The Summer of Andrew continues (that's me on the right wearing the old school Nuggets hat). Last month I attended the first annual Bloggers With Balls sports bloggers conference in New York, last week I was in Las Vegas for NBA Summer League and tonight I'll be heading down to San Diego for my 10th consecutive Comic-Con.

Newcomers to this blog may not know this, but when I'm not spending hours and hours (and hours) figuring out ways for our Nuggets to get around their salary cap mess and acquire a legitimate center, I actually have a real job. Well, sort of a real job. I'm a syndicated cartoonist and animation producer, and in the comics and animation industry Comic-Con is as close as we get to the Super Bowl.

In years past, I used to speak on the National Cartoonist Society panel (see picture to the left) with the likes of Bill Amend (Fox Trot), Jerry Scott (Baby Blues and Zits), Jeff Keane (Family Circus), Dan Piraro (Bizarro), Greg Evans (LuAnn), Michael Jantze (The Norm) and others. But since we're the red-headed stepchild of "the Con" and the panel was so poorly attended, they've scrapped it in recent years. We just couldn't compete with trailers for "Twilight" and "Watchmen." (On a side note, last year there was a line around the outside of the San Diego convention center at midnight the night before the "Twilight" trailer was to debut the following afternoon. That's right, hundreds of people slept on the sidewalk of the convention center just so they could be the first to see a three-minute trailer that would be put up online immediately afterward. If only my comic strip had that kind of following, I'd be flying to Comic-Con in my private jet!) The NCS still has a booth, however, and I'll be there frequently in case any of this blog's readers happen to also be Comic-Con attendees. The NCS booth is #1307.

I say this every year, but I really intend on taking some pictures to show my friends and fellow Stiffs what Comic-Con is all about. Even though Comic-Con has grown into much more than a gigantic nerdy comic book show, there are a lot of geeks who passionately wear their favorite superhero or science fiction character costumes. Over the next two and a half days, I'll see countless Klingons, Storm Troopers, Batmans (or is it Batmen?), Catwomans (the worst is when you see overweight women donning the skin tight Catwoman suit...yikes!), Jedi Knights, Spider-Mans, Hulks, you name it. But at the end of the day, are these people really any different from rabid sports fans who passionately get dressed up in their favorite teams' gear?

Anyway, I've got multiple vials of hand sanitizer ready and my surgical mask is packed just in case there's an outbreak of dork...errrr...swine flu in the convention hall. Wish me luck and if you really want to follow the Denver Stiffs Comic-Con experience, check out my Twitter updates.