Thread by @UrsulaV

Okay, you’ve all heard my trampled Neil Gaiman at the nacho bar story, so let me tell you my weirdass Lou Ferrigno story.

https://twitter.com/Hipstercrite/status/1485727299135676417

Right, so I was at a con. A terrible doomed con. A con which was held in an abandoned department store in a small town in North Carolina, organized by a local comic shop that was…ah…peculiar.

Somehow or other, the con organizers had convinced Lou Ferrigno, the former Incredible Hulk, to come out, and believed this would be a big draw. Also the guy who played Captain Marvel on Shazam! in the Seventies, and a couple other even more obscure actors.

And the local webcomics collective I was in had all gotten free tables, we were young and hungry, etc.

Three days in an abandoned Belks will definitely warp your sense of reality. As no one showed up, we eventually started wandering around the back rooms.

Very weird. Many old display cases. I liberated some of them in the name of the People’s Republic of Webcomistan.

But all that is neither here nor there.

I was sitting directly across from Ferrigno. I did not speak to him, nor he to me. He was charging twenty bucks for an autograph, and I did not particularly need one.

As only two actual attendees showed up, the con organizer was begging staff to buy his autographs.

See, he’d arranged a deal where if he made, say, 5K, then great, but if he did not make 5K, the con would make up the difference. This is how the organizer got him there.

Obviously there was no way anybody was making five grand at this con, but the less that Ferrigno had at the end of the day, the more the con would pay him.

So he starts, let us say, attempting to disguise his part of the take.

And that is how I watched Captain Marvel catch the Incredible Hulk stuffing twenties into his socks.

The comic shop went out of business, the con organizer was exceptionally bitter about how it ruined his life, and to this day, I have an autographed SHAZAM! photo pinned to my corkboard in my studio.