I’ve gone every year since 2005, except 2006 (when it clashed with a trip to LA for E3), but every year I attended to officially represent NCsoft. What started in 2005 as a couple of us stuck in a corner trying to flog City of Heroes (without actually selling it) culminated last year in a big ol’ stand with practically an artistic production-line to handle the pencilling, inking, scanning, colouring and printing of player sketches. Without a doubt, in terms of our professional ambitions, Bristol 2008 was our high point. As a fun weekend away for me personally though, this year is the hands-down winner.

Despite that, we definitely fulfilled our primary purpose: to help out Andrew Wildman once more with Draw the World Together. Mat and I couldn’t be happier to help, but as always, there were a lot of people who made things happen.

First and foremost was Mike Allwood, Expo organiser, who gave us the space and time we needed to sketch in. It was no easy feat, as with this year’s Expo being squeezed into the Ramada Hotel (with overspill at the nearby Mercure) it was hard to swing a cat, let alone get half-a-dozen artists to sketch in one room. Mike also ensured that our most generous supporters could get into the Expo, even after tickets were officially sold out. As always whenever I saw Mike over the weekend he was a picture of relaxed calm amongst the chaos, and went above and beyond to help things run smoothly.

DTWT doesn’t really work without Andrew Wildman at the centre of things though – even though he’d say he’s not the most important part! As always Andrew pulled strings, stroked egos and generally hustled to get a great group of artists to sit and sketch. He’s a diamond geezer, as anyone will attest to, and of course he sketched more than a few things on the day too.

Mat and I? We just turned up, really. So let’s kick back with the traditional, chronological, rambling retelling….

Travelling light

As we were paying for our own hotel room, Mat and I chose to head down on Saturday morning and stay one night. Luckily Mat owns his own wheels, so that also cut down our weekend costs considerably. Saying that, it might have contributed to the first, ahem, ‘bump in the road’ of the weekend: getting a flat tyre on the M25.

After a quick, invigorating stop on the hard shoulder where the ol’ teamwork skills kicked straight in to help us change the wheel in PDQ time, we resumed the long drive onwards to Bristol, our old friend ‘Jane the GPS System’ bringing us to the hotel. As we stepped out of the car in the Ramada’s car park, Andrew and Lesley Wildman arrived too, so we all entered the Expo at the same time.

Call it what you like – Convention Fug, or Eau De Fanboi perhaps – but there’s a distinctive smell when you get a lot of con attendees together in an enclosed space. While not distinctly unpleasant, it was very obvious when we stepped into the Ramada’s lobby. That was because everything was already in full swing, with a crowded signing area proving the trickiest part of the small Expo floor to navigate during the whole weekend.

We found Expo management easily enough, and after a trip to Andrew’s room to drop off our stuff (as our own room wasn’t ready) we wandered around for a while, Andrew handing out sketch cards and pads to any artist who was interested in drawing on ‘em for charity. I spied Mike Collins sketching up a storm on one table, so dropped by to say hi; I realised quickly that he, like a few of the other artists, was unaware that I’m supposed to be emigrating. Yes, it can be a bit surprising.

Before too long, we ended up over at the nearby Mercure, the hotel we’d stayed at in 2007 and 2008. This year it was playing host to the Small Press Expo. Little brother to the generally more commercial offerings at the Ramada, the SPE offered the chance for anyone with an indy comic, ‘zine or random product to come and plug it.

After noting that Kevin O’Neill was present, signing and sketching the new volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 1910 (which we said we’d come back to later), we eventually managed to prise Andrew away from talking to Simon Wyatt and friends at the Insomnia Comics stand, and went downstairs to get some lunch. (Simon contributed the fantastic sketch of Donna Troy for our auction you see here – check out his blog and his deviantART page.)

Another pleasant coincidence brought Andie Tong to our table for lunch, so we ate and caught up, with me explaining the boring intricacies of UK-US emigration, and everyone else listening politely. Eventually it got to be ‘about that time’, and we headed back to the Ramada for the so-called ‘Sketch-a-thon’, as Mike Allwood had dubbed it!

More ‘sketch’ than ‘thon’

After standing around being British in our designated room for a bit (hinting strongly that Alan Davis, superstar artist though he may be, needed to vacate the premises… without actually saying so) we got to work with our remarkably meagre resources.

No van full of stock this time for us, no ubiquitous black boxes of ‘stuff’ ready for any occasion. Instead, we ended up getting our Draw The World Together banner up on a wall by ingeniously re-purposing the cords for the window blinds. It was a crazy plan, but hey, it worked.

As if by magic, suddenly artists appeared; and not just the welcome familiar faces of Neil Edwards, Kat Nicholson and Jason Cardy. We had newcomers too; Stephen Baskerville, an old friend of Andrew’s who’d inked his work for many years, took a seat and got straight to work. Lee Bradley sat quietly at the end of the long table and turned out sketches without complaint. We even had David ‘V for Vendetta’ Lloyd for a while, who accidentally ended up facing the door – and as a result, probably just drew his trademark ‘V’ sketch more times than he cared for. But what the hell, every one of them earned us cash. With extra chairs and tables secured, and then with the arrival of Laura Howell to sketch as well, I realised we had more artists (eight!) than we had customers!

Luckily for us, some of those customers (Torsten, Paul, Ben and Rebecca) were regulars, and were ready and willing to donate plenty of money, so pencils flew and pens scratched as everyone got down to business. Unlike the previous couple of years, we had no scanner on hand to capture the sketches, so that meant no colouring and of course nothing I can show to you here (yet). I saw some excellent work though, from all of those involved.

For myself, I got Captain America immortalised by Neil Edwards and a Black Widow by Lee Bradley. I would have potentially gotten more, but my budget only stretched so far – and frankly, I wanted to get sketches from elsewhere around the Expo. For one, both Mat and I had sworn oaths that we would not leave the con without getting a sketch by Andie Tong; after all, we’d waited since BICS 2007!

Time passed, sketches got done, and before long between the amount of artists we had and the lack of foot traffic (our room was well away from the main floor) we had something of a lull, so said goodbye and thank you to a few artists. We rounded up a few more customers, but generally it was a little less intense than previous years. Which was fine with all of us, really; the objective wasn’t to try and top any previous amount we’d raised, but instead to see if the Draw The World Together idea would work with little to no ‘corporate support’, and it seemed to do just fine.

So fine, in fact, that I felt happy to wander off at times, although generally I was going on some errand or other. On one particular trip I dropped by to see Mike Collins again, as I’d been meaning to see if he had copies of A Christmas Carol to sell. (At last year’s show, he’d been working on pages from the book, and I really wanted to read the finished product.) He didn’t have any – but then a little later on another pass, he said “I’ve got something for you” and produced a full-page ‘pin-up’ style image of the Flash. I thought, understandably, he was offering it for auction – but he said no, it was for me. “Because you’re going away.” Chuffed? I certainly was.

A second Mike Collins-related bit of good fortune happened later. A gentleman wandered into the sketch room and asked for me by name; he said Mike had sent him over because he’d said I wanted to pick up A Christmas Carol. Turns out he was Clive Bryant, publisher of Classical Comics. He produced two copies of the graphic novel – one the ‘Original Text’ (ie, all dialogue as Dickens had wrote it) and one the ‘Quick Text’ and asked me to pick one. Taking the ‘Original Text’ (of course) I asked how much I owed him, being happy to pay – and he gave it to me for free! Chuffed? Again, I was. So huge thanks to both Mike Collins and Clive Bryant for making my weekend with their generosity.

When 5pm rolled around we held a raffle to see who’d win the ‘mega-goodie bag’ put together by Mike Allwood; perhaps unsurprisingly Torsten clinched it, which was appropriate given the amount of money he’d donated (and hence the number of raffle tickets he had!). With that done, we put our pencils away for the weekend, and got ourselves ready for the evening’s event… a charity auction!

Auctions for fun and profit

Our organisation for the auction pretty much amounted to “Moving what we have to auction to the room we’re going to auction in”, so we didn’t exactly look slick. Still, we had more people turn up than I expected, even if many of them just seemed to want to look at the art, and not bid on anything.

Regardless, somehow it seemed to work, and later that evening it turned out that we’d made over £200 from the auction alone, which is pretty good considering how many Transformers toys we had… highlights included auctioning a number of the infamous sketch cards (contributed since 2007, only sold once before!!) and also saying goodbye to Boo Cook’s excellent Manticore sketch (hope it looks good in Ben and Rebecca’s house) as well as the Simon Wyatt sketch seen above, which I almost nabbed myself.

Combining the auction cash with the £300 or so we’d made in the afternoon, and we’d made over £500 for one day’s work – which is pretty amazing given we’d just sketched for three hours (with less than the usual crowds!). We were all well-pleased, and felt quite justified in taking ourselves off to the bar for a swift drink.

I was surprised how much I ached when I sat down that night – a sign of encroaching age, I fear, dear readers – and did wonder just how I’d managed this in previous years. Regardless it had been worth the effort for all the usual reasons; getting to watch artists work for charity, raising the money, seeing old friends, and engaging in mindless chit-chat about games and comics and movies. Even better, the always-present spectre of trying to make some money and sell some games was gone, so all-in-all, it was a far less stressful con than previously.

Dinner for 13

A rag-tag group of us quickly formed in the bar, and off we went to try and find dinner. Simon Furman, writer of all things Transformers (amongst others) led the way, and it turned out he was aiming to take us to the same curry house we have ended up in at least twice in Bristol, The Raj. Finding out that was full, however, we crossed the street and got lucky in Myristica, which might sound like a pulp fantasy setting, but actually is another Indian restaurant.

It turned out to be a serendiptious decision however, as the food was excellent, we got our own ‘private room’, and were waited on hand and foot by the attentive staff. It was easily the best curry I’ve had in Bristol (although The Raj was a close second) and made even better by the presence of friends all around. The only slight downside was that Mike Collins and Neil Edwards hadn’t been able to join us, having family and work commitments. This being our traditional Saturday night Expo curry, however, I felt they were there in spirit.

Naturally, with our bellies utterly stuffed with curry, it was only right after we left the restaurant that we’d head back to the Ramada bar, traditionally jammed with comics fans on Saturday night. This year it was actually a little less busy than I’d been used to, but still had enough people at the bar to make getting a drink a very long process.

Gradually people began to drop off to bed, but Mat and I ‘stayed the course’ mostly out of bloody-mindedness than any rational reasoning. We ended up sharing a corner with Paul, who was croaking to an assorted group of UK comics podcasters. When the clock struck midnight however, Mat and I duly decided we’d ‘gone the distance’ and crept up to bed. We’re not getting any younger here, people.

Any given Sunday

The next morning, after a long, leisurely breakfast with Andrew and Lesley, Mat and I had the unusual freedom to wander around the Expo, with no stand beckoning us back after a few minutes. It was kind of weird.

Partially, it was because the Expo was so much smaller this year. A couple of small rooms, a corridor, one big dealer’s room and that was pretty much it; you could get around the whole thing in minutes. So we did, pinpointing stands and artists we wanted to visit later. One notable absentee was Mr Andie Tong, who was nowhere to be seen; Mat and I decided he’d probably fled, knowing we were coming to get our sketches or else. We decided instead to head to the Mercure so we could pick up copies of LOEG 1910 and get Kevin O’Neill to sign – only to remember as we exited the Mercure’s lift that the Small Press Expo was running on Saturday only. D’oh!

A quick about face back to the Ramada, and we said goodbye to Andrew and Lesley for the second time, as they drove off home. Now we were left to our own devices, and duly split up. After some consideration I got in a short line to get a sketch from Dylan Teague, and Mat went shopping. While I watched Dylan create some excellent art and wondered exactly what I’d get him to sketch, in what I can only call an insane coincidence, I ran into my old friend Liam, who was down from London for the day. We chatted for a bit, catching up on the past few years, as I moved slowly to the front of the line.

In the meantime Mat returned from shopping and Andie Tong Watch, telling me that the mysterious man had not popped up on his previous stand. Figuring that possibly Andie had gone home, when Dylan asked me what I wanted to have sketched I suggested Marvel’s Spider-Woman, as I’d been thinking about getting Andie to do the same. Dylan did a very nice job even though he wasn’t too familiar with the character, and I went away happy.

Queuing for Dylan had pretty much taken it out of me, though, and Mat wasn’t interested in queuing himself. Instead I did a bit of shopping, picking up three massive volumes of Judge Dredd reprints for just £25 from the Rebellion stand.

With those in hand we were just about ready to leave – but not before we ran into Kat Nicholson for one last chat. She showed us some sample pages from the adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that her and Jason Cardy are doing for Classical Comics. As most of the time Kat and Jason are colourists, this is an exciting step forward for them. Essentially they’re ‘digitally painting’ the book, with of course the script coming from ol’ Bill himself. Quite a challenge I’d imagine, but they have 10 months to get it right!

Saying our goodbyes, Mat and I headed for the lobby, resigning ourselves to another con without a Tong sketch. “You know,” I said as we headed for the doors, “this is when we’ll run right into him as we leave.”

And who did we run right into? Andie himself, on the phone with Andrew Wildman, trying to figure out how to get his own Draw The World Together donation over to Andrew. This was obviously fate, so Andie immediately promised his first two sketches to us. Hurrah!

What’s the big deal?

You might be wondering why getting a sketch from Andie was a big deal to us. He’s hellishly talented, that’s for sure, but the real truth is that we’d just been too nice for too long.

Andie first turned up out of the blue at the Birmingham International Comics Show (BICS) in 2007, where he wowed us with his work. (In fact, I seem to recall he wowed the other artists quite a bit, too.) However, as was always our policy at shows, everyone on the NCsoft staff held back from getting a sketch done on the day – just so we could ensure that you lot got your sketches first. Sure, our money was as good as anyone’s, but if there were customers before us in the queue, they came first.

As you might understand over the years this was a particularly hard policy to stick to, especially when artists like Andie were drawing their hearts out right in front of our eyes. So more than a few artists graciously did sketches for us outside of shows, including Andie himself; you can see the Aero he did for Chris here, and Mat also got a surprise Transformers sketch at one point. I, however, through fate or luck or whatever, had never ‘gotten a Tong’.

So down Andie sat, and Mat, who already knew what he wanted, ponied up for a full-colour sketch of, erm, Marvel’s Ms. Marvel – with all the money promised by Andie to DTWT. Mat and I happily settled in for the long haul, knowing the sketch would take a while but content to watch Andie work. As always it was a pleasure; confident, fluid lines, intuitive shading and in Mat’s case, some lovely layered colours combined to form a thing of beauty. (Update: added Mat’s scan, left.)

Leaving me to ponder was probably a mistake, however, as we also happened to be standing next to Charlie Adlard’s table (told you it was a small Expo) who was selling copies of a telephone book-sized compendium of The Walking Dead for just £15. Being a sucker for post-apocalypse stories – but an even bigger sucker for monster bargains – I snapped up a copy, leaving me just enough money to get a sketch from Andie, but in black and white.

That just wasn’t going to cut it for Spider-Woman, and besides, I already had a sketch of her from Dylan. Mat suggested Batgirl as an alternative – Barbara Gordon, natch – and Andie went to work, creating a fantastic sketch that I’ll proudly put on my wall next to Mike’s donated Flash.

With both of our sketches completed, we had very little reason to hang around – and little money to spend, anyway. We clambered back into Mat’s car, rolled down the windows, cranked the tunes and set the GPS for ‘Home’.

The last Expo?

As we headed home, Mat bearing the brunt of the driving while I occasionally made a semi-intelligent remark, I didn’t think too heavily about the fact that this may have been my last Bristol Comic Expo. After all, this time next year I’ll be Stateside (Come hell or high water!) and while I’d love to say my new company would exhibit at future shows, I really doubt that’s the case. (But never say never.)

However if this weekend was the last time I head down the M4 corridor towards Bristol, with blues-rock playing and sun streaming through the windows, well – it was a great way to go out. In a way it felt like things had come full circle from where we started; we started as a two-man operation, and to there we returned.

Comic Expo – and comics shows in general – have given me some excellent memories in the last few years, and for that I’m eternally grateful to everyone who’s ever attended a show, drawn a sketch, bought a game or just hung out in the bar with me. Hopefully, I’ll see you at another venue before too long.

For now though, if you’ll excuse me, I have some light reading to get to.

Extra: Pictures!

Thanks to Torsten, who took pictures of the sketching and also a few of the auction, here’s a gallery to enjoy. Thanks for sharing, Torsten!

Well, sort of.

In yesterday’s Daily Mirror – which as I understand is a ‘national newspaper’ here in the UK, with a ‘very high’ circulation – there was a competition to be found on page two, wherein readers could win a ‘one of a kind’ PC with a lovely drawing by Andrew Wildman on the side of none other than Back Alley Brawler. Which looks like this:

Yes, it’s an NCsoft-City of Heroes-Draw the World Together competition in a national paper. How’d you like them apples.

(Interesting timing, too, no? With a certain big-name, big-muscled superhero film releasing this weekend? Choice of Paragon City’s resident big-muscled brawler wasn’t a coincidence either.)

But how can you win this PC I hear you ask? Go foraging in bins for yesterday’s copy of the paper? Invent a time machine and go back a day just to buy the issue, and while you’re there, bet on whatever match happened last night in Euro 2008? You could do those things.

Or alternatively, you could just click here.

As well as winning a unique piece of Wildman art, you’ll also bag a new PC, crafted by our very own PC-crafting bods, who reliably assure me it’ll run ‘anything you can throw at it’ including all of our games.

Competition closes at noon on June 25th, and you only have to answer one question to win. Good luck!

Busy – and then quiet – first day at the show. As a result, looked like a blockbuster of a day first of all, then settled down so that it ended up in the ‘decent’ category. Still, if the same happens tomorrow I’ll be happy with the weekend as a whole.

Draw the World Together went really well it seemed; Karl Kopinski took to the process like a duck to water. Neil and Andrew both of course did great stuff too. Karl did a knockout sketch of Callista that I’ll share soon enough. Suffice to say it contains three figures… but simply looks amazing. We were all green with envy.

Right, now it’s time to get off to the curry house with artists and a few players in tow. (I can tell all the ‘regulars’ are here because my hits today are so low!!) I’ll leave you with me and a box of money.

If anything qualifies as a ‘Weird self-portrait’ it’s this. Except, erm, I didn’t do it myself. Oh well:

Day Three. Three. Three days. I’m telling you, writing this is almost the same as doing it all over again. Well, not quite.

The big difference between the Ultimate Heroic Weekend (MiniCon, same thing) and any other show we do was simply time. At most shows, we spend an entire day on the show floor, but then with a usually audible sigh of relief (or more likely, cheer of elation) we pack up and go out – or go home.

(The one exception is The Show To End All Shows; the Games Convention in Germany. It’s five days long. Proud monuments stand in the aisles of der Leipziger Messegelände, honoring the booth workers who have fallen there.)

At Omega Sektor though, while we did leave the venue, we never really left the show. So by Day Three… it was starting to wear us down a bit.

Three Orange Whips, I guess

No early morning realisations of doom for me on Sunday, but instead just straight down to breakfast when I really would have preferred a lie-in. Generally at shows I try and ‘rally the troops’ a bit at breakfast, get them ready for the day, or just talk about what was going right or wrong. That makes a lot of sense when basically you have two takes to get it right, in a normal weekend show. If on Saturday things go wrong, we try to fix them on Sunday. Here though we all knew we had Sunday and Monday to get through, so in a way it seemed redundant.

Regardless, there was plenty to talk about as we all ate heartily and well, a mixture of continental breakfasts for the, erm, continentals, and ‘full English’ for the pale-skinned amongst us. Andrew Wildman and his wife were sat near, so I talked over the auction from the previous night with him, marvelling about how much money we’d raised already.

Quick flashback: the very last thing I did in the centre on Saturday night was sit in Omega Sektor’s back office, and listen to Chris tell me that we had over £2,400 in charity cash already. (Somehow, that total was a bit wonky, but we still raised more than that, so no complaints really.) I remember feeling totally numb about it, and not because of a lack of emotional response – just because I was so… damn… tired. By Sunday morning, I’d gotten a bit more of my excitement back.

In-between turning around to talk to Andrew and eating breakfast, I made sure everyone was doing okay, talked with Alex/GhostRaptor and others about the status of Task Force: Omega and generally just made sure that all the plates were spinning. Or that we we were firing on all cylinders. Pick your metaphor.

Satisfied everyone was at least alive, awake and going to make it to the centre (Not always a guarantee) we packed up and shipped out.

Sidekicks and stock

We arrived to find Sidekicks already in place, or at least that’s what my semi-functional memory tells me, who were of course asking if we wanted coffee. Wary of the previous day’s coffee-fuelled exploits, I think I passed on the offer, and just pottered around seeing what the stock situation was like.

Selling stock at shows may seem to you like a no-brainer, but in actual fact we’ve only been doing it for a year – we started at Bristol Comic Expo in 2007. Back then, we were just getting started with learning the ropes on ‘how to sell games directly to people’ (It’s not a normal requirement of the job!).

You can tell we were new at it – handwritten signs (although I’ve since discovered, a combination of hand-written bargain highlighting signs and printed slick stuff actually works wonders), no shelving, no ability to take credit cards and so on, but we muddled through and actually did quite well at that show.

Then, over the course of the many shows we did in 2007, we rapidly evolved so that by Memorabilia in November (five months later!) we practically had a full-on shop, with signage galore, shelving, an entire range of stock and yes! The ability to take credit cards (when one remembers the PIN… I kid, I kid). Thank God for that credit card machine too, because not only has it made money for us, it’s helped to raise a whole lot more charity money than ever before.

With all this in place, we’re now getting down to the nitty-gritty of selling which relies, of course, on having the right combination of stuff to sell – and people to sell it. I’d discovered that Volker, as well as doing an excellent job demo’ing Tabula Rasa, was also a dab hand at selling stuff, so for the most part he manned the stock/shop area during the MiniCon – with some able help from Kerensky, Emmanuel and whoever else happened to be around, I think. I know that I didn’t sell anything this weekend because for my part, I was satisfied that I couldn’t sell better than them. (Of course, I taught them all I know. No, literally: I gave a presentation pre-Memorabilia called ‘How to sell games the Stephen Reid way’. I ain’t jokin’….)

So on this bleary-eyed Sunday morning I got an update, and was very happily surprised to hear that we were selling really well. In fact, as Volker said, we were selling certain items like ‘warm bread’.

I laughed. “Nice one. Big Train.”

“Pardon?” he said, being German, and not always being ‘up’ on the same semi-obscure cultural references as I am.

“Big Train. That sketch about hot cakes… Simon Pegg’s in it.” He looked at me blankly. “Simon Pegg’s working in some sort of cake factory and they’re having this conversation about how well these new-fangled ‘warmed bread products’ are selling… and he can’t get why no-one is saying the obvious, that they’re selling like ‘hot cakes’.” Still blank. “You… didn’t see it?”

“That’s just what we say in Germany. That things are selling like warm bread.”

“Riiiight.” Another example of a cultural gulf. Still, we had a good laugh about it; I did enjoy listening to him tell me very earnestly about the ‘warm bread’ attractiveness of certain items, possibly (probably?) because for a micro-second it made me feel like Simon Pegg in said sketch. (By the way, keep watching the second half of that sketch – and if English isn’t your first language, the phrase in question is ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’!)

Sketch slide

Knowing stock was under control, I turned my attention to other stuff. On this second day Ghost Widow and Ms. Liberty had returned to their respective cities of villains and heroes, so we weren’t doing photographs with them. There were a few photos still left to process from the previous day, but that was not a real problem, as Spaff would handle them when he got in later.

As for sketches though, we had a little bit of a problem, as Chris explained to me. “We shouldn’t have let them have a lunch break,” he explained.

Unfortunately the previous day when Chris had been trying to keep a careful reign on how many sketches we accepted for the artists to do, he didn’t anticipate that I’d steal them away after Draw the World Together Live to spend a little time, well, eating. Now before you think Chris is some sketch dictator and I’m Che Guevara, bear in mind that normally these guys will work straight through, only pausing to stuff a sandwich in their mouth between pencil strokes. So admittedly, it was unusual to lose them for an hour, and considering in that hour we could usually expect 2-3 sketches to be produced, the ‘lost lunch hour’ had basically given us a sketch backlog on Sunday of about 10 sketches.

Why is this bad? Well, we try our best these days (after lots and lots of trial and error) to make sure that we don’t overrun and end up with a backlog, which causes us to have to turn people away on the second day of a show who might have only just turned up. We want to get as many sketches done for as many people as possible, so that means we have to restrict the number we sign up in advance. (Hey, it’s better than the original system, when we didn’t know better, of ‘queue, wait for your sketch to be done, then come back again for another.’)

Probably the worst example of this was at Memorabilia 2007, where we ended up with a whopping 33 sketches in the queue on Sunday morning before the artists had even sat down. Luckily for us the combined drawing power of Kat Nicholson, Neil Edwards and Andrew Wildman pretty much cleared it, but it still meant we didn’t take new sketch requests until some time after lunch that day. It’s a situation we don’t want to repeat.

On this particular Sunday we weren’t too overburdened though, so we just had to hope that Andrew, Neil and David were going to be in a brisk mood. Before too long all three of them turned up and got drawing, but by then my attention had been pulled away to something else….

Radio killed the – no, wait

We’d promised interviews to several online radio stations, all gaming focused to a greater or slightly lesser degree, and they were all supposed to happen on Sunday morning. Knowing these people were scattered through the centre (and not all ‘in the corner’ as I had originally planned) I needed someone to put guests + interviewers together, consistently, for two hours.

This sounded like a job for… a Sidekick!

“Where’s Hazel?”

Hazel appeared presently by my side looking inquisitive yet helpful. I looked over the schedule and figured out that (a) I was supposed to already be doing an interview and (b) what times everyone else was supposed to be speaking. Then I scribbled all of that down on a piece of paper, and basically said “Go fetch!” to Hazel.

She disappeared for a short while, then came back knowing where all our our radio people were, and having informed everyone of where they needed to be and when. There was only one problem: we had no game designer.

“Has anyone seen Melissa today?” I asked my ever-present microphone-headset combo.

“Nope,” came the response. I wasn’t too worried – yet – because hey, she was a grown woman and she knew we needed her in the centre at some point. Right?

“Maybe she’s sleeping in,” someone pointed out. “She was here quite late last night.”

“And maybe her jetlag is catching up with her,” I thought aloud, and that was when the slightest tinge of panic began to creep in. I asked Emmanuel if he wouldn’t mind zipping back to the hotel and knocking on her door, and off he went.

In the meantime, I had some interviews to do. First of all I sat down with three guys from Evolution Radio, who produced a video camera and started to tape me as we talked. Then the camera promptly ran out of tape, or disk, or whatever it was – but luckily they had a backup. We chatted for about fifteen minutes I think, although I would have happily gone longer.

(Funnily enough, after everything was over and we were all back home, some of the Evo guys admitted on the COH/COV Forums that they were really nervous in the interview because it was the first they’d ever done – which I can relate to, as hey, everyone has to start somewhere. For the record, you did a fine job guys, and it never felt to me like you were fumbling.)

After that, guided by Hazel, I went almost straight away to speak to DJ Villan (sic – I think) from Split Infinity Radio, who’d set himself up in one of the little booths in the VIP Lounge. It was actually remarkably quiet in there, only occasionally punctuated by a whoop from the French/Belgian team, Commando Mirage, who were hunched in the dark in the balcony, continuing to slog through Task Force: Omega.

The interview for Split Infinity went quick and easy too, although Simon had a slightly different tack with his questions – a little more formal, but I still managed to get in some plugs for the DTWT sketchbook project and other stuff. On my way out, I ran into Martin ‘Amboss’ Rabl, who was about to sit down and talk about Aion with Simon. Then I heard in my ear that Melissa had arrived.

“We were starting to wonder….” I told her as we sat down together. It was getting on for lunch time, and Sidekicks appeared to materialise next to me ready to take food orders. I looked at the petty cash I’d taken out for the duration of the con, and saw it was beginning to dwindle. Still, we had enough for another round of tasty baguettes, so off they went.

(The ‘baguette in-joke’ of the ‘con was that there are two baguette shops – both with ‘baguette’ in their title – almost an equal distance from Omega Sektor’s entrance, that distance being about twenty metres. Being so near to each other, but still on different streets, it was hard not to think that there wasn’t some sort of deadly blood rivalry between the two of them… an idea which was reinforced by their ridiculous cutthroat pricing. A baguette – with filling, mind you – for 99p anyone?)

Rockjaw meets world

Emmanuel had returned from the hotel, apparently missing Melissa by only a few minutes, who had indeed slept in but just because she was tired, not because she was jetlagged (as I recall she said). We chatted for a while as I used my laptop to throw presentation slides together with Issue 12: Midnight Hour concept art in them, which I had promised at the previous day’s Q&A. Melissa wasn’t due to talk until 4pm, again, but I had two hours of presentations before that to get through and no breaks.

So it went, me tapping away at the laptop until the food turned up, after which I tapped away with one hand and shoved baguette into my mouth with the other.

Everything was good. Stock was moving briskly, sketches were being drawn, from what I heard several teams were closing in on Task Force: Omega’s end, and generally… I was quite content. Now, what could go wrong….

Running a little late, I came into the VIP lounge to find the entire EU community team sprawled out on giant beanbags on the ‘stage’, taking it very easy. It set the tone for what became a very laid back Q&A session, as we talked about the usual sort of thing players want to know about: do you still play the game, is it different being on that side of the fence, what would you like to see in the game, how do you handle problematic board posters and so on.

Even though I had no sort of agenda, I found myself happily reiterating the fact that all of them were passionate, dedicated gamers, and that although some might have felt that their constant mentions of NCsoft titles were cheap plugs, the reality was that they’re just all big fans. And they are; just like me.

Next up, it was my own presentation on ‘breaking into games’, which I’d been looking forward to all weekend. When I initially polled attendees on which presentations they’d like to see during the weekend, this was inexplicably popular, so I was expecting a big crowd; as it was, it was a little thin on the ground, but then we were getting into the home stretch with TF: Omega, and I’d find out later just how many people were busy with that!

Nonetheless I still had some interested looking audience members, and more than a few of CrewNC, who probably just wanted to know what the hell I was going to say. The answer is, summarised: to get into games you have to work really damn hard. There ya go! Just saved you an hour. Of course there are more jokes than that in the presentation (and for this particular, special version, an entire section called ‘The Aero Option’ which made good use of Chris’ worst Facebook imagery – he was very good about it) and people duly laughed. I thought it went pretty well, although of course after I was done, I knew there were still some tweaks I’d want to make to it to improve it for any potential ‘next time’.

With that done, we pretty much rolled right into Melissa’s second Q&A, which had no agenda and no presentation to go with it, just some rotating concept art. As a result we just freewheeled for a couple of hours, and just as the previous day, I couldn’t have been happier with the result. Despite Melissa’s stated phobia of standing in front of people with a microphone in her hand, she was a fantastic guest; exactly in tune with the players and what they wanted to hear. I could have gone on all day if my voice hadn’t started to dry up after nearly four hours of continual MC-duties.

Dinner time

We wrapped the Q&A up at about 5:30, because quite frankly we had to. We had a dinner appointment with the Sidekicks, Melissa, Aero, GhostRaptor, Mat and myself – the first of several dinner shifts that evening, as my generosity didn’t quite extend to buying everyone pizza two nights in a row. (I know! Boo, right? Hissss!)

It’s become a tradition – and a clichéd one, at that, given how many curry houses are in the city – to ensure we have at least one curry every time we’re in Birmingham for a show, which means I’ve had quite a few curries in Birmingham. Incredibly though, we’ve yet to find our perfect curry house, and I tell you, we’ve looked; the catch is there’s no definitive source of curry house info out there. (If there is, please please tell me where.)

Interestingly, I think most of us ‘B’rum show veterans’ would say the best curry we ever had was on Saturday night of Memorabilia 2006… which was in a restaurant none of us can remember the name of. We were just dropped off there by a helpful cab driver after we said “Take us to a good curry place that’ll serve… er… 15″. It’s in the ‘Balti Triangle’, I know that much. But that’s about as helpful as looking for a particular blade of grass in your weekly mower cuttings.

As a result, we’ve moved around a bit, going to a number of different places since then, but none have yet quite been perfect. In this case, we jumped in two cabs and got taken to Lasan, which was certainly very agreeable, I have to say. Naturally, as soon as we sat down, Sketch Sidekick Iain told me that if I’d only asked, he could have recommended an ‘excellent’ curry house that he knew. Which led me to wonder aloud: “Sidekicks. Is there anything they can’t do?”

Dinner wasn’t as leisurely as I would have liked, but then we had a Grand Prize Ceremony to get back to. As we were leaving the centre Alex had been getting the latest up-to-the-minute news on the remaining Task Force: Omega contenders… Commando Mirage had in fact finished all six Task Forces (an amazing effort on its own) but were now going back to re-do their first TF, Positron, because they thought they could improve upon their time. They had a two-hour window to do it in.

At the same time, the closest team to them was snapping at their heels; Paragon’s Unity, who as I (just about) understood it, could take the title if they did the final TF fast enough, and if Commando Mirage didn’t clock a faster time on Positron.

For an idea we never thought would even go the distance, it was starting to turn into quite a sporting event.

As a result, that dominated conversation to a certain degree during the meal, which had been promised to Sidekicks as part of their overall ‘thank you’. All of them were in remarkably high spirits considering, and now I think of it, I was too.

El Grande Ceremony of… Prizes

With curry filing my capacious belly, and with everyone else suitably stuffed, we waddled… I mean walked all of twenty steps to the end of the street, and got cabs back to the centre. We had prizes to give out.

As we got back within radio distance it was undeniably exciting to hear the chatter in my ear. There was a mass of people in the VIP Lounge, all waiting for the ceremony to begin; we knew who our winners were, so now all we needed was some prizes to give to them. Several of us zipped upstairs to grab what we needed, and to scribble down the things we needed to remember; then we made our way back downstairs to find the German comedy duo of ‘Martin & Martin’ entertaining the crowd… and it really was a crowd. Where the heck had all these people come from?

(I’d actually have liked to hear what Martin & Martin had been talking about, as I guessed they’d been interviewing players and keeping the crowd happy. It’s not like we planned it; that’s just another example of how damn good these guys are, as they just went into it without prompting.)

Muttering “Excuse me” and “Pardon me, coming through” I made my way to the front of the room, as Martin took took an invisible cue and announced me as “the one, the only, RRRROOOCCKJAWWW!” At least, that’s what it sounded like. I felt like I should be wearing silk shorts and a robe. Thanking him for the intro, I faced a dark mass of folks and started talking, as I had been all weekend.

It was amazing to see how many people were in that room. I knew quite a few had left over the weekend, but apparently many had stayed, and of course many of them were Task Force: Omega entrants. We had a white board sitting behind me (see above) with all of the times on it, so it wasn’t going to exactly be a surprise to many people as to who had won, but it was fantastic that nonetheless they’d all gathered to pay homage to their fellow players.

As I recall, I think I started off talking about just that, thanking people for coming and asking if they’d had a good weekend, which got a deafening, positive response. Then I said that we’d been talking that day about coming back next year, which got another huge roar. “Do you want us to do Task Force: Omega again?” I asked – again, a big cheer. “You’re all crazy,” I laughed. The best sort of crazy, mind you.

Then it was on to the prizes, and that was a whole mess of fun, I have to say. Leaving aside the fact that we hadn’t quite figured out what the prizes were going to be for a few categories – what can I say, we were busy – we got to give out our unique ‘Paragon Seal Medals’, which we’ve only handed out once before, to the winners of S4 in (I think) 2005 – the Super Summer Slam Spectacular, in case you were wondering. They really are lovely collectables, and I’m glad they’re as limited as they are.

We also had some unique t-shirts made for the top two winning teams, with gold and silver letting and logos on them, as you can see here. Of course, the main reason to enter for most of them was simply the kudos, and I did my best to make everyone feel like King of the World while they were up there in the spotlight. (I wonder if we can build a podium big enough for next year. Hmmm.)

A particular highlight for me, apart from the huge, exhausted smiles on the face of the winning teams, was grabbing a video camera off of Carl from the International Hero Idols, and taping him and his teammates as they explained their character conceptions. As all of them were die-hard roleplayers, it was easy for them to explain their ideas, and once again I marvelled at the creativity of our players in all situations.

The final winners? Well, the just-mentioned International Hero Idols won for Best Overall Team concept. Their idea (A team formed of the winners of a series of ‘Superhero Idol’ competitions from all over the world) was just too good to not reward, especially as each character represented a country, and was suitably attired and named, too. They had stiff competition from several other teams though; I think next year it’s going to be really hard to judge that category.

Our other ‘meta prize’ went to the impossibly named All Animals Were Harmed In The Making Of This Team, who scooped Best Dressed Team for their group of animal-themed heroes; if I get imagery I’ll update this post with it later. Our only other non-placing prize was for the team ‘first past the post’, which we knew might not have actually been the overall winning team… but in the end indeed it was.

You can get all the exact details on the winners over on the official EU Forums, but just to save you the trip I’ll tell you know that in third place was Paragon’s Defenders; second place went to Paragon’s Unity and the chequered flag went to Commando Mirage, who you may recall had re-started the Positron TF about the same time that we left for dinner.

Incredibly, they’d finished it – again – in one hour and forty-one minutes, which is insanely quick, and knocked the spots off their own previous time. Their total aggregate time for all six Task Forces was just eight hours, 19 minutes and 14 seconds. Considering we guessed early on we’d be looking at twelve hours plus, that was astonishing. Faced with that incredible time, Paragon’s Unity finished second, but were the only other team to finish all six TFs, so deserve huge respect for that.

With that… we were just about finished. I had one more set of thank-yous in particular, and that was for our Sidekicks; all of them got medals too, except Hazel, who’d had to leave early (and got her medal posted to her).

After that, I thanked everybody for taking part in TF: Omega, thanked everybody again for coming, and told them to keep on playing – as we were still there until the next afternoon, and we wanted to keep the party going. So that’s what we did.

“We’re outta beer, Victor!”

I slumped into a comfortable chair in the bar sometime later, just in time to see Superman catch a helicopter in mid-air. Not a bad time to come in, I figured… but while I’d been looking forward to enjoying this movie all weekend, I was restless. I had energy, transferred to me by the enthusiasm of the players around me. I had that feeling that always comes at the end of a big show, which is easily summed up:

“Yeah, this has been great. But how can we do it better next time?”

Already planning it in my head, I went looking for Andy Hannon, one of the big cheeses at Omega Sektor. It turned out he was out… buying more food, because it had all been eaten! Turns out this wasn’t the first time either. It was never a problem – as soon as it ran out, it was restocked – but it just made me realise how big this whole thing had become.

I went looking for a beer instead, figuring I deserved one after a 12-hour day… only to hear that we were out of that too. Catastrophe! Well, a minor inconvenience in fact… the centre was just out of Corona, in particular, so I got something else to tide me over, and circled back to the office, only this time to find Andy at his desk.

I wandered in, too tired to make up a clever pitch on the spot. I figured I’d just come out with it. “So Andy… we had a great time. Players really seemed to love it. You guys have been fantastic… basically, we’d like to come back next year.”

“You’re welcome any time!” Andy said, very enthusiastic for a man who’d just hauled back another two carrier bags of food to feed the hungry masses. “It’s been a great weekend for us.”

“We were thinking, basically… the same thing. Easter weekend. We’d theme it more generally, but… four days, same sort of arrangements. Do-able?”

“Absolutely,” Andy said. That was that settled, then. These were my kind of people, I have to say.

The door opened and Flash walked in, AKA Gordon the barman. He had a beer in his hand which he presented to me. “This is absolutely the last Corona in the centre,” he announced.

Figuring that sounded like a good cue to go ‘off-duty’, I took a swig of the good stuff.