When the excited Salt Lake Comic Con attendees that visited the Artist’s Tools panel sat down to learn from illustrators and comic book professionals they didn’t know what they were ultimately in for. The panel started off great with a full table of wonderfully talented creators. Filling out the roster were Jonathan Brandon Sawyer “Imaginary Drugs” & “Gutters”, Illustrator Carter Reid, Mike Lovins “We Go Anywhere”, Illustrator Chris Bodily “Hellskate”, and Moderator Jess Smart Smiley “Upside Down Vampire” & “Awe Yeah Comics”. The room they were hosting out of was packed full of eager young artists ready to be fed full of information straight from those who have gone before. As the panel just started to get heated up though, the fire alarm in the Salt Palace Convention center went off.
The helpful Salt Lake Comic Con security staff and volunteers helped to get every single person in that panel room outside to safety. No one was aware of what was happening but everyone was assured that their con was definitely going to be one to remember. The panelists and the panel attendees were joined by Salt Palace Kitchen staff and some other convention attendees from a nearby panel. As the security staff figured out why the alarm had gone off and if their suspicions that it was a false alarm were true, the panelists wasted no time. As Jess Smiley put it to me:
“We had a captive audience because our entire room had been evacuated together. We all jumped right back into the panel where we had left off and answered as many questions as we could on the concrete just outside of the Salt Palace.”
The panel attendees had a once in a lifetime experience that went from the extraordinary to the ordinary again very quickly. As the panel was improvised outside, the security staff got the all-clear and began to spread the word. It wasn’t too long after that when the entire room was escorted back into room 150G and the panel started up once more. The ups and downs allowed individual panel attendees to get in some personal and one on one questions during the evacuation walk and the all-clear walk to and from the panel room. Once in the room again though, the panelists took as many questions as they could to be sure to cover everything and anything the convention attendees could think of. The panel went on through the last minute and was a roaring success. The applause from the crowd for a job well done during a bizarre pressure situation was certainly an ego boost to each guest panelist.
The story of having to move around but rolling with the punches is just another in a long line of examples of the spirit that flows through the Salt Lake Comic Con. In stressful times the wonderful people at the convention, be they guests or attendees, followed the golden rule. They also kept calm and Comic Con’d on, but that’s par for the course.
Zendobot A.K.A. Mark Avo, is a co-writer and inker on the double Arty Award winning “Salt City Strangers”. You can find his featured comic book article “Five and Three” every Friday afternoon right here on Big Shiny Robot. In it he picks his favorite covers and panels to bring the world the 8 best moments in comic books each week. You can follow his shenanigans on Twitter @MarkAvo.