One of the booths that caught my eye belonged to Onrie Kompan and his comic Yi Soon Shin. The indie book illustrated by Giovanni P. Timpano follows a Korean admiral who takes on vastly superior forces in the 16th century, eventually repelling them through a combination of brilliant strategy and pure guts. The character is based on a real-life figure of Korean history.
Kompan was moved by the warrior's story after catching a television show based on his life, Immortal Admiral Lee Sun-shin.
"I wanted to create something like 300," said Kompan, "something that took a page out of history that was amazing, and make it even more amazing. I wanted to make a legend."
The book is a brilliant bloody thing that you might call pulp except for the undeniable beauty of the art and writing. It's an epic in the little-used sense of the word. It spans a period of history where the fate of all of Asia was decided by the massive balls of one man, and Kompan does such badassery perfect justice.
Despite its independent status, the book is doing quite well, and it's definitely worth picking up the handsome trade paperback.
Half Price Books has entered the arena as a comic convention dealer, something I couldn't be happier about. When comic shopping in Houston, it's easy to overlook the secondhand book dealer, but fully half of the trades in my bookshelf come from them. I even found a copy of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier in perfect condition with the 3-D glasses still sealed in plastic.
The booth was being managed by the team from the Northwest store on FM 1960. Though the selection at the Montrose location is just lightly better due to the weirder sellers that frequent it, the Northwest store is the best laid out and the most accessible of all the HPBs in Houston.
Getting the chain into the comic-convention circuit was a hard sell. David Jay told me that it took a lot of wheedling to get district management to agree to the booth, but that once they were all set up, the sales were amazing. Seeing as they get all their wares secondhand, they have a distinct pricing advantage over the competition. Even so, they were still willing to haggle, and I picked up an Eccleston-era Doctor Who novel for $3. Someone's got to cheer for the Ninth Doctor.
On my way over to the discussion room I passed True Blood's Kristin Bauer, but was frankly too twitterpated to talk to her or ask for a photo. She's...she's really, really pretty in person. Instead, I stopped at Action Figure Laboratories. The company uses photo scans of your face fed into a 3-D printer to make you your own action figure out of plastic or plaster.
The figures are more rightly statues, and the results are somewhat mixed. You don't get a terribly wide range of poses or costumes to choose from, and the lower-end selections definitely show their price. However, if you have $120 to drop on the big deluxe models, I would definitely go for it.