File talk:Comic Con.jpg

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Is that Don Chapman? Looks like him... --Da M-izz-u^Tizzalk 23:55, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes. ⇔Thunderbird⇔ 23:58, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Link to Event

This is awesome! I'm curious @Blue Ninja, how were you able to identify the event? --Stux 11:09, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate your curiosity! The mysterious origins of this photo had been bugging me for a long time — I remember years back when I was cropping File:Harmless Junk.JPG being a little puzzled wondering what event the photo was from. More recently, as I began copying con appearances from the "H*R.com updates" pages to Interviews and Public Appearances, I was checking to see if this photo was taken at any of those events but consistently striking out:

• Dragon*Con 2005 was from Sept 2-5. This photo was uploaded to the wiki on the 2nd, so it was possible (if unlikely) that a fan snapped a photo of the Strong Dad and rushed home to upload it to the wiki. However, the main page message (and TrogdorCon) established that the Chaps were at booth #101, not 907 as pictured.
• Motor City Comic Con 2005 pre-dated the photo's upload, but the site didn't have a schedule with the booth numbers (and I didn't want to spend $20+ on ebay for a vintage copy of the event's paper booklet). However, I was able to find some 20-year-old blog posts of people's trips to the con, and those (though they were only pictures of celebrity guests rather than vendors/artists) had different backdrop curtains and name-sign formatting than the photo — enough to tentatively rule it out.
• MegaCon 2005 was the next target. Again, no booth numbers on the site. However I struck (relative) gold with a video that included a couple shots of the Homestar booth — clearly not the same event as the one in this photo.

So I had hit a dead end. Plus, there were a few niggling details:

• The photo indicates the booth was registered as "Harmless Junk, Inc." instead of the "Homestar Runner" listing seen in most convention programs.
• "Pressman Toys" is visible as the neighboring booth, so I'd have to find a convention that also featured a table from Pressman.
• The EXIF data said that the photo was taken in 2004 — it could be that someone had incorrectly set up the date on their digital camera, but if correct this would pre-date any of the wiki's catalogued conventions by a full year!

Clearly I was missing something. I searched Fancon's listings to see if there were any ATL-area cons around September 14th, 2004 — the only potential one was Dragon*Con 2004 on the 3-6 (I assume TBC were/are not big enough weebs to go to Anime Weekend Atlanta), and there was no Harmless/Homestar/Chapman/Chaps (or Pressman) on that year's docket. I thought about pinging User:Trogga, who uploaded the file, but they've been online so intermittently over the past 17 years I had no idea if they'd see a message from me (or if they'd have an answer for "did you take this photo twenty years ago? if not, do you remember where you found the JPEG?"). I recalled that the wiki has not done a great job of archiving store pages, and wondered if convention appearances had been listed on the old Yahoo backend to the Flash store. And they were! And that's where this image was from (the image doesn't render in this view, but you can open it in a new tab and it shows up)! ...but, again, there was nothing before Motor City '05 (which I had already ruled out). I added the Wizard Worlds (Wizards World?) to the IaPU page, but I was still stuck without any leads.

When I was making the articles for MegaCon and Motor City and the Wiki automatically showed search results for them as I tried to get to the "Create this page" option, I noticed both were mentioned on the Harmless Junk, Inc. article. I opened the article so I could add backlinks to the new articles — and there it was! Hiding in plain sight the entire time:

September 12–14, 2004 — Booth at the Comic and Game Retailer Summit in Baltimore

Now I had a lead, and some Googling lead me to the correct name: "Diamond & Alliance Game Distributors' 2004 Retailer Summit" (although its formal title is a bit elusive — the actual event site refers to it variously, mostly just "2004 Retailer Summit" for Diamond Comic Distributors and Alliance Game Distributors) as well as an incorrect link to summit.diamondcomics.com; a little more googling/archive-searching uncovered the correct URL as summits.diamondcomics.com, and then I was able to look up that page's fall 2004 on the Internet Archive. And there I had it: a list of exhibitors from September 2004 that included both Harmless Junk, Inc. and Pressman Toys!! Huzzah!! And it being such a retailer-focused event may explain why it wasn't promoted to fans the way that collegiate speaking events or comic conventions were. In the end, we have Drhaggis (who noted this in 2006!) to thank!

A big part of the reason why this so intrigued me is that I've been going to various fan conventions for over a decade, so I like to trawl through old sites and photo galleries of conventions to recall the ways we was (and see what it was like for people who got an earlier start in the scene than I did). -- Bleu Ninja 05:49, 6 October 2025 (UTC)