Baltimore Comic Con 2014 Wrap up

CHU hit Baltimore Comic Con this weekend. It was a whirlwind event. It is truly a comic con as it does not have a ton of old TV and movie actors, pro wrestlers, former Playboy Playmates, or other “celebrities”. Instead, they have comics, thousands of comics, from tons of dealers. They do have toys and other pop culture accessories, but Baltimore is about the comics.
What is also different from other “comic cons” is that Comic Companies actually have a presence there. On site this year was Boom Studios, Valiant Entertainment, Dynamite, Avatar, Zenescope, and a few others. I haven’t seen a booth for a publisher at a convention in a while (except Baltimore last year.) Creators are on hand, at their own booth or at the publishers booth, not just pushed back to artist alley. Hot new creators such as Justin Jordan, Tradd Moore, and others were along side luminaries such as Fred Hembeck, Alan Davis, Herb trimpe, and nearly one hundred more.
Dealers had gold, silver, and bronze age books on hand, dollar bins, quarter bins, and books worth thousands of dollars. I was able to grab some spec books easily, but focused on books for my personal collection. Baltimore did have convention exclusives including the Gig Trouble in Little China Baltimore Comic Con Variant with cover art by Frank Cho (both Cho and Eric Powell were on site to sign).
Both CGC and CBCS were on site for grading. CGC had onsite grading, for which I took several books, including a 9.8 candidate Chew #1, a 9.8 candidate Walking Dead #27, and a couple other hot modern books. However, by the time I got to CGC in the early hours, their spots for onsite grading were gone for the weekend. I spoke to the rep who runs the Signature Series Grading and he said the turn out on Friday alone wiped out the spots for the entire weekend (about 1,500 slots.) I also spoke to CBCS about their grading service. Since the prices are extremely reasonable, I chose to send some books off with them for grading. Interested to see how my Enormous Phantom Variant comes back. The one down side is CBCS had an issue with their inner well plastic. The plastic is too rigid, and if dropped can shatter and damage the books. Seems that a recycled plastic was used to make the inner well. The problem will be fixed shortly, but books are taking 5-8 weeks to come back. I am still excited to have books graded by them as the cost is low and the level of service is so high.
This year, Baltimore Comic Con released a Yearbook, featuring art of one of my favorite characters, Matt Wagner’s Grendel. The $20 hardcover is filled with contributions by artists, who are onsite to sign the book. I had over 20 creators sign, or sign and sketch in my yearbook and this will be treasure for years to come. They have a scavenger hunt, where if you collect all the signatures in the book and have the artist sign off on a slip that comes with the book, you get three bonus Grendel Prints. I skipped over completing it, but did buy some of the original art that went into the book. The art was sold at a charity auction on site and raised around $10,000 for comic relate charities (CBLDF I believe).
Overall the show was incredible, I have already posted cosplay photos from day 2, and will get the ones from day 3 up shortly (Day 2 was also posted on Bleeding Cool.)
Look for a follow up article on the Spec of Baltimore Comic Con. There will also be a video interview I did with Vivek Tiwary about The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story
once the video footage is edited. (Thanks to Comiclord aka Ryan F. from the site for providing recording services and video editing.)