In Part One, Tim flew to Iowa, chatted, dined, and played a game, while in Part Two, Tim interviewed and co-interviewed, plus some repeats like chatting, dining and game-playing. Read on for Part Three, and click to enlarge photos! [Skip ahead to Part Four here]
(As with some of my convention reports, I’m going to interrupt my descriptions with some out of order photos of toys for sale.)
Once again, another hour of sleep would have set a better pace for the day to come, but cons require an early start. Mark (host and web maestro of the Talking Joe podcast, having flown all the way in from England — yes, I am reintroducing everyone here in Part Three) and I were to meet again for breakfast downstairs at the hotel restaurant. I liked its food the day (and year) before, but I’m a little disappointed in myself for not venturing out to find something more intrinsically local and different. Not to mention cheap. Hotel buffets are always at least 18 bucks, the food is always good or only-okay, and hotel eggs in California look and taste the same as hotel eggs in Texas and Florida. Jumping ahead a few minutes, here we all are:
It turned out that several pals were already eating, and we pulled up two chairs to join them. This meant that Mark and I wouldn’t be able to brainstorm for our 10am appointment or our 1pm panel, but there’d be time to squeeze those in later. But it also meant a lively meal with Roger Taft (who co-edits and co-publishes the After Action Report comics and character guides, and who runs a neat Facebook Group on Sgt. Savage and GI Joe Extreme), Greg Agustin (who draws on Instagram as g_unit2472 and who put together a new After Action Report book), Hawk Sanders (who publishes as Rising Sun Comics and produces the After Action Report books), and Josh Eggebeen (co-writer and -editor of AAR.) This is just what you hope for at a convention, to inadvertently meet up with people you know, and to make a group activity a little larger. This, and the general feeling of returning to this con in ’23 that I’d attended in ’22, reminded me of a phenomenon from earlier conventions. One I posted about in my Official JoeCon Report from 2016, a feeling of being lonely at a convention because you don’t know anyone, even though hundreds or thousands of people around you love the same thing you do, or not quite knowing people well enough to feel comfortable striking up a conversation or crashing their breakfast table.
This was the opposite of that, after many years of attending cons, but also decidedly connecting with people in real life and online. When someone emails me a question because of my blog, I respond. When someone recognizes me at a con, I ask where they’re from and what they’re there to buy or who they’re there to see. Some of this is a natural extension of owning a brick and mortar store, but it’s also a change in mindset. Way back at BotCon ’94, I was busy shopping and videotaping, and dined alone that night. (It was a one-day show.) By contrast, here in 2023, Taft and Eggebeen waved us over to join them.
One notable aspect of Assembly Required is that organizer Brian Sauer had lined up a little sponsorship. I wouldn’t necessarily peg T-Mobile wireless services and G.I. Joe fandom as a match (actually, T-Mobile is my cell carrier, so I’m proving myself wrong!) but maybe the broader note here is that people need data plans and sometimes a van near the con entrance stands out in just the right way.
Just through that doorway, an AR volunteer welcomed folks and handed them their badges if they’d pre-registered. She had a small tablet playing G.I. Joe episodes on Hasbro’s YouTube channel. A few feet to the right, the T-Mobile person had a bunch of T-Mobile-branded stuff on a similar table, and also a tablet playing the G.I. Joe cartoon. This made me chuckle because it was so weird, but also, if you’re going to stake out space at a con, why not go a little native? (I later asked Sauer about this, and he said the nice T-Mobile rep did that on her own, and also that he’d seen some people chatting with her about their phone plan, so maybe she’d found it to be a good investment.)
Also, here I am telling you about T-Mobile, so for the right reasons or the wrong reasons, the advertising definitely worked.
A few feet past and to the left, for an hour starting at 9am, the modest panel room was populated by sugary breakfast cereal and early attendees watching a projection of G.I. Joe episodes, including, of course, “Cold Slither.” I wanted in because I love the G.I. Joe cartoon, free food at a con is a bonus, and this is all-around fun, but a group of us had a task, so I missed Cartoons & Cereal completely. Instead, seven of us online-soapbox folks were going to make a short video.
This was the culmination of an idea that David T. Allen (of the G.I. Joe New News Review and G.I. Joe Fan Club podcasts on YouTube) had the previous night: Assembly Required could benefit from some free promotion, and many of the prominent podcasters in G.I. Joeland were here. Four of us had done some light brainstorming the evening before at dinner. This immediately reminded me of my weekly one-minute Hub Comics ads, which I tend to write on the spot (or co-write with an employee), shoot, edit, and post within a few hours every Tuesday night. As such, I was ready to sort of take over, but I didn’t want to for several reasons. One, this was David T. Allen’s idea. Two, at least one of the podcasters present, Hooded Cobra Commander 788, has a bigger online presence than the rest of us, and I wanted to defer if he had better ideas. And third, going back to 5th grade, I’ve tended to take over when I’m in a group and someone has a video camera, and I really wanted this to be collaborative. I kept asking questions, like “is this an ad to get people here today, or a generic one for the whole year that points to next year?” And “what’s the joke, what’s the concept, what’s the tagline?” It also needed to be short, because immediately, one of us was going to share the video with the rest, and each would post it. Someone suggested shooting it in parts and doing a basic edit in-phone, but I encouraged a single shot for ease of wrangling. And lastly, we needed some place to shoot the video, somewhere not too loud or crowded, and that was either G.I. Joe/Assembly Required-specific, or clean and generic. The main con hallway was okay enough:
In case the video doesn’t play (media fun here at WordPress!), we each torture our podcast/videocast names into verbs exhorting you to attend the show. Now that it’s finished and online, with my armchair quarterback-director’s hat (helmet?) on, I have several notes (let’s shoot two more takes, faster, can we get some background music?), but for an impromptu and free ad, it turned out great. Here’s a screencap. If the video didn’t play and you don’t know who these guys are, left to right it’s Mark and myself of Talking Joe, Joel and Jason of Order of Battle, Pat Stewart of The Full Force and Articulated Points, David T. Allen of the G.I. Joe New News Review and the G.I. Joe Fan Club, and Hooded Cobra Commander HC788.
I can’t help but think the final line is actually “We’re ready to believe you.”
At 10am the show opened. This is a good place to remind you, if you’re considering attending, that regular entry is free! You don’t buy tickets! Inside the con room I briefly chatted with Michael C. Hill (one of the con guests, G.I. Joe producer and writer of several episodes). Here’s Hill, noting that he at times looks too serious in photos, and I replied something about authors and focus and had I kept shooting, I might have even gotten hand-to-chin, a favorite of mine.
Next I spoke with Josh Blaylock (another guest, G.I. Joe comics writer, 2001-2003, and publisher, 2001-2007). I told him about my book and showed him a chapter. He made the observation that I started working on it at about the same time that he licensed G.I. Joe from Hasbro and started making Joe comics. Inside I felt a light kinship as well as my mild, ongoing embarrassment that this thing is taking so damn long. I also talked with Blaylock about some photographs he kindly shared after his Talking Joe turn, and then asked him about Mercy Sparx (his creation that dates to at least 2008 and that he’s writing and drawing again right now), as well as warehousing the current backlist of Devil’s Due (that’s his company).
Here’s Blaylock from the day before:
Now it was time for panels! Did I mention that Brian Sauer is a great graphic designer? As this year’s AR was Dreadnoks-themed, the con was informally nicknamed “Assembly DISassembled,” as if the Dreadnoks themselves had showed up and ruined the very name and signage. The distressed font below is a reflection of that.
At 10:30am, Jason Murrell (co-host of the Order of Battle podcast and the one who encouraged me 16 months earlier to attend Assembly Required) moderated the first panel of the day: “Michael Charles Hill – Behind the Music: The Cold Slither Story.” In case I didn’t get to interview Hill later on (our long chat the day before had gone unrecorded), I wanted to record this, as my 2009 attempt to line up a phone interview had washed out. (Note from eight weeks later: we talked by phone and there’s now a Hill quote in Chapter 6.) Murrell did a great job welcoming Hill to the fan community — this was Hill’s second con ever as a guest, as he’d just attended a Transformers one a few months earlier. Hill mostly talked about the genesis of a Joe episode he wrote, the aforementioned and theme-of-this-whole-weekend, “Cold Slither.” (If you’re unfamiliar, Cobra inserts subliminal messages into an original rock song that is fake-performed by the Dreadnoks, disguised as a hair glam band. I texted this one sentence summary to my wife and she replied “I’d watch that.”) Hill also mused about being a producer on G.I. Joe, his experience at that TF con, and more. Sometimes an interviewee needs to be nudged, and so the interviewer is actively questioning. Other times the guest is comfortable providing the long answer and needs little prompting. Hill fell into the later category, and Murrell nicely allowed Hill the space to riff. It was a great panel. Here are Murrell and Hill:
Noon brought panel #2, “Rising Sun Publications’ New Adventures of the Adventure Team,” presented by Hawk Sanders. Rising Sun publishes original creations as well as fan comics in the worlds of G.I. Joe, M.A.S.K., Robocop, and more, some online and others on paper. I had to skip this so that Mark and I could prep for the 1pm panel we’d be running.
That would be “Josh Blaylock – Reinstated: Bringing Back A Real American Hero.” Blaylock’s 2021 interview with Talking Joe runs 150 minutes, so we knew that we’d be doing the highlights version as this panel was less than an hour. At the same time, we didn’t want to just repeat all the same questions, so we endeavored to change things up, especially since the convention was Dreadnok-themed, Blaylock is known as a Dreadnok fan, and wrote a key Dreadnok story. Mark and I both got to ask some questions and guide the conversation a bit, Blaylock got to tell some stories, and there was even time for questions from the audience, a big difference from our pre-recorded podcast! I’ve been to a lot of conventions and am a tad wary of audience Q&As, wherein any one person (or several!) can hog the mic or ask boneheaded questions. I’m happy to report the queries at the Blaylock panel were great! You can listen to it here [Apple Spotify Podbean Google] or watch it here — please note, speaking of boneheaded moves, that I didn’t manage to audio record the panel, so Mark’s construction is A) partially courtesy of Hooded Cobra Commander 877 and B) not up to our normal Talking Joe technical standards. But you should click those links later and keep reading here.
It was novel to record what was effectively our second in-person Talking Joe episode in as many days. Mark and I have a good rhythm over the internet, whether audio-only, recording, or live-streaming, and it was nice to prove that our hosting and friend chemistry works sitting a few feet from each other.
Panel #4 started at 2pm, “After Action Report: Special Projects Sit-Rep,” with Roger Taft, Josh Eggebeen, and Greg Agustin. I skipped this partially because I’m already all-in on backing AAR Kickstarter campaigns and regularly consult volume 1 on my bookshelf, so as a believer I don’t need to be convinced, but also because if I spent the whole day in the panel room I’d miss the action in the exhibit hall. (Mark did attend.)
With that in mine I headed back to The Dealt Hand’s set-up to play Renegade Game Studio’s G.I. Joe Deck-Building Game. The previous year, The Dealt Hand had two tables, one for the DBG and another for the Joe Role Playing Game. This year they left the RPG at home because it’s complicated and hard to play in a short session (as is any RPG). Also this year, they had three tables for game play — two for the DBG and one for Mission Critical (which you may recall from Part One is one bit dice, one bit plastic figures, and one bit cards). And on a fourth, smaller table were a bunch of Renegade Joe game boxes and expansions for sale! This was great. No dealers at the con were selling any of this, as they focused on toys and a bit of comic books. And as I’d missed purchasing one of the G.I. Joe Deck-Building Game expansion packs through my own store, I was able to buy it from The Dealt Hand! Gamesmaster Joe Roth explained that just a few minutes earlier, a group playing the Deck-Building Game had won its game! That was nice to hear, as I’d now, between AR’ 22 and AR ’23, started but not finished six separate games. (That says more about me than the game.) Also, good to hear that others were taking advantage of the opportunity to play, since when I did peek at the gaming area the tables were empty, with coaches Joe Roth and Mary Roth waiting for players to sit down.
Let’s interrupt these wordy recollections with some photos of toys for sale!
3pm brought the next panel, “Joe Declassified: Dreadnoks, Disorder, and Donuts.” This was presented by Chris Murray (from Texas, I traveled there in ’15 to get photos of his collection for my book) and Pat Stewart (from Pennsylvania, both are going to read my book and offer feedback from the expert toy fan perspective).
Both Murray and Stewart had set up and were manning the Joe Declassified booth next door in the con hall. Joe Declassified is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit dedicated to preserving and presenting rare and behind-the-scenes G.I. Joe materials. With a focus on toy prototypes, development art, and package art, the group’s booth display at various conventions are continually changes, kind of like a traveling museum. (Sam Damon, who wasn’t in attendance this year, started and owns the group.) And each year Joe Declassified (abbreviated “Declass” by a few in the know) presents a slideshow talk connected to that year’s AR theme. (Last year’s was the 40th Anniversary of A Real American Hero, so Declassified did a panel on the canceled 1994 and 1995 toys, and then modified the slideshow a few months later at Joe Fest in Georgia.) To match AR ’23’s Dreadnoks theme, Murray and Stewart presented sketches, paintings, and photos of prototypes and production toys to give an overview of the development of and key changes in the Dreadnoks.
For example, I had sort of noted that the Torch sculpt input sheet I posted here at A Real American Book! two years ago called him not by name but by a preliminary specialty, that of “4WD Driver.” But I hadn’t fully formed the thought that this suggested Torch was not going to be a single-pack figure, but packed with the Stinger. Murray and Stewart had borrowed two images from my blog and put two and two together. Also, I had forgotten that after the original toy line ended there were some Official Collector’s Club and convention-exclusive action figures of the Dreadnok variety, and that some later versions referred back to earlier ones. Murray and Stewart even pointed to a few Dreadnoks created in the mid-2000s for one-off appearances in the Devil’s Due comic books, so their timeline stretched not just to 1994, but even into 2019 with Dreadnok references in the IDW comic books, like a variant cover I had sort of ignored. I appreciated the overview, and noted, as with all their talks, that they ran out of time and had to skip some bullet points and rush through some slides. I feel similarly squeezed every year I attend a career day talk at that middle school a few towns over, and every week that I taught my History of Animation class!
With the panel over around 4, I was going to head back to the exhibit room. (I’ve been using that term interchangeably with “con hall.”) I realized I was crashing, having not eaten in seven hours, but then saw a solution right behind me. The room in which all the panels were held had that very morning been the Cartoons & Cereal room. And all the cereal, with bowls and spoons and milk, was still there. I had solved this same problem the same way a year prior, eating cereal mid-day, and this year even got as far as grabbing a bowl and picking up a box:
But then I noted that sugar cereal carbs where not going to sustain me until dinner, so Mark and I headed back to the hotel for emergency late lunch. I had a salad and the potato soup. As the con was still happening, and the con room closed at 6pm, this was valuable time, so we tried to hurry. We were seated in a slightly different part of the hotel restaurant, I suppose the “lunch and dinner” set of tables rather than the “breakfast” ones (closer to the buffet area, now cleaned up and closed down). At first I thought this was dumb, like the hostess would not seat us in the breakfast area, but then I appreciated it, that I had a different view (looking out the windows to the street) and the lighting was different. If five of your meals at a con all come from the same place, anything to keep them from blending together is a nice touch.
Back in the con hall at 5pm, a small crowd had gathered for Raffle #3. This is an aspect of conventions, and Assembly Required, that I’ve ignored. (Except for the first comic book convention I ever attended, in 1991, when my dad drove my brother and I back for the final hour where we won $25 in con cash — my poor friend who got dragged back there with us, uninterested in comic books!) You’ll note that in this very blog report I haven’t even mentioned that at 10:30am and 2:30pm there had already been two raffle drawings. At AR, you buy tickets, as many as you want, and the dealers donate prizes (some pretty awesome ones, actually), and then maybe you win something. I’ve always been (or felt) too busy to stand around for ten minutes for a statistically unlikely prize of a toy I already have or don’t need. Better to let some kids or more invested collectors get that HasLabs SkyStriker. (Like I said, some great prizes!) (Oh, wait, I also did the raffle at BotCon ’97 and totally smothered the fishbowl with tickets to insure I’d win a holy grail. Ask Karl Hartman about that.)
And while I didn’t focus on any of the three raffles at AR, I do note I took this photo at the registration table out in the hallway, so here’s some context for you:
What struck me about this raffle was that A) this third one had some bigger-ticket items. B) Assembly Required is a kid-friendly show, so unlike some other cons, maybe actual little kids who like to play with toys would win. (No problem if grown up collectors do, though!) And C) the con had gotten quiet, and all buying and selling had practically stopped in the left half of the con hall. I appreciated that attendees were so invested in and respectful of con co-organizer Travis Webber’s announcements, as he pulled each ticket and read the number. I was also a tad disappointed, though, that it felt like with no one shopping, the con was effectively ending an hour early. There was some bit of funny drama, I think, where someone who hadn’t won earlier did now, and people clapped. But I also wanted the dealers to be selling, selling, selling up to the last minute. When the raffle ended, most of the dealers started packing up. If you count shopping time, then effectively the con did end 60 minutes early. But if starting from when dealers broke down their displays, it was only 15 minutes early, which isn’t bad, upon reflection. (Having exhibited at cons, I dig it, though — when you know know you’re done selling, you want to get home/back upstairs to your room.)
Also announced were the winners of the custom toy contest — sorry, I forgot to take photos of the entries — as well as the coloring contest. This year’s template was a character from Skeletron. (That’s the company founded by Ben Conway and Mark O’Byrne, who were tabling nearby, more in Part Four.) Here’s a shot I’d gotten earlier in the day:
I returned to Josh Blaylock’s table and wholesaled a few books for my shop. And then walked around to take some photos. Here are some toys for sale!
And so, a bit past 6pm, the con room was closed. Mark made the suggestion that we head to Zombie Burger now, rather than loiter in the hotel lobby or wait for a big group to form. This was smart. A year prior, dinner was on the later side because of lobby loitering and big group-forming. And I like chatting in lobbies at cons, and being part of a big group, but this backfires when your 12 or 15 or 20 people get to the restaurant and the poor host or hostess has to figure out how to seat you all, and you end up breaking into smaller groups anyway. Why not just start as a smaller group? With that in mind, Mark, Jason Murrell, his son Alexander Murrell, their adult pal Paul, and I walked the mile to Zombie Burger. It was pleasant to see a bit of the city and cross the bridge, even more so without rain or cold weather.
As per the photo at the very top of this post, the main Zombie Burger mural artwork is drawn by Ron Wagner, resident of Des Moines, guest of the show, and G.I. Joe comics artist circa 1987 and 2010. In another small difference between AR ’22 and ’23, we were seated on the left side of the restaurant rather than the right. (I appreciate any distinction to separate the pictures in my head.) Over burgers and fries, we talked about podcasting, and how Assembly Required had grown, and how Jason and Alexander and Paul get together to play the various new G.I. Joe tabletop games. They all went back to the hotel, while I walked over to the other side of the restaurant to chat with Chris Murray. I was ready to play some not-tabletop games, and a different group then headed out by foot to Up Down, a barcade a few blocks away. Oh no, Killer Queen, the game that grabbed us all the year before, was out of order! But as a consolation, I was able to pump ten quarters from the start into Gauntlet, something I’ve always wanted to do, without any parents telling me we were leaving in 25 minutes. And why, yes, I am pretty good at Galaga:
I noted that people where playing the 1992 Konami G.I. Joe game, and certainly we all love the synchronicity of this uncommon Joe arcade game so near to a G.I. Joe convention. I noted that Troy McKie (one-third of the team behind the upcoming Callsign: Longbow action figures) and his wife Lena McKie were playing Off Road (full name: Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Off Road) and the Player 3 steering wheel — blue, my preference! — was vacant. This game is a favorite of mine, and I was interested in subtly showing Troy how good I was. To my great surprise, he was the superior racer, and beat us both a dozen times. I have never met an Off Road player so good, and I wondered how McKie had mastered the subtleties of the mud tracks, ramps, and dips so consistently. Maybe I’ll blame my repeated second- and third-place finishes on the fact that this was the original Super Off Road and not the alternate race configurations of Super Off Road Track Pak.
I would have happily dumped another ten quarters into Gauntlet, but the group was heading back to the hotel, so I handed my cup of tokens to a surprised 20-something year-old and his pals and left. Back at the hotel, I gave Chris Murray printouts of Chapters 1-4 of my book and thanked him in advance for his comments. Roger Taft had asked me to draw in his sketchbook, so I retrieved that from my room and brought it to the lobby and scribbled an Iron Klaw. As I drew, Pat Stewart and two other folks chatted toys and The Walking Dead. I have a text from 10:11pm to my wife that night that reads “so tired.” I think I stayed in the lobby until 11 or 11:30, and then, without saying good night to anyone, quietly slipped away.
Some of the best part of a con is this, the after-hours talking, but sometimes you just gotta call it early.
In Part Four — yes, there is now a Part Four! — Tim gets Sunday breakfast, departs Des Moines, and reflects on the whole weekend!
A Real American Book! 