JoeFest 2023 – The Real American Book! Convention Report / Part 3 of 3

In Part 1, Tim flew to Georgia, walked around Augusta, and talked with friends and bought stuff. In Part 2, there was more talking and buying. Read on for the conclusion to this exciting saga, and click to enlarge photos…

Sunday

Woke up, packed, got breakfast at the hotel, and printed my boarding pass at the hotel business center, a tiny room with two computers. Hotel business centers are a shared joke with my wife, so it was funny to sit there, log on with a fifteen minute time limit, and with access only to email and various airline websites. In the lobby of the hotel, I bumped into one Brian and Rebecca of Virginia who were there for the con. We talked comics. It had been a successful weekend of talking to strangers. Just make eye contact and ask a question — “Here for the con?” Or not even a question: “You look like a G.I. Joe fan.” Follow-ups might be “do you read the comics?” or “Is there something you’re looking to buy?” (Not because you’re selling something, but because everyone is here to buy something.) I think the store owner and the teacher in me emerges in these interactions. I’m genuinely interested, whereas when I attended the first BotCons in the ’90s I was a kid trying to sell my hilarious fan comic, so interactions were more transactional. And there are many more generations of Joe (and Transformers) toys and stories and fans now, so it’s illuminating to hear that someone, for example, read the Devil’s Due stories starting in 2001, and has fallen off the IDW continuities, and doesn’t know Hama picks up again this November. Or they’re really into the Classified figures and skipped the Snake-Eyes movie. How far did people travel to get to this con? Did they drive? Is this part of a larger trip?

Headed to the con and chatted with Anthony Montanarella again at one of the two front desks. While we hadn’t ended up playing the G.I. Joe Deck Building Game the night before, we did talk comics here on Sunday morning. Turns out he’s catching up on the IDW Real American Hero series, and I sold him one of the issue #291 – #300 sets I had brought. Here, Montanarella and the gliders he was selling:

On my way back to retrieve those comics from my hotel room, one Peter Chavez struck up conversation with me. He’s a big Transformers fan, and had bought my hilarious and now-embarrassing parody comic, TransSpoof, from my BotCon table around 2002. It’s one thing to be recognized from karaoke ten hours prior, or from Talking Joe (which only happens at Joe cons), or the internet in general (which happens occasionally in my store when people note that I’m also in my store’s weekly videos). But it’s another matter entirely to be recognized from my earlier days of selling fan fiction at the big, annual Transformers convention. Chavez and his family had just seen Rise of the Beasts, and he recommended it. He agreed that Michael Bay’s fourth and fifth live-action TF films are worth skipping, the first one is okay, and Bumblebee is pretty good, and we already trust that Chavez is brilliant for being a TransSpoof fan, so I triangulated from his recommendation that now I’d see the new movie. (Plus there’s that G.I. Joe reference, so I probably had to.) (Update a few weeks after the con: I did.)

Here are some toys for sale! Our Shipwreck:

And Takara’s:

We’ve talked about Brian Shearer on Talking Joe, and I like his work from the two issues of G.I. Joe that he penciled and inked, so I wanted to say hello in person. But he’d also caught a glimpse when I’d showed some of my book to Robert Atkins the day before. I finally made it back to his table when he didn’t have a crowd and gave him a proper preview.

He’d self-published this book that looked up the alley of Joe and Transformers fans, so I bought it. Impressive that he wrote, drew, colored, and published it, and it’s 76 pages!

I was aware that I was getting short on time. But there was so much to take in at JoeFest! If I talked with someone or attended a panel, that was 20 or 40 minutes less until the con room closed. But I’m trying to rush around less at conventions in 2022 and 2023. Nowadays I walk slowly, a little in a dopey daze, just smiling at all the cool toys, art, and merchandise. One table focused on a niche version of G.I. Joe:

I’ll admit that 1960s/1970s 12-inch GI Joe isn’t my bag, and the 1977-1978 replacement line Super Joe, at 8-inches, is even less my bag, and also a weird blind spot in my Joe knowledge. But it’s great that folks have scooped up that name and are making new Super Joe product. Hasbro didn’t renew the copyright, and two gents I’ve not met — this is all from Google — Jason Schiermeyer and Steve Stovall, have teamed with White Elephant Toyz to make/remake the Super Joe line. Those are new toys you’re looking at above, not 45-year old ones mint-out-of-box. I hope the market is big enough to support this product line. Also, there’s been a Kickstarter to fund the tie-in comic book.

Above is a poster for the comic, featuring Ron Frenz art. I didn’t pay much attention to his copious Thor and Spider-Girl work, and then years later I realized he’d be a great fit for G.I. Joe, and then he drew a few issues! He’s doing just a variant cover for this new special. Super Joe had almost no backstory, so this comic will create that. I can’t quite tell from the internet who’s writing the one-shot (Power Comics publisher Austin Hough?) but Steven Butler is drawing it (another “old school” guy whose work I appreciate much more now), and previews look great.

If Super Joe isn’t my bag, maybe this old merch is.

But seriously, folks, I noted only two dealer tables with pre-’80s stuff. There was the Super Joe table, and this mega set-up of Six Million Dollar Man toys. I’ve never watched that show, but I appreciate a dealer who brands themselves so clearly and confidently, and who brings their own tablecloths to color coordinate with Steve Austin’s uniform.

I was about out of time, and was hanging around the Joe Declassified table and the After Action Report tables. One of the cool aspects of the After Action Report guide books is that editor/publishers Josh Eggebeen and Roger Taft have commissioned new drawings by key G.I. Joe artists for the covers and backcovers, and have purchased that original artwork! And all of it was on display behind their table. Left to right is Tim Seeley, Larry Hama/Steve Leialoha, Rod Whigham, and, upcoming, Mark Pennington. (Eggebeen or Taft noted that Josh Blaylock’s contribution was all digital, so there’s no original art to frame for that one.) Wotta collection!

There was some buzz around the Declassified booth and the After Action Report table concerning comics. Josh Eggebeen was looking at his phone. He asked me if I knew the crazy news about Void Rivals. I did. A little context: an online rumor months earlier pointed to Skybound/Image Comics as the new G.I. Joe (and Transformers) publisher. No official confirmation nor unofficial leaks had followed. Two weeks earlier, while near home in Massachusetts, a shop owner friend asked me if I’d ordered enough of Void Rivals #1 to get the rare variant. I didn’t know what he was referring to. He explained that it would depict a Transformer, and that series would connect to Transformers and maybe G.I. Joe, that he’d been on a retailer video conference call with Skybound. I felt stupid for missing that, but my shop and I get a dozen emails a day from publishers (and we could sign up for more!). Yes, we had ordered Void Rivals‘ premiere issue, but not in crazy quantities — Oh, that’s what the catalog solicitation’s vague reference to a new shared universe and a surprise we didn’t see coming meant.

Josh, not a retailer but someone with a professional interest in G.I. Joe comics and -related variant covers, had just heard this news and was looking on eBay right then for the 1:100 ratio variant. While Void Rivals #1 wasn’t on-sale for another three or four days, lots of shops had received their shipments early. I felt a little anxious — that comic was sitting in an unopened shipping box at my shop right then, a thousand miles to the north, and here I was in Georgia not reading it! I explained my take on all this to Josh and someone else (was it Chris Murray? Hi, again, Chris!) and looked forward to reading Void Rivals when I got back to Boston. Here are issue #1’s three regular covers and the first three ratio variants, and in order to simulate our anxiety and sense of unknowing, I’ve excluded the Transformers cover since we didn’t know what it looked like:

Out in the upper floor hallway one Casey Wheeler of the Podcast from the Pit podcast said hello and that he liked Talking Joe. I dropped off Montanarella’s comics and realized I only had about 20 minutes left, so rather than one last walk-through to take photos or window shop, this was the fast goodbye round. Ran into the con room, said some goodbyes, ran out. Almost sold another set of ten IDW comics! Grabbed my luggage, checked out, and headed to AGS. It’s pretty relaxing at a tiny airport with only six gates as compared to Boston Logan or the zoo that is, say, LAX. The lines take less time, the walks are a shorter distance, and everything is quieter. There seem to be fewer announcements, and there are no TVs loudly playing CNN. I drew a clock:

My plane and others around us were delayed due as a storm at our connecting airport became an overhead one, so I started worrying about getting significantly re-routed, or having to go back to downtown Augusta to stay over an extra night at the con hotel. The socializing would have been good, but the mental momentum by now was get home. I’ll end the actual chronology by stating that my original flight worked out. But I want to wrap up the full convention report with a little highlight.

At some point on Saturday, Josh Eggebeen of After Action Report realized that all the Joe authors, this recent spate of researcher/writers who’ve published, either with Hasbro or without, art and guide books on G.I. Joe comics and toys, were almost all within fifteen feet of each other. Eggebeen wanted a photo, because maybe this was a little bit of history in itself. So here, initially, left to right are Roger Taft of AAR; Ted Jacobson, writer of the upcoming AAR volume 3 (and longtime contributor to yojoe.com); designer supreme Brian Sauer; Dan Klingensmith of Creating G.I. Joe; James M. Kavanaugh Jr. of the Rank & File photo guides; and front row, Hawk Sanders, co-writer of the upcoming After Action Report Command Files; Eggebeen; and myself.

Researcher/author/publisher Carson Mataxis of The Art of G.I. Joe was actually upstairs running tech for a panel, but someone joked they could Photoshop him in later. I felt like perhaps I should opt out of the group shot because my book isn’t finished and certainly isn’t published, but I’m glad I accepted the invitation. (I’ll count this as a promise to the future.) The following week, Eggebeen posted the photo to Facebook and Mataxis Photoshopped himself in, so he’s now second from the left in the rear. But you know what? Of the four original shots of taken, someone is blinking in all of them, so I’ve done a head replacement from a different shot. There. Don’t we all look nice?

(Also, I remastered this from the Facebook post using Eggebeen’s full size original, because Facebook compresses like crazy. Nevermind, it doesn’t matter. But Carson, who’s spent more time than anyone Photoshopping G.I. Joe-related images in the last decade, will appreciate this.)

Eagle-eyed fans will note that Irishmen Brian Hickey and Paddy Lennon of Total Action Force: The Battle Years, weren’t around, and they are certainly part of this informal troop of devoted and intelligent fans writing and publishing books. They weren’t in attendance, but they certainly would have been pulled into the shot had they been on our side of the Atlantic, on the east coast, in Augusta, and in the room at that moment.

Part of what was interesting about JoeFest was the ways in which it was different from other Joe cons. And I will admit that I don’t have a wide sampling range. I haven’t been to the California or Kentucky shows, I haven’t been to JoeLanta (soon!), and there hasn’t been an official JoeCon since 2018. So my comparison is to my general memory of JoeCons in the 2010s and where those shows were similar to Assembly Required.

What is immediately clear is that JoeFest is huge. A tip of my hat to organizer Ed Schumacher, as this is a big show! 2023 looked and felt bigger than the final official Joe shows. Unlike all the other shows I’d attended, here were no contests. That is, no art contest, no custom contest, no diorama contest. I imagine that for some con-goers, this is a disappointment. For me, it was a little bit of a relief. I want to look at the art at a con, but I always rush through and can’t give it the time it deserves. The schedule tells me there was a costume contest, though. I wonder what the prize was. I think I saw about 10 cosplayers across the three days, which is a good amount, but felt small for how big this show was. That’s not a criticism, just an observation.

Also, the art guests like Adam Riches, Larry Hama, and Robert Atkins did not have any panels. Perhaps if JoeFest gets bigger more than one panel will run at once. Or maybe the folks running JoeFest leaned towards other panel topics this year. I imagine that not having to answer audience questions for an hour was something of a relief for the artists. The only breaks they needed were comfort and food ones, and they could have one more hour of drawing and selling.

I do want to point out that voice actor Lisa Raggio, who portrayed Zarana in Season 2 and G.I. Joe: The Movie, was in attendance and did have a panel. It looked great, but for time and schedule-clarity reasons I skipped it. And Samantha Newark, Jem voice actor, was also at JoeFest and also had a panel. (I think one of these panels was a last minute addition and meant a change in the con schedule, one not reflected in the one Instagram post with a full con schedule.) In terms of listening to a professional actor talk about their craft or share anecdotes, it’s a bummer I skipped this. David T. Allen, somewhat last minute, moderated the Raggio panel. Here’s a photo of him:

And that photo might be a good, symbolic place to wrap up. I met Allen at a con seven months prior. Since then, he asked me to guest on his podcast, and I found most useful for my book a big interview he’d conducted with a former Hasbro person. I didn’t necessarily expect to see him at JoeFest, and certainly not leading dealer load-in, but I was pleasantly surprised to run into him. And a theme that people state over and over is that toy conventions aren’t just about buying and selling, but people. I relearn than every time.

JoeFest 2023 was a big success for me. I picked up a few items and got ideas for my book or this blog, chatted with friends, made a few new ones, showed a few people my book, sang a song, recharged my book-writing batteries, and felt reconnected with the Joe community that hums along so strongly online. Before any G.I. Joe convention I wonder if people will show up and celebrate. They always do.

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Next up here at A Real American Book!: Some late 1980’s turnaround art, and between starting to write and finishing this JoeFest ’23 report, I did in fact attend a completely different show, JoeLanta ’23, so that’ll be a two- or three-part blog post.

Relive the action of [JoeFest ’23 Part One] and [JoeFest ’23 Part Two]