Creation Convention Part II: Geeks on Parade

Back in August 2010 I wrote about a science-fiction/comic book convention that I attended with a few friends of mine twenty-five years earlier. Some new information from that trip has recently been unearthed, and at the risk of exposing the true geeky nature of my past, I'd like to present this new information here. The original blog was titled Creation Convention--25 Years Later, and should probably be read before delving into this sequel, if you haven't already done so.

When we last left our daring conventioneers, they had experienced a sci-fi/comic book nirvana of sorts. It's true that the Special Guests featured at the convention may not have been all that "special" in reality, but to a novice convention attender like myself they were just fine. Exactly who were these guests? Well they had one each from the worlds of "Star Trek", "Doctor Who" and comic books. When you hear that a special guest from "Star Trek" will be attending the first thing that pops into your head is a name like William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy. Then you think that maybe those A-listers might be too much to ask and you downgrade your expectations to someone like Walter Koenig or Nichelle Nichols--still people you'd love to meet. The Special "Star Trek" guest at this particular convention was none other than... Judson Scott! Judson Scott? Yes, Khan's right-hand-man from "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan". Not exactly a household name, but at least he had some other early 80s sci-fi credentials. He also appeared in the series "V" and was the star of the short-lived TV show "The Phoenix".

The "Doctor Who" guest was even less "special" to me. I was (and still am) only familiar with the Tom Baker ere of the show. While I wouldn't expect Tom Baker to make an appearance at the convention, I would have been happy to meet one of his sidekicks (or I suppose I should say companions)--like Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan, Leela or Romana (especially Leela or Romana!). Turns out they did have a companion--but it was Mark Strickson, who played Turlough, the companion of the Doctor after Tom Baker. This was probably a good guest to have on the list, as he was the companion of the then-current Doctor (played by Peter Davison). Unfortunately, I had not seen any of the Peter Davison episodes of the show and therefore had no idea who Mark Strickson was.

The special guests from the comic book world were Wendy and Richard Pini--the husband and wife team responsible for the comic book series Elfquest. I wasn't really into Elfquest (or comic books in general), but it was the favorite title of one of my friends at the time, so meeting them really made his day.

All of this information was already reported in the original blog. So what's new? Well, a couple months after writing the first blog I managed to find an old photo album that had some pictures from our trip to the Creation Convention. Then, just last week, I found an old folder that contained some random things...including my autographs from the convention! I'd like to present some of these items here to conclude the story of the August 1985 Creation Convention in Boston.

Here we are at the convention. Note how they went all out in promoting the show: a nice 11x17 sign propped up on an easel. Very impressive. Oh well... Also, note that we already have all our "stuff" from the convention. This photo was obviously taken as we were leaving, but it makes a good intro if you ignore all the swag we're carrying. I'm the one in the green jacket by the way.

Here we are again, looking very awkward but happy to be immersed in all the geekiness the convention had to offer.

This is a photo taken during the convention's "famous" no-minimum-bid auction. This was right after I had the high bid on the Star Trek communicator. I was a bit frightened to think I had just handed over FIFTY-FIVE bucks, but was also VERY happy to be the proud owner of a communicator!

And here's that very same communicator, more than a quarter-of-a-century later--still in my possession. Nowadays you can get high-quality toy replicas of communicators, phasers and tricorders that actually have working lights and sound effects. Mine was a non-functioning replica, but was pretty much all you could get back then.

And, here's our illustrious guest star Judson Scott surveying the scene and preparing to make his grand entrance onto the stage!

Meeting Judson Scott for autographs and awe-inspiring awesomeness (or something like that).

All these years later...here's my very own Judson Scott Autographed photo. Note that I had him write "Long live the Concept" too (the "band" my friends and I were in at the time). What a geek!

Here's my autographed postcard (sorry, but I wasn't about to shell out the cash for an 8x10 for someone I didn't even know) of Mark Strickson. This photo also solves a long-time mystery. A friend who couldn't make it to the convention was a big fan of Doctor Who, so we got him a Mark Strickson autograph too. The funny thing was that we could never figure out what he had written on the photo. It looked like it said "To Kurt, Love: Mark Strickson". To this very day my friends and I STILL use "Love: Mark Strickson" when signing off on a letter or e-mail. Now I can look at my photo and see that he actually wrote the more appropriate, and less creepy, "Yours: Mark Strickson". Of course, my friend doesn't have his photo anymore, so I suppose it's still possible that it was indeed "Love" and not "Yours" on his photo, but that doesn't seem too likely...

Here's my copy of Elfquest #1 autographed by authors/artists/creators Wendy and Richard Pini. Unfortunately this was back in the day when Sharpies weren't ubiquitous at shows like this and they signed it with a regular pen. I'll bet it would have looked a lot more impressive to have their autos scrawled on the cover in sharpie rather than on the first page inside in ball-point pen, but what are you gonna do?

Finally, I have to make a correction. In the original blog about this convention I mentioned that I thought it was the very first convention I had attended. I wasn't really sure of this fact, but it seemed likely enough. I now have photographic proof that I was wrong though. A funny thing about this convention is that I remember that we were particularly struck by a young lady named Holly (we never got her last name). She was a fan and fellow convention-goer dressed as a character from the miniseries and subsequent TV series "V". Even with all the "special guest stars" present at the event, Holly really was a highlight for us. I think it's at least partially because she was an attractive female dressed up as a character from one of our favorite sci-fi shows. Did I mention we were geeks?

Anyway, I remember that we actually ran into Holly at more than one convention. It was a great thrill to see her a second time (in a better costume and accompanied by a like-dressed male companion--bummer). Well, when I found the photos from this convention, there was also one from the other time we met Holly. It's obvious from the photos that the other meeting was at an earlier convention (based on many factors, including my appearance and Holly's less-elaborate costume). I guess now I have to figure out exactly when that first convention was. The mysteries continue...

Here's the photo of Holly and her fellow alien visitor from the August 1985 convention.

And, here's the photo of us with Holly from the first time we met her at an earlier convention (almost certainly my VERY first convention). Note my "Star Trek II" phaser squirt gun and my attempt to imitate the character Donovan from "V". Poor Holly! What she must have been thinking.  I may have mentioned this already, but yes, I was a geek.

Well, I guess this finally concludes this extended trip back in time to the Boston Creation Convention of August 1985. Hope it was worth the 25+ year wait!

Creation Convention--25 Years Later

Twenty-five years ago today (August 24, 1985) I attended what I believe was my first-ever Comic Book/Sci-Fi convention. If there had been any doubts that I was a certified geek, that day obliterated those doubts. I had read about these conventions in Starlog and other science-fiction magazines, but as a fifteen-year-old I wasn't able to actually attend any of these meccas for nerds.

All that changed when I received a brochure for the Creation Convention coming to Boston the weekend of August 24-25, 1985. This brochure came in the mail. What a quaint notion in this online-first world we're living in (especially so for comic book and science-fiction fans of today). I must have been on a mailing list because I also had a subscription to Starlog (courtesy of the meager earnings of my paper route).

I had a small group of three best friends in 1985. These same three guys remain my best friends to this very day. Two of them went to the convention with me. Actually, I should say that one friend and I accompanied the other friend. His mother drove us in to Boston so we could attend the convention. This friend pretty much HAD to go to this show, because Wendy and Richard Pini were going to be there. They were the husband and wife (or should I say wife and husband?) team that was responsible for the Elfquest comic book series (nowadays it would probably be classified as a graphic novel rather than a comic book). Elfquest was a HUGE thing with this particular friend, and he really wanted to meet his hero, and unrequited love interest, Wendy Pini--Elfquest's creator.

Two of my friends were big comic book fans. I read certain comics from time to time (Micronauts, Swamp Thing, Sgt. Rock, The Haunted Tank...), but never could really get all that into them for some reason. My big thing was movies and TV shows--especially science-fiction ones. This convention featured special guests that wouldn't seem all that "special" today, but who were pretty interesting at the time. If you had heard that there would be guests from Star Trek and Doctor Who, you might have visions of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (or at least Nichelle Nichols and Mark Lenard) from Star Trek and Tom Baker from Doctor Who. Well, it wasn't quite that cool. The Star Trek guest was Judson Scott. Who? Well, that name doesn't mean all that much today, but at the time he was reasonably well known as Khan's right-hand man in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982). I believe he was the only member of Khan's followers who spoke any lines in the movie (could be mistaken on that one though). Mr. Scott had also recently been the star of his own short-lived Sci-Fi TV show on ABC, "The Phoenix" (1981-82), and was currently featured in the series "V". He hasn't done a heck of a lot recently.

The Doctor Who "star" was less familiar to me. His name was Mark Strickson, and he played the sidekick of the Peter Davison-era Doctor Who. Thanks to PBS I was a big fan of Doctor Who--but specifically the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who. I didn't really know any of the doctors that came either before or after Tom Baker. My friends and I certainly lined up to get autographs from these guests, even if they weren't exactly what we would have considered "A-Listers". Our friend who didn't make it to the convention was the biggest Doctor Who fan of the four of us, so we decided to get Mark Strickson's autograph for him. Our friend seemed a little perplexed when we gave him the photo the next day. This was not only because of the fact that he probably wasn't exactly sure who Mark Strickson was, but also because the personalization on the photo was a bit tough to read and appeared to say: "To Kurt, Love: Mark Strickson". You know, we had a great time at that convention in general, but that little quote specifically has actually managed to become part of our lives that we still use to this very day. It's become such a tradition between us it's almost hard to believe that its origins can be traced back to that moment when Mr. Strickson scribbled that personalization on that photo in 1985. Even today, that quote, "Love: Mark Strickson", is frequently used as the sign-off when we write e-mails to each other. I guess you never know which little moments will be special and stay with you for the rest of your life!

The rest of the convention was fun too. We enjoyed watching the costumed freaks walking around (there but for the grace of God I could have easily been one of those "freaks"). The tables of merchandise were a sight to behold for a teen at his first convention. Thousands of comic books, books, novels, manuals, movie blueprints, posters, movie props, toys, action figures and very expensive VHS tapes (this was 1985 of course and DVDs were still years away). A couple of us got our own "Buckaroo Banzai" ID badges that had our photos on them. I'm sure we checked out the old Star Trek blooper reels (from the original series of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation was still two years away) that were a mainstay of these conventions. Of course we sat through the talk/Q&A session from Wendy and Richard Pini. I believe there were a couple other semi-well-known comic book artists there too. And, one of the staples of a Creation Convention back then was the big, no-minimum-bid auction. One of my most exciting moments from that day was when I got into a bidding war for a communicator prop from the original Star Trek series. I thought at the time that it was actually used in the show, but now I'm pretty sure it was just a fan-made version. It was still pretty cool. Anyway, I had limited funds (as most of my money came from my modest paper route--I wouldn't get my first "real" job until September when I started working as a bar boy at the Cocke 'n Kettle restaurant) so the rapidly escalating bids for the communicator were starting to scare me. I was just about to give up when the gavel fell and I had won the bidding war at $55.00 (a king's ransom of money for me at the time). I still have that communicator and count it among my prized possessions.

The reason I remember the date of this convention is because within the past year, while visiting my parents, I found that very same brochure for the event that I received in the mail during the summer of 1985. What a neat item to behold after so many years. It's amazing to see how much has changed since those days. The brochure is a black and white job on paper typed out on a word processor (maybe even a typewriter?) with various photos of the guests and drawings of many science-fiction and comic book characters sprinkled throughout. It's nothing fancy, glossy or even professional-looking. I haven't been to a convention like this since the mid-1990s. At that time they really hadn't changed much since my first one in 1985 (and probably long before that too), but I'll be they are a completely different animal these days. Every company, movie, actor, comic book... has it's own website now. Everyone is online and has cell phones. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are the preferred mode of communication. DVDs have replaced VHS tapes. a LOT more neat stuff is available (at a cheaper price too) and easy to find on DVD today compared to what was around then. It's much cheaper to dupe this stuff, rip it, share it, store it on computers or iPods... I can only imagine the madhouse that is Comic-Con these days. Now instead of being merely the realm of geeks and nerds, all kinds of stars, directors and producers make appearances to promote their latest movies/projects. It's all online (which didn't exist in 1985 of course) and it's everywhere. Like the brochure for the 1985 show, the convention itself seems positively quaint compared to today's mega-events.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Creation is still around and still promoting conventions. I don't know how directly this Creation Entertainment company is related to the old one that sent me that brochure all those years ago, but it's kind of nice to see the name still around out there today!

*For more on this convention, please read my follow up blog: Creation Convention Part II: Geeks on Parade. A lot of questions raised by this entry are answered in that one after more "evidence" was uncovered.

Love: Mark Strickson