Naughty Bicycle

Welp, we just got done with Freecon 8 in Tallahassee. I’m usually pretty upbeat about these con recaps, but this time I may sound a little displeased. This weekend had a lot of disappointments, but we still managed to get a few great moments in there. So here we go…

Let’s start with the GOOD. I have a feeling most of you won’t read this whole article, and I don’t want to lose you with all the bitching that will come later. So we’ll start off with some positives. Financially, we ended up walking away with some profit. We managed to hit our goal, even though our goals for anime cons are usually pretty low. So that’s pretty awesome. I’m glad this weekend wasn’t a total bust.

Also, we met some cool people, most awesome of which was Lee from Adventuring Company. That dude rules. Go to his website and check out all the awesome comics and prints. I bought a copy of Very Near Mint online after I saw it at Megacon a couple months ago. I was a little sad when I found out the guy who actually wrote and drew the comic wasn’t there, but it’s all good. Lee is a super nice dude, and his comics and art were equally awesome. After the con on Saturday we all went out to Decent Pizza, which was more than decent. It was AMAZING!

Kate was able to get some cool commissions done, as well as some random art in between commissions. Here are a few of the things she made this past weekend:

So that’s about as much positive I can remember at this point. Now for the negatives…

Where to begin? Well, given the name FREECON 8, you would think that they’ve been doing this for eight years and they’ve got things pretty under control with their years of experience, right? You WOULD think that but you’d be dead wrong. I’ve seen conventions in their FIRST year that were more organized than this one. Every staff member I saw was running around like a chicken with its head cut off as they frantically tried to organize things at the last minute. As soon as we got there on Friday we walked to the artist alley, which was being held in a room not much bigger than our hotel room. Which isn’t that big of a problem if you only have 10 or so artists at your convention. But no, they tried to cram like 20 artists in this tiny room.

When we got there they confirmed with us that we had table #1, which was a great table. It was right next to the entrance, at the end of the row, easily accessible, etc. So then we went back to our car to grab our stuff. But when we got back someone was sitting at our table, like it was theirs all along. WTF? We soon learned that in the 10 minutes it took us to grab our stuff, they decided to switch to a first come first serve policy for the tables. Now, Kate and I are somewhat new to this con game (this is our 2^nd year) but I can tell you right now that cons should NEVER resort to a first come first serve policy. Especially when the con’s website specifically lists every artist and where their table is. With a map and everything. It took a bit of bitching on Kate’s part, but we were finally able to get the table they originally said was ours in the first place.

I could keep going with the negatives, but I don’t want to totally bum myself out. I’ll just walk away happy knowing we didn’t lose any money here and we got to meet some cool people.

If I haven’t lost you yet by this point, there’s one more thing I’d like to talk about before I head out. That thing is not comic related, but music related. My band, The Long Johns, just launched a Kickstarter to help fund our debut album. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you can do so HERE! Anything helps, and if you aren’t able to pledge anything, you can still help by sharing with your friends! Thanks, we appreciate any help we can get!

Our next con is PariahCon in Lakeland, which goes on from April 27^th-29^th. After that we’re taking the summer off to prepare for Dragon*Con in August. I added a schedule for all our convention appearances to the right side of the screen. So be sure to check us out at those places!

Thanks for reading!

- Josh