My second convention appearance as a small-press publisher/creator was in June 1992, when Troubleshooters, Incorporated artist Dan Peters and I set up shop in artists’ alley at Great Eastern Convention’s New York Comic Book Convention (not to be confused with New York Comic Con, which debuted in 2006), held at the Ramada Hotel…which used to be the Penta Hotel when I did the Great Eastern Convention in 1991…which used to be the Hotel Pennsylvania in the decades before that…which ultimately reverted back to the Hotel Pennsylvania before its closure in 2022 (it’s a long story).
This time, as you can see in these pictures, I was really playing the part of an Important Comic Book Publisher: a full display behind us, showcasing the digest-size comics available (See the black wings? It was actually a discarded “book dump” display for the 1989 Batman novelization that I’d rescued from the trash outside a Borders bookstore); pinups and sketches galore; and the first-ever (and only, to date) Lorelei T-shirt. I even wore a jacket and a tie (and occasionally a fedora)!
Dan and I hawked the comics all weekend, chatted with comic fans, and even conducted reviews of artist portfolios. The jacket and tie, it appeared, made folks think I was more of a comics veteran than I really was…
There were many other comic creators there, of course. Sitting directly across the aisle from us were a couple guys trying to get folks interested in their black-and-white horror comic from Eternity Comics, about some headbanger who looked like a zombie version of heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio and whose pale-skinned, white-haired girlfriend wore nothing but a bikini and a black cape.
And thus began the legend of writer Brian Pulido, artist Steven Hughes, and their creations Evil Ernie and Lady Death…
I chatted a bit with Pulido, who was finding it a bit of a struggle to get people interested—a situation that would, of course, change dramatically for him and comics in general just a few months later, when the Bad Girl Era began, ushered in by Harris Comics’ relaunch of Vampirella, the queen of the half-naked comic femmes fatale.
Well, I was interested, so I bought a copy of Evil Ernie #1, along with the one bit of merchandise they had: handmade reproductions of Smiley, the evil, sentient, smiley-faced button that Ernie wore on his leather jacket, The repros were so new that Pulido had to write a copyright notice on the back of each, with a silver-paint marker. I actually wore it on my coat later that winter, but eventually stopped doing so when I realized how fragile it was (I’ve wound up gluing the arm bones back on a number of times over the years).
By the time the con wrapped up, I’d sold some comics and sketches, Dan had sold some sketches, and I’d discovered that people had started to take notice of the small-press horror publisher with the science-fictiony name. Things were looking up!
Stay tuned for more Convention Memories!
