NYCC 2012 : One Man’s Walkthrough

By Prolific

New York Comicon 2012 like in past years was pretty amazing…Once a year you have a meeting place where you can geek out to your hearts content,look how you want to (for the most part,and for some of you REALLY!),Get lost in video games,anime & press panels with varying companies showing off their wares and keeping fans up on the latest news and content….But for me it’s about the art,more specifically comic art and the artists who make them!

I took the first day and walked the floor with Setty Mc,mostly just to see the layout and get my bearings,Comicon was pretty crowded last year and a little overwhelming …Happily the organizers recognized this and made a smarter layout by separating the dealers and comic companies from the Artist Alley altogether It made for a more relaxed experience to say the least.

After taking a spin through the show floor we went through Artist Alley..I gotta be honest it’s a little nerve racking to walk through there,Your seeing some of your favorite artists just sitting there drawing,You wanna roll up to them and not come off weird or creepy…something that gave me a reason to be less nervous was the fact my teacher at the Art Students League Steven Walker was there pimping his new Graphic Novel “The Battle of Blood and Ink : A Fable of the Flying City“..he’s a really nice guy so seeing him put me at ease.

I had so many questions for these guys and yet I didn’t…I do so much research in my field in terms of technique,supplies and looking for inspiration that really it came down to just saying hello and flipping through their work to study panel design and inking techniques….we came up to Joshua Middleton (we featured him here) and he was super mellow,asked him about his experience working on The Legend Of Korra and what his plans were his answer was prophetic for the whole weekend “I enjoyed my time at Nickelodeon they were nice people but I really wanted to work on my own stories”…walking the floor talking to guys like Sanford Greene,Matteo Scalera and my dude writer Kurt Christenson (Power Play) I just got the feeling what it all comes down to is “to break in to comics you gotta make comics”!

I had the pleasure of meeting Sean “Cheeks” Galloway he was selling prints and his new Table Taffy Books with Ryan Benjamin (which I bought and he did some nice head sketches in),this man was incredibly nice,his energy and stories of working on the Spectacular Spiderman cartoon as well as his motivations for working on his creator owned titles/projects had me feeling I must recognize the signs here…”to break in to comics you gotta make comics”

The rest of my weekend was spent trolling the floor for books to inspire (High Fructose,Tekkon Kinkreet Art Book) buy a couple goodies for the wife,snap some photos and overall just take it all in.

NYCC is a place where I found some answers and made me come up with some new questions about where I should go with my art but the prevailing theme is…to break in to comics you gotta make comics!