Three Autograph Stories

One of my favorite possessions came about because I stood in line for three hours.

The line was for my all-time favorite comic book artist, George Pérez. I was attending the Chicago Wizard World Comic Book Convention at the Rosemont Convention Center in 2001. Getting autographs was never something I spent much time on at Wizard World, but since it was George Pérez, I was willing to wait.

In the early 1980s, Pérez was penciling my second favorite comic, The New Teen Titans. If you must know, The Legion of Super Heroes was my favorite. However, at the time, he was working for a now-defunct company called CrossGen, promoting a book he was working on called Solus.

The biggest reason I stood in line for so long was that Pérez was drawing and inking original sketches for everyone who asked for one. It was my one and only chance to have an original George Pérez piece of art. He was known for drawing so many DC and Marvel characters that I genuinely froze when he asked me what I might want in a sketch. Pérez drew beautiful women and had a long run on Wonder Woman. He drew literally every DC character for Crisis on Infinite Earths. He drew practically every Marvel character with the Infinity Gauntlet.

He smiled at me, happy to fulfill my request. I stammered, “How about a brooding Batman?”

Off he went with a pencil and a couple of Sharpies. It was incredible to watch. He took his time, making sure Batman was suitably brooding. I stood there, genuinely shocked that he was creating this drawing just for me. When he finished, he signed it for me and then added his incredible signature to the piece. We took a picture, and it might have been one of my top ten happiest moments.

It is framed and hanging in my office as I write this. George Pérez died of pancreatic cancer in 2022.

There’s a saying about never meeting your heroes, but I have had, more often than not, good experiences when I’ve done just that. My George Pérez experience was one. Another was meeting Gene Simmons.

Unsurprisingly, I met Simmons at a different Chicago Wizard World Comic Book Convention. The first time was outside the venue, when I ran into him and a couple of his entourage. He was on the phone but saw me out of the corner of his eye and started to prepare for the onslaught of “fandom” he was undoubtedly used to receiving.

I simply shook his hand and told him how much his music meant to me growing up, and that I certainly had my share of his face on my teenage bedroom wall. He was incredibly gracious with me. I think one thing that was also important at the time was that I didn’t make him stop walking. He did all of that while strolling toward a waiting SUV, no doubt to whisk him back to his hotel. He told me he’d be back the next day, signing in a booth on the convention floor, and I said I’d be in line.

The next day, I made sure I had a ticket for the signing. The downside was that I didn’t have anything KISS-related for him to sign. I probably should have tried to find some KISS comics at a comic book convention, but I didn’t. What I did have was a copy of Mike Grell’s novel Jon Sable, Freelance. I knew this was a character Simmons especially enjoyed. He had been attached to play the character in at least one movie, and he even blurbed the novel.

He was a bit taken aback when I approached him in line, and he gladly signed the book. I remember him telling me he absolutely loved that character. I told him I knew that and thought his signing the book would be unique. He then posed for a photo, and I got my autograph and a photo of me with Gene Simmons.

I think the earliest autograph I ever got was from Larry Bird.

It was the summer of 1978, and I was at a basketball camp in my hometown. There were probably 100 of us from the surrounding area. We ran drills and reviewed basics most of us already knew. The high school coaches would come by and speak occasionally, but this year someone knew someone, and we were visited by college-age Larry Bird.

This was, of course, before NIL deals, when student-athletes could come to a camp or a classroom and earn some money. I have no idea whether Bird was paid to come to my little town in downstate Illinois.

What I really remember is him nonchalantly making baskets from about as far from the rim as I’d ever seen. It was effortless. He made shot after shot from way beyond the non-existent three-point line. I’m sure he spoke to us about hard work, teamwork, and listening to your coaches. At the end, he sat there and signed autographs for everybody on small sheets of paper. I folded mine up and kept it displayed in my room for years.

I think around the time I entered high school, my room transformed from Star Wars and St. Louis Cardinals posters to hair metal bands. I gifted the Bird autograph to my younger brother. He had it in his room forever, and now he still has it in his basement.

I have a few other autograph stories, but I’ll keep them to myself for now. Maybe I’ll take another walk down memory lane and revisit them.