Off-Topic: Tampa Gets The Comic Con They Deserve

(Update 8/1/14: I may be getting visitors looking for the 2014 con.  This post is from 2013, so just to warn you this is more past than present.  I *will* blog about this year's con after 8/2, so please come on back y'all)
For the first time in recent memory, the organizers of the Tampa Bay Comic Book Convention finally got the convention center downtown to host for a weekend.

Previous cons in Tampa had either been at a hotel out near the International Airport or at a mid-sized warehouse kind of place in St. Pete.  They hadn't been at an actual, large-sized, "hey-there's-room-for-an-artist-alley-INSIDE-the-con-for-once" facility whose purpose is to, you know, handle conventions.

I mean, I've done MegaCon in Orlando.  They've been at the convention center out there (one wing out of three, in fact: Orlando still outsizes Tampa for convention floorspace, sad to say) for ages, at least since the mid-90s I believe.  I've done library conventions at New Orleans and San Francisco and Chicago and San Diego and San Antonio... they've been at the convention halls, using the hotels for extra conference meetings and stuff.  I'm just saying, for once it was NICE to be at a Tampa Comic Con that was, yeah, at a Con.

Warning: some of the pictures are blurry.

One good thing about having a job this year: I can afford getting an autographed George "Crowd Scene" Perez print!  WOO-HOO! (link to print image, which was recolored to get all the background heroes done right)

It's F-CKING GEORGE PEREZ!  (and some fat Batman guy who's not Ben Affleck)

There were an unusually large number of Banes (one had a speech balloon claiming "I will break Ben Affleck") walking around at the con... and so I had to stop a few of them and chide them for the havoc they caused at last season's Super Bowl.  This one had a good reply:

(in Tom Hardy's WTF voice): "Be grateful I allowed such beautiful singing during half-time, before my reckoning!"

Meanwhile, in the foyer:

One of these days I'm gonna need to get a costume together, see if I get stopped twenty times a minute to get a picture taken...

All apologies to Kaylee for the fuzzy picture, though.  I like Cosplay Kaylees: they're always girls with the nicest smiles...

So that was my day today.  How was yours?