Terrificon 2026

I took my daughters Hannah and Emma to Connecticut's Terrificon comic book convention at Mohegan Sun this past Sunday. We had a good time.

Holding hands with Thanos.

I'd assumed that Terrificon would be kind of a small convention, but friends, this thing turned out to be anything but small. It took up the entirety of Mohegan Sun's convention space, had two separate halls for panels, and featured enough booths that they spilled out into the entryway. Tons and tons of big-name comic artists and writers came out, including Jim Lee, Jeph Loeb, Chris Claremont, Dan Slott, Jim Starlin, and many, many more. 

Supposedly Charisma Carpenter was there, too, but I didn't see her. That's too bad. Who didn't have a crush on Charisma Carpenter?

The convention itself positioned Lee as the headliner, followed (arguably) by Loeb, though my perspective be skewed considering that Loeb is my daughter Hannah's favorite creator. She wound up buying a book, so she could get his signature and then missed her chance because the line was too long, and then he left before his panel started. Big sad-face, though she took it well enough.

Starside, Volume 1

I personally always like meeting the independent creators at these things. For my two cents, the best indie project at the con turned out to be Starside. I bought volume one and can't wait to read it. Just from our talk, it looks like a standard Hero's Journey set in space, kind of reminscent of The Last Starfighter, at least in its plot. But I haven't read a single page yet, so who knows? 

We also talked at length to the guys from Dreamscape Publishing. I really admire what those guys have built. We bought Marcvs #1 from them as well as their overall issue #0. Honestly enjoyed talking with those guys so much that it made me miss reviewing comics, which is incredible.

I haven't talked about this for a while, but I used to review comics professionally for a little website called Paperback Reader (now defunct) and got successful enough to get invited to the NYC Comic Con as press. I even got to interview Jim Starlin for the site one time. But I wound up with more review comics than I could have ever read in a lifetime, most of them awful. I felt guilty about it even as it became totally, unmangeably time-consuming. The whole project blew up entirely too much, putting me off comics for years and convincing me to a) write under a pen name forever, and b) be a lot more careful in the future about accidentally turning my passions into actual second jobs. 

As we walked through the show, I started watching to see how some of the more successful independent creators marketed their stuff with an eye towards marketing Dr. Necropolis. I didn't want to talk about my project with any of the presenters -- this was their time, and I'm not a douchebag -- but I paid attention. The idea I liked best came from a novelist who wrote a magic-centric Indiana Jones-style book (his description), but I can't remember his name now. Alas. I feel really bad about it. But the guy had commissioned maybe ten splash page-type illustrations as part of his marketing campaign, and he was using those as the backdrop for his booth. He then made a whole graphic novel with the illustrator as the next piece of the project. 

Both of those things struck me as good ideas, though I don't know that I'm ever going to commission another graphic novel for any reason. Still, getting a half dozen or so pieces of promo art for Dr. Necropolis seems like such an obvious move that I should really get started on that immediately. With that said, I have no idea if Digital Webbing is still in business (they aren't), and without it, I've no idea where to look for artists. That's a complication, though surely one with a solution somewhere.

I started talking about all of this with my daughter Emma over lunch. Emma is heading into her senior year at Clark University in Massachussets. She majored in Psychology but will be doing a fifth-year masters in Marketing. She's going to need a portfolio, and I would quite like to hire her as an intern at As For Football LLC. We'd pay her, though not a lot. But this is exactly the kind of problem I'd want her to learn to solve.

I'm just not enough people, friends.

Life-size X-Men Exhibit

We headed to a couple of panels after lunch. The X-Men panel was the big one, staring Claremont, his long-time editor Louise Simonson, and Fabian Nicenza. We eventually got into audience questions, and one guy actually berated Claremont for killing off Jean Grey! In a shrill voice, he asked something like, "How could you kill off a founding member of the X-Men?!" Classic toxic fandom in my humble opinion, made worse by the reality that this event happened over forty years ago, and the guy it enraged wasn't even forty himself. 

My friend, you do not own this book no matter how much you love it.

Claremont looked visibly non-plussed. He noted that by killing a character, especially a long-time fan favorite, it upped the jeopardy for the entire team. Plus, he meant for her to stay dead forever. But then long-time Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter left Marvel, and practically the first thing the new management team wanted was to bring Jean Grey back. This led to one of the most disjointed storytelling plot points in X-Men history because Scott Summers's Cyclops then had to leave his wife Madeline and their infant son Nathan to go be with Jean, a thing that always struck everyone as totally out of character. It's out of character because Claremont was very clearly headed somewhere else with this storyline, but editorial made him change it to what we wound up getting on the page. He landed it with the Inferno saga -- arguably -- but I found myself wondering what he'd actually had in mind before they brought Jean Grey back to start X-Factor. Claremont even pitched to put Jean's sister into X-Factor in lieu of Jean herself -- yes, the same sister we see in the new Spider-Man movie -- but that didn't fly. What a story!

When it was my turn, I asked which adaptations I should get my kids to read in their original issues. I was trying to be flattering and tp get their opinions about what work they were most proud of, but I'm not sure that actually came across. All three said Days of Future Past. Then some of the guys around us started shouting their favorites, but I didn't ask them, I asked the creators. 

Guys, *I* have read all the original issues, too. We're talking about my kids.

This pic does not do my man's Galactus costume justice.
He's on stilts with extra long arms and stood maybe 15' tall.

We stayed for a little of Dan Slott's panel, but then we went looking for Hannah, who'd gone looking for Loeb. Alas, Loeb had left early for the day, and so we left, too.

Overall, a good day all around. I don't know that I'm as much of a fan as I used to be -- and certainly not as much of one as three quarters of the people at this show -- but I really enjoyed diving back into it with my girls for a few hours.