I flew down the day before the big San Diego Comic Convention and took a taxi to my hotel.  The airport is only about five minutes away from the city core.  That's pretty impressive.  In Toronto, the airport is half an hour from downtown, and that's in light traffic.  Anyway, I went to my hotel.

There's something nice about having your very own hotel room.  Every afternoon, you come back and the carpet has those fresh vacuum cleaner lines in it and the bed's been made up, and the air conditioner has been running all day.  There's something very comforting about stuff like that.  Until then, I'd been sharing rooms with other artists in order to keep travel costs down.  But not for this show.

The next thing I did was hop a chain link fence.

Because I had no idea where I was in this brand new city, I asked for a map at the hotel desk.  They didn't have one, and neither did the gift shop, but the gift shop lady said that the gas station might be able to help.  She pointed across the street and over some palm trees.  (Palm trees were new for me also.  They're a rather dorky plant, though.  They seem to work like pine apples.  I wonder if you can build anything out of them, or if they just sort of peal apart like lettuce after you take the bark off. . ). Anyway, there was a tall gas station sign just peeking over the tree tops.  With no side walk or any obvious way to get there, I just bee-lined for it.  Turned out there was a highway on-ramp in the way, and after I navigated that, the chain link fence.  The one I hopped.

The attendants looked at me kind of weird when I walked out from behind the gas station where you could only come from if you happened to work there.  Or if you'd hopped a fence.  I bought a map and a cold drink from them.

Then I visited a small restaurant, where a bored looking girl with a sweet face sold me some food made out of meat substitutes.  I said I didn't need a drink with it because I had some juice (still cold) from the gas station refrigerator.  Then, since we were the only two people in the whole place, (besides a huge sweaty guy in the kitchen), we started talking.  She asked me what I was all about and I told her.  She told me where the nearest comic ship was.  I finished eating and left.

A thirty-something year old lady who lived on the street stopped me and asked if my name was Tom.  I said my name was Mark.  Her name was Clair and she was waiting for her boyfriend to come back from the navy.  She said I reminded her of him.  Clair didn't look or sound very healthy.  Her eyes had that 'living too long under really bad conditions,' look to them.  She asked if I had any spare change.  I did, and I liked her, so l gave her my quarters.  She told me that the comic shop was a block away.

This comic shop had three racks.  One for Marvel Comics. Another for D.C. and Image comics, and the last for independents.  (That is, Dark Horse, Acclaim, and various other big companies I don't consider to be very independent).

The fellow at the desk told me that the owner was out and wouldn't be back for half an hour, so I hung around.  We talked comfortably about nothing very important until the owner returned and showed me that they actually carried Thieves & Kings, except they hadn't been able to get the last four issues due to problems with their distributor.  He produced three copies of the first issue and one copy of the second from a box he kept beside the racks.  I signed and put sketches on them and one customer who was watching bought a copy.  Then I sold a bunch of new copies out of my back pack to the owner.  I put sketches on those as well.

Then it was closing time, and I was invited out to a giant party which was going on at another hotel.  Practically everybody in the whole industry was there.  I got to see a bunch of artists I already knew, and I got to meet a bunch I didn't already know.  It was very loud, and I wondered if Clair felt lonely.  It was late when I went back to my hotel.

And that's how I spent my first day in San Diego.