DragonCon c 2011` & Al Feldstein & Skip Williamson

 

Labor Day is just a couple days away.  In Atlanta soon comicbook dressed along with Sci-Fi dressed characters along with old fashioned Movie Monster characters will be all over Atlanta to attend DragonCon, which occurs every Labor Day weekend in Atlanta.

One time Anna and I were flying in from Chicago just before Labor Day and a bunch of people scattered about the plane were dressed in full fictional characters.

I heard tickets for DragonCon are going for $200 this year.  Wow!

I think it was just a week or so before 9/11/2011 that I took my son Adam.  Adam was healing from a wreck with a broken leg and thought a little cheering up would help.

At the time I was friends with underground cartoonist Skip Williamson.  Skip had since died.  Skip and his wife Harriet bought a house on Gordon Combs Road around in west Marietta.  He bought the house from Stan, who used to be my boss at the Marietta Post Office.  Stan also had a pat time self-employed auto painter.  Stan’s garage had special lights that helped in painting cars.  Also, they were just the kind of lights needed for inside auto painting.

When I heard Skip Williamson had moved to Marietta I called him up to welcome him.  After we talked  we concluded we had the same MAD artist heroes and he invited me over for a beer..  We got along great.  He offered me two free DragonCon tickets.  They were not really free tickets.  Each artist was allowed to bring two helpers to help set up things.

We took him up on it.

While there I got to talk to Al Feldstein, editor of MAD Magazine for over 30 years.  He was the second editor of MAD, the first being Harvey Kurzman, my hero.  Now Al has moved to Colorado or some such western state and spent his time  painting Native Americans and Western Scenes and he was hawking EC Comics 3 Witches from TALES FROM THE CRYPT and other horror comics that he created.  He was getting very little visitors so we had plenty of time to talk.

Dragon Con:  The first pictures are Al Feldstein (and me).  The last picture is Skip Williamson.