Show Report: 2016 Ultimate Comic Book & Trade Expo

Less than a month ago my brother and I went to the 2016 Ultimate Comic Book & Trade Expo in Poughkeepsie, NY. It was the second one they held, and we went to last year's as well. In fact, in last year's show report on Cardboard History, I even hinted at a possible future comic blog. It only took me a year to get it started.

This year's show, held July 23rd and 24th at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center, was different from last year's in that it didn't really have much of a car contingent, but they brought in more celebrities to sign autographs. Most of them I've never heard of, but one of them I did.

They did have one car (truck) worth photographing.

 A clever display by an insurance agent-

The one celebrity I had heard of was Kathy Najimy, known to us for Hocus Pocus, which is a family tradition to watch at Halloween. We got a picture and a few autographs.

That was petty cool to meet her. The autographs were not for free, but when we told her how it's a family tradition, she signed one to give to mom as well, who was not at the show. That was really cool of her to do so.

This is the third show we've gone to since they started having them again locally. (Two years of this one and one other show in May of this year). The first two, I was not really looking to buy comics. For many years now I've just been getting new stuff and not really chasing back issues. That is changing now, as I'm starting to hunt back issues again. It used to be a regular thing, where we'd go to any comic shop in reasonable distance, looking for new additions or just to see what's there, but we kind of stopped doing that in the mid 2000s. Well, I'm starting to get back into it.

Although I don't see the need to chase DC books from the 1970s to current, I will still pick up random books from the 1960s, and in the past few years I've discovered I really enjoy the military comics. The collection I have access to read doesn't have many of them, so I have something to chase again.
There was a dealer at this show who had a whole bunch for under a dollar each. I ended up getting a lot of them, and I only made one error, so that's not too bad. I knew I didn't have to worry about purchasing a duplicate, as I didn't have a single issue of GI Combat before the show. I ended up buying every different issue they had, and I ended up getting two of #262 by mistake. Although technically they are different as I got both direct market and newsstand editions.

That's a pretty good run of comics! GI Combat ran from 1952-1987 so there's 287 issues to hunt for, but this is a solid start. Ironically, of all DC's military features, Haunted Tank is not my favorite, but I'll take what I can get, the majority of the books cost me less than a dollar...and most are double sized, some being 80 pages! I got 52 issues that day. (A total coincidence, even though it would become the focus of DC in later years) I have not read them all yet, but one of them I found turned out to be the first appearance of the Monitor.

I also picked up two Star Wars comics, I missed about a year's worth, and I was so out of it, I could tell the issues I was reading felt jumpy, like I was missing something, but I didn't realize I truly WAS missing something! I just thought that I was so preoccupied with other stuff that I just didn't remember the books from month to month, even though it turned out that I was missing many issues, including, in Knights of the Old Republic, over a year's worth. For a lot of the past decade I would get the monthly books but not read them until I had stacks of them scattered around. I've gotten better at keeping track of my comics, but I'm still hunting some of those missing Star Wars comics. Two less to go now!