff for directions – itself not a problem, but it raised an eyebrow – if you’re relying on people to ask, it doesn’t really feel like you’re supporting the relationship between events.

So, anyway, small press event. The first thing you notice is the obvious contrast between the two venues. The Mercure convention rooms are on the 4th or 5th floor, heavily windowed and as such give the impression of airiness and space. The Ramada is, from the off, an oddly subterranean affair – the main entrance to the hotel itself looks like a side-door from an open car-park, and you go down corridors and up stairs that don’t have any exposure to natural light just to get to the reception area. In fact, you can spend a day in the bar and convention areas down there and never see natural light until you go out to the bijou smoking annex off the bar – which smells of cigarettes – or you go down for breakfast in the morning.

The Ramada’s restaurant hall/breakfast room is a completely different affair, by the way. Compared to the rest of the place, it is luxurious and nicely designed, with what passes for a great view in that part of town out of curved panoramic windows.

In previous years, the Angry Candy boys have been cramped into a noisy, stuffy hall, in very cramped conditions, but at the Mercure, they had a view! Right behind them! Of the river Avon! Peet Clack and Paul Rainey, on the other side of the hall, could see council flats and grime, but beyond, undulating green hills! It was curiously like civilisation had found its way to a comic con.

What they didn’t have, at that time of the morning, was all that many punters, but that picked up a lot by early afternoon, as people found their way over from the Ramada. The wide avenues between tables meant there was still plenty of room to get around, which again is pretty unheard of for a con.

I’ve noticed that after the several year hiatus I took recently from comic conventions, I’ve become a much less confident visitor to the events, which makes for a muted experience – I get panicked if I feel too much pressure to buy stuff, and find it hard to ask for sketches and such – but luckily Chev and Tim didn’t seem to mind having me around, and the chaps on either side of them were on one side very nice, and on the other very entertaining, if a little nerve-jangling.
(An aside – something I’ve noticed about my behaviour when in a relationship is that I become a marginally more attractive individual to the opposite sex, and I think this is because I become remarkably casual and unconcerned with their attention – thus somehow drawing more of it. Peculiarly, at conventions this effect fades away, as I become suddenly very concerned by any attention, and I feel twitchy and shifty. This seems to make women at the events a bit edgy around me – I wish I could explain that I’m like that with everybody at them, but that might make things worse!)

Not sure entirely when the delightful Mr Baillie turned up, but I know that it was after my return from checking in and reading my first comics haul at my hotel room. I know for certain that it was just before I bought one of these (a transaction of which there is photographic evidence, a little down the page).

I also bumped into Selina Lock and Jay Eales, of Factor Fiction, at different times, and had a bit of a chat and that. They are nice, and their Girly Comic is a bit of a trailblazer in terms of small-press anthologies, so it’s always cool to touch base with them.

Everyone seemed pretty pleased with themselves at the small press event, and word coming from the main site was that it was a bit of a clusterfuck to get anything much done outside of the bar, so Tim, Chev and I returned directly to our hotel rooms, ignoring the throng.

I absolutely failed to watch any porn on the hotel room TV – something I have failed to do in every hotel that I have ever stayed in – but I did read some more comics, before cleaning up and heading out for a meal at a lovely Chinese restaurant with Tim, Chev, and their friend Jim.

(Jim, incidentally, is very nice, but a bit of an alpha geek – he corrected me on two or three TV sci-fi talking points I raised, so I deferred to him and just enjoyed the company. It later turned out I was right, but then, it normally does.)

The Ramada bar was still roaring pleasantly on our return, and saying goodnight to Tim, Chev and I jumped into the drunken mess with both feet.

A timeline at this point gets a bit sketchy.

At some point we were baffled by what later turned out to be “Most Bladdered” – a drinking event apparently showcased by Messrs Tony Lee and Dan Boultwood, involving “Most Haunted” and drinking. Some time before the gentlemen in question exploded out of the room, we were accosted by two charming young chaps who wanted us to say something into a video camera. Mr Cheverton, as we all know, is in the Witness Protection Programme, and declined, but an enjoyable distraction followed wherein we talked nonsense at the two boys before Lee and Boultwood appeared and forced themselves upon me, the camera, and posterity.

At some point we found David Baillie in the bar, and… some other people? Two from Tripwire (one of whom I am reliably informed was Joel Meadows) and one… who was very nice and lasted most of the night… called Leon Hewitt. I started some kind of mini explosion of religious debate between two of them, discussed the relative failure to astound of the “Watchmen” movie adaptation with another. I think I may have unnerved myself with a Liam Sharp up at the bar. There was some discussion of Schmurgen Jonerhaffs. Chev left for bed at some point around 2.30? Mr Baillie left for his – apparently much nicer – hotel at 5am.

I was asleep by 5.30, with a pressing need to be up in time for the legendary Ramada breakfast buffet as early as possible.

I timed it badly, arriving around a half hour before Tim and Chev at about 9am, and eating alone. This would have been a lonely affair, had I not lovely scampering Miss Caffeine and her faux refined chaperone Mrs Cholesterol to keep me company. Later, when the men arrived to share juice and more coffee with me, there was more discussion of Schmurgen, so I suppose in some ways he kept me company too.

I was pretty hung over for the rest of the day, to be honest, but through this haze, the main convention taking place in the Ramada actually seemed pretty swell. Sure, it was cut down, but that made it manageable, and I got to meet and chat to Ian Sharman for awhile, as well as taking in the sights. At around this point I also talked really briefly to one of the Geek Syndicate guys, and gave him one of the Elephant Words cards I’d been gingerly handing out all weekend – he seemed nice, but I don’t know if anything will ever come of that.

The convention took a while to wind down for us. We made a base for ourselves on a sofa just near to the Ramada entrance, as Tim’s friend Theresa from Bristol visited, and we numbly took in the passers by, but the event still seemed pretty busy. There was a point at which Kieron Gillen nodded and sort of waved acknowledgement in my direction – something that he always does and I return and appreciate, even though I always suspect that he doesn’t actually know me, but just recognises me from me buying a mini-comic from him some years ago – I have that kind of face, apparently. Chev and I talked for some time to the lovely Bevis Musson, who I think is just awesome, and to Karen Rubins, who knows Chev and Tim quite well, was one of the creators on some of the better comics I had bought the previous day, and kept feeding us chocolate snacks.

My last ditch purchase, from the lovely Chris Staros, was a bundle of nearly $100 worth of awesome Top Shelf books, for a round £40. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal in the economy of two years ago, but for 2009 exchange rates, it’s a considerable bargain. The chap is becoming a bit of a Bristol convention legend, and rightly so – the quality of his company’s output is consistently brilliant, and it’s clear – from his eleventh hour convention generosity to his manner – that he loves and is in love with the medium, and the events.

So, that was Bristol 2009. David Baillie wrote the whole thing up for Down The Tubes, and Kev F Sutherland shared his own entirely different and second-hand experiences for the same site. There were a lot of things missing from this year’s show – such as Budgie/Gibbons’ famous Hyphotheticals panel – but everything that was there was so tightly packed in that it was difficult to imagine anything else being crammed in.

Lots of fun, and thanks to Mr Cheverton for helping to get me home afterwards!