As The Kid America Club, and later as the Frankie’s Apartment Crew, my team and I have been hitting every single Comic Book Convention in the tri-state area since we were 11 years old.  When we were young, the Trek-heavy Creation Thanksgiving conventions were the ones to wait for.  Soon after, Fred Greenberg threw smaller, dealer heavy conventions.  We dropped out for a few years to chase girls and watch movies, but we picked it up again in the later 90s and started hitting Carbanaro’s Big Apple joints that he threw at the church, and later, at the Penn Hotel, where a lot of the old Creations used to be thrown.  We dressed up a lot, and talked to all the nerds and kids and superheroes.

Then NY Comicon finally came to town and blew the whole comic thing up again in New York.  It brought back some of that old fanfare (like the way Creation used to at The Roosevelt Hotel) but also added about fourteen blocks of technology, manga, anime, Hollywood special effects, and possibly 2000% more PEOPLE.  It was only 6 years back at the Big Apple Cons, when there were hardly any people shooting video or reporting on comics at all.  In such a short time, the NY COMICON has turned the idea of a Comic Book Convention into a major multi-media event that sucks in people of all sorts of ages, backgrounds, and interest zones.  The guest, artist, and exhibitor list is exhausting.  The video game demos, the cosplay, the sugar-enthused children, the pretzels.

She-Hulk had my vote for best costume.  I especially liked how her make-up got smudged. At the peak of her donut inhalation, she was acting like the old-school savage hulk right in the middle of that dancing video game expo.

We don’t have that many fans.  But Hildy here swore that she loved our videos.  This is one of 16 pictures she made me take with her.

Me looking through the old Undergrounds bin.  After all these years – it’s still the thrill of the hunt for me! A lot of cats think that the search for the ultimate back issue is over.  In a way it’s true, you can get a lot of stuff in collections and things like that – but we must press on!  There are so many comics from the past, so much pulp that we still must discover!  I’ve started in on old funny papers - Sunday Newspaper comics.

My man Janus is a weapons freak.  Well, he’s more of a fake weapons freak,  He also builds his own models, that he’s designed himself.  Everything from Ion cannons to Laser blasters to telekinetic cyborg helmets.

This is some fans interpretation of Third Base, one of our old characters! At first we were flattered, then he wouldn’t leave us alone!

This is me and Voltron.  Later, Voltron and I sat down and had some coffee from Starbucks.  We sat in the giant food court in the Javits Center.  Voltron complained about how his feet, the blue and yellow lion heads, hurt something terrible.  He said it was difficult to explain to people that shaking their hands could result in the red or green lion heads biting people’s hands off.  I asked him what it was like to split up into 5 different lions sometimes and he said it made him feel a little crazy sometimes, like he didn’t really know himself.  I said, “We all feel like that.”

From Left: George, Jeff, and Me, getting ready for tomorrow’s cosplay