The immensely talented Stuart Immonen (Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman: Secret Identity, Nextwave) doesn’t draw sketches at conventions any more, and he’s not too fond of attending shows, either. This self-published mini-paperback collects his fifty reasons why. (The four-panel strips originally ran as webcomics, and this interview elaborates on the book’s origin, if you want to know more.)

Comic artists and their fans often have a love/hate relationship. The new eight-page introduction puts the strips into that context, explaining that these experiences, weird as they might seem, aren’t terribly unusual on the convention circuit.

50 Reasons
to Stop Sketching
at Conventions

Immonen’s mouthpiece also reminds the reader that most fans are nice people, there just to compliment the artist. It’s the few who think of nothing but themselves, who treat artists as sketch machines, who ruin the experience for others.

The actual encounters concentrate on those obnoxious ones. Each strip shows a particular type of problem fan, whether the early bird or the pervert or parents who can’t control their kids or many more. I wouldn’t have thought to enumerate the many in such detail, but every time I read a new strip, I thought, “oh, yes, I’ve seen someone do that, how annoying it must be!”

This serves as an accurate and entertaining capsule of how not to behave when meeting an artist and what life is like from the other side of the table.

You can buy 50 Reasons to Stop Sketching at Conventions from Stuart Immonen’s website. He also has a webcomic, Never as Bad as You Think.