D-Con Report

D-MINUS: 0

Arrived at the Hyatt Regency around 1 p.m. and went straight to registration. No sign of my pals, who allegedly were to leave Starkville, MS, around the same time I left my in-laws in North Carolina, putting them there same time as me.

Checking the schedule of panels, I see Peter Davison (the 5th Doctor Who) is scheduled to be giving a panel at 1:30. If my pals were at the con that's where they'd be so that's where I head. Peter Davison isn't actually there when I arrive at the panel, nor are my friends. Instead, comic scribe Warren Ellis (Planetary, Transmetropolitan) is on the stage, along with Annoying Brit Track Boy. (ABTB is one of the D-Con folks in charge of programming involving British themes--the British Track. I've seen ABTB around in years past, but never thought of him as especially annoying until this year. More on him later.) Turns out this panel is a general Brit-panel with the two major British guests, one of whom, Davison, is running late. So I get to hear Warren Ellis talk about things he has in the works and answer questions for a bit, which is great cause he's one of the guests I was already looking forward to seeing. (I also see my first Pern Person of the year, pictured here.)
Peter Davison eventually shows and the panel proceeds. It's a pretty good panel, though it's a little odd to have two completely unrelated guests, beyond the fact that they both live in England, answering questions from the audience on similarly disparate topics. ABTB, always the glory hog, is seated at the panel table along side the guests. At the end, they give away prizes via trivia questions and I win one. (Nerd!) They asked on which cartoon did Jon Pertwee, the third Doctor, do one of the voices. I answered "Danger Mouse" since that's the only British cartoon anyone ever gives a rat's ass about and it turns out I was right. I won a Doctor Who book signed by the actors who played the Brigadier and Benton during the 3rd Doctor's run in the 70's.

Still no sign of pals after the panel, so I hit the dealer's room where I immediately found a booth with probably twenty five long-boxes full of graphic novels and trade paperbacks bargain priced at 50 percent off. And they're in great shape! I buy up the first two volumes of The Ultimates and spy several other potential purchases before I can escape.

The guys show up at 3:30 and we go up to our room. It's fantastic! Exactly what we had hoped for, which is good cause it took an act of congress to get it.

My friend Glen made reservations for a room several months ago, but when he called Hyatt up in early August to confirm the reservation they said, "Glen who?" Turns out the asshat Hyatt clerk who had taken the reservation had inserted the wrong hotel code, so our reservation was made for a room in the Hyatt in Marietta, Georgia and not Atlanta. Things looked grim at first, for the hotel claimed they had no other rooms available and that we were shit out of luck. Glen, however, is no stranger to showing his ass when the need presents itself and after doing so for a while the clerk he was dealing with gave in and transferred him to a customer care rep who arranged for a small suite for us at half price. It cost more money than any of us really wanted to pay, but was considerably cheaper than we should have been paying for what we were getting so we gladly accepted it. Granted it was on the 11th floor, so hoofing it up by stairs was not really a feasible thing for a bunch of out of shape nerds. Fortunately, the bellboy let us in on a secret that the staff generally doesn't raise a fuss if guests use the freight elevators, so that saved us quite a bit of time.

The guys, Glen, Joe, John and Marc, had made a wager during their trip over as to which variety of costume-clad con-goer they would see first. Would it be the Klingon, the Stormtrooper, the G.I. Joe character, the Pern Person or the perennial Fat-Chick in Chain Mail? Pern Person won out, yet again.
We also did a strafing run on the Walk of Fame to see who was there. Not all of the guests were present, but a few choice ones were. Erin Gray, TV's Colonel Wilma Dearing from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was there. I had a huge crush on her when I was a young lad and she still looks really really good today. (Sorry, I'm lame and didn't take a picture.) Like a dumbass, though, when I spoke to her I said, "I really enjoyed your work when I was a little kid." Great! Now I made her feel old!

We walked on and came to Peter Davison's signing table, at which point the only thing any of us could utter was, "That's fuckin' Doctor Who!" We thought it was probably best not to approach him until we could get a better choke hold on our vocabulary.

While we were in the Dealer's Room area, I slipped away on a reconnaissance mission to get snapshots at the Speculum & Leather Sales booth. Found it right away. In addition to medical instruments sold for non-medical purposes, there was the standard assortment of whips, chains and clamps. The proof...

Dinner was at the Hard Rock Cafe, where we didn't even need to use our reservation as there were plenty of open tables. Just to get my influx of carbs started, I ordered the Twisted Mac & Cheese, which was excellent and sat in my tummy like a Fat Chick in Chain Mail for hours to come.
We retired to our room where the closed circuit Dragon Con channel was playing the pilot episode of the Joss "Buffy" Whedon penned, quickly cancelled by Fox, sci-fi TV series Firefly. Only one of our crew had ever seen Firefly before and he told us to shut up and watch, cause it was a great show. We shut up. We watched. When the episode was finished, we were to a man born-again Firefly converts. Suddenly we were excited that some of the cast members were present at the con! They were going to have a big panel, even! We were also a tingle that not only were the episodes available on DVD but a Firefly movie has been filmed and is scheduled for release next summer! And, another episode was coming on next! Unfortunately, whoever was showing the next episode had not intended to do so, for they shut it off after ten minutes and played Spaceballs instead. Bastard!

Our first panel of the day was Peter Woodward. For those who don't know him, Peter Woodward is the son of Edward Woodward, of TV's The Equalizer fame. Both were members of London's Royal Shakespeare Company and Peter served as the fight master for them for a while. Peter played Galen on the short-lived Babylon 5 spin-off, Crusade, and hosted and produced the Discovery Channel series Combat. He's a favorite of ours. His panel this time was all about combat and fighting techniques using different weapons. He even had our row get up on stage with him to serve as a visual aid for a point he was making. Fun stuff, even though Peter didn't hump anyone this year.

After that there was a Cartoon Network Adult Swim panel in the same room. Lots of the staff and voice talent for Adult Swim programs like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab were present as well as Billy West, the voice of much of the Futurama cast and the original voice of Stimpy on Ren & Stimpy. Mostly they showed clips, acted crazy and did voices for us. Billy West has been hired to do Popeye in a new computer animated Popeye project and he demonstrated his impressive vocal process for doing that character. The Adult Swm team also showed clips from upcoming shows and told us about a few choice bits of news in that vein. I knew they had more Family Guy in production, which is good. They also have a whole new series from FG creator Seth McFarlane as well as a series by FG co-star Seth "Scott Evil" Green. Their truly big news is that in late Summer 2005 they will be airing a cartoon based on Aaron Macgruder's comic strip The Boondocks and said this is going to be an envelope pushing show as far as edgy humor goes.

Afterwards, we met up with Beta Squadron, a second group of friends from Mississippi who were staying elsewhere in the area. My friend Mark "Hey, there's a Gerbil in that Cleavage" Chow was among them. (Hi, Mark!) We all went to lunch, then hit the dealer's room and walk of fame again. I was able to find a pristine copy of the Sin City graphic novel Hell & Back at the half-off booth. It's a good thing it was half off, cause it's a $28 book cover price.

In the Walk of Fame I also nearly collided with actress Dee Wallace Stone, who was standing in front of her signing table. She's about my height, but looking into her face all I could think of was "Wow, it's Mom!" Name any given 80's movie and chances are Dee Wallace Stone played the mom in it. She's terribly good at playing the Mom and she still looks every bit like a mom should. I just wanted to give her a big hug and tell her that I was sorry I hadn't called or sent any mother's day cards in a while. I refrained, but I did tell her that I really enjoyed her work. She gave me a big warm mom grin that made me feel all loved and stuff.

While the rest of my crew went off on their own missions to find specific nerd swag, I went to the 4 p.m. Warren Ellis panel back at the Hyatt. Ellis was very Ellis in manner, which is to say he was insightful, vulgar and terribly funny. Asked what he thought of the current political climate, as his book Transmet is an extremely political book which some see as a response to the current administration, he turned the tables on the question and asked us how we felt knowing we were about to have four more years of Bush. Naturally, there were boos, but Warren rounded on it and made the extremely valid point that if the Democrats were actually serious about winning the White House they would have run someone other than a corpse with a badger nailed to its head. He also pointed out that most of Transmetropolitan was written in response to Tony Blair and not Bush, but that there were lessons to be learned all around.

Ellis also told the story of how he had inherited a literary agent who insisted he write a novel. He didn't want to write one, so he turned in 100,000 words of the most insane and offensive material he could think of--we're talking Godzilla bukake and Ostriches zonked out on ruffies insane--figuring no one in their right mind would ever publish it. Naturally, Harper Collins bought it for quite a bit of money, so now he's forced to finish it up. He also touched on the subject of Harlan Ellison after someone asked him if he'd ever had any discussions on the subject of the internet with Ellison, being as how Ellison hates the web and Ellis loves it. Ellis said he had not, but would probably find out as they were scheduled to breakfast together the following morning. He described seeing Ellison in the guest's lounge, jumping up and down with glee saying "I've just been verbally abusing people!" This certainly bade well for the future Marc Stewart/Harlan Ellison rematch I'd been hoping to see.

I also was able to talk to Denny O'Neil, writer of the classic 90's series The Question. I asked him to sign my copy of issue #30 and issue #1. I explained issue #30 was the first of the series I'd ever read, given to me for my birthday by Rob Snell, one of the guys who owned the late lamented comic shop, Gun Dog Comics, back home. Rob's gesture was only generous on the surface, though. Much like a crack dealer, he knew that giving me a first hit of a series as good as The Question would only lead to more sales. Once I read issue #30, I ordered all the back issues from Rob and the shop wound up making a tidy sum off me. Worth every penny. O'Neil seemed like a nice guy.

We adjourned to Champions Sports Bar, in the Marriott, where we ate excessively expensive and not particularly tasty fried food and watched the Mississippi State game. Afterwards, some of us went to the room to chill while others of us ventured out to freak watch and attend the Buffy The Vampire Slayer prom, which was even more of a freak-fest.


First panel of the day was the Babylon 5 reunion. The only B5 cast members present were Peter Jurrasik (Londo Mollari), Jason Carter (Marcus Cole) and a guy who played one of the generic aliens on the show. As usual, though, it was still a good panel.

The three spent around ten minutes paying tribute to actor Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Stephen Franklin on the show and who passed away from a brain aneurysm a few months back. It was a nice tribute but would have been better had Dragon Con staff provided a screen and video projector present so they could show the tribute video that had been made. Before the panel started, I overheard the guy who made the tribute film complaining to someone that one of the decision makers within the Dragon Con upper echelon does not like nor gets B5 and goes out of his way to shit on all B5 programming at the con. Granted, this is one man's perspective on this and perhaps the video projector was being used by another panel at the same time and wasn't available. But I've seen evidence of such B5 program downplaying in the past too. On many occasions, the B5 programming has been crammed into tiny rooms in the sub-levels of the Hyatt with standing room only crowds. Sure, the show's been off the air for several years now, but Trek panels don't get treated with such disrespect and that show's been gone for 30. Regardless, this particular panel was in one of the bigger rooms and had the crowd to justify it so I'm happy on that front.

At one point during the panel, Peter Woodward burst through the door, interrupting Peter Jurrasik mid-story, and staged a coup on the stage. Woodward screamed he was taking over because he'd not been invited to participate in the panel since he was only on a B5 spin-off. He claimed he had dirt on the personal lives of all of the panelists and would be revealing that down at his signing table. He then ran through the audience passing out flyers for the cruise he's hosting next year and then fled the room. Jurrasik just smiled and resumed his story, to much applause.

The next panel of the morning was the Harlan Ellison panel we'd been looking forward to. Harlan was late getting there and when he finally did show up he was wearing a t-shirt and sweat pants and looked a bit disheveled. He explained he'd been asleep 20 minutes ago and had just spent ten minutes trying to get downstairs via the perpetually crowded and slow elevator system. He claimed he had become so frustrated with the idiots on the elevator with him, who were getting in DOWN directed elevators in order to wait for them to go back UP, thus crowding the elevators unnecessarily, that he began verbally assaulting them and finally physically hurled several of them from the elevator onto random floors. A man in the audience testified that this was indeed true.

The Ellison panel was called "The Secret Crimes of Harlan Ellison" and was supposed to be a forum for Ellison to take questions from the audience regarding tales of his bad behavior in the past and then give his side of the story. Sounds fun, no? The trouble is, as my friend Marc pointed out, Ellison seemed to have been possessed by the spirit of Grandpa Simpson for the duration and spent 45 rambling and digression-filled minutes on a single tale about a near-miss fist fight with Frank Sinatra in the 60's. He kept stopping to try and remember tiny and irrelevant details and then chastised the audience brutally for not being able to fill in the blanks for him. As nasty as this might seem, it was tame compared to the last panel my friends attended, during which Harlan took the microphone and walked into the audience laying verbal waste to one and all. We suspect he may have mellowed down.

After the panel, Harlan returned to his signing table where a line of fans formed to get him to sign their books. My friend Marc, recipient of Harlan's destructive tongue during his last attempt to get Harlan to sign something three years ago, went to join the queue. This time, Marc didn't exhibit the hubris that brought about the wrath of the Crassness God last time. Instead, Marc plied Harlan with such an eloquent commentary of his own nature as a fan that when Marc finished all Harlan could do was gesture toward the rest of the penitent in line and say, "I went through all these idiots to get to you." So while it wasn't a fiery rematch, the levels of irony were sufficiently satisfying.
Following lunch, Peter Davison had another panel all of his own which we attended. Present on stage with Peter was Annoying Brit-Track Boy. Now in the past, I've seen ABTB participate in panels as a moderator, asking questions of the subject of the panel and directing audience questions. That seems to be a valid role to take should the guest require it. However, Peter Davison does not need a moderator and is fully capable of running a q&a panel on his own. To make matters worse, ABTB wasn't even acting as a moderator for the panel at all. He was just sitting there by Davison adding unneeded commentary to the man's answers and even daring to answer questions on his own that weren't posed to ABTB in the first place. Add to that ABTB's high-pitched hyena-like laughter which he insisted on braying directly into the microphone whenever anything was remotely funny and you get an idea of how utterly enraged the entire audience was with him by the end. At one point, he said something about possibly leaving and there was a smattering of applause at the notion.

Another example: Peter Davison, upon being asked by an audience member how he went about preparing for any given role, answered, "Well, not as much as I probably should." Seems cool, no? However, Annoying Brit Track Boy seemed to feel that the question had somehow been asked to him as well, so he also answered, saying, "Speaking as a drama-minor, not much." Who the fudge cares, punk? Annoying Brit-Track Boy also dis-endeared himself by not shutting off his cell phone during the panel. We know this because it rang and he actually took the call, ON STAGE, in the middle of Peter Davison's panel. Peter Davison, ever the gentleman, exhibited a Herculean amount of patience with ABTB. I don't know how he managed it, but I'm guessing potential headlines of "Doctor Who Throttles Fishnet-Clad Dipshit at Nerd Con, Audience Rushes Stage to Help!" probably had a lot to do with his mercy.

Most of us wanted to stick around for the Firefly panel in the big room that afternoon, but I was on a mission to secure Warren Ellis's signature on a few books. So me and a new friend from Beta Squadron, named Malloy, went to wait in line. Afterwards, we strolled the Dealer's Room a bit more then went back for the last 15 minutes of the Firefly panel. Seeing what I did there made me wish I'd gone for the whole thing. The two guests were just awesome and I now want a Firefly DVD set even more than before. Even Malloy, who said he wanted nothing to do with Firefly, had to admit it was cool.

Back in the Walk of Fame, I saw that Soupy Sales was there in person. I'd heard he would be there, but had forgotten about it until then. My dad was a huge Soupy Sales fan back when he was a younger man. I even have an appreciation for him from an early 80s comedy series he hosted on CBS. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I enjoyed Soupy's early 80s series until the Halloween episode, where someone knocked on the door of his set "house" and when he opened it there were just two evil looking eyes against a field of blackness, meant to represent a vampire. The image scared the hell out of me and I screamed and cried for quite some time. I think dad avoided Soupy Sale's show after that to prevent any trauma to me, and it was subsequently cancelled. I thought this would make a cute story to tell Soupy Sales himself as a way of showing how big a fan Dad was. However, I was only part way into a short version of the story when I realized that no communication seemed to be getting through to Mr. Sales. He was just staring through me blankly. A lady I later learned was his wife was seated beside him and I kind of gave her a brief glance, then decided that I really didn't want to embarrass Mr. Sales or the lady by letting on that I'd noticed anything wrong, so I just wrapped up my story as quickly as possible and said it was nice to meet him. At that point, he seemed to come back to life and smiled and nodded. I don't know if he'd had a stroke or Alzheimer's or was just hard of hearing.

We feasted that night at a steakhouse across the street from the Hyatt where we were accosted by a street person who begged us to vote Republican in the next elections and who accused the one staunch Republican among us of being a Democrat.

Afterwards, we freak-watched in the lobby for a while, looking at the various costumes of the participants of the Costume Contest. I saw a great Starman and talked to him about how he made his staff, as I had made a similar one when I did that costume a few years back. I don't know that his staff was better than mine, but it was certainly a lot lighter as his staff head was made of foam and mine was made of transparent yellow plastic resin that weighed a ton. He still had the advantage on me, though, in that he actually looked like the character and I was just a poser.

We all woke very late on Day 4. Too late to get packed up and still have time to hit the first panel of the day. We didn't even bother looking at the schedule to see what we were about to miss, cause it would just ruin our day. As it stood, it looked like we would miss the second panel too, cause we were scheduled to meet Beta Squadron at Hooters for lunch at 11:30.

Showers were had and shite was packed up.

Joe had managed to win the chance to buy a Heroclix Galactus, a truly huge chunk of plastic, so he was having to drag that out. You probably won't know what any of that means unless you're a gaming or comic nerd, but you won't catch me explaining it for the masses.

Most of my purchases fit nicely within my backpack and duffel bag, but I had lots of other stuff to carry too. Before leaving for the con, I'd stopped by the grocery store and purchased a shitload of food to keep in the room. We're talking bags of chips, two packs of Oreos, pretzels to supply a good sized bar for a week and granola granola granola. I'd also brought a full case of Old Vienna, which Mrs. A's boyfriend had imported for me from Canada and which I was hoping to dispose of at the Con so I wouldn't be tempted to tuck into it while low-carbing it upon my return home. We'd only actually brought half the case up to the room on Friday night, (thank Jebus!) but out of the five of us, plus the five of Beta Squadron, only I had drank any of it and I only drank two. So much for getting our drunk on at the Con. Thusly, I had ten bottles of beer left and the maids had thrown out the original box, so I had to wrap the bottles up in my clothing and carry them out in my duffel and backpack. This added weight made those bags extremely heavy. The food as well had to be carried back down. Almost none of it had been touched by any of us, so back it had to go. (I guess I'll donate it to the "liberry" for use in their end-of-the-month patron appreciation open house gigs.) Originally, I was going to make two trips to take my stuff to the car, but decided that even though I knew it would nearly break me, I could manage it in one. Backpack on back, duffel in hand, three bags of uneaten junk food in other hand, pillow beneath arm, I slowly trudged with my pals to the freight elevator for one last unauthorized use of it.

The rest of Alpha Squadron had parked in a different garage than I had, so we separated there while I and my added seventy pounds of baggage took the walking tubes from the Hyatt to the food court next door to the Marriot and finally to my parking garage in back of the Sun Trust building. I wasn't ready to drop by the time I got there, but was certainly feeling the burn.

Not having anything better to do for twenty minutes until the Hooters rendezvous, I just walked around absorbing the general atmosphere of melancholy. Day four is always sad at the con. It's palpable. Beyond just my own bummer at the thought that this year's con flew by so fast and that I would soon have to drive eight hours to get home and not see my pals for a while, the bummers of just about everyone else at the con were plainly apparent. You can feel it in the air. All these people, particularly the ones who stay in costume the whole time, are clearly unhappy at having to return to the real world. You can just drink it in, and so I did.

I was first to arrive at Hooters so it fell to me to secure us a table for 10. I'd never actually been to a Hooters before, but found the experience mostly enjoyable. A waitress in the usual super tight wife-beater shirt and shorts so short Daisy Duke would blush, came to help set up tables. I must say, super-tight wife-beater or not, she was not exactly overly blessed in the Hooters department herself, at least not as much as one would tend to expect from such an establishment. In fact, only one of the waitresses there really qualified as Hooteriffic and she was so generously equipped that her too-tight wife-beater seemed in peril of exploding at any moment. She could not have been comfortable in that corset of a shirt, and I found myself wishing that management would give her something a little more suitable to wear, as it hurt to look at her. I did get a bit of a thrill, though, when the wind from tropical storm Frances blew over the Hooters sandwich board sign out front, causing two of the girls to have to go out, bend over and pick it up, aimed quite satisfactorily in my direction. I know, it's a juvenile comment to make, but we've long since accepted that Dragon Con reverts even the best of us into 12 year old boys. If it didn't, then we would have a real hard time explaining all those people we spit at from the balcony.

After a bit, Beta Squadron showed up. They'd been betting that Alpha wouldn't actually be there at 11:30 and were also wagering that we would be at least 15 minutes late. Well, I blew that away, but indeed the rest of Alpha did not arrive until after 11:45. It seems John misplaced his own car, so they had to reenact the Seinfeld episode of wandering up and down levels of a parking garage in search of their ride.

Lunch was irritatingly expensive, but tasty all the same. We ate our fill then paid and went to stand on the sidewalk out front, the formerly gale-force winds of Frances whipping through our hair. This is always the saddest part, when we have to say goodbye. Fortunately, this time around it's only for a couple of months, as most of us will be meeting up again at Glen's wedding in October and then will see each other another couple months later at Christmas.

The drive home was long and boring, punctuated by angry talk radio and my P.G. Wodehouse book on tape.

(OKAY, I LIED, THERE'S ACTUALLY ONE MORE D-CON REPORT...)