It might be a stretch to claim that all the children at Sunday's Boston Comic Con were present to support their parents, but there was one incontrovertible example. Two toddlers, swaddled in the costumes of Superman and the Flash, raced through the Back Bay Events Center in strollers, pushed by their parents. "I think he's going to win," said the mother, pointing at the one dressed as Superman. "He's really the fastest."
The convention was held in the lower floors of the Events Center, effectively the basement of the Old John Hancock Building, where there is a lot of brass and the men's room is called the men's lounge. The building was completed in 1947, during the Golden Age of comics, and it seemed oddly appropriate to see the faded walls of its hallways covered with poster reproductions of covers from old Batman and Wonder Woman issues.
Inside the main hall, Chris Famulari staffed the New England Comics table. Famulari has a long history with comics. He first applied for a job at New England Comics when he was thirteen and a half years old, the age he believed it became legal to work in Massachusetts. (It's actually fourteen.) He finally succeeded in getting a job some years later, and has worked at the Norwood store for the past seven years.
"You never know what people will buy [at these conventions]," he said. "In the first hour we sold three hundred dollars worth of romance comics." He flipped through a box of aging comics with titles like "Linda Carter: Student Nurse" to find a good example of the genre. He quickly gave up and told a story.
"This woman came in and picked up this book that said 'Too Many Boyfriends' and shook her head," Famulari said. "So, I asked her, 'Do you know from experience?'"
Famulari has a talent for maintaining multiple simultaneous conversations: a useful superpower if you work at a popular comics store. "I bought my first book at New England Comics," said one passerby, a burly, tattooed man with a porkpie hat. "It was Fantastic Four number four and it was from Quincy." Another man caught Famulari off-guard. "What's the issue of the X-Men where Rogue gets a pie in her face?" (It was X-Men #8.) This, as Famulari held forth on the royalty issues facing Silver Age comics creators.
Not everyone was at the convention to sell comics. Chris Tarbassian is in the business of giving them away. Tarbassian is the founder of Operation Comix Relief, an organization that ships comic books to soldiers serving overseas. Supported entirely by donations from comics manufacturers and private parties, Tarbassian has shipped comics to places including Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, Bosnia, and Kosovo. "I can't pronounce half the countries where we ship," he said.
Operation Comix Relief began in 2003, when Tarbassian, a nurse, started shipping comics to his friend Tom Chafe, an Air Force nurse serving in Iraq. Chafe distributed the books to wounded soldiers, who had little to distract them from their injuries during long periods of immobility. The comics served as a diversion. "You give them the comics," Tarbassian explained, "and they start acting like twenty year old kids again."
Tarbassian was at the convention raising money for a big Christmas shipment destined for a large group of soldiers from Rhode Island. "I like my comics," he said, "but I'm certainly not like some of the people here."
Trent Bagley had his own unique mission at the convention. As a Director of Marketing at Emerson College, Bagley was on hand recruiting for Emerson's new Graphic Novel Writing & Illustration Certificate. The program is designed for adults interested in learning the comics trade and is the only one of its kind in Massachusetts. "Many of the people I talk to are lifelong fans, who, maybe secretly, wanted to be creators themselves," Bagley said. "[Comics] gets in you. It gets in your bloodstream."
Rob Stull, a native Bostonian who has inked comics for fourteen years, would agree. "It's the main reason any of us do what we do. It's reflections on childhood. I wanted to be Spidey when I was a kid." Fair enough, but the SMFA graduate who has worked freelance for every major comics publisher offered a more prosaic justification for his vocation: "My commute is from the bedroom to the drafting table."
Comics is not the only disturbing thing in the bloodstream of Rachel Hochberg, who attended the convention dressed as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Inspired by the testudinal heroes, Hochberg has prepared and eaten a series of terrifying pizzas using ingredients such as sausage, bananas, and cereal. "The best one turned out to be peanut butter and anchovies," Hochberg said. Her Ninja Turtle costume was completely homemade, including a green crocheted skullcap and gloves. She wore the orange mask and nunchucks of the Turtles' "party dude," Michaelangelo.
"Mikey's my favorite," she confirmed. "I couldn't bear to dress up as anyone else."
Photograph of Rachel Hochberg by Courtney Lockemer
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