Comicpalooza took place May 12-14 in Houston, TX, with Comics Experience founder Andy Schmidt, Social Media Manager Meredith Nudo, and Creators Workshop member Milton Lawson in attendance. Milton offered the following recap.
***
This weekend, Andy was at Comicpalooza in Houston, TX. It’s a relatively new show but it keeps growing each year. Andy had lots of fans check in at his booth:
I was able to attend a couple of his panels, a Breaking into Comics panel, which was well-attended and Andy handled it (reasonably) well when he prompted the audience with a question asking for an example of a comic creator that folks think doesn’t have much talent, and an attendee shouted out “John Romita Junior.”
Andy paused in the face of such blasphemy, composed himself, and continued on with the panel.
I also got to attend the Writing Fundamentals panel, which CE Social Media Guru Meredith Nudo live-tweeted the heck out of.
Speaking of Meredith, she’s involved with a local improv comedy theater, the Station Theater in Houston. She managed to get Andy and Gene Ha to participate in one of their shows. I tagged along, and discovered along with Andy what it was all about.
Here’s Andy, backstage before the show, discovering what the format of the show was going to be, and he was a bit relieved to learn he wouldn’t be asked to do improv comedy stuff:
The format of the show is simple: they bring on someone of note, interview them on stage, and then the comedy troupe performs some improv comedy based on the details obtained during the interview.
As you can imagine, the topic of comic books made for fun conversation:
The troupe did a pretty hilarious bit, interpreting Andy’s tale of taking his wife to the “Guardians of the Galaxy” world premiere. In their version, a character’s spouse threatens to divorce them if their debut performance at a theatrical play isn’t a rousing success:
After the show, they posed for a photo with some of the cast – note this pic includes CE’s Meredith Nudo and also the comic creator Gene Ha:
The theater itself was pretty cool, with some interesting art painted on the building’s facade. There was a great pic of Gene Wilder as Wonka but when we saw this one, we knew that was the one we’d have to pose in front of (that’s me, btw, with Andy):
***
Thanks to Milton for the write-up!
Andy weighed in on the experience too, saying, “I just enjoyed the interaction, talking about the business of comics…helping people navigate some stumbling blocks with publishers and whatnot. It was really great to re-connect with some creators as well as connect with fans.
“On top of that, Milton and I probably hung out for about 8 hours all told, which was super-cool, I mean, not as super-cool as his hat, which is like extra-super-cool, but it was a lot of fun.”
Thanks to Milton, Meredith, Andy, and to all who came out to meet us in Houston!
——————————————-
If you want to make comics, write, draw, letter, and color comics, or improve as a comics creator, you’ll find like-minded friends and colleagues in our online workshops and courses. We hope to see you there!