Wizard World Chicago Comic Con 2010 has ended. As a frequent attendee to the Rosemont convention since 1994 I’ve seen plenty of ups and downs. Before Wizard took over the Chicago Comic Con was easily considered the only sibling to the monster San Diego Comic Con. Chi-Con never tried to be San Diego, but it managed to have a similar vibe — it captured that cult love of all things comic book. Since that peak in the late 1990s the show has been on a steady decline, when Wizard took over many people felt the soul of the comic show fade, and weather it was economy, the promoter, or simply the evolution of the hobby the show withered for the good part of a decade. It started picking up in the last few years — I had a great time at the 2009 show, but the for the most part the fans didn’t seem to show up.
This year the fans showed up. . . in droves. When I arrived on Saturday about 2 hours after the doors opened there was a HUGE line outside the convention center. . . the line at the ATM machine was about 20 people deep, and it was difficult to navigate certain parts of the show floor due to a San Diego like crush of fans. The space was JAM PACKED with celebrities, exhibits, dealers and artists. It was supposed to be a big deal that Marvel and DC weren’t there, and while it would have been nice to have them at the show, to be perfectly honest I didn’t even realize they weren’t there until well after the show ended.
Of course my main objective at a show is non-sport cards, and for that Chi-Con 2010 was a strange show. There was only one exhibitor listed on the website. For whatever reason they didn’t even set up at the show. Derek Woywood had a small corner in a big booth — so small in fact that my first pass through the dealer area I didn’t even notice his set up. In fact when I finished going through the dealer area for the first time I was pretty disappointed. . . I hadn’t found a single trading card dealer. A couple of folks with a few random vintage cards were set up, but that was it. Half way through my second pass I ran into Derek. He had an impressive amount of stuff given the small space available to him in the booth. I thumbed through a couple of boxes of chase cards, but didn’t find anything I had to have. . . then I noticed some boxes of Pop Century on the shelf. The boxes were very fairly priced like all Derek’s boxes. . . but I didn’t jump on ‘em quite yet.
After leaving Derek’s booth I headed to the front corner of the convention. Oddly, behind the exhibitor section there were more dealers. These dealers were sort of mixed in with the celebrities and exhibits, focused on finding card dealers I totally missed this section of the convention until Derek pointed it out. Triangle cards was set up on an impressive six tables back in the corner. Initially slated to share a booth someone else Triangle hit the jackpot when they were given permission to take over tables that remained empty after the start of the show. Tony had some deals at his table too, I picked up a couple of David Mack sketches from Iron Man 2.
The day had certainly turned around. . . starting with the fear of not having any cards to finding a couple of sketches and some boxes things were definitely improving. The last stop in the convention was Artist’s Alley, with the goal of finding Sad Little’s booth. Nate was manning his booth, and we had great conversations about what was new with Sad Littles since I interviewed them for my last article in Non-Sport Update. The company has been doing well, and it’s nearly impossible to not root for Nate. The guy made a sets of exclusive promo cards for Chicago-Comic Con. . . most manufacturers don’t even bother to show up, but Nate brings free stuff. In fact he gave me a handful of promo sets to give out. If you’d like one, and couldn’t make the show drop me an email or post a comment. After a long conversation I walked away from Sad Littles with a pile of stuff to open. . . now were talkin!
The rest of artist’s alley was a bit of a blur. Bill Maus was there and had P’ups artist exclusive cards for $40 a pop, not a bad price. There were other sketch artists as well, but at this point in the night I was broke, and tired so I headed for the door. . . but not before picking up a handful of Pop Century boxes from Derek.
Chicago Comic-Con 2010 was a BLAST. Unfortunately it seems like card collectors have given shows the cold shoulder this year. Chatter on various web forums about Chi-Con was virtually non-existent, so while the show was packed with fans, I really have no idea how many card people made the trip. I personally appreciate Nate, Derek and Tony putting in the effort and cost to set up, and I hope it was worth their time — they all seemed satisfied or happy when I spoke with them. . .
Other notes about the con. . . bringing in big name celebrities definitely brings in fans, and it gives the show a good, exciting vibe. They had a bunch of tables set up this year near the food — finally lots of tables! The volunteers for the show seemed much more ‘together’ and in general happier than they have before. Saturday at noon I had to park on the top floor of the parking deck. . . that’s never happened to me before. There may have been other spots somewhere in that deck, but when I left the show the entire top floor was covered with cars. Some dude was in a Stormtrooper suit at a urinal. . . I desperately wanted a picture of that because it was SO FUNNY.
The entire show from top to bottom felt better than it has in 10 years. . . I can’t wait for 2011!
Jon
KISS has appeared on more trading cards than any other band — they had 2 releases in the 70s, several in the 90s, and more as recently as this year! Back in ’97 Cornerstone was producing KISS cards, and they promised band signatures would be included in the next set. This was HUGE for 1997, which autograph cards were still relatively new, and big names were pretty few and far between. The set never materialized, but eventually the set of 4 unsigned autograph cards were released. They are gorgeous looking cards, a tantalizing promise of what was possible. . . but they weren’t signed. . . 
Today these don’t pop on to the market all that frequently, but I noticed all 4 on eBay tonight, so I took a close look. Unfortunately the scans are low resolution so the images don’t really blow up at all beyond how they appear.
Even with all these red flags I kept examining the signatures, and it was Paul Stanley that interested me the most. . . it is really difficult to tell in the scan, but looking closely, and messing around with the image in an image editing program it looks to me like the signature was signed backwards — or at least out of order. The line that crosses the ‘T’ appears to be under the rest of the signature, indicating it was signed first, and the line that makes the base of the T looks like it cuts through the edge of the ‘a’ indicating the ‘t’ was written after the ‘a.’ I attempted to get better scans out of the seller, who first claimed he didn’t have time to scan it again, then claimed there something must be wrong with my computer. Conveniently, when I asked the seller to look at the card to see if he could verify what I was talking about he stopped responding. He also told me he wouldn’t guarantee the card was authentic. Here is the conversation I had:
It’s difficult to refer to 5FINITY as a new trading card company, after all they keep releasing sets that sell out within days if not hours. Their product format is being emulated by other manufacturers who are hoping to catch lightening in a bottle the way 5FINITY has — after a handful of releases they’ve forever innovated the hobby. . . it’s hard to refer to them as a new company, indeed.
Congratulations on your comic book releases! How did you take your product from sketch series into a full blown comic book?
What is the most exciting thing collectors can expect from 5FINITY in the next six months?
Clearly The A-Team is popular — they got freaking Liam Neeson, Jessica Biel and Bradley Cooper (yeah, The Hangover guy) to show up for the new movie. . . But who cares about The A-Team 2010. . . 1983 is where it’s at — George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz, Mr. T, and of course — the most important component Stephen J. Cannell. . . ring any bells?
For some reason death seems to have become all to common in the trading card world. Recently the world has lost stars Gary Coleman, Corey Haim, Peter Graves, Robert Culp, among others and even artist Pat Carlucci passed away recently.
P’ups. . . Pin-ups and Puppies. . . the concept certainly isn’t obvious, if you look at the heritage of P’ups you’ll see that it was born from success of 5FINITY’s Mandy set. Mandy is a pin-up gal who frequents the pages of men’s magazines with her dog Skoots. By current standards Mandy was a slow starter — it took a week for 5FINITY to sell out of the product, but after that week the prices for cards and packs exploded. While 5FINITY’s previous releases were all successful Mandy was a phenomenon, and likely the turning point for 5FINITY as releases since Mandy tend to sell out in hours rather than days lead by massive collector orders as well as dealer speculation. 
Once I returned I thumbed through all the packs picking out my lucky number, I slid my finger up the side of the pack and pulled out the sketch. . . I looked down to see a card that gave me that sick feeling in my stomach. . . there was nothing pin-up about the card, and the quality was far below what I’ve come to enjoy from 5FINITY. I swallowed hard and stuffed everything back in the envelopes to open more later.
Perhaps the reason I was shocked to hear of Frazetta’s passing was that the man seemed as immortal as his artwork — he fought off a stroke only to learn to paint with his non-dominant hand!!! Have you seen old black and white photos of him reclining across a motor cycle? The man just looked like a legend in the same way that Clint Eastwood does — he seemed like he would live forever.