As New York Comic Con (NYCC) approaches I thought I’d share a few of my favorite stories from comic book conventions past. I have so many great memories attached to all the various conventions I’ve had the good fortune of attending. Some are funny, some touching, and still others were eye opening, but they have all helped shape both my life as a geek and many of my friendships.

I got my start with comic books by going to NYCC, which might seems a little backward. Most wait until they’ve been into comics for a little while before they venture into this particular comic fan gathering. I ended up going because my friend Cory was going and I wasn’t doing anything that weekend. Cory was already into comics and had gone the year before (the first ever NY Comic Con) and told me it had been a pretty good time.

For the first few years NYCC did not have the fixed weekend in October that it has now. For my first year it was held Feb 23-25. Also, since this was the only the second year the convention had existed, organizers were still trying to figure out some of the logistics, so everyone had to line up outside, in Manhattan, in February. The line went one long block down east, six short blocks north and then back one long block west (about .6 miles) and it took us a couple hours to get inside. Not only were we waiting for hours to get it, but the temperature was below freezing and it was windy since the Javits Center is on water. I had on heavy pants, a shirt, hat, scarf, and an ankle length leather trench coat, and I was still freezing. I have never been that cold before or since. Even in all my heavy winter clothing I was shivering. There were even some poor people who weren’t expecting it to be that cold and only had a light jacket on. While it was miserable to stand out there for hours on end, shuffling forward a few feet at a time, I look back and realize that it was more of a rite of passage than anything else, and it made for great memories. Of course, at the end of all the waiting there was be a warm and inviting geek wonderland to thaw us.

As it turns out, going to conventions has a pretty significant learning curve, especially when a group of people go together. At a Big Apple Con a few months after my first NYCC, my friend Dave and I learned a few valuable lessons at the same time. The Big Apple Con was held in the Hotel Pennsylvania, an old hotel which tried to cram as many artists, vendors and comic fans into as tiny a space as possible. This often meant that “aisles” were barely big enough for one person to go down it, let alone two people walking in opposite directions. We also had yet to learn that a friend of ours would wander off at random moments without any warning. As we were trying to squeeze down a particularly small aisle, our friend took it upon himself to wander off to look at a vendor booth that we passed. Dave turned around suddenly and our friend wasn’t there, so Dave decided to stop and let him catch up. Since it is generally frowned upon to just stand in the aisle without doing something, Dave turned to the booth he was standing in front of.

It was a pretty non-descript booth with a couple of photo album books sitting on the table. Harmlessly, Dave reached down and flipped one open and things began to take a turn. We had unwittingly stopped at the booth for a Playboy Playmate from the early 80’s, and Dave had just opened up the photo album containing all her 20 year old nudes (which is apparently before razors were invented). Out of surprise, not disgust, he immediately closed the book and looked up to find the Playmate looking at him looking at her pictures. If the story had ended here, it would have been a little funny, but instead the Playmate began to harass Dave and berate him about not wanting to look at her pictures. In order to quiet her, Dave was forced to look through the whole album, trying to compliment the photos, while the Playmate stared at him to make sure he was actually looking them. Imagine trying to look at twenty year old nudes of a woman who was sitting right in front of you. Not to mention, while she may have been a Playmate twenty years ago, now she looked rather jaded, with way too much makeup and her skin had the texture of an old leather jacket.

Dave finally reached the end of the album, and then turned to me and asked where the hell our friend had disappeared to. I proceeded to inform him that we had lost him somewhere behind us about ten minutes earlier. A horrified and mildly sick Dave grabbed my arm, said very loudly that we had to get going, and very forcibly moved us further down the line. He was dragging me away so hard, I thought he was going to dislocate my shoulder. The moral of this story for us is first that our friend wanders off on us, but also learned to be much more aware of what booth we are in front of before we start flipping through books on the table.

With NYCC just on the horizon, I can’t wait to tell more of these awesome memories. Keep an eye open from more stories from comic con and stay tuned for Therefore I Geek’s coverage of New York Comic Con, October 10-13.