Here’s a quick summary of my thoughts about Oz Comic Con and what I plan to do over the next few articles before I run out of material. I’ll also finish Authors by Alphabet.

I spent the weekend wandering around talking to all the authors and as many of the artists as I could. I took a lot of photos and some video interviews. I’ve made contact with a number of people with a view to interviewing them via email in the future. The videos will be on Youtube and I’ll link them here when that happens. The photos will be on Twitter and Instagram with a few words but I’ll put some of them here with an expansion of my thoughts.

The first thing you do is buy your ticket online. This year the queue to buy tickets wasn’t too big and the queue to get your wristbands with online tickets was enormous but I still recommend buying online. When we got there around 10:30am on the Saturday there were probably 100 people waiting just to get their wristbands.

Lots and lots of volunteers, they tended to be in multiples which would have been most necessary. With so many people you’d often have multiple people needing help at any one point. Just look for someone with a green tshirt and the words Oz Comic Con.

It was a tremendous weekend, I had a ball. The key to the weekend is in the name, the word ‘Comic’ should let you know that the bulk of the weekend will be about comics with enough other stuff to make everyone happy. There were three book type people who write books with words rather than illustrations and then many other people who write or illustrate graphic novels, comics or help with this kind of endeavour. There were four stages where you could view or participate in talks to learn more about the writing/drawing/creating/publishing of the books or learn more about the special guests or learn more about the art of cosplay and how to create or repair your costumes.

I only did a few panels and entirely missed the big special guests, there’s a story with one of the queues which I’ll write about before I finish today. There were many booths selling all sorts of goodies to do with cosplay or fan club booths trying to raise awareness and get more people (and also sell stuff). There were even some food places as well as the cafe provided by the convention centre.

You could buy autographs or photos with the special guests but this was rather expensive and as I don’t collect either of these I didn’t do more than look at the very extensive queues and photograph the price lists.

Some of the guests were Australian, such as the people from the Red Billabong movie while others were brought in from overseas such as John Barrowman.

Before I finish for today, here’s the story of the queue.

It was John Barrowman’s talk. I’m not a fan of meeting big luminaries, my mouth tends to open, my brain empties of all thought and such rubbish dribbles from my mouth you’d think I had no brains ever, so I tend to approach the smaller names where I’m a little more comfortable. As I have a smaller readership I didn’t think I’d get anywhere near Barrowman so I contented myself with an attempt to queue up for his talk. It was in the biggest room, of course. People must have been queuing for 10 or 15 minutes before I got there as it was already very big.

In order to get to the room they called Stage 1 you had to leave the main hall, go through the wide corridor to the broad breezeway and into the spacious foyer to queue up. I got into the breezeway before I realised the queue I’d been passing was actually queuing for a reason. I asked someone if this was the Barrowman queue and with an affirmative response I did the right thing and found the end. It had already grown another few metres in those couple of minutes. It went all the way through the foyer, through the breezeway and most of the way back to the wall of the main hall. When I got there I was only about two metres from the wall. I did try to take a couple of photos to show you the queue but I’m too short and they just show a mass of people.

The queue was so large that I only got halfway through the breezeway before we were told the room was full. If the queue was only one person wide then we would have all made it in but it was actually four or five people wide. It was an amazing queue!