It had been quite a few years since I'd made a Fan Expo trip, and up until last year's ComicCon I was really falling out of this side of my collecting scene.  Of course it's not at all hard to get back into it!  I had a friend interested in trying out a first trip to Fan Expo, so it was an easy decision to take a mini vacation and head to Toronto.  Even took the train to avoid the hassle of the drive, and aside from the Con, had a good trip with some dinners with friends, a visit with my son and read a couple of books.

As for the con itself, I typically do a ton of research on artists so that I can bring comics for signatures, left it to the last minute this time, so certainly missed out on some I'd like to have had signed.  The really cool thing was that two of the creators I was having sign books actually pointed out that there was someone else at the show who had worked on the book, so I got a couple of sigs I never even had planned - always good to talk to the creators.

I spent a bunch of time on artist alley looking through folders of art, bought a couple, had some great conversations with creators and other collectors, and got a fantastic couple of commissions.  My highlight was the Simone Bianchi commission shown below, that even made it onto Fan Expo's social media shoutouts of Artist Alley.