Whew.  I'm tired but back to work (slowly) after a whirlwind trip to San Diego from Thursday night to Sunday afternoon.  IT WAS AWESOME!  It's far from my first SD comic con, I've been going off an on since I was a kid since I grew up in the LA area and San Diego was about two hours away.  As a matter of fact, when I checked into my hotel room ( I stayed with my friend/Producer of the TV project I'm working on right now) I looked out the window and we had a view of the historic El Cortez Hotel in downtown San Diego.  The El Cortez was one of the first hotels to house the SD comic con and I had attended a few conventions there when I was a kid.  Back in the day when you'd see Jack Kirby walking around and it was only a thousand or so people there, not 100, 000 like now!  THOSE were the days.  Anyway, I saw a bunch of my comic book friends at this years con.  And picked up my favorite thing- sketchbooks and original art!  Many of my comic friends offer my sketchbooks for free, but I always feel guilty (I've done this too, but the wives hate it because you bring home less cash to pay for all those printing costs!).  This year, I brought along a small stack of sketches so I could at least give them something back in return.  Weather they wanted it or not!  Some of the great swag I got this year (yes, I bought some of it too) were sketchbooks from:  Terry Dodson, Javier Guzman, Andreas Deja (his animal sketches sketchbook), Laurie B.,  Brandon Peterson, Humberto Ramos, Francisco Herrera, Bobby Rubio, Stuart Immonen (my new favorite artist), Art Adams, Frank Cho, Sean "Cheeks" Galloway, and Ryan Ottley!  It's quite a stack.  I will say that Humberto Ramos's new book "Fairy Quest" is REALLY nice.  I love it.  I met Skottie Young for the first time and he's a great guy.  He wants to maybe move to Nashville, so maybe we'll get meet one day.  I hung out with Terry Dodson a bit over the couple days, he's just a great person too.  One of my favorite people is old friend, Greg Evans (he's the artist/creator of the comic strip "LuAnn") so I got to sit at the National Cartoonist Society booth with him and help him sell his book and talk.  I ran into Dean Yeagle at a resturant that my brother and I went to and we talked for awhile (Tony knows him pretty well).  That led to me getting a sketch of him in my sketchbook!  Thanks Dean!  Great time, can't wait till next year!

EDIT:  OOOops, How could I forget....and I got CHRIS SANDER's sketchbook.  Sorry Chris, its awesome!