headshot geek issue 4

1 HEADSHOT GEEK / / Is sue 4I S S U E 4 : D O O M T O T O M B • N E W J E R S E Y C O N V E N T I O N • V I D E O G A M E C A S I N O

No MercyAn Interview with Alex de Campi

on Her Newest Thriller

Also Inside: A Closer Lookat The Beauty

2 HEADSHOT GEEK / / Is sue 4

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Video Game Casino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PAGE 04

No Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PAGE 08

From DOOM to Tomb . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PAGE 14

The Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PAGE 14

Gay Fish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PAGE 20


Editor/DesignerPriscilla Wilson

WritersJeff GuerreroJim LeyvaRoss MaszczakBrett RoseEva Sarracco

© Headshot Geek, 2015

Editor/DesignerPriscilla Wilson

WritersJeff GuerreroJim LeyvaRoss MaszczakBrett RoseEva Sarracco

© Headshot Geek, 2016

From DOOM to Tomb, page 14

CasinoVideo Game

Photography by Brett Rose

HEADSHOT GEEK / / Is sue 4 5

A G E O F T H E M I C R O T R A N S A C T I O NB y B r e t t R o s e

continued >>

Casino


Casinos utilize a variety of tactics to persuade people to start playing and gaming is no different. The most obvious example in gaming is free-to-play games. A free-to-play (F2P) game is one that is normally completely free to download, but has in game purchases known as mi-crotransactions. A microtransaction al-lows a player to spend real world money for digital goods that will give them an advantage in the game. These micro-

transactions are completely optional, but developers dangle them out there like the forbidden fruit. One of the first F2P games I played gave you the option to spend $99.99 for the “chance” to gain an upper hand. I put the word chance in quotations because a random number generator decided whether or not you

obtained the resources you needed. I know of several people who have spent over $10,000 in the past several years on that game alone. I have also seen numer-ous news reports about teenagers spend-ing thousands of dollars on microtrans-actions by stealing their parents’ credit card. The casual gamer is not going to be engulfed by the microtransactions and need to get ahead, but even the casual

gamer is coerced by other shiny objects. High scores, trophies, achievements, and other goal oriented reward systems run rampant in games. After complet-ing these achievements gamers are often rewarded with content normally only available to those who made microtrans-actions. By getting a taste of what the

microtransactions are all about the once casual gamer might take a step over to the other side. Most people have the self-control to manage their money efficiently so going broke is not an issue, but spending mon-ey is not the only problem. While at the airport several weeks ago I saw a family of four sitting quietly waiting for their airplane to arrive. An hour passed by and I do not believe one family member mut-tered a single word. All four individuals were so immersed in their phones that I would not have been surprised if they had missed their flight. I see the same situation all the time at restaurants and I have been a frequent participant. My

wife is a saint for putting up with my gaming habits, but I think me asking her to play my game while we were on a road trip was a little too much to handle. Microtransactions are taking over gaming and I do not see that changing any time soon. More and more games are including them because people are willing to spend the money. The gam-bling aspect of these microtransactions is worrying especially considering a vast amount of gamers are teenagers. Com-paring video games to casinos might sound absurd, but if you really think about it they are not all that different. Hopefully the age of the microtransac-tion will be a short-lived one otherwise the future of gaming is going down a road I do not want to take.

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER I collected trading cards and I always joked about how buying a pack of trading cards was equivalent to gambling at the casino. You were spending money in hopes of getting the “perfect” card. Video games are now starting to follow the same path. It is extremely evident in mobile gaming, but is quickly transitioning to console and PC gaming as well. The age of the microtransaction is upon us.

By getting a taste of what the microtransactions are all about the once casual gamer might take a step over to the other side .

NoMercyB y J i m L e y v a

Mercy A GROUP OF PRINCETON bound students head to Central America on a humanitarian trip to build schools. The diverse and carefree group of teens quickly find themselves caught in the middle of an unexpected adventure filled with fear, danger and tragedy. No Mercy’s Alex de Campi spent some time with Headshot Geek to discuss their realistic and terrifying environment, as well as their unique cast of characters.

HEADSHOT GEEK: What can your new readers expect from No Mercy?

ALEX DE CAMPI: I like to say it’s a book about texting, emoji and sudden death... A John Hughes script directed by Sam Peck-inpah. A group of 20 incoming college kids

take a pre-freshman trip to Central America to build schools and to meet other fresh-men. It goes very badly wrong very quickly, and the kids find themselves with almost no adult supervision, in the middle of the wil-derness, with no cell signal and very little in the way of survival skills. Things get worse

from there. The book is really a massive drama/horror story about that age in your life when you think you’re indestructible, and you think you’re finally getting to be the person you are inside, and how wrong you are on both accounts.

HG: In an industry full of stories about superheroes and the undead, what was your inspiration for the more realistic terror of No Mercy.

ADC: I’m so bored of high concept stories. She’s an immortal vampire! He’s afraid of the dark! THEY FIGHT CRIME. I start out with the best of intentions to write com-ics like a normal person, comics with talking cats in them or flying or ghosts... but real life is so goddamn fascinating. I love history.

I love things that actually have happened, or could happen. And once my characters start coming alive, I find I just... don’t need the chatty felines or the spectral visitors. This book has so much drama and suspense, just with the kids and their choices and their environment. Sometimes I think relying on

too much high-concept / powers / super-natural makes a writer too able to make lazy or hollow choices. I’m a huge theatre fan, and a lot of great theatre is basically four people talking to each other in a room for two hours (bit more if it’s Eugene O’Neill). That’s... how you do it. That’s the basic level of skill you as a writer have to achieve, in my mind. If you can’t make a story gripping just using actual humans interacting with each other in real ways, don’t fucking go and add spaceships. That doesn’t make it better.

HG: No Mercy has a very unique cast of characters. Did you draw upon any personal influences when creating the characters?

ADC: And she saith unto him, “my name is Legion; for we are many”. Every writer

– every good writer – harbors a whole host of different people inside them. It’s one of the joys of writing – this permission to be other people, to feel things and examine the unrealized possibilities of your self and of selves close to you. I’ve been Travis; Charlene; Gina... I still am Tiffani.... their weaknesses


It goes very badly wrong very quickly, and the kids find themselves with almost no adult supervision, in the middle of the wilderness, with no cell signal, and very little in the way of survival skills .


and foibles have been mine as well. Their strengths, too. Maybe not in those exact ways, but close enough. (Bad writers only write a single, indivisible self, the same damn character in every story, but sometimes if you really commit to just writing that one damn character, you break on through from the other end of the spectrum and become great. It helps if you realize it, though.)

HG: Have you found yourselves having a “favorite” character in terms of either story or illustration?

ADC: My favorites rotate. Right now my favorite is one of the moms that we haven’t even met yet (and may not until the fourth arc). I love ‘em all, though. Even Chad. HG: This is one of the first times I can recall seeing an abundance of tweets, texts

and emojis in a comic. Was that to appeal to a younger audience or just another aspect of the “realistic” environment?

ADC: I’m sorry, what? I was just send-ing this Snapchat. No, seriously, the book encapsulates my average daily level of engagement with social media. It’s actually probably on the low side for a real teen-ager. It always amuses me how little, in a progressive, visual art form such as comics, people truly visually experiment, even to the extent of trying to capture the way we

communicate with each other right now, IRL. So yeah, hella emoji, you will deal. (I never attempt to appeal to a particular audi-ence. It feels too much like sucking up, and then one gets terribly upset when that quite smart audience totally see through your ef-forts and dismisses you. Only write to please

yourself; at least then you’ll have one reader who likes you.)

HG: There were some pretty intense scenes in the story. What is the process in creating some of the more intense moments?

ADC: People always consider the violent mo-ments to be the intense ones, but I can write those all day long. They come easily to me. I grew up on Peckinpah and exploitation, and I’ve seen real violence, how it explodes in unexpected ways. For me, though, I like

to mess with people.... to try to match that intensity and casual brutality with scenes where it’s just a couple people talking. I think Issue 9, there are a couple page turns early in the issue when a mother and daughter are discussing something, and though nothing physically violent happens, it is an incredibly

Physical violence is just a bunch of red squiggles on a page, if it doesn’t have an emotional punch too


emotionally violent scene. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say: physical violence is just a bunch of red squiggles on a page, if it doesn’t have an emotional punch too, if you don’t care what happens to the characters. So the process is I make you care. I make you care in the way that Park Chan-Wook did in Mr Vengeance, with these long, slower scenes of people just hanging out being people, sweet, fallible, embarrassing people. HG: Some of the darker moments throughout the story have created both strong friendships as well as intense hatred throughout the group. Will this continue as their struggles are sure to escalate?

ADC: Well, some of the friendships will fracture, and some of the intense hatreds have not reached their peak yet. So yes, the interpersonal drama will continue apace.

HG: It seems that the story goes directly from one cliffhanger to another? Is it diffi-cult to maintain such a fast paced story line?

ADC: My stories are very dense. A lot goes on

in an issue, so yes, while we do (deliberately, and in the best pulp fashion) end every issue on a cliffhanger, you feel like you’ve gotten a lot before you get to that edge. I worried I wouldn’t be able to maintain it (the terror of the artist: the muse will desert me!) but we’ve written up through issue 9 and I’ve outlined the next two arcs and the cliffhangers will reli-ably continue. I’m actually stupidly proud at the number of mic drops / cliffhangers in Issue 8. Of course in many ways the book was set up to be like this, with my aiming for an over-all storytelling structure of discovery similar to Death Note or Attack on Titan. HG: These kids appear to get into situations that constantly go from bad to worse. Will they ever catch a break or will they truly find No Mercy as the story progresses?

ADC: Oh, some will catch breaks. Possibly not the ones you thought would, and not in the way you predict they will, but some do. And we also have some new kids.

HG: There were several mentions of “El In-dio” in the story. This name carried a certain

level of fear to those in the know. What can you tell us about “El Indio”?

ADC: You will meet El Indio in this arc. Much will be revealed. Not as much as in the next arc, where he has quite a mo-ment, but you’ll meet him. No Mercy has little eggs, little clues to its future scattered throughout its early issues. I’m glad you caught that one.

HG: What can you tell your readers about the progression of the story and the out-come of the students?

ADC: The story from here progresses out-wards as well as forwards. This arc, by the end of it, we start to bring in what is going on back home in the US, with parents and the university administrators. And of course what the twitter reaction was.


I REMEMBER WHEN I FIRST fell in love with video games. At 10 years old, my dad brought home our very first computer. He downloaded DOOM onto our MS-DOS system and so began my relationship with first-person shooter gaming. It was (and still is) my all-time favorite type of genre. The invulnerability and ammo codes are still burned into my brain over 20 years later. DOOM’s immersive 3D graphics as well as the available weapons arsenal became prototypical for future first person shooter games. Since DOOM, Bioshock became another one of my personal favorite first person shooter games. It would have been crazy for me to write about influential first person shooter games without mention-ing Bioshock. Taking into consideration the available weapons options coupled with the creepiness of the imaging, both games have been highly significant in my gaming life. After my initial experience with PC video games through DOOM, I had a range

of consoles including the original Nintendo, Atari Jaguar, Sega and PlayStations. These days I am an Xbox enthusiast. But systems aside, there are certain games that make you remember the excitement of your first gam-ing experience. Although not a first-person shooter game, I have always loved the Tomb Raider franchise. Besides DOOM, Tomb Raider has had an important influence on me that goes beyond gaming. I was in my early teenage years when I played as Lara Croft on Playstation. I was more of a tomboy who would rather play and explore outside than have tea parties or play with dolls. Seeing a woman as an adventurous, Indiana Jones-type of charac-ter, Lara Croft quickly became my female video game inspiration. I enjoyed being able to play as a female protagonist in a video game since my initial experience playing Ms. Pac-Man. Of course there have been some bad-ass female characters in games including Kitana (Mortal Kombat), Princess

Zelda (Legend of Zelda) and Chun-Li (Street Fighter). But there was something about Lara Croft that made her more special to me. She was certainly never a damsel in distress, and she was always traveling and ex-ploring. From the initial Tomb Raider video game up until the most recent game, there is also a lot of gameplay available through exploration. Tomb Raider also set the template for other exploration games such as the Uncharted series. I recently invested in the Xbox One for the sole purpose of playing Rise of the Tomb Raider. We already have a PS4 and I would have just waited for it to come out for that console, but ended

up getting the XB1 sooner than planned so that I could play my beloved game. We all have these nostalgic stories of how we became gamers and what our favorite games and consoles preferences are. It is fun to reminisce and share these stories. Some of us have very similar stories. For somepeople like me, the first person shooters pioneered their interest in gaming. For others it is role playing, strategy or sports games. Whatever your preference in game type, we can all agree that these games shaped not only our childhood, but almost every stage of our lives.

DOOMA LOVE STORYBy Eva Sarracco

FromtoTomb

Beautythe

BeautyTHE NEW COMIC BOOK THAT TESTS POSITIVE

By Jeff Guerrero

continued >>


the same. I started out wanting to draw these things back in the nineties. Like most people, I tried the route of showing my (rather rough) portfolio around at conventions. After more than a few rejections, I decided to make my own thing. That went well for me. One thing led to another. I did creator owned. I did smaller press stuff. I worked for Marvel, then DC. Finally, now, nearly fifteen years later, I’m back doing my own thing. When It comes to my work process, things get a little ridiculous. I pretty much work constantly. I tend to get up around noon, have a bite to eat and then get to work drawing. I pick up my sons from school around 3:00pm. We hang out for a while, play video games, grab a snack, and maybe run to the comic shop. I’ll usually let them get to homework and stuff and then work for another hour or so until around 5:30 when my wife gets home. We spend some family time together, make dinner, eat and stuff. Around 9:00pm it’s back to the drawing board for me. I’ll usually work until around 4:00-5:00am. I sleep a bit and repeat. I’ve been really trying to work on balance in my life. Working that many hours, seven days a week really catches up to you after a while. I’m figuring out how to fit in a little more fun time. And naps. Naps are good.

HG: The first issue of The Beauty had its launch in August of this year, but not many people know that this comic goes all the way back to 2011 – winning Pilot Season with Jason Hurley! How amazing was that? Did you feel like this was a real pinnacle moment of your careers?

JH: Yeah. We initially launched the book

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a disease emerges in the world that people actually want to con-tract? Well, this hauntingly twisted thought is

the foundation of masterminds Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley’s new series, The Beauty. Since its

debut in August of last year, this series has proven to be yet another Image Comics must-read. We’ve

been fortunate to pick the brain of one of its creators, Jeremy, to learn how it all began!

HEADSHOT GEEK: Hi Jeremy! Can we get a quick introduction

– where are you from, how did you get into your career, and maybe just walk us through a day in the life working on Beauty?

JEREMY HAUN: I’m from the Midwest. Mis-souri to be exact-- the southwest tip, right where Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas meet. I’ve lived here all of my life. Not a bad place to grow up and live. I tend to get a lot of people asking why I still live in this part of the country instead of New York or LA. The easy answer is that it’s nice and an incred-ibly cheap place to live. Gives us the opportunity to live well here and travel

wherever we want to. Well worth it,

I think. No

two paths into com-

ics is exact-

ly


We managed to pull off something really special – a book about beautiful people that was somehow body positive .

for Pilot Season a few years back. It was a hell of a lot of fun. I was working for Top Cow at the time under exclusive contract to draw The Darkness. I was having a fantastic time working with them. Filip Sablik and Matt Hawkins really put a lot of faith in what I (along with the always brilliant David Hine) was doing on the book. Time for Pilot Season rolled around and they were looking for a new slate of books for the project. Filip and Matt knew that I was interested in doing some writing, so they invited me to pitch a couple of things. I pitched a few things for Pilot Season. One of them was The Beauty. Hurley and I had wanted to do something with the concept for a while, so we threw it in the hat. Of the things I pitched, The Beauty was the longshot. ...or at least I felt like it was the longshot. It was the one Filip and Matt picked, though. A few months later at Comic Con, we were on a panel introducing the Pilot Season books. Everyone gave their pitches for their

projects. Mine was simple. “It’s about an STD that makes you beautiful.” The crowd went a little nuts for it. We pretty much knew we had a winner.

HG: The whole concept of a virus making people beautiful is awesome and genius. Did one of you come up with the concept of the series or was it a mutual brainstorm?

JH: I actually came up with the concept when I was out visiting the Top Cow offices in LA. We went to lunch at this mall and I looked around me and realized that EVERY-ONE was probably an actor or at least hoped to be. It got me to thinking a lot about vanity. About the lengths we go to in order to look good. The idea just stuck. Hurley and I were on a drive home from a show in St. Louis a month or so later and I pitched him the idea. We’d been talking about projects to do together. By the time we were home three hours later, we had the world and

characters pretty much mapped out. HG: The pace of the series is pretty frenetic which I find a perfect fit for your storytelling. You guys know how to keep us engaged but in the realm of what feels like a race against time. I (and many friends) find this series awesome because it’s so multifaceted and the virus itself is so relevant of today’s society and how obsessed we are with image. Are we going to see a lot more of the societal effects – maybe like religion, politics, and more in upcoming issues?

JH: Yeah. One of the limitations of setting up The Beauty as a Pilot Season book was that there was no room for a slow build. We had to lay out the mission statement and the stakes immediately. In spite of the crazy pace of the first arc, we still wanted to give readers glimpses into the larger world. We decided to add cold openings to the first arc teasing at those wider societal effects. They were a lot of fun. The next arc is going to take things in a

different direction. We’re going to meet a whole new set of characters and see how The Beauty affects their lives. While we love writ-ing about Foster and Vaughn, there’s so much to explore here. We’re excited to do just that.

HG: You guys are killing me with all the cliffhangers and plot twists. Do you guys have an ending in mind already or are you still adding things on the go?

JH: From moment one we knew how the first arc would end. In the tradition of all of those cliffhangers and plot twists you men-tioned, we’re going to go out with a bang. The fun thing from there is where we go with subsequent arcs-- playing with back-ground characters, giving glimpses of things we only hinted at, tying it all together. We know where things are going up through the fourth arc. There’s still plenty of room to add things on the go and shuffle stuff around, but that’s part of the fun of telling a story.

HG: In the middle of drawing or writing the series, were you ever worried that you’d receive a bunch of negative feedback or back-lash on what you guys defined ‘beauty’ as?

JH: There’s always something to worry over. A story like The Beauty really could have upset any number of people. We hit on some hard stuff in there. When it came to our “definition” of beauty in the series, it was always us taking a look at what society is jamming down our throats and kind of taking the piss out of it. What I find attractive probably isn’t exactly what you find attractive. We knew that the disease couldn’t just be subjective. It had to be a specific thing. We wanted to take a stab at social commentary, so we wanted to examine what would happen if a disease made you “Hollywood hot”. In the end, overwhelmingly, people seemed to get it. We managed to pull off something really special –a book about beau-tiful people that was somehow body positive.

HG: Follow up question to that … how do you draw the difference between someone who has the beauty virus versus someone who is just naturally attractive or beautiful? That has got to be a challenge – or is that something you like leaving open for interpretation?

JH: That’s not easy at all. I’m not going to lie, I spent waaaaaay too much time thinking on how to differentiate people with The Beauty from people without it, and then attractive people that didn’t have the disease. It nearly stopped me cold a few times. At one point in issue two I was drawing Foster and I had to figure out how far into the change he was at that time. He’d lost some weight, a few of the wrinkles, and was generally “prettier”, but I still needed to leave room for The Beauty to continue to work on him throughout the arc. That same issue, I found myself draw-


ing characters like Agent Brandon. She was tricky. She doesn’t have The Beauty, but is still lovely in her own way. I constantly had to ask myself “Is she too pretty here?”. On top of all of that, it’s just a pain in the ass drawing beautiful people all the time. Give me a grizzled face with some scars or wrinkles and I’ll gladly draw that all day long. Figuring out how to represent a face with as few lines as possible is tough stuff. Pretty is hard.

HG: We don’t see too much of the disease outside the scope of Foster & Vaughn’s world. Are we going to get more perspective of how it’s affecting people around the world in upcoming issues?

JH: As we were writing the first arc, Hurley and I were constantly doing the “What if

THIS person got The Beauty?” or “How would it affect THIS situation?”. A lot of those made it into the cold openings in the first arc, but we still have this laundry list of crazy questions we want to examine. Two of those questions are going to be the focus of stories in the second arc. They were things that went from a question, to a larger conversation, and ultimately to full stories. Part of the joy of working on a concept like The Beauty is that there is no end of stuff to examine. And we want to examine it all.

HG: The first issue was amazing and there’s no shock that it got sold out in many stores. I have to give huge props to John Rauch for his amazing coloring that definitely captures your attention. I love the subtle coloring dif-ferences between those that have the disease

and those that don’t. Do you have a lot of input on the color rendering or do you just let Rauch do his thing?

JH: For the most part, I just let John do his thing. He’s one of the best colorists in the industry. When we initially started working on The Beauty, we’d already worked together for a while on The Darkness. We understood one another. He knew how to make my stuff look better. I knew that he’d do just that. We had a few conversations about how we wanted to handle things in The Beauty. I knew that I wanted Beauties to be more saturated – to pop amidst the duller world around them. John took that and ran with it. We owe a lot of the book working as well as it does to his color art.


HG: Are there any other easter eggs hidden the series?

JH: Sure. Always. I like to keep myself entertained. A lot of the easter eggs are little inside jokes that no one but a few of us are going to get. I put in things that I like. Little nods to pop culture here and there, too. I like sneaking in friends and family members when I can. There are specifi-cally a few characters named after friends. One especially cracks me up, but probably only two other people will ever really get the joke.

HG: You guys did some great campaign-ing for this series release, but one of my favorites was the messaging behind the #BEAUTYFREE meme campaign? I thought it was pretty awesome to do and really engage all the fans with. Who came up with that one? Did you ever expect such a great response?

JH: While we were doing a book about beauty-- heightened beauty at that, we really wanted to do something to be body positive at the same time.

I’d seen a lot of the #effyourbeautystan-dards and similar hashtags popping up. I loved what those represented. Just before the first issue came out, we were at Heroes Con and I was talk-ing with a friend about wanting to do a meme campaign. I knew that it needed to be something simple. She suggested #BEAUTYFREE. It was perfect. We really couldn’t have planned on the response to the campaign. People got it. It was about the book, sure. It was a resistance within the comic. But it was also saying, in a much larger way #effyourbeautystandards. I loved it. We published as many as we had, right before we had to send the book to print, in the back of the book. I actually think we want to do it again at the start of the next arc.

HG: Are you and Jason working on any cool side projects? What cons can fans find you at in 2016?

JH: We’re both working on new stuff. To-gether and separately. Our plan is to continue telling the story of The Beauty for as long as readers want to

follow it. At the same time we’ll also put out some other stuff along the way. Writing is obviously a little faster than drawing. I’ll be doing both writing and drawing some new stuff in 2016. It’s an exciting time for storytelling. I will be at Long Beach Comic Con, C2E2, and Heroes for sure this spring. There are a few others not confirmed yet, but fans can follow our social media for updates.

HG: What has been the best part about working on this series?

JH: After years of focusing on my career just as an artist, it’s felt really good to step up and actively write too. It may sound a bit cheesy, but I’m a storyteller. I tell stories with words and pictures. Having Image and fans believe in what I do has been a real honor.

HG: What are some of your favorite series out there that you’d recommend people to check out?

JH: I’m reading more and more creator owned stuff every week. Not to sound like a company man, but Image is where it’s at, right now. I’m reading most of their line. Stuff like Head Lopper, Deadly Class, Southern Bastards, Stray Bullets, Outcast, Paper Girls, East of West, Black Science, Injection, Rasputin, Pretty Deadly, Revival, I Hate Fairyland, and The Wicked +The Divine keep making it to the top of my massive “to read” pile every month. And even there, I totally know I’m forgetting a ton of brilliant stuff.

HG: Can you give our Headshotters a little exclusive look into tease of what we can look forward to in Issue 6?

JH: Everybody dies. Okay...not everybody. But a few people die. Quite a few. I think issue six is going to really shock people. We’ve been building to a pretty crazy thing throughout this arc. We don’t pull any punches. You may want to hit us a few times once you finish the last page.

Video Game

Photography by Brett Rose

N E W J E R S E Y C O M I C E X P O W R A P - U P Comes to Town

TheExpo


Video Game

continued >>

Comes to TownB y R o s s M a s z c z a k

Expo


WHENEVER A NEW convention comes to town, you never quite know what to expect. What I was completely cognizant of was the fact that my little buddy and I had all week-end free to take in as much of it as we could. November’s New Jersey Comic Expo at the New Jersey Convention & Exposition Center in Edison was MAD Event Management’s first event on the east coast and personally, we felt that it went swimmingly. The venue

was amply sized and well laid out for easy navigation and the staff could not have been friendlier or more accommodating. Our first encounter upon hitting the floor was a beautiful display of the works of NECA. Members of the Hillside, NJ based collectible company greeted us with

smiles and great conversation as we took in a gorgeously detailed scenario from the Aliens universe. Their generation-crossing licenses gave us a chance to talk a little about the “scary” movies I grew up watching and how we could start to watch some of the classic horror films that came before both of our times as we headed over to the Carsplay area. I think we’ve all had a favorite film or television vehicle. As an adult, I am able to dif-

ferentiate reality from fiction. A seven year-old however, is an entirely different story. PPassing by the original Batmobile and the Delorean prompted straightforward, curious questions about if I had watched those films when I was his age. The moment of sheer amazement and confusion in his sparkling eyes came with the

Mystery Machine as he struggled to conceptu-alize that what was formerly just an animated fantasy was sitting right in front of him. A few yards away we discovered the spacious Cosplay Corner, which was full of talented friendly folks from all over the coun-try including Vegas Power Girl, Ms. Rae and Princess Morgan. We were able to steal a few moments with DeAnna Davis, best known as It’s Raining Neon. She briefly shared some of

her experiences cosplaying. Though we often see ladies donning skillfully hand-made scant outfits, DeAnna has noticed an upswing in a new style; armor and lots of it. Her interest in costume design coupled with a degree in me-dia arts and illustration has propelled her into a career she is passionate about. DeAnna crafts

Members of the Hillside, NJ based collectible company greeted us with smiles and great conversation as we took in a gorgeously detailed scenario from the Aliens universe .


the majority of her own costumes and armor, as well as shoots most of her own photos. From there we followed our noses to the intoxicating scent of popcorn where we stumbled upon Justin Purvis and his card-based party game, Movie Buff. Grow-ing up in a military household, Justin was relocated frequently but always managed to find common ground in his locales with society’s love of trivia and of the cinema wherever his family was stationed. Built on intertwining those two things combined with a dash of strategy, Movie Buff pulls from player knowledge as well as luck of the draw so each game you play provides a unique experience. In June of 2014, it made its debut on Kickstarter and was fully funded on August 1st, 2014, allowing Justin’s dream to become a reality. Our next stop was Artist’s alley which was composed of all manners of styles. One of the first people we met was Jessica Ross who goes by Ginger Jess. Her boldly colored pop-fantasy style drew us both in immediately and the more we looked at her portfolio, the more

depth we found in each of her pieces. For her, her work allows a safe haven from an often harsh world which I believe is something that many artists can identify with. We also picked up a copy of Sweetie issue 1 signed by its creators, Sean Dillion and Steven Petrivelli. Sweetie debuted in October at the New York Comic Convention and focuses on young Maggie discovering her powers while balancing life and crime fighting. Between the excellent conversation we had with Sean and Steven and our time reading our purchase later that evening, we both hope to see Sweetie’s story continue for quite some time. Among the ocean of talented creators in Artist’s Alley were students of the Kubert School. Idan Kerbis, Erik Klaus and Marki Wolfson were gracious enough to spend a little time talking with us about their experi-ences both at the school and as developing artists. Their kindness and openness about their paths gave my son some great vantage points as well as presented him with the real-ity that one truly can take a path of a creator. For those looking to grab an autograph or

photo with one of their favorite artists or ac-tors, there was no shortage of options either. Jim Lee, Mark Bagley and Garth Ennis were just a few of the many big names from the comic world gracing us with their presence.

On the acting side, Daredevil’s Peter Shinko-da and Tommy Walker, Sons of Anarchy’s Drea de Matteo, and Amy Acker of Person of Inter-est and Angel fame were all on hand. On the shopping side, we found every-thing from rare Funko POP! collectibles to miles of comic books both new and old. Aside from the mass produced products, there were also several booths and tables of handmade clothing, accessories and toys for even the most persnickety collector. On the far end of the convention center was a spacious and well thought out “Kids Love Comics Pavilion” which included several smiling faces of comic creators and authors in addition to face painting and airbrush tattoos. There were also tables laid out with drawing materials and stickers and even a myriad of free novels and assorted tchotchkes. In short, MAD Event Management has made a smashing entrance to The Garden State with their solid organization and planning beautifully balanced with a great sense of humor and humility. We’re looking forward to 2016’s New Jersey Comic Expo scheduled for November 19th and 20th.

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