Yesterday confirmed that while I’ve gotten pretty good at scheduling this monstrosity of an event, I need some work, since I never got dinner and actually managed to triple-book the 6:00 hour.

Luck was with me, though, in that I got to say hi to a bunch of people I wanted to, mostly by coincidence. I was hardly ever in the Dark Horse booth, but I was standing in just the right spot when Felicia Day blew through for five minutes, and when Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon showed up. Debbie Olshan from Fox was having a meeting in our booth with a coworker, and I interrupted it with a big inappropriate greeting—Debbie’s been my Fox contact for years, all through the entire Buffy job. I got to meet with a writer who I’m interested in working with, and it turns out he’s a major Buffy fan specifically interested in a character I sort of need help with, so he (the writer) might become one of our guys for Season Nine. The gang from Buffyfest came through the booth, and moments later, as always happens, I was standing in the booth talking to a reader or an aspiring artist, and I see drifting through our booth, looking slightly lost, Joss Whedon—I have breakfast with him an hour from now, but almost without fail the first time I see him at the show he’s drifting through our booth looking like he doesn’t know anyone. The breakfast meeting with him and Sierra is largely to shore up plans for how we’re gonna finish work on Buffy Season Eight while he’s directing The Avengers, a fact he confirmed to the world at his panel yesterday with JJ Abrams. I didn’t get to attend the panel, because I was doing a Dark Horse horror panel with Mike Mignola, Steve Niles, Shawna Gore, and Marc Andreyko, where we plugged a lot of our books, and announced plans for new Cal McDonald comics with Steve and new artist Chris Mitten, including a Goon/Cal crossover. I did my usual over-the-top recommendation of The Orphanage, scariest movie I’ve seen in years, to which, of course, no one on that panel has any connection …

If you follow my Twitter, you saw some pics of the sad little Baptist hate mongering demonstration, three people with twice as many signs, as I recall, and the much larger, more vocal, anti-hate group, mocking them with signs like God Loves Gay Robin, which I’m pretty sure he does.

Elisabeth and I went to the Dexter party last night. Michael C. Hall’s hair has grown back in curly after treatment, which led to an in-depth conversation with a girl, Telly, who asked if I were half-black, then kept saying, “You’d never know it, but I’m half-black!” She was so focused on my hair that she didn’t realize that the other guy in the cowboy shirt was Michael himself. After the party, Elisabeth and I mellowed out on the Hilton patio, per tradition, with some Dark Horse coworkers.

Today, I’ve got the Dark Horse panel with Gerard Way and Eric Powell and a bunch of other folks at 11:30 in Rm 3; a long-overdue meeting with Mark Fernandez from Ecko; introducing Joss at his panel at 3:00 in room 20, where we’ll share a little of what’s going on in Season Eight and hopefully some of the horror stories from the hiatus; the Goon movie panel’s at 6:00 in room 24ABC, where I believe Eric is showing the promo reel, which is amazing; and … the Eisners. Patton Oswalt is doing a standup show somewhere in town tonight, so the Eisners are sure to be slightly less funny than they were last year, but hopefully the Reno 911 guys are presenting again. I think we’re nominated for a few things, I think Beasts of Burden and Dave Stewart—wish us luck.