The work began before we even got on the plane. An abundance of work at the office meant that Neal couldn't make it for the first 2 days of the show. If he worked fast, he'd be able to make Friday through Sunday. In the mean time, the set up and show would have to be handled by the other Adams men. Josh, Joel, Spyda, and Bridget.
The flight over was comfortable and arriving at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego was wonderful. It's a great place to stay. Just enough time for sleep and get an early start.
When you walk into a convention center while people are setting up, you expect to see a few things. Hopefully, the center's employees have placed the right amount of tables and chairs in your booth. Hopefully, they've set up any cross beams you've paid for and stacked your boxes neatly in your space. This year, the booth was flooded with our own boxes. We had decided to cater to more than just the Adams crowd, and add a few items for those who might not be into books, statues and prints. So we had a truck load of dolls and other items for people who might not normally stop at our booth. This did add a bit more of a problem for us in setting up, since we had more boxes than space. One of the new items that people were excited about was the earrings and pins featuring Joel Adams' art. A few hours later, and things were settling in. We'd broken down a lot of boxes and even stored the folded boxes in our hotel room.

During the final set up, comes the most tense part of the day. Opening the boxes of sculptures. It's become a running joke that, if you were to mark a box "Fragile". this is the box you will then find that they have stacked on the bottom of 600 lbs of books. It'll also be upside down and crushed in odd places. The big surprise this year was the Going Ape Bronze statue which looked like someone went at the tough plastic case with a sledge hammer, then took the statue out, slammed it to the floor breaking the marble base and snapping the metal rod holding the figure to the base. Then, the figure was crammed back into the shattered box upside down...... Aside from that. Each of the dozen or so display figures was broken due to their double boxes being crushed. It'll be a couple more hours for Spyda, while he glues it all back together.

Finally, just moments before people were let in, the booth was finished. Not an inch of table space was spared.

We got to shoot off a few photos before the doors opened. Some things before the crowd let in. It's very different without thousands of people in the way.

Bart Display

SciFi Channel Display

DC Direct Display

Jabba the Hutt

FrankenBerry

IronMan

Lego Batman & Robin

The Mighty Thor

The first two days o the show were busier than the year before. Fans stopped by to see Neal and we were lucky that we had thought to get him to pre-sign a stack or two of books for us in case fans wanted a signed book and couldn't come back after the second day. Neal's flight landed in the wee hours on Thursday night. On friday at breakfast, we filled him in on the happenings of the show. He still had a ton of work to do. A job to finish for the office. Fortunately, Neal can multi-task and managed to draw while signing autographs and shaking hands for 3 days. All in all, the show was a huge success. None of us got to go to any of the events or do half the things we'd hoped because it was so busy, but a great time was had by all.