I was able to make my second con of the year this past weekend in my home state of South Dakota for the farewell tour of Sogen Con. About a month before the con, it was announced on social media outlets that Sogen Con was in it’s final year. I was bummed out by the news, because I am hoping that I can take Cosmic Rage on the con road next year and I was hoping that Sogen was going to be on the list of cons to submit for. While the con could come back in future years, this was going to be it’s finale, at least for now.

I didn’t make it for the opening ceremony on Friday night, but I was able to make it to a couple panels. The first panel I attended was the web comic panel, I always like to hear about other artist’s journeys into the medium and to hear them talk about their artwork.

This year the featured artist was James Hatton, who runs a webcomic called “In His Likeness” A comic based on a dot characters of God, the Devil, Poseidon and other characters of religious mythology. The comic makes fun of pop culture so you should get a lot of laughs out of it.

After the comic panel, I  went to a mystery screening session where we poked fun at a few random series. Nothing better than laughing at a series with bad voice acting, bad artwork or terrible storylines.  I caught a few screened episodes of Dragonball, because come on, stuff is always funner to watch on big screens.

I headed back to the con on Saturday morning and had a chance to hang out and talk with James a bit more before going to another panel of his where we talked about how the medium of web comics is changing and evolving. I love hearing about what other artists are working on and their perspective on the current state of the field.

After the panel I killed some time checking out artist alley and the dealers room. I talked with a few of the other artists and saw a lot of stuff I wanted to buy, but that’s normal right?

I went to another screening, this time it was some OVA’s on Dominion Tank Police. Some good stuff to laugh at a bit, it was like an animated 80’s hair band music video. Funny stuff.

I grabbed some food, and then went to another panel about kaiju monsters and we worked on creating one as a group that will be online later. The following panel was the Season 2 premiere of a short series called Bar Flies (you can check the first episode here).

I didn’t see season 1 before so after a quick recap we dove into season 2. It was very entertaining and the director and producer were there to answer questions afterwards and tell us about some of the ups and downs of the filming journey.

Before the rave got underway, there was a pretty epic hailstorm that dumped ping pong sized hail in the area. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the con on Sunday, missing a few panels that I wanted to see, as well as the closing ceremony. I met some great people and I hope that Sogen Con can be back in the near future.