Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1998 20:46:54 +0100 To: [c--m--x] at [indra.com] From: [arthur v k] at [xs4all.nl] (Arthur van Kruining) Subject: My ACWCC '98 (slightly sad) We should have known better than to hold my own 'comicon' at the same time as SPX. We thought the family atmosphere would attract something like an 'off-SPX' audience. Perhaps it would have been better to advertise with free ganja, or something. As you know we had invited a special guest star, the venerable Mr. Scott Gilbert, but due to his shocking lack of knowledge of an important cultural figure we had to disinvite him. Closing our doors to our one guest may have led many to believe that they wouldn't open at all. Perhaps the disgruntled Mr. Gilbert told potential visitors some wild and discouraging stories about ACWCC and/or its abode, the famous Mushroom Cellar. In any case, the knocks on our doors were few. Possibly also because it was past midnight when we arrived to open those !@#$ doors. We had been drinking in a local bar and were having so much fun with the local femmes that we forgot the time--you know how it goes. We were getting ready to inspect the art collections of said femmes, when some lousy drunk yelled: "Hey, aren't you supposed to host a funny book convention today?" We turned around to tell the ladies about this man's notoriously overdeveloped imagination, but they had already vanished. After sharing our thoughts on this with the drunk, we got on our way, because we didn't want to lose time by explaining everything to the police. We almost hit the ambulance on our way out. Because we were drunk out of our skulls it took us three hours to find the Mushroom Cellar. We will tell you about this odyssey another time. Zeus was definitely against us. We were asking him, "Why, o mighty Zeus, dost thou lead us astray from our purpose? Hast we done something to offend thou? Dost thou not like comics? Dost thou not like the way thou art portrayed in them? Or what? Sayeth something. Giveth a sign. Striketh that inebriated pedestrian with thy mighty thunder, so that thou sheddest thy wrath and we can go forth in peace. Thank thou." Too cut a long story short: at half past midnight ACWCC '98 officially opened. We tried to sober up a bit and sneaked off into the dressing-room to put on our costume. We wanted to dress up like characters from a Blechman comic. This is not easy. As you know, these characters are bare essence, and since we are hardly essential this was quite a challenge. To get that wavy, squiggly look we used what we in Holland call 'golfplaat', it's a metal often used to make slums in third world countries. We hammered away at it, to get the squiggly into the wavy. ('Early' visitors of the con were puzzled by this noise, they let their imaginations run wild and dirty, and years later they will tell their grand-children The Saga of the Dressing-Room.) The resulting costume was, um... heavy. It was not easy to manoeuver round the tables. In fact, it actually was a good thing that hardly anybody turned up, because wading through the crowd would have caused a trail of cut and bruised conventioneers. Now we only upset a table or two. Since we were unable to bend down to help gather the comics that were once neatly arranged on them, we decided to attend to our guests. It was great to finally meet fellow lister Frans Stoele. We hadn't seen him for at least two days. He said we looked like monsters from Kamagurka's early work. After setting him straight we embarked on a playful and stimulating intellectual discussion. Topics ranged from, wait, we wrote them on a napkin: * The Stratisfied Hierarchy of Meaningful Symbols in Ancient Icelandic Limericks * Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis * Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits * Symmetry Aspects of the Periodic Drawings of M.C. Escher * Agatha Christie and the Ancient Greek Novel * The Genius of Alphonse Allais * Non-Euclidean Geometry * Toy Guns * The Significance of II Timothy 4:13 * What we would do with the amount of meat Georges Perec would have to use to turn Lake Geneva into a nice bouillon * How we would store that meat * The Meaning of Life * More about meat * The Use of Speedlines in Medieval Miniatures * Amateur Brain Surgery * The Dutchman who ruled Tristan da Cunha * Arcimboldo's favorite fruit * Osmosis * Netball * What was in Aesop's hunchback * Polysynthetic Languages * The Tripartite Tractate * Soccer * Soccer * Beer * Babes * Soccer * Port * Beer * Beer * Soccer * Wodka * Wodka * Another bottle in the fridge * Wodka * Sex * Neutrino Transfer and Group Bestiality * Sssssssoccccccerr * Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz We remember being woken by a little old man blowing a whistle in our ears. He said that everybody had left and he asked if we could help him get his merchandise in his van. Frans wanted to explain the rules of netball first, but the old man hastened to say that he knew them by heart. Frans didn't believe him and started to grill him about the meaning of the letters on the back of the players' shirts. In the meantime we went and changed our slum metal suits for our comfortable daily threads. The old man started whistling again, it sounded like a scream of pain. Apparently he had heard more about netball than he could take. When we arrived at the scene of the crime he said to us: "Here, take this book, you can have it, just make him shut up!" We took the book, hit Frans over the head with it and helped our poor concessionaire on his way. Bye bye, come again next year. The book turned out to be a first edition of Christophe's _La Famille Fenouillard_. We wanted to add some substance to this nonsense by writing an in-depth review of this book, but we feel a massive head-ache coming on. :-( Hopefully we'll get around to it tomorrow when we feel a little better. Proost, Arthur.