Halloween ComicFest @ Heroes Landing

October 25^th 2014 was the date for the 3^rd annual Halloween Comicfest brought to you by the same people who bring you the Free Comic Book Day every year. This year was the first time I and my family had heard of the HCF and after writing a blog about it and after doing a Q&A blog with the management of Heroes Landing in Claremont we decided we would take our 2 year old to his first comic book event. Unfortunately, as I will outline in this small blog, the day was not what we were expecting.

When I did the Q&A with the manager of Heroes Landing, he told me that they were giving out the comics to those that came in in costume. Well my family drove an hour and a half to get to Heroes Landing because they are one of the best and closest comic shops to our house in Ocala. However, when we got to the store there was one worker behind the counter wearing a plastic Thor’s helmet. In the front of the store was a table with the comics and a sign saying they were the free ones for HCF. So there we were my 2 year old son happy as can be, dressed as a Ninja, myself dressed in a very warm long sleeved costume as a slugslinger from the SlugTerra TV Series, and my wife as a Pokemon Trainer. No one else was even remotely dressed up in costume for the HCF event and as new customers came in they got told “Free comics on the table for today help yourself, there’s candy too.” So basically we dressed up for no reason.

We were also told in our Q&A with Heroes Landing that they would have the Mini-Comic packs for sale. We planned on buying at least one of them, maybe two, to give out at our house for Halloween and to maybe use as freebies for contests in the All Things Geek facebook forum. However, when we asked about those packs, we were told they didn’t have them. Not that they were out already- just that they did not have any at all. Another dissapointment.

I had also asked in our Q&A about any other special events for the shop, and it was mentioned that on the same day there was the celebration for the 40^th Anniversary of Hello Kitty. Well, we wandered the shop to do some actual shopping and to be honest I did not see anything special pertaining to Hello Kitty. No figures, books, clothings- nothing.

All in all, it was a somewhat disappointing day after having gotten so excited about it for the past few months. The good thing is we got our free comics, however, other than the fact that it was a nice family outing I really am not sure that it was worth an hour and a half trip. Hopefully soon we will get a good comic/collectibles shop in the Ocala area and not just the meager crud we have right now.