So to pry another work day out of the week–I have pages galore due in the next month and a half–I decided to fly to SD this morning instead of yesterday. I figured I would just power through the day and go straight from the airport to my first Con signing. Which is more or less exactly what I did.

However, this Amazing Plan involved getting up at 5 in the morning. So I now feel like roadkill.

But I did get to sign with Azz and Bill Willingham/Mark Buckingham for a couple of hours. I wanted to rub each of their heads for luck, thereby absorbing 100 Bullets and Fables mojo, but Mark said no. I didn’t even ask Brian. I think he would have stabbed me in the neck with his Sharpie. He was busy drawing a tombstone in a fan’s sketchbook, with the fan’s name on it. It started out as a bed of flowers. “Everybody likes flowers,” he said. The fan and I were enchanted, thinking we were seeing the softer side of Brian Azzarello. Mais non. The flowers were just crap growing at the foot of the fan’s final resting place.

I also spent about an hour at the Comic Book Tattoo table in the Image booth, signing swag. There are people out there who are Really Excited about that book, which is awesome, only some of them are maybe A Little Too Excited, which is less awesome and more scary. If you haven’t seen the limited edition of this thing, go to the Image booth and just glance through one of the display copies. (Wash your hands first so you don’t sully it.) It’s possibly the most beautifully produced book I’ve ever seen.

And that, friends, is life on the other side of the signing table.