It's a meeting of professionals.

It is NOT an opportunity for the fans of dentistry to meet their favorite dentists. It is NOT an opportunity for these rabid dentistry fans to buy rare collector's edition toothbrushes from "the golden age of dentistry."

And it is CERTAINLY not an opportunity for these fanatics to get the autographs of dozens of D-list celebrities, the most famous of which is only barely remembered from a brief walk-on role in a popular dentist-themed movie of the late 70's.

Comic book conventions, by marked contrast, are built around the fan. Fans meet creators. Fans buy comics. Fans get Jawa #3's autograph. Fans. Fans. Fans. Everything else is an afterthought.

That said, there is awful lot of "everything else" going on at conventions these days.

Fans are there to celebrate their hobby. Companies come because the fans are there, and they want to sell them comics. Creators come because the companies are there, and they want work. Companies aren't there to be pitched to. Fans aren't there to be marketed to. But if the product is good enough, they'll take the time to listen.

THEY'RE NOT THERE FOR YOU. YOU ARE WASTING THEIR TIME.

If you're approaching a comic book convention as a creator, you need to keep that in mind. You should be asking yourself: How can I make things easier for these guys? As Tom Cruise might say--well, as Tom Cruise MIGHT have said, if his career had stalled out with Jerry Maguire the way Cuba Gooding Jr.'s did--"How can I help them help me?"

Be friendly. Be helpful. Be to the point.

And don't interrupt them while they're trying to coordinate a signing with a major celebrity like... (give me a second) ...Seth Green.

     But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I love Philadelphia. I grew up in Philly, give or take a few feet, and I went to college in Philadelphia. I only moved to New York a few years ago, and then only because I'm an easily manipulated sheep, duplicitously duped into believing that Manhattan is the be-all and end-all of Western civilization.

(And also, quite possibly, because Manhattan is the be-all and end-all of Western Civilization. My friends make some very convincing points.)

In 1993, Philadelphia hosted Comicfest. Comicfest was a very big comic book convention. Perhaps five to ten times as big as San Diego was that year. Or perhaps not. It was over ten years ago, and I was slightly shorter then.

Comicfest was great, but apparently not great enough to merit a sequel, so the Northeast Corridor languished without a major comic convention for nearly a decade. But then, thanks to the wizards at... Wizard, all that changed.

Now, the folks at Wizard magazine have been starting up conventions all across the country. Chicago, Boston, LA, Texas, and, as of 2002, Philadelphia. This year, by Wizard's estimates, approximately 27,003 people attended the Philly con. And who can blame them?

Philadelphia is an ideal city for a comic book convention. The weather is miserable, and the guys selling soft pretzels on the sidewalks make you vaguely uncomfortable. All the more reason to stay inside for three days and think of nothing but comic books!

     (Okay, comic books and D-list celebrities.)

Last year, I came to the Philly con and spent most of the weekend with my friends and collaborators, Yvel Guichet and Joe Rubinstein, in Artist's Alley. We hung out, met fans, and talked up a comic that should finally be hitting the stands this January. (A year and a half later. I love comics!)

This year, I had no table, and my goals were relatively modest:

The last goal is really the Holy Grail of convention-going for me, so let me say a little bit more about it. What do I mean by, "Find out where everyone is drinking?" Well, obviously, it's not JUST about finding out where everyone is drinking. The answer, after all, is more than likely "the bar at the Hyatt."

"Find out where everyone is drinking," means finding and talking to editors and big-name creators when they're NOT crazy busy. It means finding those rare minutes when they don't mind you wasting their time. It means making a big enough impression that they might actually remember you, six months later.

Ultimately, it's not just about finding out where everyone is drinking. It's about getting invited to join them.

Of course, I always got picked last for the kickball team, so maybe I'm making too much of this.

Anyway, I had four goals. It's good to come to a convention with goals, because there's always so much going on. It's easy to lose focus on why you're really there.

And I was working under extreme time pressure.

Thanks to my day job as NYC public school teacher, I couldn't get to the convention till Saturday, and I had to be back in the city early Monday morning, which meant that Sunday was pretty much shot as well.

I woke up a little before 5 a.m. Saturday morning, took a shower, brushed my teeth, packed my bag, and hopped on a train down to Philly. I arrived just after 9 at 30th Street Station, a little less than an hour before the convention doors opened at 10.

I decided to walk the 20-odd blocks from 30th Street to the convention center, because it was a miserably gloomy day, and I secretly hate myself.

A non-comics anecdote:

I know! I know! But what about the convention?

Well, there was a massive line to get into the convention hall. There were at least a hundred people in front of me and, by the time I got in, probably several thousand behind.

So, naturally, once I got inside, the first thing I did was jump into another, equally long line. This second line was the line for special tickets to the DC panel, to the Seth Green signing, and to the "woman from Battlestar Galactica" signing.

I figured I could probably get a word in with Seth through my Top Cow connections, but "ticket to signing" was my back-up plan.

I stood in line for another hour, and by the time I got to the front, all the "back-up plan" tickets were gone. I got a ticket to the DC panel, though. These are the "maybe you'll get to see Batman Begins tonight" tickets that you may have read about online.

I just made it through the line in time to get to the Top Cow panel, which was mostly focused on Seth Green and Hugh Sterbakov's upcoming comic, The Greshmen. This was the reason that Seth was at the convention in the first place.

Before the panel, I got a chance to touch base with Jim McLaughlin and Matt Hawkins for a couple minutes before the panel started, and they were very nice to me, but they obviously had a lot of other things on their minds.

In fact, they ran into some technical troubles during the presentation (with the sound of an Aphrodite IX anime clip) that I'm sure could have been discovered and corrected if they had just done the right thing and just ignored when I walked up.

Anyway, I got to talk to Jim and Matt, and Scott Tucker, later, at the Top Cow booth, and I was able to remind them that I exist and that they should put out Heroes of Tomorrow sooner than later. Goal #1 accomplished.

Seth and Hugh arrived about midway through the panel. They were a little bit late, requiring Matt and Jim to do some hasty improv, including a plug for a snack called "Wheatex" (?), which is apparently a healthy Wheat Thins alternative.

(Bet you didn't read that at Newsarama!)

Seth and Hugh were both very funny as they explained the premise behind The Freshmen. The two, who are childhood friends, spent some time talking about their love of comics, including a few anecdotes from their days as customers at Fat Jack's, the comic book store that my brother and I worked at when I was a kid.

Obviously, Seth received the lion's share of the attention. Any time the panel began to slow down, he would shout out some random, made-up Buffy the Vampire Slayer pseudo-fact, like "David Boreanaz's bottom smells like children!" always to tremendous applause.

But the biggest applause line of all came when he announced that they'd be doing a second season of Robot Chicken.

I didn't get a chance to talk to Seth at the panel, as he and Hugh were promptly whisked away by Wizard security at the end. No worries, I thought. I'd still get another shot at Goal #3, after the signing.

But first I took a detour to the J. Michael Straczynski panel. I knew that "J" would have a lot of interesting things to say about writing that I could paraphrase and/or plagiarize as my own ideas here. Unfortunately, all my digital tape recorder picked up was a lot of garbled noise, and all my notes for the events say things like, "Ooh! Make sure you transcribe what he said at 46:45! That was really great!"

So let me try to reconstruct what he said at 46:45.

The gist of it is this: Breaking into the comic book industry as a writer--breaking into any industry as a writer--is "really, really, really, really, really, really" hard. (My notes say "six really's.") There are plenty of writer's workshops that will take your money and "teach you how to write like everybody else and break in." But the reality is that the people who hire writers don't want you to write like everybody else. Why should they?

As Straczynski puts in, if you write like everybody else, "Why should we hire you? We already HAVE everybody else."

For Straczynski, the key is figuring out what you care about, where your passion is, and writing about that. "Whatever you do with your life, you better burn. Nothing else is worth it."

Editors are a cowardly and superstitious lot. I shall become... an arsonist.

     I may have missed his point.

After the Straczynski panel, I made hustled back to the main convention hall to catch the end of the Seth and Hugh signing. Not necessary. The thing ran over by almost an hour. I talked to Scott at the Top Cow booth, and he told me that Wizard was running the signing, so not even the Top Cow folks were going to be able to get close to them.

No ticket. No Top Cow sneak. I needed another plan.

So I waited. And I waited. And I realized, as I was waiting, that I was standing next to Hugh's father and his fiance. I talked to them for a few minutes, and they were very nice people. I explained who I was and convinced them to help me grab Hugh for a minute as they were leaving. The Wizard security guards would take a bullet for Seth Green, but I was pretty confident that I could get a few seconds with Hugh Sterbakov.

And I did. Thankfully, both Hugh and Seth fondly remember my brother, who was the manager at Fat Jack's for a number of years when they were kids. That got me about five seconds. Enough time to blurt out that I als hv a cmc cmng frm Tp Cw n I rt fr a ste clld Scrptc Stds n I'd lk t d n ntrvw wth n r bth f u t sm pnt n srry I ddnt mn t stp n yr ft.

     I'm paraphrasing.

The short of it is that I'll be doing an interview with Hugh for Scryptic in the next couple weeks. And a word about Hugh: Obviously Seth is getting a lot of attention for his involvement with The Freshmen, and obviously he brings a lot of star voltage to the project. But this is no bait-and-switch. Hugh is an honest to goodness writer, and he's the one who's actually sitting down and writing the darned thing. And he apparently grew up about fifty feet from me, and from what I've seen he's a very, very good writer.

Oh. And if I didn't mention it before, both his father and his fiance are very nice people.

Anyway, I'd completed Goal #1, and now Goal #3 was more or less completed. Then I was off to the DC Panel, which you'll recall had nothing to do with any of my goals. But I was very excited about the prospect of seeing Batman Begins two weeks early.

And I had the right colored ticket, so I got to see Batman Begins two weeks early. By now, you've probably ALL seen Batman Begins, but for two weeks I was cooler than all y'all.

But seeing Batman Begins was not part of the plan. How could I ingratiate myself to the movers and shakers of the comics world if I was being bussed off to King of Prussia Mall to see a movie? Now, it's true that there were a number of movers and shakers at the screening, but they kept giving me dirty looks when I tried to talk to them during the screening.

That's a lie, of course. For two plus hours, my only coherent thought was "Batman... cool..."

And, because I'm never above telling embarrassing stories about myself, I was the one who spilled his soda all over the place as he rushed to get to his seat in time to see the new DC logo. That's right, I literally wet my pants when I saw the new DC logo on the big screen for the first time.

That was the movie. Before the movie, I did manage to squeeze in a little Goal #2 action:

I talked to Dan Slott, the awesome, awesome writer of Arkham Asylum: Life in Hell, She-Hulk, and the very, very funny GLA. The man is a genius. I'm trying to arrange an interview with him now.

I met John Ostrander and Guy Davis and Jim Krueger in Artist's Alley, who were all very nice to me, even when it was clear I wasn't going to buy anything from them.

I caught up with Jose L. Torres, the writer of Speakeasy's Hunger. Jose is NOT J. Torres, of Titans, Go! fame, but he will pretend to be, if the price is right.

Oh, and I ran into Joe Quesada, off by himself, just standing there by one of the exits, quiet and unnoticed and lost in thought.

There's an odd, wonderful truth to be found at conventions, when it's allowed to slip past the Wizard security guards. Despite the hype. Despite the voltage. Despite the egos. Despite the very real talent. These are people.