This has been in the works for a month, a year, or a decade, depending on how you count.
Larry Hama signed at my comic book store in 2012. I had bought it a year earlier, managing a big reorganization and clean-up. Hub Comics’ reputation had suffered in the year prior, so I wanted to demonstrate to the community that the shop was vibrant in this new era. I organized a lot of signings and parties. I was also teaching comics at the nearby arts university, so bringing Hama to Boston could check off two boxes. He’d sign at the shop and also give a talk to students. Both went over great. Here’s a flashback triptych, click to enlarge photos:
We sometimes meet up for lunch when I’m in New York or when we’re at the same G.I. Joe convention, and I’ve moderated a few panels with him at such cons. And we’ve had a secret project slowly cooking in the background all along, a 100-page comic by him and Mark Bright. It’s creator-owned, and Boom! Studios published the first issue about two weeks ago — The Center Holds. I’d had a mental picture for all of these years that when the book was finally published, Hama and Bright would sign at Hub Comics. That became more concrete in January ’25 when Boom proposed a deal, and even moreso a few months back when we had a specific release date — February 11th, 2026.
Unfortunately, any such store event held in the Northeast during winter is at the mercy of the weather. Bringing Hama to Boston was a worthwhile gamble. I wouldn’t be able to bring artist Mark Bright because he died two years back. I’d considered bringing color artist Josh Burcham from the Northwest, but he’s retired from comics. Series cover artist Joe Quinones would be away at a convention in Florida. I even thought about inviting letterer Janice Chiang. She’s smart and leads a fascinating life, and she and Hama go way back. If this was going to be an interview, Hama and two or three other people would make for a killer event at Hub Comics. But he was interested in a regular signing rather than a lecture, slideshow, or a chat in front of an audience. In that case, I would keep it simple, just Hama sitting at a table with a Sharpie, a line of fans queued up. (Also, wrangling a single guest with one set of travel arrangements and accommodations might be all I could handle — wouldn’t want to imagine coordinating two other people at the train station and airport.) My concept of a release party quickly morphed into a “regular” signing, but in my mind, this was still a celebration for our milestone.
Also, we might have to dodge snow. We’d had a weekend storm in January, and the winter of 2026 was shaping up to be heavier than previous years.
Separate from weather, I had some concern about normal, occasional Amtrak delays. Most of my trips to or from NYC are smooth, but when I visited Hama in April ’24 for Mark Bright’s funeral, the return trip home involved a late night, 4-hour pause in the middle of Connecticut.
It’s fun hosting a guest at my shop, but it’s also a lot of work. We have to make banners of various sizes and configurations. Some are print size and resolution, while others are for monitors and the web. We have to print some to paper and hang them around, while posting others to various social media platforms. We have to make variations so that re-posts look new and grab your attention. We post the event to the store’s website, ping locals in our email list, and I might make one of my 60-second videos. Any one of these is easy. Making a 1080 x 1080 pixel promo with image-and-text for Facebook might take 20 minutes. But creating a dozen different ones sure adds up. And then there’s the in-store displays of books, comics, and signage. I probably spent an extra 15 hours at the shop sorting, bagging, boarding, pricing, and moving around G.I. Joe back issues. Variant covers required extra notation. I removed face-out displays of non-Joe graphic novels so there’d be more space to have G.I. Joe issues and books out in the open. I doubled the square footage of our G.I. Joe back issues and created an entirely separate, second back issue “station” so that several people could be flipping through long boxes at the same time, avoiding a collector bottleneck. I brought out our spare G.I. Joe Compendia box sets from storage, plus several Transformers ones. Each of these is huge and heavy (six pounds?), so figuring out where to display them isn’t straight forward.
If our guest had a new graphic novel, we’d put a stack on his signing table. Simple. But ten days prior, both The Center Holds #1 and G.I. Joe #325 debuted, two comic books with a combined 13 covers. These are worth spotlighting, so more thought had to go into figuring out what else to move. I wanted all 25 Skybound issues face-out. I wanted all four Hama Files reprints face-out. Dozens of non-G.I. Joe things got filed away or temporarily tossed in a box and hidden “in the back.” Heck, I wanted Energon Universe issues and books out, too.
A few customers and potential customers contacted the store ahead of time to inquire about purchasing items to have Hama sign, that Hub would then mail. Great! But again, extra time.
At last, the big day arrived. But so did snow.
We got lucky. While two or three inches fell the night before and into the morning of, the temperature hovered a hair above 32 degrees, and my manager, Jesse Farrell, shoveled the sidewalk early. No ice formed, and the path around the store stayed clear. Crisis averted. Now I just needed Amtrak to have a breakdown-free Saturday. We were expecting a big crowd, so Jesse and I cleared some cases and displays so our back room would have open space for a table and a bunch of people. We also lugged an entire couch (technically a banquet) out of the store and into the building behind it.
I’d been up since 6am, making a simple video slideshow to play on the TV behind our guest. One slide would show some background art from The Center Holds and spell out Hama’s prices for free and not-free autographs, one featured some panels from “Silent Interlude” just for fun, one showed Hama’s hands sketching his character Bucky O’Hare, and the final one zoomed in on the cover to The Center Holds issue #1 and encouraged visitors to ask Hama about this new project.
Also at my computer before heading to work I had designed and printed a template that we’d hand to people after they purchased signatures or art prints. This was to streamline the pipeline — just one location to pay (our register), not two. I forgot the paper cutter at home, so I was chopping these up with scissors, one at a time.
Business was a little slow — we opened at 10am, Hama’s train would arrive at Boston’s South Station at 1:35pm — so I had some breathing room in the shop to continue organizing. All morning the train schedule read “on time,” and that held out. I headed into the city just before noon. South Station isn’t conducive to live parking in order to pick up someone. There is a taxi stand, and it’s situated on top of a subway station, but there’s always a traffic snarl around it as cars exit or merge onto Interstate 93. I found a sort of legal spot half a block away — I don’t know what my plan was if that hadn’t materialized. Hama phoned from the train: he was 5 minutes away.
I headed in and waited at the end of the train platform. It was cold and blustery. Everyone was wearing heavy coats and hats, a contrast to Hama’s 2012 visit (held in April, and not a rain drop, snow flake, or ice crystal in sight.) In front of me, Hama looked like, well, to pick a G.I. Joe reference, Sub-Zero version 2, part of the Arctic Commandos four-pack. But with aviator glasses. It was good to see him. (We had intended to meet up twice in November, but a travel cancellation and an illness nixed those.)
Traffic was fine, and the train station is surprisingly close to my shop. The signing was scheduled to start at 3pm, and we had an hour to spare. We stowed Hama’s gear and hit the cafe next door. I’m there about three times a week for snacks if not full meals, but rarely during the Saturday lunch rush. Every table was taken except for one in the vault — the space used to be a bank — so we got some privacy as well as the novelty of sitting in a steel box with a two-ton door. We talked about his convention schedule and how I wanted people traffic to flow during the signing.
We headed over to Hub Comics, where four or five people were already waiting, and Hama set up at our signing table — his markers, photos for sale, art prints for sale. As I had hoped would happen, he managed to start a little early.
It got crowded fast. This doesn’t quite capture the hustle and bustle:
This was a 5-hour event, long for a store signing, but short compared to Hama at a Saturday + Sunday convention. And if he was taking a long train all the way to Boston just for this, we wanted it to be worthwhile. Attendance was heavy during the first two hours, and then moderate during the next three. (It is still February, after all — people just stay at home even if it’s not actively snowing. Plus, halfway through the signing a major snow storm alert was issued for later that night.)
Rich Borges, listener to the Talking Joe podcast, attended (and wore his Talking Joe shirt).
And lots of people I knew: Clay Nferno and Matt Dursin of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen/LeaguePodcast attended as well. They’d been hyping the signing on their show, which I appreciated. (Nferno is a local promoter, the person who got the amazing Transformers cosplay cover band The Cybertronic Spree to perform in town a year ago, so we have nerd interests in common.) Some folks drove from Maine, an hour north, to attend. Other folks drove from Rhode Island, an hour south. And still other folks drove from Cape Cod, a far away part of Massachusetts. And friend of the store Dave Marshall, who’s drawn a comic book story in the Doctor Who universe and lives a ten-minute walk away, attended as well. Hub regular Steve Cronin, who’s had a bit of a hit with his self-published comic, Runes, showed up. Two-time Eisner winner Erica Henderson, currently writing and drawing (and coloring!) DC’s Harley and Ivy: Life and Crimes miniseries, stopped by with her fiance, Dave Robbins. And my pal Dirge, a DJ in the Boston goth scene (and who grew up in a comic book and collectibles store) attended as well.
One gent wandered in, not realizing we were having an event. It turned out that he was visiting from Washington State, in town with his wife to see her sisters. He’d googled to see what comic book store was closest, and stumbled in to see some kind of crowd in the back. He was stunned that Larry Hama was here, and he looked happy but disoriented as he scoured our selection to buy an item or two to get autographed, his whole collection back home.
All in all, there was a nice range of new customers, regulars, acquaintances, and longtime friends. Manager Jesse, who’s been with Hub Comics even longer than I have, and who was in on the 2012 lecture/signing, was able to talk to Hama. And when things slowed down at the end Hama held court, telling some of his amazing stories. I was particularly glad that Hub’s most recent hire, Kiki, got to meet and hear from Hama. Kiki has been supportive of The Center Holds, from the October NYCC announcement, to being the person on-site to unpack all the copies that arrived from our distributor this month. I’d mentioned a few key highlights of Hama’s career, and Kiki certainly knows that I’m a G.I. Joe expert, so that Kiki could meet him — someone with so much experience in comics (plus music and theater) — was nice.
If you’ve never been to a convention panel where Hama has told a story, I recommend it.
What were the items that attendees bought or brought? Earlier in the day a customer picked up several G.I. Joe Compendium softcovers, and returned with them for autographs. One gent was carrying a pair of boxed Declassified toys. A few people had Wolverine or Wolverine: Patch issues (that last one a great miniseries from 2022) to get signed. We sold a bunch of IDW A Real American Hero back issues, a bunch of recent Skybound ones as well, and a lot of G.I. Joe #325. The most commonly bought G.I. Joe items were the recent Skybound single-issue reprints of G.I. Joe #21 and #26 (great double-whammies — written and drawn by Hama), and several people were holding their prized 1984 copies of the original G.I. Joe #21.
And we sold a ton of The Center Holds issue #1.
This was edifying, as the nearest comparison was Hama’s signing at Midtown Comics 11 days earlier. It’s not a smart comparison, because that one had an official Hasbro livestream announcement, was the day that G.I. Joe #325 was out, took place at one of the best-known comic shops in the country, and was held in Manhattan. While my off-the-beaten-path/small city graphic novel store might not beat Midtown for line out the door and total comics sold, it does sound like The Center Holds didn’t have a big (any?) presence there. Having Hama at my shop for his/Mark’s/my book, and selling a lot of copies, did make it feel a little like that release party I’d vaguely imagined. (Another reason not to have a full, regular party — food and drinks in a store full of paper make me nervous!)
While Joe Quinones was out of town, I did have his cover for The Center Holds issue #4 on my phone, and was able to show Hama. We both thought it was great.
And another fun bit — I’d bought Chuck Patton’s original pencil art and Roger Robinson’s original ink art to one of the variant covers to The Center Holds issue #1. An attendee had that comic — Cover C/the 1:10 ratio variant — for Hama to sign, and I got to trot out these two big pieces of bristol board for him to see, right next to the printed version.
The end of the signing coincided with closing time for the shop. While we did our closing procedures and put some fixtures back in place, Hama walked around, looking at books. He had a question about Dragonball Z and another about Uncle Scrooge. From our spinner rack I showed him brand new issues of Uncle Scrooge — completely different comics — published at the same time by Fantagraphics and by Marvel.
My wife had reminded me to get a photo of Larry and myself with The Center Holds issue #1, and I was so distracted by customers, well-wishers, and restocking, that I forgot. But we did a get a photo at the Japanese place across the street, after the signing:
Dinner was great, and a relief. We talked about Disney World, and how much I like Benihana, our respective visits to Diana Davis’ house, and Hama pulled up a photo of his grandkid. And then, I’m not sure how useful this photo is, we got one in front of the store sign:
I took Hama to the nearby hotel and we made plans for the morning. As he still had some sketches to draw from the Midtown Comics signing, plus pages to draw for his and Guy Dorian’s Mounties Vs Werewolves, Hama hadn’t taken on any sketches at Hub Comics. Since it was late, he wasn’t going to draw even if he had. If that bus-full of high school athletes could keep quiet on his floor, he might have a relaxing overnight at the hotel.
In the morning, I picked up Hama and we went to a breakfast place near my store. It’s Portugese, so the portions are all big and everything comes with potatoes and bread and apple sauce. We talked about his family, my family, migration in Japan, and whatever Ron Wagner is up to.
We had about 20 minutes until it would be time to leave for the train station, so we went back to Hub Comics. This struck me as funny, as the store was empty and here was this in-demand, famous person, returned the day after his busy signing. I don’t know if he would have whipped out a Sharpie and autographed any comics had a fan walked in and recognized him, but it did occur to me that here was a golden opportunity for a few lucky readers who might just show up. No one did, but I still enjoyed the moment. I thought for a second I should post to Instagram “LARRY HAMA BACK AT HUB DID YOU MISS HIM?” During that lull I was actually relieved that the store was quiet, as the day before, and the whole week, and the whole month, had been hectic. I remembered to get that photo my wife had suggested. Then it was time to depart.
En route we talked about Neal Adams’ comic book store in Los Angeles, the new Kickstarter for the next set of G.I. Joe Compendia hardcovers from Skybound, and some chores that awaited Hama upon his return to New York. I asked my standard question, “What issue of G.I. Joe are you working on right now?” because I’m curious how ahead Skybound is. Hama told me the hook for what I believe will be issue #331. I parked in that same spot, and we walked around Boston South Station until his track was announced. He said “Well, there’s my train, see you,” and was off.
Postscript: starting nine hours later, our fastest, blustery-est snowstorm in a decade dumped two feet of snow on Boston, blizzard conditions that shut down every school and most businesses for a day — including Hub Comics!
A Real American Book! 