And so another Wizard World-brand comic convention has come and gone, and I think this might have been my last one, unless something changes.

I go to shop, but I have run out of things to buy; I go to meet creators, but I am too shy to talk to them; I go to see panels, but I oversleep and miss the good ones; I go to spend time with girls from the internet and they get drunk and run around and raise hell and are generally terribly difficult to keep up with.

This year, I spent far less money than I have in the past, and that probably would have been the case even if I had not spent all of Saturday chasing the girls around. Am I getting tired of comics? I don’t think so. It’s simply gotten to the point where I more or less own all the older stuff I’d been looking for in years past. Am I getting tired of comics fans? Hell yes. And being that I am one, it puts me in quite a pickle, doesn’t it?

I walked through row after row of artists and retailers peddling their wares, which, based on display alone, were by and large composed of richly detailed paintings of fantasy warrior women, with stickers over any exposed nipplage in the paintings so that small children walking by would not be subjected to a visual onslaught of nipples that their young minds were too weak to prepare them for. I looked at the fat, balding artists selling these, and the fat, balding men buying them, and could not help but think of my own future. I would like to be an artist. I like drawing women. Will I become this artist? Or will I give up on my art and become the man who buys this stuff? Do I really have to become either? Can’t I put a gun in my mouth instead?