Not only did he have the costume, but he played the piano awesome. The whole convention was awesome. Exhausting, but awesome.

Delilah didn’t take home the Eisner, but I wasn’t surprised or disappointed. Samuel L. Jackson presented the award, so when I heard him read out my name and the title of the comic book… well, I’ve decided to accept that moment as a consolation prize. If anyone has a recording of that, please let me know. I need a new answering machine message.

Flight 5 sold extremely well! Apparently at least 400 copies found loving homes before the end of Saturday, and the pace continued on Sunday. A reasonable guess would be that I was at the table for 66% of my time at the con, which means I would have signed at least 250 copies, each of which would have had a little Delilah or Selim drawing in it. That seems pretty surprising to me. Some pages turned out to have themes or something. If you’re a person that has one of those copies, I’d love to see a scan. Or go post them on the Flight forums.

A lot of people got meeted! Some of them I’d never met before, and others I felt like I’d known for a long time on the inter-nets, but had never met in person. Hey – turns out everyone was really awesome. I was surprised to run into a few folks from Vancouver, the most surprising of which happened at the airport. A friend I worked with at a studio five years ago sat across from me while waiting at the gate, which was surreal since he had moved to Japan, and I hadn’t heard from him since, and he had been at SDCC the whole time. WEIRD.

There was a lot of great stuff to pick up, of course. Notably, I grabbed a beautiful print by Vera and a couple t-shirts from Nucleus (more awesome dudes to hang out with!). I also developed a weird fixation on Revoltech figures, and brought home a couple of those. Lots of video game companies were demoing their stuff on the floor, too, and it was exciting to get some good first-hand experience with LittleBigPlanet, Mirror’s Edge, and Battlefield Heroes. This fall will be a very non-productive time!

Another awesome experience was meeting Travis Charest for the second time. The first time had been in Vancouver about fifteen years ago. I had taken a portfolio of really crap, really high-school drawings to get his opinion on, and he was a lot nicer than he could have been. So I took the opportunity to thank him for his kindness. He said, “let me guess – now you’re pencilling X-Men?” and I said, “ahh, no. But here’s my Eisner-nominated comic!” and we laughed together. Hilarity ceased when he asked me to sign the comic. It seems like it took a long time to get the courage to put that pen to paper.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come by the Flight table and say Hi. It was a lot of fun to meet everyone and chat, and I hope everyone’s enjoying their copies of Flight and/or Constantinople. Also, so many thanks are due to Kazu, Amy, Johanne, and Amy’s Mom for all the crazy work they put into making the con awesome. I felt tired at the end of the day, but I can’t imagine how bushed those hard-working people must have been. I feel spoiled to be able to hang out with you dudes.