Chris is on Infinite Earths, Episode 20: Justice League of America #224 (1984)
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Chris is on Infinite Earths, Episode #20
Justice League of America #224 (March, 1984)Writer – Kurt Busiek
Penciller – Chuck Patton
Inker – Dick Giordano
Letterers – John Costanza & Todd Klein
Colorist – Gene D’Angelo
Editor – Len Wein
Cover Price: $0.75
And Ho-lee crap, now I can’t toggle HTML without great swaths of my writing vanishing into the ether? Are you kidding me? This is a product from Google, right? I can’t be the only person having these problems, can I?
Welp, lemme jump through the hoops and try and revert back to “Legacy Blogger”.
Jeez… okay, I think I’ve got the HTML in there. Guess I won’t know for sure until I hit publish. What a dumpster fire this place has become… Blogger itself, as well as my little corner of it.
Anyhoo.
In this episode of the Chris-Show, I discuss my early days in fandom, and how I was taken in by the phenomenon known as the “Mall Convention”… which really set me up for a massive disappointment as to what Comic Conventions would ultimately become.
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| The Pathmark at the SunVet Mall, where my parents grocery-shopped while I perused the vendor tables at the “MallCon” |
I also discuss how, in 2016 when I was still a fresh-faced naive comics blogger, I was given the opportunity to attend the Phoenix Comicon with a Media Pass, and chat up the few comics pros they allowed to show up… though, they did stick ’em all in the corner. Can’t have ’em distract the “true” comic book fans from seeing the dude who played the Karate Kid 40 years ago!
It was a pretty sad little scene. I saw legends of the business, like George Perez, Marv Wolfman, and Dan Jurgens… just sittin’ there. While Ralph friggin’ Macchio (who was charging $100 for a photo) had a line around the corner. What happened to our fandom? Pathetic.
Speaking of legends in the business, I was there to interview Kurt Busiek (for DC in the 80’s)… and, interview Kurt Busiek I did. You can check out the transcription of that interview right here. I did include a few minutes of the audio Kurt and I recorded in this very episode, if you’d like to hear me (sounding a whole lot like Scott Baio for some reason) chat up a comics icon… and likely ask him the same questions he’s asked every time some idiot pushes their phone into his face.
I did manage to snag a photo of me and Dan Jurgens while we were getting ready to leave. It’s a wildly unflattering picture… where I weighed around 100 lbs more than I do right now, and hadn’t trimmed my beard in like months. Makes me cringe to even look at it… but, I’ll share it here anyway!
Listening to your stories over the years we have a lot of similarities in the comics we enjoy and many of our collecting experiences but the stories in the episode do not fall into that category! I was a lot of fun hearing you talk about the "mall cons" you went to in NY.