Todd McFarlane Signing (Patreon)

Like I mentioned yesterday, I went to a Todd McFarlane signing today. He was raising money for the Eaton Canyon fire in Southern California that we had last winter, which was really cool of him to do. I arrived around 7:30am because I had to drop off my wife for her running club, but I figured I would still be relatively early. I ended up waiting in line until 1:30pm to get the signature!

Was it worth the 6 hour wait? I probably wouldn't do it again, but I would have definitely regretted missing the chance to meet one of my heroes. Earlier this summer I was coincidentally thinking about how I would really regret it if he passed away before I got a chance to meet him, so I felt super luck that he was randomly doing a signing just around the corner from me! A couple of years ago I got a sketch from Jeff Smith (creator of Bone) when he was visiting a local book store, and it's one of my most prized possessions.

The whole time I was in line I was thinking about what I would say to him. Ask yourself, what would you say to your hero if you have 1 minute to talk to him or her? In the end I was so nervous I just thanked him for his work and for doing the charity event. He probably won't remember our meeting at all, but I'll remember it forever, lol.

Here's the comic I ended up having signed:

It was sort of a random choice compared to some of the famous Spider-Man or other issues of Spawn that other people were having signed. But this issue was especially important to me because I had done the following picture when I was 14 years old:

Getting the signature on the same artwork sort of brought things full circle for me, which was nice. Plus I thought the way the green signature complemented the other colors on the comic looked really sick!

By the way, while I was waiting in line, I happened to hear some of the people behind me talking about Magic a bunch. It was pretty funny to hear. One guy was like, "there's this creature called Llanawar Elves that's super good--it's like a creature land!" Anyway, I asked them how long they've been playing Magic, and they told me how the Final Fantasy set inspired them to start playing. There's so much negative discourse about the Universes Beyond sets, it was nice to hear about how UB was also creating new fans.