The (Not Exactly Canon) Gargoyles / Spider-man / Young Justice Radio Show at CONvergence 2016

Performed live at CONvergence 2016, here is the (not exactly canon) Gargoyles meets The Spectacular Spider-man meets Young Justice Radio Show featuring Black Manta’s Celebrity Hot Tub.

…perhaps I should explain.

In 2014, CONvergence (the convention I co-founded many moons ago) was lucky enough to get to host a 20th Anniversary Celebration of Disney’s Gargoyles. Our Guests of Honor that year included four people with ties to that series: Gargoyles creator Greg Weisman, the voice of Demona Marina Sirtis, Supervising Producer Frank Paur, and Lead Character Designer Greg Guler.

At previous Gargoyles “Gatherings”, Greg had written Gargoyles radio plays to be performed by a mix of voice actors from the show who were on-hand to play their roles and fans from the convention to fill out the rest of the cast. These were tongue-in-cheek stories that frequently broke the fourth wall and became increasingly more convoluted and absurd as they carried forward their continuity from year-to-year and eventually included mash-ups with other Greg Weisman projects including The Spectacular Spider-man animated series.

Greg generously decided to continue this tradition at CONvergence 2014, expanding this madness to include characters from Young Justice. So with only Marina Sirtis on hand to play both Demona from Gargoyles and her character Queen Bee from Young Justice, a large cast of fan actors were auditioned and cast from the fans at CONvergence. The play was called “Recruits” and you can watch the video of the event below.

When Greg Weisman returned to CONvergence in 2016, he was joined by Khary Payton (the voice of Aqualad on Young Justice and Cyborg on Teen Titans). From the moment we knew these two were coming to CONvergence I was hoping we could get Greg to not only bring us another radio play, but that we could incorporate an unproduced gem of an idea called Black Manta’s Celebrity Hot Tub.

OK, more explaining. Back when Young Justice and Green Lantern: The Animated Series were airing back-to-back on Cartoon Network as part of a programming block called “DC Nation,” Greg and Khary pitched Black Manta’s Celebrity Hot Tub for the series of comedy shorts that aired between the two shows. In one of history’s great tragedies, these shorts went unmade.

However these shorts were repurposed into segments in the CONvergence 2016 radio show, so now you can get a taste of the glory that might have been.

We had two separate sessions of auditions at CONvergence to fill out the sprawling cast, followed by Greg, Khary and myself hiding away in secret corner of the hotel and sneaking lunch while casting the whole show. The day after the final cast list was posted we had an hour to run through and rehearse before the live performance!

Many thanks to Greg Weisman for somehow finding the time in his busy schedule to write this crazy thing and to everyone who helped make the show happen, and thanks to the CONvergence Video Team for getting the video put together. The video isn’t fancy (single camera from the back of the panel room), but the audio is reasonably clear and we even have subtitles you can enable in the YouTube video!

So without further ado, here’s Greg Weisman, Khary Payton, and a cast of dozens (including me!) in Gargoyles meets The Spectacular Spider-man meets Young Justice: “The Cosmos.”

Why I want Greg Weisman at CONvergence 2016 (And You Should Too!)

I wanted to show you all the art print I recently colored. I created a black-and-white line art version of this print for CONvergence 2014, to commemorate the radio play that Greg Weisman wrote then produced entirely at the convention. But I just colored it this month. This is the very first time it’s been colored.

And here’s a recording of the radio play, “Recruits”. It is a mashup of Young Justice, Gargoyles, and The Spectacular Spider-Man. and it features CONvergence 2014 Guest of Honor Marina Sirtis.

Why am I sharing these things? Well…

Most of you know that way back in 1999 I helped start a science fiction convention here in Minnesota called CONvergence. (Yes I have a second career as a con runner in addition to my career as a comic book artist.) Many years later the convention is still going strong with 6-7,000 annual attendees. One of our favorite repeat guests at CONvergence is Greg Weisman, among other things, creator of Disney’s Gargoyles, producer and writer for The Spectacular Spider-man, Star Wars: Rebels, Young Justice, and, of course, my collaborator on DC’s Young Justice comic book. Beyond Greg’s impressive list of writing and producing credits, he always makes a great convention guest because he’s a great talker and great panelist – great both in terms of quality and quantity. No guest ever does more panels at our convention than Greg Weisman does. (Seriously, he’s broken records.)

This is how you’ll usually find Greg Weisman at CONvergence: on a panel

So, some of us are trying to bring Greg Weisman back to CONvergence this year. How, you ask? Well,  he’s been good enough to volunteer to be our guinea pig for a new program CONvergence is piloting called “Fan-Featured Guests” – guests brought in by an outside group with approval from and working directly with the CONvergence Guests of Honor Department.

That is SO CRASH!

The funding for bringing in a Fan-Featured Guest is provided entirely by the group bringing the guest and can be crowdfunded, fund raised, or privately donated. This means that the budget to have Greg as a guest at CONvergence 2016 isn’t coming from the convention budget, but rather from a third party – in this case, a crowd-funding campaign that Hal and I are running. As of right now, it’s 70% funded!

I’d particularly love to see Greg back as a guest at CONvergence this year because Khary Payton (the voice of Aqualad on Young Justice and Cyborg on Teen Titans) will be a Guest of Honor as well. (And strangely enough, so will I! After having been a guest at most of the other sci-fi and comics conventions here in Minnesota, I’m finally going to be a guest at the convention I helped start. It’s a little surreal. But I’d love to have TWO members of the Young Justice family there with me to join in the fun.)

The last time Greg was a guest at CONvergence in 2014 he wrote and produced the radio play at the beginning of this post – a mash-up of three of his TV shows: Gargoyles, The Spectacular Spider-man, and Young Justice. Marina Sirtis was also a Guest of Honor at CONvergence that year and she provided the voices of her characters Demona from Gargoyles and Queen Bee from Young Justice. The rest of the characters were cast from volunteer attendees of the convention, during the convention. I wasn’t kidding when I said Greg produced the play at the con. He held auditions and everything. I mean, this was a hell of a thing.

Greg has said that if he returns to CONvergence this year, he’ll write and produce another radio play, and this time we’ll have Khary Payton to lead another cast of fan volunteers. I would do a new art print to commemorate the new play as well.

Greg and me with Young Justice fans at CONvergence 2014

You can probably tell where I’m going with this. I’m inviting you to contribute to help bring Greg Weisman as a guest to CONvergence 2016. We have a number of rewards for various contribution amounts, including the new color version of the 2014 radio play print. I’ve also donated copies of prints I’ve done based on Young Justice and on Greg’s novel and audio play Rain of The Ghosts, which will be signed by both Greg and myself. Those prints can be picked up at the convention or mailed out if you are unable to attend.

Hold the phone. Why would you support the campaign if you are unable to attend?

Well… Some of the rewards are things like Khary Payton (Aqualad, Cyborg) recording a custom greeting for your voicemail. You could have Greg Weisman or me do one too, but if it was ME I’d want the Khary Payton option. Or you could have one of the art prints mailed to you. On top of that, the radio play will be recorded and made publicly available after the convention, so that’s a new, original production by Greg Weisman for everyone.

Also, if you don’t want “Black Manta’s Celebrity Hot Tub” to be a real thing, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Because it will definitely be a real thing if we can get Greg Weisman to CONvergence 2016.

Click here to view the crowdfund campaign.

And please share this with your friends. Together maybe we can all give this effort the last push it needs!

The Digital Print I Created for Greg Weisman’s Rain of the Ghosts

I created this digital print as one of the rewards for the Rain of the Ghosts full-cast AudioPlay Kickstarter.

Rain of the Ghosts is the first in a Young Adult novel series by Greg Weisman, creator of Disney’s Gargoyles, and a writer and producer for numerous fan-favorite animated series including Spectacular Spider-man, W.I.T.C.H., Young Justice, and Star Wars Rebels. Greg describes the novel this way:

These are the adventures of Rain Cacique, a young girl descended from the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean.  Rain lives on the Ghost Keys, a chain of islands on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle, where her parents own and run a Bed & Breakfast that is both Rain’s home and place of employment.  Over the course of the first book, Rain goes from making beds for tourists to learning she has the ability to communicate with ghosts.  Rain has a mystery to solve, a mission to accomplish and a destiny to fulfill.  I can honestly guarantee that if you enjoy the sensibility, characters, plotting and surprises I’ve brought to such series as Gargoyles and Young Justice, you’ll love Rain of the Ghosts.

Now Greg wants to bring the story to life as a full-cast audio drama. Not just an audio book with the text of the novel being read by a single performer, but a full cast of 20 actors with sound effects and music! Greg has already paid to record the vocals out of his own pocket, but funds are needed to complete the post-production work and bring the story of Rain Cacique and her friends fully to life.

I created the image you see above as one of many rewards being offered to supporters of the Kickstarter campaign. The digital download print you can earn as a reward is at much higher resolution than this preview version and doesn’t have the big “Rain of the Ghosts” text in the middle of the image! 

Here’s more on the Kickstarter:

CONvergence 2014 Guest of Honor Badges

Since co-founding the first CONvergence in 1999, I’ve drawn unique, custom badge art for every CONvergence Guest of Honor, every year. It’s time consuming, but I believe—both as a convention runner and as a frequent guest at conventions myself—that it creates a powerful first impression towards CONvergence being a unique convention experience.

I usually try to reference something from a given guest’s body of work in a clever way, as well as try to incorporate our mascot, Connie, on badges for Guests who have been to CONvergence before and are already familiar with the character. Here are the custom Guest of Honor badges I created this year for our CONvergence 2014 Guests.

	Amy Berg One of Amy’s projects is the digital series, Caper, for Geek and Sundry. It seemed appropriate to highlight one of the superheroes from that show, so I drew the armored alter ego of The Machine.
	Emma Bull Emma Bull is probably best known in the Twin Cities for her Minneapolis-based urban fantasy novel, War for the Oaks, so I wanted to visually reference that setting, including the novel’s protagonist, Eddi McCandry, and the shape-shifting phouka.
	C Robert Cargill Cargill is a long-time friend of CONvergence as well as a personal friend of mine. Knowing his tastes, it was a no-brainer to suit him up as Ace Hunter from Megaforce, with Connie along for the ride on his jet-powered, flying motorcycle.
	Sarah Clemens Much of Sarah’s work features the characters of Magnus the cat and Loki the Norwegian Speartail Dragon, so doing something with them seemed the obvious choice. I understood Magnus & Loki are known to be pair of troublemakers, and somehow a “Usual Suspects” motif emerged…
	Matthew Ebel Musician Matt Ebel includes many references to robots, including GLaDOS from Portal. So I placed GLaDOS in front of a keyboard and added Matthew’s trademark beard. This was the design from this year that I most questioned how it would go over, but Matthew was delighted with it. Whew!
	Scott Lynch This was Scott’s first time as a CONvergence Guest of Honor but he’s been attending the convention for many years, so I had no problem casting Connie as the Gray King standing in front of Red Seas Under Red Skies from Scott’s Gentleman Bastard series of novels.
CONvergence 2014 welcomed several Guests of Honor with connections to Disney’s Gargoyles as part of our celebration of the Gargoyles 20th Anniversary. In light of this, I did a mash-up of a Gargoyles character with another thing a given Guest of Honor was known for.
	Greg Guler Greg was Lead Character Designer for Gargoyles and currently serves in the same capacity on Phineas and Ferb, so his badge featured a mash-up of Brooklyn and Phineas and Ferb’s Agent P.
	Frank Paur Frank was the Supervising Producer on Gargoyles and in recent years has served as art director and director of many Marvel animation projects, including Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, so I drew Dr. Bruce Banner transforming into Gargoyles’ Broadway, in an homage to the cover of The Incredible Hulk #1.
	Marina Sirtis Marina Sirtis was the voice of the villainous Demona on Gargoyles, which stood in stark contrast with her role as Counsellor Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. So I couldn’t resist putting Demona in Troi’s uniform… With a phaser rifle thrown in for good measure.
	Greg Weisman I’ve been lucky enough call Greg a colleague and a friend for several years. The majority of our work together was on the Young Justice comic book for DC Comics, so dressing Goliath as Young Justice’s Nightwing seemed oddly appropriate. Whelmed, even.

So that wraps up all of the CONvergence 2014 badge art. If you didn’t see it yet, be sure to check out the CONvergence 2014 membership badge art as well! And if you’re interested in checking out more badge art from previous years, I’ve got most of it posted on my blog under the “Badge Art” tag – click here to check it out!

CONvergence 2014 Badge Art

Each year, CONvergence commissions volunteer art for its Membership Badges that feature our CONvergence mascot, Connie, and references that year’s convention theme. We have different badge art for each of the four different age categories we produce badges for, and inevitably I hear people wishing they’d gotten the artwork on a different age group’s badge.

When I produce the badge art (which almost always, but not always the case), I try to keep the colors bright with a different color scheme for each design so that the small membership badges are as easily identifiable as possible for our volunteer badgers and staff under the various lighting conditions around the convention.

Without further adieu, here were the CONvergence 2014: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Membership Badge Designs!

Adult Badge: Connie and her slightly evil sister Connie Mark 2 as Detective Elisa Masa and Demona from Gargoyles, flanking Goliath.

Ages 13-17 Badge: Connie and Mark 2 again as Sam and Dean Winchester from Supernatural, with their creator Professor Max as Bobby.

Ages 6-12 Badge: Connie as Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service.

5 & Under Badge: Connie riding Falcor from The Neverending Story.

CONvergence also produces custom badge art for each of its Guests of Honor. It was no different for our 2014 Guests! Check out my CONvergence 2014 Guest of Honor badge art post!

If you’re interested in checking out more badge art from previous years, I’ve got most of it posted on my blog under the “Badge Art” tag – click here to check it out!