<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">Greetings, Groop-<br><br>Unfortunately, I don't have a lot to tell; I was only able to attend for a portion of Sunday.<br><br>I did, however, manage to catch Sergio at his table. As always, he was a consummate gentleman- I wore my 25th anniversary hat (thanks again, Gary!), and his first words upon seeing me were "Hey, nice hat!".<br><br>Unfortunately, also as always, he was very busy, so there simply wasn't a lot of time to chat.<br><br>A quick photo of Sergio in a position that I'm sure most of you will have seen him in before- <br>http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/6647/0904261431000.jpg- hunched over a sketch, heh.<br><br>For those that are curious, in the photo he's doing me a sketch of a character from the Naruto anime ("Sasuke Uchiha")- it's the favourite character of one of the boys I sponsor through Compassion Canada, and given that said
character's (English) Voice Actor was present at the con, I thought it would be a very cool gift to have his favourite character (signed by the VA), done by one of MY favourite artists.<br><br>And the other photo that I THOUGHT I had gotten, I apparently didn't, somewhat to my disappointment- it wouldn't mean a lot to most of you, but it was a shot of him and me together. Apparently my fiancee hit the wrong button *sigh*<br><br>Mark, unfortunately, had had to leave before I got there, and wasn't slated to return before the end of the con, so I missed him.<br><br>Other than the Mark and Sergio show, there was the usual parade of costumes- the 501st Stormtrooper's Calgary branch was out, so there were some very impressive Star Wars costumes wandering about (I spotted a Clone Trooper, a Storm Trooper or two, both Boba and Jango Fett, that purple-outfitted female bounty hunter whose name I have no idea of from Episode II, two Darth Vaders (one rather
more impressive than the other), and a Rebel X-Wing pilot), along with the usual assortment of anime and superhero characters (it was with a weird mixture of shame and pride that I realized I recognized almost every single one that I saw, heh...)<br><br>I also stumbled upon a rather good dealer out of Victoria who had a lot of classic... stuff, including original Pogo collections (I didn't look too closely, being on a limited budget and the books costing $35 apiece, but at a guess I would have been surprised if they were any newer than 1950-something), DVDs of the complete works of Tex Avery (which I snapped up immediately- I'm very nearly as much a fan of Tex' work as I am of Sergio's), and a few other odds and ends, including a couple of comic collections that I had been wanting to find for some time (Don Rosa's "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck" series).<br><br>I also picked up a couple of pieces of entirely superfluous, but impressively large,
bits of cutlery- a replica katana and some sort of long blade that can become a two-ended short-bladed... thing, or else have the blade come out of the opposite end of the hilt entirely. Mostly useless unless I'm planning to do what Groo does best, but entertaining.<br><br>Brief glimpses were also caught of Ray Park (aka Darth Maul, Toad from the X-Men films, and Snake Eyes from the upcoming GI Joe film- he seems to like the Calgary Con, he was there last year, too), Bruce Timm (executive producer of the DC Animated Universe... I actually wanted to talk to him, and maybe snag a sketch, but he was busy (borderline swamped), so we wandered off... and he was gone ten minutes later. Bah), Margot Kidder, and a bunch of other people who I theoretically should have recognized but didn't =P<br><br>Oh- I also got to exchange pleasantries with Gavin Blair, co-creator of the seminal CG Animated series, "ReBoot", although it was mostly a "Hey, I love
your work, hurry up and release it on DVD" sort of situation. Apparently it's horribly tied up in some kind of rights dispute, though. Feh.<br><br>Not much else to tell- the con was winding down somewhat, and my fiancee wanted to catch the reptile show that same day (what can I say? I have a very cool fiancee), so we moved on.<br><br>Cheers,<br>David<br></td></tr></table><br>