Assembly Required 2023 – the A Real American Book! Convention Report / Part 1 of 4

[Jump ahead to Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four]

This trip felt like an anniversary. Twelve months prior, I hadn’t attended a G.I. Joe convention in four years, and progress on my book had nearly halted. But in prepping for Assembly Required 2023, I now had 12 months of book productivity under my belt, and 12+ months in this new life of not teaching. And rather than stepping into an unfamiliar show, I was returning to what I knew as a fun and friendly one, to see friends I’d made at AR ’22. In several cases, these were friends I’d also seen at JoeFest and online for podcasts and live streams in the interim. Rather than being anxious about returning to an in-person world of fans and toys and personal interactions, I was going to hang out and talk toys and comics for three days.

Oh, click to enlarge photos.

Importantly, Mark LastName, maestro and host of the Talking Joe podcast, would be in attendance. This is key. I’ve known Mark for almost three years, and we passionately talk G.I. Joe comics for two to four hours almost every week. Mark has allowed me to put my name on a quality Joe product, and he has hustled to line up a killer list of guest interviews. And it’s not just that we talk, it’s that we get along. I wouldn’t have stuck around if we didn’t. But he’s 3,000 miles away, and since I wasn’t planning on hitting that cool, tiny UK con near him, and he wasn’t planning any trips to the States, our connection would stay online. That is, until he mentioned a month or two before the show that flights were cheap and he’d be flying out to Assembly Required. I was floored! This wasn’t the inevitable family trip to Disney World where we’d joke that Florida and Massachusetts are pretty close (they aren’t) and we could join up in the middle. Nor was this New York Comic-Con or Comic-Con International (that’s the actual name for San Diego) or even JoeFest, a very large-for-G.I. Joe show, the kinds of events a Brit might journey to. This was the extremely small Assembly Required in the airplane connection-required Des Moines, Iowa. But Mark had heard great things about the show from me, and from fellow Joe podcaster Jason Murrell (who nudged me to attend a year ago), and again, flights were cheap.

Before this weekend in Des Moines, this is how Mark and I knew each other.

Actually, usually I’m just staring at a recording timer on my screen and only hearing Mark in my headphones.

But during the con weekend, there’d be meals together, walking to and fro together, moderating a panel together, and recording the next episode of Talking Joe in-person together. But let’s start with day one, a day I’ll call…

THURSDAY—–

I’m skipping most of the airport, skyways, convention center, and downtown descriptions — there was plenty of that in last year’s con report. But I will point out that the Mickey Mouse plush toy/Thanksgiving display was in effect again at the Des Moines airport, and I enjoyed my cab ride to downtown. When I feel like talking with a taxi driver, I have three standard questions I ask, to paint a picture of their livery habits. They often counter with “are you here for work, or visiting family?” I took this as an opportunity to give the five-sentence description of my book and what G.I. Joe conventions are. This cabbie had never heard of G.I. Joe, so I explained it was an ’80s toy, and comic, and TV show, and there have been movies, and offered a two-sentence description of fandom since then. We pulled up to the Hilton, and the cabbie said “Now I know.” And I smiled and didn’t say anything else because you don’t have to.

It wasn’t even noon, and I was hoping for an early check-in. One front desk clerk said her older cousin had played with G.I. Joe, and that she recalled some G.I. Joe chatter here in the lobby a year earlier. Another front desk clerk said his dad puts a Cobra Commander and a Snake-Eyes and a Boba Fett on his Christmas tree every year. Both of these people looked like they were 25 years old, so I could see A) that important and painful hole where the Joe brand didn’t nab a particular generation, and B) once again, G.I. Joe in 2023 is definitely not Ninja Turtles, Marvel, or Star Wars. But we’re all working on it.

Headed to my hotel room. On Facebook, AR co-organizer Travis Webber posted that the few early arrivals could gather in the lobby at 3pm for fun activities. I’ve never gotten to a con this early, and anyway the previous year I kept to myself the first half day to walk around. After a little exercise, I got tasty potato soup at the lobby bar, but didn’t see anyone showing up for 3 o’clock. Oh, wait, was that Troy McKie way across the lobby? Why yes, yes it was, plus Troy’s wife, Leena McKie. Troy informed me that the gathering time was in fact 3:30. We chatted about his Joe collection, the cabinet G.I. Joe arcade game (they own one) and Callsign: Longbow action figures. Here’s Troy, Leena, and myself.

After a bit, about ten people had gathered. That included Roger Taft and Josh Eggebeen, co-publishers of After Action Report. The group activity would be traveling 20 minutes by car to a comic or toy shop, and then a pizza barcade. I had dinner plans, and would have to skip, which is too bad, because taking part in the informal, not-on-the-con-schedule caravan to fun and food with convention pals was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to say yes to all weekend. They left, I had another snack (lunch had been a casualty of the day’s air travel), and then Ron Wagner picked me up. We’ve kept in touch since I interviewed him in ’05 for my book. He lives in Des Moines, and so being a guest at Assembly Required is relatively easy for him. I’d wanted to see his studio a year prior, and he graciously allowed me in this time. Here are some harmonicas and a prop pistol next to Wagner’s drawing table:

Something that both Des Moines and my home base of Somerville, Massachusetts have in common is development and redevelopment, in all its goods and bads. Amusingly, the very building Wagner now lives and works in was many years ago configured differently and the headquarters to a magazine empire where he had a high school job. And he raised some hell as a high schooler. Stepping out of his car in the garage, he pointed and mimed, explaining he had once pushed a mail cart here and there, before escaping Iowa for the rigor of the Joe Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey. We headed to dinner, and I noted that across the street a building belonging to the American College of Hairstyling was no more, now a flattened lot with an orphaned sign. Wagner was surprised.

At dinner we talked comics and Larry Hama, and some of Wagner’s Kubert classmates. And of how hard it is, physically, to draw comics, to sit at a table all day and move one’s arm over and over. I have a pal who draws professionally. He’s in his early 40s, and he’s mentioned a few times that drawing comics for a living, though interesting and fun and a lifelong dream, is also physically wearing. Wagner, decidedly not in his 40s, talked about taking breaks, going for walks, and stretching, and how writing, playing, and recording music are a break from drawing, and how he tries to balance these two passions. Well, maybe music is the passion and drawing is the job. He also talked about getting bored drawing a comic job after six or 12 or 18 months, and, as with our dinner a year earlier, how he’s not interested in super-heroes. He got into the comics biz to draw the war genre!

Wagner dropped me off at the hotel, and he departed. The comics/toy/pizza/barcade excursion had returned. There was now a proper gaggle of 10 or 15 people chatting in the lobby/lobby bar. The AR organizers had, a few weeks earlier, floated the idea on Facebook that the first night could have a gaming get-together, and I was all for this. But first, I saw Mark TalkingJoe in person for the first time! Fun fact: Mark is taller than I thought, and in fact, I think taller than me. (My starting point had been only seeing him on a monitor, and always sitting.) Earlier, I had suggested to him that he might skip the airport shuttle and hitch a ride with con/internet pal Josh Eggebeen, who’d driven in from California, but was heading to the airport to collect Hawk Sanders. It’s more fun to get picked up by a friendly face (Eggebeen was on an episode of Talking Joe a few months back and Mark is a fan of After Action Report, which Eggebeen co-edits and Hawk Sanders co-publishes.) In fact, Eggebeen, Sanders, and Mark headed straight from the airport to the pizza barcade, so Mark, after a long flight from London, before even getting to check in at the hotel, was already taking part in Joe-fan socializing! And in all of this meeting and greeting, there’s still some post-pandemic relief that live events returned and we can travel, so seeing a person in-person is great. Just great.

Mark wanted to stay in the lobby, I wanted to play games, so we split off.

Up on the fourth floor, con organizers had an extra room available, and so ten of us assembled there. Joe R. of The Dealt Hand, a two-person company that hosts gaming events around Iowa, brought with him two of Renegade Game Studio’s G.I. Joe games: the miniatures/card game Mission Critical and the Deck-Building Game. I wanted to play the latter, because that’s something I can try solo at home, but I still need helping learning the rules. However, I did back the Mission Critical Kickstarter, and got everything in the mail, so I’m interested in that. But I still haven’t opened the box because I’m still learning the Deck-Building Game!

Five of us committed to playing the game, while the rest half-watched and half-chatted. Playing were myself (and clockwise from me – only counting people whose faces are visible) Chris Murray, Peter Hubner, Alexander Murrell, and Alex Bainter. Watching/chatting were Webber (torso, top right), AVAC (unpictured, but more on him in Part 2), and coming and going to and from the lobby, Alexander’s dad Jason (unpictured). Bainter, who I was meeting for the first time, but who I think won some art contests in previous Assemblies Required, is a big Warhammer player, as well as a big Warhammer and miniatures painter.

Here is a photo not from Assembly Required, but from a comic book and gaming shop my wife and I visited this past July, where a gentleman was painting miniatures. This can act as a stand-in photo for Alex Bainter, who is a talented painter of gaming figures!

Mission Critical comes with a set of unpainted plastic Joe and Cobra miniatures. Here’s where Thursday night gets cool. Bainter had spent the previous month painting a complete set of every miniature that comes with the base game plus the expansions, and he’d brought them all up to the fourth floor. We were going to play with his painted miniatures, so there was an added visual element. And in fact he would be selling them for the next two days at the convention. His handiwork was impressive. If I had already opened my Mission Critical box and played it at home, I would absolutely have sprung for these:

The actual game had some similarities to the Deck-Building Game. The main ones are 1) that it’s cooperative — you all play as Joes and you’re all fighting Cobra; 2) you draw and play cards to decide what is going wrong and how you’ll attack, and 3) you role dice to see if you hit or miss. The main difference is that you play as one, single Joe for the whole game, rather than as several Joes. I was Duke. (Technically, I was Tiger Force Duke, with blonde hair.) And of course, there are miniatures, whereas the Deck-Building Game has just cards. I found the game to be complex because I was tired, but at the same time familiar because of mechanics similar to the Deck-Building Game. Alex Bainter made the point, and Joe D. backed it up, that once you know any one or two tabletop games, they all play somewhat similarly. Jason Murrell observed that he, Alexander-his-son, and their friends had played all three Renegade G.I. Joe main products (the Deck-Building Game, the Mission Critical miniatures game, and the Role-Playing Game), and that he found the Deck-Building Game the most fun. After an hour of slow progress, Hubner swapped out and Webber swapped in. He’s on the right:

We didn’t finish, but after a slow two hours of learning the rules, we got to a good stopping point and called it. Back in the lobby, Chris Murray put a deposit on some custom-painted Mission Critical miniatures from Alex Bainter, and I caught the hand-off.

As a comparison, here’s a photo I took two days later, of the unpainted, although still great figures from Mission Critical:

I was tired from an early start and the day’s travel, so after checking in with Mark TalkingJoe, I retired.

—To be continued in Part Two, in which Tim talks with interesting people, looks at toys, and takes photos! Or jump ahead to Part Three or Part Four!