It is supposed to be school vacation week here in the Boston area.
As my youngest two are still of an age where that matters, I routinely take the week off from work.
One of the tasks that I usually do in this week off is begin thinking about convention season, looking at guests who are coming to cons I go to and start pulling books.
And usually the best way for me to start pulling books is to go to ComicBookDB.com and search for creators while limiting the search to books I have in my collection.
Well ... it's 2020 and so there are some things happening in the world which makes a lot of the above routine impossible. Thanks global pandemic!
First off, it isn't really school vacation week. The COVID-19 pandemic closed schools about a month ago. Everyone has been home since then. And the kids are getting on-line assignments.
The pandemic has also impacted shows. San Diego Comic Con just canceled. My con season happens in August but that is just around the corner. So I don't think they'll be happening.
But just in case, I thought I'd look.
Boston Fan Expo hasn't any guest listed.
Plastic City Comic Con, a smaller local con, has two excellent guests lined up: Roy Thomas and Jerry Ordway. I have seen both a couple of times at other cons so don't have too much to get signed.
And Terrificon, usually my heavy lifting con, has a smattering of guests announced but I have to imagine this is the tip of the iceberg. Some of them are people I haven't seen before and would be very excited to meet. Denys Cowan, Marguerite Bennett, Bart Sears, and John Ostrander are all new for me which would mean lots of potential books to pull. But also some favorite creators who I have met but would love to talk too again are also going. Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner, Dan Slott, and Steve Rude (as well as others) are also announced.
Now I have an idea of the Ostrander books I'd get signed as well as the Cowan ones. As for sketches, Amanda Conner is always a grail piece. I'd love to get a piece by Cowans and Sears. And if prior shows are a template, this is the tip of the ice berg of announcements.
But will this show happen? Who knows.
If it doesn't, I will be very sad.
But wait, there's something else to change this con season. ComicBookDB is gone.
Now I can't easily search my collection for books these creators have done to bring for signatures. I need to rely on my memory!
I know I can search the internet and get lists and try to cross-reference. But it won't be easy.
I miss ComicBookDB. I would have paid for that service!
Look, I get this is a very myopic post. This is a pandemic and I know people will be dramatically affected by it. For all I know, I will be dramatically affected.
But I look forward to cons as a nice diversion from my busy life. It'll be a blow to my morale if they don't happen.
2 comments:
I thought I saw that it was available in the wayback machine (archive.org) as so many sites are.
There's also comics.org.
I don't remember comicbookdb well enough to know if these come close to the functionality.
I don't know how searchable it is for what you're looking for, but mycomicshop.com has the best organized lists of comics I've yet seen, and it's also a superfast site. Every solicitation is there, so writers and artists are credited. Has all covers. It's a resource I find myself turning to constantly.
External searches targeted to specific sites are very often far superior to using a site's own search features. If you don't know, you just type this in any search engine:
site:example.com
T.N.
I dunno if I'm gonna resume my con going until a reliable vaccine is distributed, those are huge events and the odds of encountering the pathogen correspondingly rise...
JF
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